Blind Sound Walk II

Later on the same day as the previous blind walk we went to La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House on Church Street.

This is a permanent installation where La Monte Young has set up several oscillator’s at different pitches as drones that never change. The pitches are such that they interplay with each other, creating ripples and oscillations between themselves. The idea of the installation is that the longer you are there with the sound your perception of it will change, and it will sound different.

Here’s what it sounds like: 

At first we sat down on the wall and listened. Sure enough, worlds began to unfold as we listened longer and longer. I could hear bass tones, and upper tones, and rumbles between tones that were close together. It was fun exploring.

At some point though, I noticed that if I moved my head a little I could hear some different pitches that I didn’t hear before. After a while of playing with this I realized that the room was enhancing or attenuating certain wavelengths at different places in the room, making the sound changed as you moved your ears in space. In acoustics each room has different places of resonance where some frequencies are deadened or intensified. I got up and walked around totally excited that moving around in the space you could play the music, and the music itself was never actually changing!

I then grabbed the blindfold from before and put it on Kiori and moved her around. After a while she wanted to walk around on her own, blinded, and explore the sounds of the room and the installation, so I just followed and kept her from running into things. We then switched and I walked around blind. I could of stayed there for hours exploring that sound world…