Birdsong & Darkness

Last night, I went to a very special show that, as part of the Images Festival, was performed in complete darkness. By darkness, I mean COMPLETE DARKNESS. The organizers did an amazing job of making sure that no light whatsoever made it into the theatre, so we all had the unusual sensation of not being sure if our eyes were closed or not, or where our limbs might be.
The experience slotted in well with my current consciousness, having just read Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, in which the main character spends a great deal of time at the bottom of a dried up well, where in complete darkness he goes on strange journeys through walls into hotel rooms where he aquires a bluish black mark that allows him to heal people by touching their foreheads but also perhaps dooms him and if you've read Murakami, you'll know what I mean.
In any case, I was prepared for the experience of darkness to be transcendant. And it was... somewhat. Once I got over the flashes of hallucinatory light that shot over my eyeballs from time to time, I spent a long time noting how much bigger things seem when touched than when seen. Running a fingertip over another finger, I could have sworn my hand was a foot long, my hair Rapunzel esque. But the whole point of the sensory deprivation, or rather, focusing, was the sound. It wasn't music, persay, though performed by musicians like Ryan Driver and (sigh) Mary Margaret O'Hara. One was a spoken word piece discussing room tone and how it is used in film, something that I've always been fascinated by. Though with this particular piece I was distracted, as I always am, by how much 'room tone' is actually microphone tone. Anyway, it was interesting to sit in a room of people noticing, finally, the little shifts in tone that happen in square rooms or round rooms or big rooms or soft rooms, or rooms with refridgerators (that sound terrifying), all because no matter what we did, we couldn't SEE anything to distract us or give us context for the sound.

I used to hum under my breath all the time when I was a kid. Sometimes I would hum tunes I knew, or phrases lifted from things, but I'd weave them into a narrative of my own devising, or sometimes I'd just make up the whole thing, a kind of accompaniment to my day or what I was doing. It was usually an orchestra in my head, and looking back, it was probably kind of humorous - a blast of horns for a toboggan ride or soft flutes at night. Or sometimes, if I was out walking in the woods or fields where I grew up, I would sing the ongoing song at the top of my lungs. I used to drive my sister crazy with trying to play the song on an imaginary piano, drumming my fingers on things. Now I don't know if I did this all the time, but I remember it happening a lot. I didn't think it was unusual. But of course I grew up and the inner symphony ceased, and I went to high school and didn't play music at all. And then I became a musician and played music all the time, but it's only recently that I've been returning to it. I've been singing all the time lately, just walking around or doing dishes, just singing little phrases that repeat and repeat and then change, bit by bit, into new phrases, and I don't think about it at all. Anyway, I was thinking lately that this singing reminds me of birdsong sometimes, just this constant sort of meandering melody in the background that's certainly communicating something, but something I don't necessarily understand. In any case, I find it deeply calming.

Speaking of birdsong: there is an interesting video which you've probably seen, if you follow these things, wherein people were taught bird songs that had been slowed down till they were in a normal human register, and singable, and then they sang them, and then the video was sped up to bird song register again, and the people sound exactly like birds, and look like them too, with their breath super fast like birds.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1997689,00.html
I also liked this quote about birds:
"Birds are thought to have a finer temporal discrimination of sounds than humans. This means they hear the individual elements of composite sounds that for us appear as a single blurred sound. Their hearing may have up to eight times the temporal resolution that ours can achieve. One way getting some impression of this is by slowing down bird sounds; the simple way of doing this also lowers the pitch of the sound by the same factor and this is a fascinating way of tuning in to the hidden depth of birdsong, a kind of transformation to a more human musical sensibility."

I think this all fits in with how much I, for one, have been thinking lately about detail in music, detail in general. I think a useful way to judge the health of one's psyche could be joy in detail - the ability, which I don't always have - to notice and see beautiful little things, the knit stitch made miniature in t-shirt fabric, the sound of pulling open a guava. And I think about birdsong and all the tiny little variations in the repetitions that they use to say things, and i think of the same thing about my dishwashing songs, and of all the best folk songs, and I think of how if you really narrow in and close your eyes, the tiniest little shadings of timbre and melody are where the musical joy is.

And yet it's funny how so much of it depends on where you're at, and sometimes you can't hear those things at all. But I feel lucky to be hearing them these days.