Voice Mysticism: The Harmony of the Spheres

"The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the entire universe" Khan

Some train themselves to hear in the solitude, on the sea shore, on a river bank, in caves.... 

I bought a book a while ago, The Mysticism Of Sound and Music: The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Several years actually, and since then it has been sitting on the shelf. I "randomly" opened a page today and found answers to questions I have been pondering all year. Right under my nose.  Clear answers. Clearly I have been in training.

I am exploring my sensory engagement to my environment, and associated issues with perception. I have been exploring the melodies that come by exploring natural structures. It is sometimes nudged by the etheric (almost above the tree tops) and sometimes it is the denseness of the physical environment, more like a Pranic energy. Inside the caves, sometimes there is a mixture of both of these.

Accoridng to Khan, abstract sound is called 'sawt-e-sarmad' by the Sufi's; all space is filled with it...the sound of the abstract plane, which Muhammad heard in the cave...Moses heard on Mt Sinai....Christ heard in the wilderness...Shiva in the cave in the Himalayas.

"Space is in the body and the body is in space". Almost like in the caves: being in the cave, and the caverns in the body. Paradox within paradox. Space within the space. Infinite. 98% of our body cells are empty space. 

Those who are able to hear the sawt-e-sarmad and meditate on it are releived from all worries, anxieties, fears, sorrows, diseases and the soul is freed from capitivity in the senses and in the physical body.

A shell, found on Bateman's Bay, possibly
 like the shanka, that awakens in man his
inner tone, his "inner song".

I went to a beautiful concert at the State Library of Victoria "Love and Devotion" back in March. It was on Rumi, one of the greatest poets of all time, in my opinion. It was presented as a combination of the Persian Flute, poems said aloud in both Farsi and English. Such a creative presentation. Exquisitely beautiful. Rumi states that he did not belong to any religion although he was Muslim. Persian poetry is highly symbolic, acting as a bridge that links earthly and heavenly images, spiritual and profane ideas. Shahnama of Firdausi is one of the songs. and so powerfully moving. 

Listening is active, hearing is passive. In his TED talk, Julian Treasure speaks of the concept of 'Sound Health'. (Check him out, there are several other great talks he does. I am a big fan) One of his comments is "It's when the birds stop singing that we need to pay attention". As I woke to the sound of chopping wood this morning, and the distinct absence of bird song, I was reminded of this. He urges us to consider listening consciously to the world around us. He also talks of "earlids" which i like immensely. Except that unlike eyelids, we cannot close our earlids when we do not want to hear something.

Marius Schneider is an ethnomusicologist  who coined the term "Acoustic Spirituality" and stated that all matter vibrates, and therefore everything in the world has a sound.

"The astronomy of the Pythagoreans marked an important advance in ancient scientific thought, for they were the first to consider the earth as a globe revolving with the other planets around a central fire.  They explained the harmonious arrangement of things as that of bodies in a single, all-inclusive sphere of reality, moving according to a numerical scheme.  Because the Pythagoreans thought that the heavenly bodies are separated from one another by intervals corresponding to the harmonic lengths of strings, they held that the movement of the spheres gives rise to a musical sound-the "harmony of the spheres.""
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2000

In the  TED talk by Janna Levin, she speaks of how the universe isn't silent, but has distinct sounds and rhythms which is the sound of the planets vibrating. Just think, the big bang likely had a song! a description is that it is like a low banging on a drum. Perhaps the future of music is "Gravitational Tunes"? How can we listen to this? Open our ears more to that which surrounds us? What kind of equipment do we need? And because we can't hear it at our frequency, does that mean it doesn't exist ? And because we can't hear it with our ears, does it not impact upon our physical body? Sandra Selig says that there are "hidden rhythms and structures so that we can sense sound through the visual." Evelyn Glennie's aim is to teach the world to listen. As our accessibilty to sound has increased, how can we listen to music with our whole body?

