The patterns that connect us
The power of sound and music to change the way we feel is unquestioned. There has been extensive research in the entertainment, health and therapeutic industries searching for unique sound patterns that might hold the secret to ‘programming’ the inner states of human experience. From the classical music of Mozart to natural environmental recordings to ancient musical scales, it seems the crafting of sound fields offers rich potential.
At the sacred and burial sites of the ancient Mexicans (Mayan and Peruvian), archaeologists have discovered unique globular wind-blown instruments made from clay shaped into figurines. According to Andean legends, the creator made the first people from clay, and then breathed into the vessels to bring them to life. It is thought that the purpose of the instruments was for travel into other realms, and for the ‘medicine man’ or shaman to bring back wisdom, knowledge and secrets of healing.
Sonorous artifacts have interested researchers of ancient art for their originality and visual design, but studying the sound they generated competes with the museums goals of preservation, nevertheless some replicas have been analysed and found to have special characteristics and can generate complex sound and effects.
Spectral analysis of the Peruvian Whistling Vessels shows mainly pure tones or weak harmonics. The sounds are generally quite high pitched. When a group of vessels that was found together are played simultaneously, the sound is somewhat like the buzzing of the hummingbird in flight, a bird widely depicted in the decorative art of the region. The participants report psycho-acoustical affects in the mind like the sounds of sea and wind, the sense of space inside the head, electrical sensations moving from one ear to the other, accompanied by visual phenomena typically indicating altered states of awareness.
University studies have speculated that the binaural beating of these collective acoustic frequency patterns, very close to those displayed in the EEG tracing of brainwaves, are perhaps causing ‘electrical interference’ between voltage generated by acoustical stimulus and brainwave voltage and might be responsible for the emergence of various inner experiences.
Clearly though, this can’t be the whole story, because the effects cannot be reproduced by listening to recordings of the group sessions of whistle blowing.
Whistles
My sound-art works explore a number of ideas in using sound to create regenerative magnetic fields rather than electrical voltage patterns.
The first idea derives from the interesting stories of ceremonial use of globular whistling vessels. The accounts always seem to involve a circular positioning of the instrument players; even when children are participating they do not all clump together like children are apt to do but they are positioned around the edges of ‘table legs’ or other objects or people. Perhaps a space-time (phase) relationship is key to an immersive inner experience. Achieving ‘surround sound’ is a challenge with today’s digital technology which usually compresses the recording and broadcast of sound to a minimum of points. The complexity of the patterns in the propagating sound field is severely limited. Digital compression technology aims to remove all ‘information’ from the signal that the ear and auditory pathways cannot perceive…. BUT we also ‘feel’ sound. Sound transfers its field patterns into the body’s electromagnetic field: both our brainwaves and our heart-rate variability, which is linked by a growing body of research to emotion.
Globular flute art pieces
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