I heard these sounds in February.
Mausoleum acoustics, tuned air.
A strained nothing sound. Air thin choral resonances.
Leaning in between acoustic screens.
I step through the curtain, drop my self consciousness and sing. I find harmony with AI, enjoying the secluded, private space to share my voice. I wonder if I’m singing with another human, unseen in the booth opposite me.
I face a wall with my back to the speakers.
Ponies squelch through mud in Hyde Park. The ground I’m walking on is wet. Every footstep slick and glistening. I look up just as a formation of croaking geese fly towards me, passing just over my head. I hear fluttering details of feathers beating.
A voice against a backdrop of cicada’s, wavering tones and ambience, plays from a small speaker cone embedded in an old, brown wooden box. The sound waves leave that box, pass over a floating wooden approximation of a toilet bowl and cistern before activating the wide gallery acoustics.
A soft motorised rhythm pulses, then a hum and a click before that original pulse takes on a ticking higher note that ripples away from me.
Variations of the above sequence surround me.
Distant, faint rising and falling pitch like an air raid klaxon.
Occasionally a squeak ignites the room like a sneaker on a basketball court.
The wooden box voice drifts through to here.
Mary Shelley Bell chimes. (Not actually Mary Shelley). Changing my focus to listen to St Pancras Church respond to The Seer and Trystwch Y Fenywood, their tones and voices coating the religious architecture and iconography. The intimate friction and pressure of hands.
Reception room tones and a distant electronic pulsing. I wonder if that's the MRI scanner.
A repeating signal beeps 10 times.
The nurse is talking to someone through an intercom, asking him to keep still, encouraging him. I'm apprehensive. Curious about the sounds but worried about the process, wondering how long I'll be in there, what it will feel like.
I can hear a square wave modulating a high frequency oscillator against a backdrop of music coming from a radio that sits on a brown shelf above the waiting area.
The square wave pulse stops.
I slide inside a white plastic tunnel. A frame is placed over my face. It holds a mirror which allows me to see my legs, feet and a limited view of the room I’m in. Ear defenders are slipped over my ears and I’m on my own. I instantly feel the urge to escape this disorientating position.
Mechanical insects swirl around my head, clicking, buzzing and fluttering. I sense the machine preparing and unseen parts moving in to position.
From a voice note: Many frequencies, percussive. Triangle LFO waveform, with a little curve on the end, quite deep oscillations, knocking and banging very close and very loud, moving around my head.
The pitches seemed to get lower and lower, and the frequency of the pulse was different, sometimes a bit quicker, and then occasionally slow.
After 7 minutes a thin, tinny control room voice talks to me in my ears. It tells me this is the most important part. The hardest too. Then the constant thrumming frequency pulse knocks begin hammering and impacting like a construction site in my head. Structural and physical vibrations - heard and felt. I found the last 5 minutes difficult and struggled to keep my head still.
From a voice note: It was a familiar sound world to me. The throbbing took on more of a, you know, it was like someone had opened up the filter on it.
12 minutes in the white tube.
My hand brushes against a hidden plastic dial and activates a condensed ticking like a radiation meter. Because I can’t see it I use sound to try and return the dial to its original position, recreating the exact duration and number of clicks from memory. My toast is still burnt.
I'm at football practice with Echo.
Screeches of excitement - high pitch.
Instructions - lower.
Cars crunch and swish behind me and my car door clunks.
Everything is muffled in here. My left ear rumbles.
A goal net fluctuates in the wind, and I imagine a thin membrane oscillating and rippling.
Rain and condensation filter my view, blurring and fragmenting colourful football shirts into abstraction.
Light rain taps the roof above me. A soft, sustained drum roll.
I hear ‘Echo’ called out by many voices.
A click behind me activated by the slightest movement. I connect with the wall twice. Once softly, and later angrily.
I push all of my force into the structure and listen deeply.
A listening session at St Nicholas Church in Shoreham. The graveyard gives very little, sounds masked by a busy road behind a flint wall. A small shift walking north, flanked by weathered gravestones. As if we stepped over a threshold.
I'm drawn to a large wooden door that leads to a part of the church I just left. I hear jaunty piano from within which surprises me as I thought the church empty. I like listening from beyond - half heard, the structure filtering. Is it taking something away or adding? Enjoying the edge of perception again.
A participant says she placed her head between foliage to reorientate her listening. Another was conscious of all her senses empowered through listening. She noticed patterns in bark. I felt it too, some good bark in that graveyard. Another visual artist talked about shapes of sound and we discussed making a tranquil spaces map.
Later I see the stranger playing the piano. Something pretty filled the space stretching out to all the dusty corners and nooks. Chords and note sequences coating religious shapes, carvings of saints and other worn stone faces. The performer hunched over the piano, never looked up and I never saw them leave. These facts and the surroundings give their music a ghostly energy.
