Sympathetic Vibration

Well, I just had a pretty strange little moment.

The boiler maintenence crew is here with their truck outside, so the hot water is off until later today.

So with the time I now have, I picked up the shakuhachi to warm-up/play something. I put the metronome on 60 bpm (that's one beat per second last I checked - more on that later) as I usually do, and played the first two notes of the warm-up: low Ro, to Tsu. (The pitches are: D above middle C, up a minor third to the F)

But when I stopped the breath on the F, the Tsu, it kept ringing. It was very subtle, but there. At first I thought something in the apartment somehow tuned to an "F" was ringing sympathetically. This will occasionally happen with one of the guitars laying around - I will play a loud note on the shak (it helps if its loud) and one of the open strings on the guitar will ring (guitars are generally tuned, low to high, E-A-D-G-B-E; the 5 holes of the standard 1.8 length shakuhachi play D-F-G-A-C respectively. So the D-A- and G occur on both and when played on a shak will cause the corresponding strings of the guitar to vibrate, to ring - I'm still trying to figure out how to do it the other way around;-).

And it is actually not even limited to the pitch of the note itself, but will incorporate the overtone series as well. So a note one fifth away is also likely to get things a hummin'.

The phenomenon is fascinating. It is almost magical. If we didn't understand what we are told to be the physics behind it so well, we would be much more impressed, I'm sure. To cause something across the room to come alive and sing back to you the pitch that you are putting out into the ether has many levels of metaphor. Metaphors of class, culture, gastronomy, spectra, etc. Things and waves and people tend to gravitate to what they find most familiar. That is the comfort zone. Other types of people seek things out that are the LEAST familiar, to try and understand the other and themselves better. We're all some mixture of both, I suppose.

And so anyway, it was with me just now that I was curious as to the source of my duet partner.

Alot of times it will be the piano ringing as a result of something laying on the keys at the low end, releasing the dampers from contact and allowing those strings to vibrate. But the sound was coming from the opposite direction.

Also immediately off the list were the guitars, because the pitch was an F - the vibration would not be what the guitar strings found interesting or familiar enough to answer back to. The F was "some other", "different" sort of vibration, one not easily recognizable. Probably a sound that should be feared, or perhaps eliminated (maybe I'm reading too much into the guitar's mal-intent - it is, afterall, set up to be a polyphonic instrument).

Not to mention the fact that all the guitars are presently in their cases.

On the other hand, I got to see the pull, first hand, of what it means to make a sound you think noone can really hears, or cares to hear, be echoed back to you as an identification - as an invitation to continue the dance. "I am You, You are Me, continue, continue". It was irresistable. Suddenly that F above middle C was the only note on the flute that mattered, because somewhere, something else was singing it too.

This felt like some kind of "Free Willy" moment.

The other, random movie reference would be to one of the Indiana Jones movies (the one with Sean Connery as the Dad) where Indy is in some old library in Venice, which is actually also the place on his map where he needs to excavate to move on with his day. So he grabs a brass rope divider holder and smashes the floor marked with an "X" at the precise moment that a library clerk slams the due date stamp down onto the page of the book he's processing.

The force of the smash echoes through the marbled, high ceilinged atrium and the clerk looks at the stamp quizically and after a pause, tries it again. And again, it is synced up to the smash of the floor by Indy and the clerk begins to question his true power.

What was making this sound? I walked toward the kitchen. It got louder. I played the note again. It felt still better. The drop returns to the ocean. The calf to its momma's teat. Ahhhh....

I stuck my head out the window. It was the boiler truck's mechanized machinery making that awful racket.

"Hey, shut up down there!".

;-)