So if everything has a sound, including the trees, caves, rocks, water, perhaps I can continue to make aural landscapes for these visual and kinaesthetic objects. So that they can be perceived on a multi-sensory and multi-dimensional level, and that I may be able to share with others such an aural experience that I perceive.

"We are ourselves works of art, and as we work to bring forward the art within us, we express our inner divinity" Julia Cameron.

Sound and Silence: a(n) (H)earpoint

“The important notes were the ones I didn’t play.” Louis Armstrong

Contemplation and meditation, as well as musings gathered from regular ocean walks, helped me to become aware again as to why sound was so important to me. People around me seemed to be able to be with a lot of loud noise, a lot of the time. Not so for me. I am starting to make silence a regular part of my day. Without it my nervous system becomes over-stimulated and the parasympathetic nervous system becomes elusive having all sorts of body ramifications.

From birth I was significantly vision impaired. I needed to hear and touch the world. I could not see things and did not see things as others saw them. I was exposed to an alternative sensorial environment: one where sound was paramount. Individuating people and their moods from their unique sound “aroma”. I have vague early recollections that this led to a great deal of fatigue; where silence was a balm when I did not have to be on alert. When i did get glasses it was a whole new way of information entering my psyche, which I adored. I would read to excess, under the covers, even though my eyes hurt.  

Even at this age, I had such a strong desire to know more; to understand the world. It wasn't until I was in my mid 30's that I had a true experience of depth perception: seeing the world in 3D. Oliver Sack's book "The Minds Eye" tells the story of a woman who has 2D vision (unable to sense depth). I  related to that instantly upon reading it, where much of my visual world then made sense. From this visual lack, my auditory and kinaesthetic worlds are my strength. I am lucky for as a voice specialist, visual detail is not the most important aspect. I can hear the voice in a uniquely different way from so many early experiences where this was vital to my survival. It now acts as one of my primary tools of differentiation.

I looked to my creative world for silence to fully immerse myself in the experience of sound at its most delicate. We are exposed to copious amounts of “ambient” noise each day. On any given day in a local café, I could hear the sounds of gulls, traffic, cups, coffee machines, people chattering, exhausts, skateboarders and many other noise cues, as well as music. Interestingly, it was also here in noisy places that I had the opportunity to become aware of my body, my thoughts, and emotions. It seems that when there is too much sound (known as auditory bombardment), I have the opportunity to not listen to any of it (for short periods only).

I was able to contemplate auditory selection versus bombardment in reading the journal of  Acoustical Society of America (ASA) (2012) “Although we have little awareness that we are doing it, we spend most of our lives filtering out many of the sounds that permeate our lives and acutely focusing on others -- a phenomenon known as auditory selective attention.” 

It is interesting that those who get hearing aids for the first time often give up for this exact reason. It takes up to 6 months for the neural re-structuring to filter out unwanted sounds. For many, they wear them non-stop for 3 days, become auditorally 'burnt out', place them in a drawer and never use them again. There needs to be a making peace with the sound world again.

The balance between sound and silence is a unique aspect of my musicality and performance. 

I began to look into my creative sound world through a lens of selective attention to express increasingly subtle nuances of sound. I started to question if could invite people into my auditory unique world: To show them a prism of my conscious world; an invitation to sense another viewpoint. Or a(n) “(h)earpoint.”

This led me to further performance musings.What state does one have to be in in order to truly hear and to be here? Does selectively hearing make us more present to our environment? The idea arose that there might be multiple stages of presence. What would guide people to be more present to themselves and the sounds around them? 

How could I invite others to be present to sound in performance? Is it through shock- as I have seen so many others do, such as in horror movies or certain theatre performances. Or is it through subtle sublime-ness, which I have also seen, such as a performance by Chamber Made Opera and Rawcus theatre company in their show “Another Lament”. Here there were definite feelings in the silence. Some silences were peaceful and others were strident. 

In performance I have a sense that I want to wait until the echoes have ended. Call and silent response, silent response and then call and so the cycle continues. 

Finding ways to strike the balance between sound and silence, for therein lies the power and the harmony between us and the world around us.