I try ringing the church bell, pulling on the soft blue, white and red tail connected to rope that rises high into the central tower, disappearing through a square hole cut in to wooden panels. I untether it from a hook on the wall and pull gently. I hear creaking of rope. I pull more forcefully with encouragement from the group, but still no bell. I build a rhythm and can hear and feel the weight of the unseen bell. I'm struck by a thought that the bell could come crashing through the ceiling above me, so I stop and the bell remains silent. I place the striped tail back over the metal hook feeling slightly disappointed. It's not often you get to sound a community, to play a sound that carries so far and is so weighed with symbolism and history.
Soft cloth friction, a slow shift hidden underneath.
My tinnitus is terrible at the moment. I'm noticing how certain frequencies affect it, especially whilst working with the pure sign tones of feedback. Some mask and push it down, whilst others have no effect.
I’ve been hearing faint music in my studio in the evening. I'm not sure if it is a trick caused by listening to feedback material, or an actual sound coming from next door. I'm guessing it is a child’s sleep music, but it is difficult to tell as it's filtered heavily through brick, plaster, wallpaper and layers of paint and is in the same world as the quiet pure sign tones.
A train passes close, a repeating three beat rhythm fades to the west. A few minutes later, I hear a similar pattern, but I can't place its location, spatial clarity dislocated by headphones and directivity of the microphone. It catches me by surprise, because it sounds like it's coming from the south, which is impossible, as there are no more train lines past this one in that direction. I wonder if it is an echo from the flats opposite, bouncing the sound of the recently passing train as it travels West.
A crow and other bird calls echo multiple surfaces behind me. My furry wind protection catches a resident's eye. “Take it for a walk”. I play along, stroking the furry creature as it listens.
I enjoy the wide open soundscape here and tune in to distant and mysterious timbres and shapes that catch my ears.
The loud crow sits high on a security camera. Its sore throat caw hits concrete and is thrown and repeated, echoing away in to nothing. I turn a corner and the brown brick structure opens to reveal a shaded zone of phasing air. There are two layers - the phasing air pressure carried through ducts, pipes and conduits then released through slatted vents, and the electric drone of the energy that moves it.
Electric air fills every space and makes recording quiet sounds a challenge.
Under a tunnel where a dog handling van is parked, I watch a man sat on the corrugated roof of a nearby industrial unit. I press record. He is wearing shorts and looks out of place early on a Sunday morning, and I wonder how he isn't freezing like me. I pick up fragmented syllables of his phone conversation carried by the wind.
I'm hoping to hear a train from this enclosed tunnel, anticipating the acoustic filtering of distance and multiple surfaces. A car glides past in perfect synchronisation with the train, masking all that I’d hoped to hear.
I'm in a Leon and I've eaten an unsatisfying breakfast of lukewarm beans, eggs and stale sourdough toast. Soon I will gather my bags and jacket, dispose of my tray, and walk across town to my therapy session.
There are sounds here. You can probably imagine them (I’ve written about them many times before) - fluffy air, fragments of voices drifting from behind the counter and beyond. Traffic rumbling past outside, muffled by large floor to ceiling windows. I'm gazing at the big Boots Chemist building, the structure encased in scaffolding and plastic sheeting that I heard singing last year. Today, it's still and quiet.
Later, you'll see me at an event, a small room half full of Brighton artists and others coming to hear me talk about my work and working class history and campaigning. I'll look calm and confident, possibly well turned out, and I'll probably be sharing jokes and light hearted small talk with friends. What you probably won't see, unless you know me very well and can spot the signs, is the need to escape, to be somewhere else, out of my body shimmering with hot anxiety. Or maybe I'll be okay and I just told a story that doesn't come true.
At the moment I'm full of self doubt and a million miles away from Mumbai and that superpower confidence I felt. But I can still be honest and speak in my own voice.
After the event, I note that it went well, that it felt a bit tender and emotional.
A hum appears between two tall buildings. My instinct is to locate the source, the place it begins, and then I wonder where it ends. I sing harmonies, enjoying the blurs and finding a brief connection with the space, tentative, soft, playful and light.
I note down a deep listening score. In a building make a sound using your voice or a small percussion instrument. Follow the sound, its reflections, reverberations and spatial properties moving through the structure, activating materials and acoustics. Imagine the building and its rooms and corridors far away, hearing the sound passing by.
I'm at Picker House and a loose tap is causing friction in the pipes. It doesn't bother me, but then I don’t have to live with it. It sounds like a distant washing machine on a spin cycle, humming and whirring. Jim gets up multiple times to manipulate taps to ease the pressure. I tell him about the same problem in our house and how I used to think it was a boat at the nearby port.
We plan a workshop that we tentatively name Noticing.
