Ancient Echoes: The Power of Place

May 1

Ancient cultures, had a deep understanding of sound, its sacredness and how the dimensions of spaces could be used to enhance the psycho-spiritual effects of voice and music...

In On the Soul Aristotle writes that “everything that makes a sound does so by the impact of something against something else, across a space filled with air.” (De Anima II.8) The Ancient Greeks, along with other ancient cultures, had a deep understanding of sound, its sacredness and how the dimensions of spaces could be used to enhance the psycho-spiritual effects of voice and music.

Archaeoacoustician Stephen J. Waller has noticed that rock art in caves and canyons tends to be found where the acoustics are most reverberant. “Sound reflection, as a general phenomenon, would have been inexplicable to ancient people—whether it was a distinct repeat, or a reverberation that blurs together like thunder—because they didn’t know about sound waves. Instead, they had a supernatural explanation for this phenomenon. Hearing it as communication with the spirit world…”

For our ancestors, echoes held a spiritual symbolism - the sound of a song or prayer returning from the void. Even though we now understand how sound propagates as waves and reverberates in spaces, the experience of echo and reverberation is still primal and essential to our comprehension of music. Reverb establishes a sense of space, and we process it instinctively. No matter how much we know about the science, the sound of a reverberant space, be it a canyon or a cathedral, inspires in us a sense of awe. This is what inspired my creative process with my album, Voices on the Wind. The Canyon echoes are woven into the music. (Mixed with a bass drum is the sound of me stomping on the ground in small box canyon!)

One of my first jobs out of college was working on the construction of a new 24-track recording studio in Auckland, NZ called Harlequin Studios. My boss at the time, Doug Rogers, commissioned a room within a room. All the interior walls and floors were floating, suspended and sonically separated from the outside world. When the project was finished you could walk into that space, and it felt like entering an airlock. There was an unnatural silence that was at once calming and disconcerting. The goal of such a sterile audio environment is to control the effect of echo and reverberation by starting with a completely dry signal and inputting the desired amount of reverb from an effects unit to make it sound natural again. The sound of a voice recorded in this environment was chilling. Nobody liked to hear their voice played so completely naked. In fact, we rarely played a vocal back to a singer without some reverb on it.

At the behest of a visiting English producer, the legendary Roy Thomas Baker, (Queen, The Cars, Smashing Pumpkins) the sterile drum booth was ripped out, and reflective slate tiles were strategically added. We attenuated the ‘liveness’ of the drum booth by low tech trial and error, sonic intuition, feel, using rugs and drapes. It turns out you do need some natural reverberation to work with, particularly for drums.

By the time I got to Nashville the thinking on audio recording had changed, and studios were adding more spaces with reflective surfaces, especially in drum booths. The complexity of natural sound reflection is something our brains notice and our emotions respond to. My first studio job in Nashville was at a famous old studio in East Nashville called Woodland Studios. Woodland was a converted movie theater with large rooms and high ceilings, really the opposite of Harlequin. Woodland sounded great. You could control the amount of natural reflection by placement and then augment it with reverb effects. Those were the days of analog tape. Fast forward three decades into the digital realm where the end result of our recording work is most likely a compressed audio file, MP3, the lossy codec that launched the global streaming revolution. Audio compression is very convenient, and convenience rules. It does, however, have an unfortunate side effect. MP3 is a compression algorithm.

It makes audio files smaller by removing data that is not deemed essential to the replay of the music. Most of the time we don’t miss this information in comprehending the music and lyrics, but one of the things that can be lost is subtle spatial information and reverb tails. (How a reverberation fades out tells us a lot about the dimensions of a space.) This means you have a sense of the music, but you have lost the spatial awareness of the environment in which it was performed/recorded.

To accommodate the loss of spatial information, (since it is inevitable that my music will end up compressed unless it’s played via CD,) I have devised a way of countering the spatial loss by embedding entire sound fields in my music. I go to the effort to do this because the subtle effect of echo and reverb still moves something primal within us. These are more than ‘nature sounds.’ These are reverberant spaces full of spiritual resonance. Even though data is lost through compression, the codec will find the spatial clues I have embedded within the music and recreate some of the depth of field from the original recording. The forest on Forest Bathing is still a psycho-spiritual presence even at the lowest MP3 settings, as are the Sedona Canyons I recorded for Voices on the Wind.

Stephen J Waller has a good explanation of how Ancient people were attuned to sound in ways in which we moderns have become desensitized.

“…There’s a place in Chaco Canyon [in northwestern New Mexico] called Tse’Biinaholts’a Yałti (Curved Rock That Speaks.) An artificial mound was built at the focal point of this curved cliff face, and you can actually get an echo that’s louder than the original sound, because it focuses it. There is a legend associated with a spirit being that’s in the rock. In fact, there’s a whole mythology about portals that open up into a spirit world. Sound reflection helps to give that illusion.”

In Chaco Canyon the building of a mound at the focal point of the rock face reverberation was the result of powerful observation and some adaptation. Instead of moving the floor and wall coverings as we did in the Harlequin drum booth to satisfy Roy Thomas Baker’s discerning ear, the Anasazi found, by that deep instinct that loves the reverberant sweet spot, the perfect place to build the mound where the Curved Rock could speaks to them. Even though objectively, now, we know what an echo is, it is still mysterious and spiritual to our subconscious. It turns out that humans love reverb. We love echoes. It stirs something in us, and this stirring has been known for millennia.

In Ancient Greece the power of human observation was applied in the deliberate construction of sound spaces that still inspire wonder to this day. While the Ancient Greeks may not have conceived of sound waves in the same way we do, they had a sophisticated understanding of harmonics and musical theory merging mathematics, astrophysics, and metaphysics. Their amphitheaters and sacred spaces inspire awe to this day. In a little over a week we will be visiting several such sites in Greece, where the knowledge of sound and its somatic effects were applied to healing.

Stay tuned.

Sources

https://www.archpaper.com/2020/01/an-interview-with-archaeoacoustician-steven-j-waller/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/

https://www.discogs.com/label/263782-Harlequin-Studios

https://www.soundsonline.com/about-us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Thomas_Baker

https://www.discogs.com/es/label/294182-Woodland-Studios?page=1

https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/19/8068923/mp3-compression-ghost-suzanne-vega-toms-diner