Sound

04-22-05

Geghard Monastery, Armenia

Starting at the peculiar hole in the top of the dome, I let my eyes wander along the inverse curving stone and down into four symmetrical arches with their four sturdy pillars, as much a part of the rock floor as the rock ceiling. This entire room, twenty meters long, with aisles running around the central dome space, was handcarved from the mountain by ambitious monks many centuries ago.

There were no lines of mortar, no placed stones, the ornamented cross carvings were not on the walls but a part of the mountain, carved in directly. No walls built up over time created this internal space, rather, piece by piece, each rock removed revealed a new corner of the future negative space. A monk, scratching away the first stone at the top of the dome, did he imagine the entire chapel below him, arches, columns, carvings, even the floor, destined to be fifteen meters below him, did he imagine it all then? Was it a perfect picture in his mind, or did the room reveal it’s own nature with each passing year of work? We stood in awe.

Either way, the room created is a perfect acoustical chamber. The kind of room which, upon entering, one must either choose to whisper or sing, nothing inbetween. It is the most fabulous singing space I have ever entered, reminding me again of my longtime idea of writing a book on the natural and constructed acoustical wonders of the ancient world (does this book already exist and if so, can someone recommend it to me?!).

Jim tested the space. Quietly, he let out a low drone, dropping his jaw and ovaling his lips to create a low overtone; a whistling pitch exactly one and a half octaves above his droning note. I was looking straight at him, but the sound did not come from his mouth. It came to my ears via forty-five other directions, reverberating ecstatically round the dome overhead, dancing gracefully round the pillars below. When I heard the first note, it was not a human voice, but a rich warm chorus of harmonies. Jim let his overtone whistling graduate up the overtone series, each subsequent pitch perfectly lining up in vibration with the bass drone.

In the dimming light our eyes ceased trying to see, but into the enlivening abyss of vibration our ears stretched with new found attention and longing. Just as eyes rejoice in rich color and tastebuds crave combination flavors, the ears seek vibrational perfection.

I experienced my ears shutting down my whole brain, my whole body, anything unneccessary to the immediate need of hearing. My feet rooted to the floor, my shoulders and jaw relaxed as if sleeping, my breathing became nothing, my eyes glazed, my thoughts fled. Only my heart remained strong, it’s beat suddenly louder to ears that could hear. The intensifying realization that I was hearing an exact vibration caused it to beat faster, sending a glow of warmth up the back of my neck.

Precise relationships between drone and overtone were audible. Not close, not far, but exact vibrational coordinates. My ears became a microscope of vibration. Zooming in ten-thousand times, the interval remained intact, without the possibility of being outside a perfect mathematical relationship. It was the sound of the room, and not of human possibility. Listening made my ears warm with joy, as if the ears themselves, habitually having to block out destructive sound pollution, were finally enjoying the satisfaction of precision hearing.

Only four seconds had passed since Jim first began to sing. I joined in, singing a second light drone pitch, a perfect fourth below Jim’s. The tones expanded. If I could have seen colors, they would have been dancing. Instead I was seeing sound, ringing it’s way out of space and time, with no analogies to the visible world.

The chapel was underground, therefore fifty-five degrees, and when we were both shivering with cold we emerged, beaming the happiness of a fully realligned vibrational body. The sun was shining at a different tilt, two hours had passed in the single turn of a heartbeat.

We wanted to stay close to the monastery, to savor the aura of sound, the aura of centuries of spirituality and aestheticism. The main church hugged the cliffs, hiding behind it’s deceptively modest walls three more complete chapels, buried in the mountain beyond. A flagstone courtyard swung round the church, the supporting walls full of old carved stones, crosses and Celtic looking ornaments ending abruptly where this rock broke in two, destined not for the sanctuary but for the wall.

Time had not existed for these stone carvers, so elaborately and carefully notched is every tiny niche. Caves dotted the high cliffs, and as we reluctantly passed away from this place, my body continued to vibrate in the waves of sound we had been immersed in for so long.

The Acoustical Exploration Tour of Ancient Armenian Sacred Sites, 2005, had begun!