taking direction …
At the MacDowell Colony for four weeks … arrived Tuesday, now it’s Friday night. A studio of my own in the woods, with nothing to do but work. I’m fed well, can ride my bike to town if I need anything, and have to walk to a little library to use the internet. Quite heavenly. Have immediately finished editing together a version of Numb, and have begun writing more musical material for the rest of MONO … and hope to have the piece structured and plotted out before I’m done here. Also, of course, I need to prepare for concerts in China next month and a write a paper to deliver in Shanghai … but I think MONO is my main job for the month. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll post another call for collaboration in the form of stories, after I post links to Numb and MONO Prelude.
One of the things one does here is talk to other resident artists about your project, so now people are aware of my history with hearing loss, and what I’m doing with it, on some level. This is what we talk about at breakfast and dinner. But this evening, back in the studio, I had a little reminder of my reality.
I’m in the studio, listening to the recording of Numb I’ve been editing together (picture of the ProTools file above). I suddenly become completely paranoid that the stereo imaging isn’t happening. I spend about a half hour sending tones through one speaker then the other … and it doesn’t really matter which one I’m sending it through, I really can’t tell which one it’s coming from. I can see it on the meters on the computer and in the mixer, but it sounds to me like all the sound comes out of both speakers. I finally calm down enough and do some simple diagnostics to convince myself that the sound I’m sending through each individual speaker is what I mean to send there, but it’s an intellectual exercise in debugging. I can’t hear it.
So, if I can’t hear it, why do I care if the stereo is working for other people? On the one hand, it seems antithetical to everything I believe about how I write music: for years I’ve striven to write what I really hear, not what I think I’m supposed to hear. But this seems different. In fact, the rest of the world takes great pleasure in the spatial movement of sound, the separation of sources and their isolation and distinct identity. I can imagine it, but I can’t hear it. That is, I hear it internally, but not with my ears. So trying to realize it seems as important as it did when I had two ears, but now I can’t just deal with it intuitively and with my senses. I now have to treat it as a kind of intellectual task, something I need to do and to trust that it will work as I imagine it.
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