Write Your Own Reverb
INWARD SOUND | 1.24.21
Echo chambers are bad. Surveying the wreckage of the last election cycle, most would agree on that. By contrast, the word “resonance” veritably hums with harmonious understanding.
So what’s a healthy level of reverb?
Musicians would say it’s the wrong question. Reverberation varies wildly from space to space. The size, shape and materials of a room all affect the time it takes for a sound to decay. Reverberation ranges from the dusty plushness of a hotel room to the liquid shimmer inside a cathedral, where sound reflections dart and dance about, long after the initial impulse.
Acoustics aren’t good or bad in themselves. But there’s music that’s wrong for a particular space. And it takes skill to read a particular resonance profile and navigate it.
Last summer I wrote about a group of researchers who study the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The art historian Bissera Pentcheva thinks that the Byzantine cathedral music written for it deliberately employed vocal squiggles and ornaments so that worshipers would be rocked into a spiritually receptive state by all the overlapping waves of reverberation.
But on the whole hyper-resonant buildings are kindest to music that is clear and slow. A great example is Michael Harrison’s cosmically patient “Just Constellations.” The vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth performed it inside the Tank, a former water tower in Texas with fantastically blooming acoustics.
In “The Sound Book” the acoustic engineer Trevor Cox quotes Stuart Dempster, a trombonist who improvised inside the Dan Harpole Cistern in Washington State with its sound decay of some 45 seconds.
“Usually when you stop for a mistake, the mistake has the decency to stop too, but it doesn’t” Dempster said. Inside the cistern, “it just sits there and laughs at you.”
All of which sounds awfully like Twitter. Social media has exponentially extended the reverberation acting on public speech. Things uttered on a whim sit there and laugh at you long after you’ve regretted the impulse. Inanities take on the halo of truth as they ricochet in space; snippets of truth bounce back harshly dissonant.
The word “repercussion,” by the way, is a synonym for reverberation.
So maybe it’s worth looking to musicians for guidance on how to show up skillfully in a high-resonance space.
And to poets.
At President Biden’s inauguration last Wednesday, the National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recited a poem, “The Hill We Climb.” Judging by the reactions, she struck a chord with millions. It wasn’t just that her delivery had the clarity required of a such a historically resonant moment.
The poem itself artfully builds in moments of micro-resonance where rhymes and homonyms function almost as oracle. “The norms and notions of what ‘just is’ /Isn’t always justice.” It’s a bit like the poet is volleying a word into a canyon and the echo returns it, energetically changed. Weapons become limbs, harm turns to harmony:
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
In the final verses, it seems like the call to action comes from outside the speaker, as if Gorman’s resolve to see the light, once verbalized, resounds as an invitation to become it. Because some thoughts only reveal themselves fully when voiced out loud.
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it
If only we're brave enough to be it
As a meditation on resonance I invite you to dive into this mesmerizing playlist the Tank created for the last summer solstice. It includes Harrison’s “Just Constellations” – with the magnificent addition of a rainstorm pummeling the metal tank – as well as examples of very different approaches to skillfully playing with reverberation.