Cat and Shanmao's blog

The mist surrounds me. The cool, grey vapour hides all but the grassy field from my sight. The moisture heightens awareness of the wet grass.

Walking among the gravestones that spread out around me, the names of people materialize. Names of people I have never met, dates carved in stone that mean little to me. Dates match up with places and times in my life. 1985, highschool. April 8 1985. Can't say I remember what I was doing that day. There was no loved one who died, no Challenger disaster, no birthday party. Another indicates 1978, my gradeschool. Another 1963, before I was born, but the same year that picture of my neighbours in Ashburn was taken that I remember looking at in Burns.

One gravestone catches my attention. It is simple, bears Cyrillic script, and has a small, sad vase of wilted flowers beside it. The gravestone bears my name.

On Saturday night, Shanmao dragged me to the city for a performance at the Audium. According to their website, the Audium is "a theatre of sound sculpted space". That seemed to be a reasonable, though not easily ... well... visualizable concept. Anyways, music, sound, and everything "audio" is Shanmao's territory, I just went along for the ride, not really expecting much at all.

It turned out to be a more interesting experience than I expected. The audience was led to a round room, with a few circles of seating. Lights dimmed and then the whole space became completely dark, except for the little arrows on the floor that lead out of the room, for those in need. Then came the sound, a mixture of nature, human, and synthesized sounds from the numerous speaker around the room. It was all right, I thought, nothing fancy. Not very interesting. After a while, the only impression I formed was that synthesized sounds are the most jarring of all the sounds, most annoying, in a way. Then the concept "sound sculpted space" came to me, and ironically (or maybe not), it was also the synthesized sounds that like the most sculptural quality. Whenever these sounds played, they seemed to have form, shape, or movement, maybe even color. Whereas when natural sounds only made me think of the nature they came from, and human voices reminded me of human. Was it because synthesized sounds are more simple, that it could be used as a building blocks of visual imagery? Was it because it is abstract and our mind has nothing "real" to relate to that it had to creat some imaginery mental images? Or was it just the way the sounds were played to make me drawing these conclusions...

At the half hour intermission, lights went on. Shanmao claimed that he liked the performance so far, but I was getting a little bored, and not just a little sleepy. When the lights went off again and the sounds surrounded me in the dark, I closed my eyes and started thinking about what I wanted for dinner, and that strange pillow we saw in the store earlier that day, what it would feel like to sleep on that pillow..... I do not know how long this line of thoughts went on but at some point I started seeing things, like in a movie, some kind of drama started playing out in my mind, frames of imagery, with dream-like logic, of a story I vaguely know, all accompanied but the strange soundtrack that was played. But wait a minute, what was happening, this was no movie I was watching, no story and no images. Was I dreaming? Yet I did not recall ever falling asleep. Strange.... I let go of the images.... Then after a while I realized that the same thing was happening again, with different imageries forming in my head, like a vision or a dream. And it happened one more time before the sounds intensified, rapid movements of synthesized sounds filled the space and pulled me completely out of my strange state. Though I was fairly confident that I did not really fall asleep, I was half afraid that I actually did and disgraced myself by snooring in public!

Lights went on, we were out on the street. As I told Shanmao my strange experience, he said he experienced something similar! Like a trance that you get into when you're meditating in Yoga, he said. I had never entered such a trance while doing Yoga -- I either stay very awake or really fall asleep. This time I was really not sure. Given how sleepy I was before the performance I am more inclined to think that I did fall asleep, or that at least I was more asleep than awake. But I really couldn't tell! And that made the whole permance intereating. Music do have great powers. Another thing I remembered from the show was, this would be a terrifying place for someone who's claustrophobic, in the darkness, we were completely in the power of the music, or the sounds that enveloped us.