Peter L. Wittrock
That’s the name of the dude that me and nine others spent the better part of 1998-1999 with, studying and meditating on the human voice while in graduate school (UCLA). We would meet with him twice a week—sometimes in a studio and sometimes, just out in the sculpture garden on the north side of campus.
He would guide us through an understanding of the human voice that entranced me and piqued my interest; so much so that I continued my meditation on the matter (pun intended) for the next…23 years. We worked with two other professors on voice and speech, too. But their focus was more technical in nature (e.g. acoustics, formation, resonance, etc.). Peter’s thing was…not so technical. It was…subtle. His focus was on the generation of human sound in the first place.
I remember engaging my buddy Matthew about Peter and the work we were doing with him. Early on, when we first met, Peter struck me as being more reserved with his presence than what one normally senses while interacting with artisans. He was more of a brooder. Very quiet, for a professor whose teaching us about sound and voice. I remember asking Matthew something like “So, is it me or is this guy just making this up as we go along?”
We were young artists ourselves, eager to change the world and couldn’t make the connection between what he was trying to get across and how it applied to our potential impact. But what I also observed was that he was in total control of his presence. That is, his reticence to talk or create while we were in session wasn’t a result of a socio-emotional condition, or his style.
He was listening.
Those two years of study stayed with me as I transitioned out of our academy and into the commercial planet. It lead to a decades-long fascination with vibration, frequency, resonance, polarity, rhythm, and correspondence as well as music, and communication. I’ve tried to discuss it over the years with friends, colleagues, and family. But each time, I notice that it falls on deaf ears (pun, intended). There’s just so much background knowledge one needs to accept for the ideas being expressed to coalesce in their mind/body as a menagerie of meaning: subjects such as physics, music, quantum mechanical principles, religious history, etc. So, I’m taking a crack at putting down some of the notions I’ve come across in writing (if anything, just to see if my thinking is clear).
Sound as Conduit
The proposition is that sound, and more particularly, the human voice, is the clearest conduit we may have to accessing the Over-mind, the All-Encompassing, the object at the end of time. The most powerful connection between humanity and the Divine was and is through the ear. True listening is the deepest, most ancient form of prayer. By “true listening”, I don’t refer to some authoritative claim to understanding the ideas spoken. I’m not referring to the message embedded in the signal being sent. Instead, true listening is a reference to the actual sonic soundscape being generated via the perturbation and manipulation of air and acoustics.
First, here’s how I conceptualize sound: it’s the interruption of the continuity of our experience (a purposefully conceptual and lofty definition I’ve come to use, first learned from Bio-physicist Jill Purce).
Consider water. When we see water without any interruption (e.g. slopes in the riverbed, rocks embedded in the ground, fallen branches, animals, plants, gravity of the moon, etc.), it has no form; no color. It’s shapeless. Even its motion is imperceptible.
It isn’t until there is an interruption in the form of resistance that we see it take form and shape. Think ripples, streams, eddies, vortices, etc.
So, the proposition is that our universe, in its primordial state, was, and is, like water, a shapeless, formless, and colorless field.
What do I mean by field? I think of fields as clusters of foundational electromagnetism formed by potentiated light (perhaps plasma?) and able to respond to discrete, localized signals which lead to the development of specific, morphogenetic structures (e.g. organs, planets, symphonies, you know…stuff.) within the field—in this case, the universe.
So sound= a vibration within a field propagated by an acoustic wave, through a transmission substrate such as gas, solids, quantum particles, or, in this case, air.
There are many aspects of sound. For example, if you clap your hands, you quickly compress the air between your hands and pressurize it, for an instant, into a much more confined space (between your hands when they connect). The manual compression of that air shifts its state (i.e. molecular arrangement) into a higher frequency of vibration caused by the pressurization which transforms the air into what you and I experience as sound. Sound is, quite literally, the transformation and motion of air (or any substrate).
Now if I clap twice, I reach the next parameter of sound—rhythm. If I could clap 16 times a second, we would have a pitch. Then, there’s duration, or the sustenance of the vibration. But subtlest of parameters is harmonics.
A harmonic is a sound wave that has a frequency which is an integer multiple of a fundamental tone. It’s the distortion of a sinusoidal waveform by waveforms of other frequencies (in this case, we are thinking of air as the substrate).
