July 03, 2023 / By mobanmarket
Photo of the Portland State Chamber Choir: John Atkinson
“The crying rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause.“—Bob Dylan, “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”
I remember as a toddler sitting in the kitchen on a highchair, watching my mother smoke a cigarette, apply red lipstick, and tune a turquoise table radio from one news station to another. Between the strange, nattering voices, the radio emitted a sharp hissing sound. That’s my first memory of human voices coming from a little box.
I did not understand how the voices got into the box. But I saw a wire that went from the box to the wall, so I concluded the voices came from somewhere else.
Another memory, a few years later: a hot August day on my father’s farm. The sun was bright white, and I was chasing three dogs through a field of thistles and nettles. We were heading to the creek to cool our business in the shallow, fast-running water. Plowing through high weeds, we zigzagged toward the stream’s muffled, crackling sounds.
For no conscious reason, I stopped still and looked up at the sun. The dogs’ barking faded, telling me they hadn’t stopped. I heard loud splashes as they broached the stream. Looking down, I noticed the rhythmic The kric-kric of cricket sounds framed by the ear-piercing 350Hz drone of throbbing cicadas. Insect cries, burning thistles, and blinding sun pierced my body in equal measure.
That moment of hot, noisy awareness was my introduction to the vibrating, sun-and-moon-capped, dome of energy that surrounds me at all times. For the first time, I perceived the outside world as a concert of vibrating forces penetrating my body. I hadn’t started school yet.
When I was 15, I spent many August nights standing with my bike just outside Tom Adams’ open garage door. I watched in silence as he and my pal Bill Brier (who was 22) worked on their gray-primered Model A Ford hot rod. One night they invited me in and offered me a beer. It was a celebration: They were about to fire up a flathead V8 they’d just finished building. After a long minute of slow cranking, they achieved ignition. Flames shot from backfiring header pipes. Dust squalls and concussive sounds overwhelmed the garage.
Brier urged me closer so I could hear air shrieking into the three carburetors. I felt wind from the four-bladed fan. Then Brier released the throttle and said, “Listen for the valves and lifters—can you hear them clattering?” With a screwdriver, he turned the idle way down, till the engine loped and sputtered spasmodically. Almost whispering, he asked, “Can you hear the pistons moving?” I nodded, pretending I could.
Later, as I was leaving, Bill shouted after me, “You have to learn to listen! To the whole engine, inside and out! When you can do that, you’ll be a real mechanic.”
Fifteen was a major turning point in my life.
Before loud cars in garages, I spent much of my youth in churches: singing in a choir and praying, but mainly listening distractedly to spoken words reverberating off stone walls. I still regard a church’s acoustic volume as a sacred and mystical entity — especially if it has a dome. Even empty and quiet, a church’s space is alive with sound. Audio recordists call the sound of a room’s quiet emptiness room tone. My brain responds to room tone. Therefore . . .
I have begun collecting high-rez recordings of room tone, to use as tools for comparing components, especially DACs and DAC filters. Room tone makes subtle sonic comparisons easier because it represents what John Atkinson calls “a picture of a room.” Imagine an extremely delicate 60-second aural snapshot of a specific moment in a large enclosed space. These savory, nuanced stews of low-level ambience sound revealingly different with every DAC, speaker, or amp I audition.
My best room tone file is a recent recording, by John Atkinson, of an inspirational talk given by the Portland State Chamber Choir’s music director, Ethan Sperry. It was spoken to the choir in the moments preceding the final take at the final session for their forthcoming album on Naxos. Listening to it feels like a vivid childhood memory. As the music director speaks, my brain asks, How can a room this big, with that much reverberation, ever be an effective recording venue?
When Sperry finishes, JA’s voice startles me with a loud, “Amen!” Obviously John had been sitting right next to the microphone (footnote 1); Ethan Sperry had been about 20 feet away. When the choir begins, the power of their combined voices overwhelms the massive energies of room tone and sends my mind racing backward.
The word audio implies an electromechanically recorded source: a cylinder, a wire, a tape, a disc, or an invisible file. But in my mind the crickets, splashing dogs, and backfiring flatheads are audio sources, too. In my mind all sounds under the Dome of Life are equally real and equally important. Whenever and wherever
I am still, and listen consciously, with tuned awareness, I experience—full spectrum — the mechanizations of life and the vicissitudes of thought. To me, that experience is the only real reality.
In my mind, Ethan Sperry’s voice appearing between my speakers is more than just an energized facsimile of those mechanizations and vicissitudes. It’s more than a newfangled table radio. It’s an important part of my personal reality.
And finally I understand how the voices got in the little box.—Herb Reichert
Footnote 1: My “Amen” came from a talkback speaker on a stand on the right-hand side of the choir. Producer Erick Lichte and I were at the back of the Oregon church, about 100′ away from Ethan Sperry and the choir, so I had rigged up a microphone and preamp for us to use, connected to the powered speaker, and I had turned it up too loud!—John Atkinson
Click Here: cheap Crusaders Jerseys
Categories: