The walks kicked off with Dean Brian Pertl explaining the history and concept of Deep Listening. The term was coined by composer Pauline Oliveros. The discovery story is that she was experimenting with recordings, while living in New York City. One day she hung a microphone out of her apartment window, and hung her head out as well. When she played the tape back, there were all kinds of sounds the microphone had picked up that she had not attended to. Deep Listening is the practice of listening as a microphone would, of opening your ears to the full soundscape around you.
We don't do this all the time because it would make communication and getting around in the world very difficult. When I am explaining the concept in person, I say, "For example, right now you are attending to the sound of me talking, and filtering out the background noises like the air conditioner, the clock ticking, the cars going by. We have this capacity of attending to certain things and filtering other things out that works very well for you to understand me right now. But Deep Listening is the practice of reversing that, taking the filters off and attending to the whole soundscape."
The other instruction Dean Pertl gave us was to image the sounds we were hearing were a composed piece, organized in a particular way for us to hear.
The first walk was at 5:00 pm on Friday, a very noisy time during the Festival. We took off from Harper Hall on the Lawrence University campus and walked along the north side of College Avenue. The group included five members of the Music Education team, who were all wearing the same orange t-shirt, so at this walk and the second one both, the visual presentation of the walk was of a group of obviously linked people, moving very slowly and not speaking, and adopting very strange postures toward the objects around them - slowly pacing into doorways and nooks in building walls, putting their ears right up to an orange traffic cone, rocking toward and away from walls and glass windows, standing very still or turning in slow circles, putting their heads inside mail boxes. Someone was taking photos of the second walk and I'd love to see them.
Dean Pertl told us to attend to the point along the walk when music from one venue faded and you could just hear the music from the next one. I heard sounds coming from The Fire, the Alley beside the History Museum and Houdini Plaza - emerging indistinctly as I approached, then loud as loud, then mixing with other sounds.
He asked us to be Sonic Explorers, to interact with things to see how the sound changed. One Education Team member, who had designed the seven Deep Listening stations throughout the Mile, leaned down and put her ear in the opening at the top of an orange traffic cone, and then stood up and silently caught our eyes and nodded an "Oh, yeah," sort of nod, so we all tried it, and it was the best and most surprising sound I heard, especially the difference between listening to the cone when it was sitting on the ground (ocean waves) and when you picked it up an inch or so (more like radio static).
Walking into doorways and little nooks in the fronts of buildings mainly removed the hissy treble sounds of the music in the distance. It didn't seem to matter what shape the entry was - large or small, sharp or angled corners. Perhaps it would it I had more sensitive listening skills.
As we passed under a trestle that has been set up in front of the City Center building as they paint and replace the sign, a man came up behind me talking on his cell phone, and I heard his voice very distinctly say, "Can you hear me now?"
My most personal discovery was as we crossed the street and came to the big gray office building bemoaned by city Placemakers because it doesn't open on to the street. One thing I always do on Deep Listening experiences is try to hear how big the space is (maybe I do this being a big fan of reverb on guitar amplifiers, and also an authenticist who was trying to discover what the "realest" amp is and considering spending $700 on a Fender Spring Reverb Tank, but then researching some more and realizing the only authentic reverb comes from standing in a big room). We were looking down at the sidewalk during much of our walk, to focus on the sonic experience (aural experience). But when I crossed the street and entered that space beside the ugly gray office building, I could hear the larger space opening up. I've tried this since, but it worked much better when there was so much noise being produced.
Dean Pertl's first observation in the debrief of this walk was how few times you fail to hear a Harley-Davidson. They don't close the road during the Mile of Music, so the passing cars contribute to the music themselves.
The second walk was the next morning, early. Some people gathered near Harper Hall, two groups with small children because it was an Education event, and they seemed worried that they didn't know what they were supposed to be doing. I said, "Well, I know how to do it, so if no one shows up, I can lead it," and that seemed to cheer them. The same orange-shirted Music Education Team members arrived, and then Dean Pertl, who had been stuck in traffic behind the Bike to the Beat cyclists, another Mile-sponsored event that early morning.
We began this walk with a walking exercise, Slow Walking, before we started the listening part. We went outside in front of the building, which has a lovely array of sidewalks going in all diagonal different directions, for some distance before you hit another building or a street. The object was to walk as slowly as you possibly could. Have one heel just coming off the ground as the other one hits, and the same for your toes. A little girl who was probably two years old was a very keen participant. She stuck one foot out immediately after Dean Pertl did, to follow his instructions, and walked this funny way throughout the exercise, although she couldn't quite master the slowness at first, just walked one foot in front of the other but at normal pace. She's one of those kids who wants to walk up to everyone and find out what they were doing, so she approached a number of people outside, someone moving percussion instruments on a cart, someone putting up a light, walked right up and looked up and said hello. She looked back once and I reached a hand out to her, mainly to wave but also to keep her connected to our group, and she came right up and held my hand, and we slow walked together for a while. She finally got the pace, and looked up to me and said, "I'm doing it!" We were supposed to be keeping silence, but Dean Pertl had said that he was glad there were some little people in our group, because the sounds they make are part of the soundscape. Her excited and friendly and proud sounds were delightful.
On the walk a few years ago we had spent most of the time in City Park, and much of that playing with the fountain and its sounds as reflected off surrounding surfaces like walls and trees. This time we never made it past the courtyard between the Chapel and the Conservatory building, because there was so much to discover there. Dean Pertl gestured toward me and pointed in some indiscrimiate direction, urgently. I finally realized he was pointing to the air conditioning system at the top of the Con building, and when I saw it then I heard it, I hadn't before. Then he pointed to the plate glass window on the other side, and he rocked back and forth as if he was doing push-ups on the window. I tried it and it made a very distinct and satisfying phaser sound.
At one point the air conditioning of the Chapel building kicked on, and someone had just gone in the automatic door so I thought that's what caused it, but when I pressed the button to open the door again, it didn't really do much, which is how I realized.
Because we were attending to such subtle differences in continuous background noises, it was a shock to hear something like a digeridoo or a trombone, a honking scraping noise. It was Dean Pertl, stepping on the corner of a loose paving stone, in a way that made it squeak. (He must know this area of campus amazingly well.)(I asked him, kidding, in the debrief, whether he had had that stone installed specially, and tuned up, and he said, yes, yes, that's right - so I still don't really know for sure that he didn't!)
At one point, in a spot where I could hear both air conditioners plus street noise, the sound almost became overwhelming, and I could imaging how they describe autism feels, with just too much stimulation and an inability to filter it and attend. I came back away from this feeling by imaging that the sounds were a composition. The Chapel air conditioning system kicking off was very much like the denouement of a composition. The composer was returning to the quiet themes of the opening, before the climactic build. Imposition of imagined intention somehow gave me back control (something to muse on - made it a more conversational experience).
I took myself into parts of the staircase on the Washington Street side of the plaza area where you wouldn't normally go - sitting on the steps, on the wrong side of the railing, down into the greenery near the water pumps. Different parts of the air conditioning noise, different car and street noises, another person on his phone, the park fountain in the distance. I thought the discovery of new visual experiences was sometimes even more impressive than the sonic experiences of a place. On the steps on the wrong side of the railing, I looked up and the number and depth and arrangement of different square and curved shapes was remarkable.
I would love to see a photo of us, mostly in matching orange t-shirts, standing in various meditative postures arranged around this plaza area, some leaning their ears to walls, some turning in slow circles, some lying on the ground and hanging their heads over the side.
The other visual experience I had was that colors were much brighter after each walk, and I remember a friend, years ago, describing this as one of the key benefits of meditation, and his indication that it works (and is better than drugs). Deep Listening is certainly a meditation, and a practice of mindfulness. I suppose you can do it with any of the senses, but it has been a revelation to me to do it with the experience of sound.
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