So, whatever the shape, a complex waveform can be split up mathematically into its individual components called the fundamental frequency and its many harmonic frequencies (a third or a fifth or a seventh multiple of the fundamental frequency, for example).
Now, every sound has a frequency and every frequency has, embedded within it, ALL of its harmonic frequencies; frequencies that are existent in the signal, but only to color the sound of the fundamental tone being generated. So when you sing a note, you’re actually singing the note in a dominant (fundamental) frequency AND all of its harmonic tones. And you ARE hearing those harmonics; just not as clearly as you can discern the fundamental tone.
What’s fascinating to me is that the Mongols and Tibetans, through millennia of study and shamanic practice have developed their instrument (their voice) in such a manner that it CAN separate the fundamental frequency (tone) from its harmonics. Here’s a demonstration:
It’s called overtone chanting or over tune chanting or polyphonic chanting . What Jill Putce (the women in the video) is doing is first generating, then isolating one tone-frequency combination (pitch) by accessing the internal structure of that one tone through the generation of a SECOND TONE—its harmonic. This allows us to better understand the qualities of the sound, known in musical terms as “timbre” of sound or its “klangfarbe”, in German. She is revealing the very nature of that single note, the essence of the sound which is more like light, than sound. In fact, it’s referred to as “color” in the language of acoustical-electromagnetic studies.
Now here’s the thing: when some people are in the presence of the over-tonal sound generation, they report a soothing sensation—almost as if they could sense the vibration of the sound. But about 4% of us perceive these sounds—as shapes or colors. It’s called Synesthesia (Greek for “to perceive together”). It’s the use of one sense to generate another sense (e.g. visual to auditory, or vice versa). It’s not a disease. It’s not a disorder. It doesn’t affect our health and its not a sign of mental illness. You can’t control it. It’s internal, mostly (i.e. the colors are hallucinated), but some have reported that they see colors outside their body. It stays the same over time and often starts in childhood. So, in the presence of sounds, those whose circuitry connecting their auditory sense to their visual sense can SEE the sounds. They may describe a kaleidoscope of visions, colors, and flashes of light. That is, sound creates form.
Now, I know you understand the semantics of the phrase “…sound creates form.”. But what are the implications regarding our existence if we are able to generate form from nothing? And not just humans—insects, mammals, reptiles, etc.) Again, to be clear, I’m referring to the very medium of messages, not the messages or signals themselves (high five, Marshall McLuhan!). For me, it seems the implication is that creators of sound are, in a very real sense (not a metaphorical one), shadows of gods—which makes us gods too.
To vivify, imagine I’m holding a birthday balloon sized skeleton of a structure. Something like this:
I can see that it has multiple dimensions to it, the least of which are the four we all find ourselves in (width by length by height or depth in relation to space/time). It has a form, it has a shape, and is quite colorful.
It’s a bright sunny day so I notice that when I hold up the object, an analog of the object is cast onto the ground, just adjacent and in perfect correlation to the object itself and dependent on the location of the object in relation to the sun as well as the ground: an analog we refer to as shadow.
So, is the shadow its own object?
Does it exist, independent of the thing that it’s a shadow of?
Technically, the skeletal object is existant before the shadow. But once the shadow is perceptible and its produced information comes into being, the shadow locks its information phasing with its object’s infirmation phasing. It's literally a direct projection of itself. We even say things like “It’s my shadow”. That doesn’t mean it belongs to the person. Rather, it means it IS the person: and in this analogy, the person is the distorted and TWO dimensional filtering of the information produced by the object.
Therefore, many of us have concluded that…
…the generation of the human voice is the best and perhaps ONLY way to phase locking the mind/body information stream with the information stream generated by whatever the object is that we are a four-dimensional projection of; in this case, said object would necessarily be a 5+ dimensional conception.
To clarify, if we went back to the object-and-its-shadow metaphor, the difference is that, with the human voice (shadow), we may be able to have two-way communication with the casting object. We wouldn’t be its progeny—we would be its siblings, so to speak…
The information patterns are the key to understanding this argument. I’m not quite ready to discuss information, yet. Still processing…
So, sound…is holy.
What do I mean by holy?
That’s coming up next…