Every two years, those of us who live in Waterloo Region are spoiled by an incredible outburst of sonic experiences called the Open Ears Festival. For the past two festivals, I have taken advantage of the all-festival pass, which gives access to about three or four performances each day over a period of about a week. It's both exhausting and exhilarating. There is no possibility that I could capture even a small fraction of my experiences from this festival, and I almost feel as though the effort of trying to clunk down words is going to sully the memory of the experience. But I can't resist a few brief remarks about my favourite event, just because it lines up so nicely with some of the other tangents of my work. On Friday, I embarked on a sound walk with R. Murray Shafer. This consisted of a short talk given by Shafer himself in a beautiful little outdoor space, a ride in a yellow school bus to a trail winding along the banks of the Grand River, and a slowly unfolding buffet of auditory events ranging from a poetic raptor, to an operatic angel, to a loving father belting out the story of a battle between son and river while being circled by a tonal representation of the water and buffeted by an extraordinary and unexpected series of gusting winds.
Shafer's argument that we normally encounter music in cloistered halls, carefully insulated from the outside world by the laborious construction of acoustic temples reminded me of my own arguments that the visual barriers set up by the walls of the built environment encourage us to live our lives as if we were entirely disconnected from everything not of human origin. His reminders to listen for the ways in which the human voices and instruments married in spectacularly unpredictable ways with the natural sonic environment worked perfectly for me. This is truly a performance that could never happen in the same way twice. Indeed, our experience on Friday on a bright blustery day was apparently very different from the dark, rainy setting of Thursday's performance.
For me, there's something very special about sounds. They remind me of just how fleeting and ephemeral my experiences can be. When I look at a painting, a photograph, a natural vista, I can look away and then return my gaze and, though there might have been some subtle changes, I'm returning to the object that was there before. Sights are enduring. Sounds arise in an instant and then are gone forever. My most intimate experience of this came years ago during an intensive course in meditation. In Buddhist practice, one is encouraged to find ways to cleave memory, meaning, and expectation from the experience of the moment -- to take in the constantly changing sensory panorama as a ceaselessly renewing, ever changing knife-edge of sensation. It's incredibly difficult to do. My own peak experience of this (though I know one is not supposed to feel attachment to such experiences -- I think this means that I'm a better psychologist than I am a Buddhist) came while sitting in an overheated attic space beside a busy city road. Eyes closed, in the company of a dozen or so kindred seekers, trying to peel the labels off of sounds and experience them as a pure rush of time, I had a moment -- I bet it was no more than 500 milliseconds -- during which all words fell away. I was picked up and shoved into a maelstrom of pure, unlabelled sound. And then, ever the analytic mind, I recognized what was beginning to happen, felt a sudden rush of excitement, and it was all gone. It's been some time since I've recollected that experience, and the walk with Shafer on Friday brought it back to me in a emotional flood. I look back on those 500 milliseconds as one of the peak experiences of my life. And anything that can take me back to that moment, remind me of the possibilities for getting out from under the monstrous mess of mediated experience...well...let me just say that my ears were open.