On the way home I notice a reflection in a train window and wonder for a moment if it's me, even though I know it's an impossibility due to the angle. But when I turn my head and the reflection does too, I question the facts for a second. This experience is further complicated by being an identical twin.
Massimo Bartolini Sparse Steps at Frith Street Gallery.
A single pipe organ enclosed in a white wooden case runs the length of the gallery. At one end is an opening from which a 32hz/A Flat rumbles and at the other end sits a small statue of a bodhisattva.
A series of Sound Paintings are hung on the wall. There are square holes, or mouths, in the sound paintings, through which air passes like a breath that forms a note. Each Sound Painting has a number of mouths and plays a different chord.
Echo sits on the 32hz.
White gloved hands activate harmonic air before pitches curdle and the tails slur dying, leaving concrete reflections and traces.
On stairs leading to a downstairs gallery, the low 32hz tones are magnified and multiplied, growling within the small wood panelled space.
Echo and I sound the acoustics of a pedestrian tunnel heading north from the South Bank.
We use our mouths to form notes in a transitory space. The pitches are fleeting, lost after a brief reflection, but bring me so much joy. A beautiful duet.
Later I tell Echo about Massimo’s other installations, the large scaffold tower organs. He connects these to our listening with the wind activated scaffolding covering Boots (the chemist) in Brighton. Sharing these brief moments connecting through listening, means so much to me.
A voice under my pillow. I can't understand what it says. It's missing clarity and anything above 500 hertz. A dream or my air pod?
Embraced by a mountain. Thunderous vibrations.
Listening to old songs only heard by us.
I'm in a coffee shop lit with a red glow. A poodle is having its photo taken by its owner. I'll be in the background, sitting alone, writing these words, describing this scene.
I'm meeting someone. They're late. I don't care.
The music is too loud here for me. I appreciate the staff's need for it though. That energy and half being elsewhere that music can provide.
The poodle is pacing and its owner makes one of the only sounds I can hear above the music - a coffee cup against saucer. The poodle’s tail brushes against chairs and tables in sweeping glances, hollow and light.
Today a group of artists released an album of studio room tones to campaign against AI copyright issues. They use the slogan, ‘Is this what you want?’, referring to the empty music void, and I have to admit I love the album and would like more, even though I support the campaign.
I heard another voice under my pillow this morning.
Disembodied voices. Papers slide and scrape below me, unseen. Those voices raise questions about fairness, social justice, negative harm. I hear multiple hollow 500 hertz mic bumps, pulled coughs and stifled croaks. High viz rustles against a soft rumble. I notice the outlet where the softness escapes. Alice speaks passionately and a security guard yawns again as bandana man's phone chirps and then erupts into melody.
Illusions of choice
A new member of gallery audience mumbles something in opposition as Equity in Education give a brilliant, moving speech. She talks about ‘amplifying the voices’ and the people that are ‘so often unheard’. The new guy boos. More hollow resonances.
Clicky clicky in the council chamber.
Thin communications. Pause.
Cramp grabs my leg, and I push my heel against rough scratchy carpet.
The microphone cuts out, and for a brief moment those of us up in the public gallery are transported down there with him in his sound world, somehow closer.
Someone says Unheard. not because they can't speak, but because people don't listen.
Just before the vote a thin, unthreatening cloud of feedback crossed the chamber.
I'm on my way back to Frith Street Gallery to hear Massimo Bartolini’s sound paintings accompanied by saxophonist Edoardo Marraffa.
A burnt train alert interrupts my thoughts. I'm anxious, feeling woozy on antibiotics and self conscious because of my face, which has been very red and sore, but I didn't want to miss this.
I hope I can move around the sounds. Move with them, through them, feel them move around and through me. I'm in the gallery now, and that low tone is sometimes solid and then rumbling, broken with modulation, all dependent on location and acoustic properties of the room. Just a few steps into the corner enough to achieve difference. As the audience gather I feel the urge to find the sweet spot. I wonder where it will be, and I hope I can wander and find more than one.
A little more wind. Massimo and gallery staff play the Sound Paintings guided by simple graphic scores on music stands. Edoardo paces slowly, moving through the audience who are also free to follow their ears and wander.
Breathing. Mouths. Lips. Chords. Sounding corners, subtle spatial shifts, definite locations muddied by the acoustics. Some of the Sound Paintings wheeze and whistle. In each of the two performances Massimo walks to the long pipe and plays it, moving his hands in and around the aperture causing fluctuations and silences, before returning to his blue wall mounted instrument.
Saxophone squeals, cavorting in wild frenzied blasts pacing around the gallery. The audience are inside the machines. Our breath creating the chords. I stand close to Massimo’s Sound Painting watching him pull and push the air handle. I place my hand over a mouth and feel a ghosts breath on my skin.
In here or out there, we go where we need, transcending the space.