“It sounds lovely, but what is it?”

Phoebe Pan

A Tone Poem in Twelve Frequencies

The practice room had no windows. I was thinking, not of Chopin or Mozart or Bach, but of buckets, how if you walked under the rain with one over your head, it might sound like you were on a different planet. The keyboard remained untouched. Someone next door was learning Schoenburg. I imagined landscapes made of cymbal rain and thunderclaps. Once, after a concert, a sprightly woman came up to me and said: “I loved your performance. It sounded lovely. But what was it?” Yes, indeed. What I have gathered, from those large, interminable years, now rests in the murk of memory: plastic trophies cast in cheap gold lacquer. The accompanist coating her fingertips with liquid bandaid. The thick chorus of blood thrumming through everyone’s hearts. The eyes of a concert hall. The mouth of an orchestra. The silence, then---

When I dreamt of being a pianist, in those days laden with dog-eared music scores and delicate wrists, there was a mysterious and oft-sought secret to the brilliant performer that some called an irreplicable quality of sound, which was simply a melodic transposition of je ne sais quoi: the way one would distill, with gentle firmness through the alembic of her soul, a sound that did not merely reach people but held them, a sound that did not end but in fact began. I never learned this secret, though. Perhaps if I did, I would have a different sounding of my desires. Now, I suspect those dreams were not of the Clair de Lune type, but of reaching toward something akin to a Björk-ful wail, teetering between love and despair. I did not have the patience to become a classical pianist. I did not want to be the precise pin drop; I wanted to be the roaring silence against which it could be heard.

In a fervor, I spent an entire summer learning Olivier Messiaen’s Regard de l’esprit de joie. I had read sparingly of his composing style. All I knew was that he loved birdsong and the theology of joy. How to describe his music? Imagine blackbirds plunging down the thin branches of a tree, then---as quickly as they came---springing back into the air, with only the quivering branches as proof that they had been there. His music is the quivering branch. Sparse, but within that sparseness, teeming with ghostly chaos and movement. Years later, I recognized Messiaen’s theology of joy during organ pump nights at Oberlin, when we would gather in Finney Chapel and unfold our bodies on the stage floor to keep it warm, splayed like starfish across the wood paneling. Bach toccatas rushed into our anxiety-ridden bones. Yet it was also like being rattled from the inside, with latent emotions clamoring for long-lost attention. As if to say, please. Another. Again. Hungering after something in the shape of God. Our starfish forms braced against the great shoulders of slamming waves. Meanwhile, my friend recalls mishearing, with horror, organ, as in a vital bodily part, in lieu of organ, as in the church appendage with great reeds and windpipes. I wonder if Messiaen thought of organs as organs, instruments as bodies and bodies as instruments, each sounding the great distances of desire. For what is sound but a motion carried out by our limbs and hearts? I do not know much else about Messiaen. Perhaps I should. What I did not realize about growing up is that we are expected to be so much at once. Now, in the music shop below my apartment, college boys pine through The Smiths with their cobbled-together bands. Sometimes my fridge rattles along, because of course the tiny gnome who inhabits it has drum practice at the same hours. As winter creeps into Chicago, I wake to hissing radiators and draw myself into the bedsheets. The floorboards creak. The kettle pings. I am still scared of thunder, the thing that breaks and sharpens everything it touches. I am comforted, too, by the resonance it sends through the air, the way it sounds my body, frightened into a clarity of being.

As a kid, I loved to hold seashells up to my ear and listen for the ghost of the sea. Later, though, I would feel bad about him being trapped in these shells, as if he were a claustrophobic genie in a brass lamp, so I tried to search up ways to set him free. No luck. He was stuck. I decided to place the shells near my tape player so that the ghost would at least get to listen to my old collection of Alfred Brendel’s Schubert recordings. I hoped that, bookending the music, the white noise reminded him of home.

Ryuichi Sakamoto made async after recovering from throat cancer in 2015. It’s an album of electronic and ambient recordings, defamiliarized from the everyday, intimately concerned with the end of life. I listened through this album, several times, during the years when I began to understand what a home meant. I had moved out of childhood and into the dingy apartments of supposed maturity. The titular track, “async,” reminded me of that one scene in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, when the castle breaks down and falls apart, piece by piece, yet still continues to stumble through the hills, adamant, inexorable, ravenous, clinging to a withering blue flame. Home is where the hearth is, yet the hearth is not always lit. Now, I walk through the rooms I have filled, piling the cupboards high with matches and spare bulbs, waiting to meet the sulking dark. I’ve learned of the sound that one makes when realizing there is no way to return. The scrape of a match struck. The flames, nipping ever closer to the extinguishing pinch. An exhale, mistaken as relief. They say that there are things more terrible than the dark. I hold the match in my hand, listening to the smoke curl. It sounds, oddly, like the soft swallow of a throat.

During end-of-semester college exams, the classrooms became avant-garde compositions riddled with the notes of pencil scratches, palms against paper, peppermints cracking against teeth, the occasional gulp of panic. I spent a good portion of my college years trying to be as quiet as possible. It seemed necessary, amidst the chatter of seminars and posturing tones, to care for what I might find in the silence. There was gentleness, a lovely kind, and the occasional cat’s-paw breeze across the pool of my heart. I spent time with the ducks. Still, sound entices---to shock, to fill this kaleidoscopic world with its own psychedelic soundtrack---and I felt silence’s discomfort. Everyone asked where my sound was. We love to hear it! You should speak more! Inside, the pool drained itself. I tried to give it Lifesaver rings. A storm hovered over its place yet never rained enough to fill the cracked basin. Only thunder and empty lightning. Even now, when I try to return to the silence, I find it guarded by a sheen of noise, the distant howls of every love left unconfessed, every argument conceded, every compliment retreating into awe, every unspoken truth subsumed by an inevitable symphony of doubts.

As it goes, I fell in love with Seamus Heaney’s poems one rainy summer. Particularly, I loved the way he understood how language can metamorph into song. In “Bone Dreams,” he writes of “the iron flash of consonants / cleaving the line.” In “To a Dutch Potter in Ireland,” there exists the “cold gleam-life under ground and off the water, / Weird twins of puddle, paddle, pit-a-pat.” That summer, I tried to memorize poetry on long walks. Mostly Shakespeare and George Herbert because they were easy, with their lullaby rhymes and psalm-like rhythms. I pulled on my boots and stomped in shallow dishes of sidewalk water. The slap of soles against concrete scared the birds away. Funny, these impulses. They hear something that we cannot.

A friend recently gifted me Daphne Oram’s book on electronic music and sound composition, in which, among other diagrams, Oram draws sound waves like the ragged crests of a mountain range. I thought of how the earth’s mantle must sound in the mornings, stretching and groaning against its baked crust. Long ago, I had worked my way into the caverns of audiophile culture, trawling Reddit forums on gear, wincing at all the tech bros puffing their egos through blowfish jargon and judgement, yet unable to look away, thinking, I need a good pair of headphones only to absorb every breath taken in Sufjan Stevens’ “John My Beloved,” as if his voice were around me, as if I didn’t have to stretch over the table to touch his sorrow. The way he sings of fossils and fries, blue hills and baby teeth. The way he sings I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head. I wanted good headphones so as to hear his songs in landscape mode. More than the world. Larger than life. So desire reigns in these registers, these notes that nudge the little tugboat of one’s heart with a gentle choo choo, across the lake with light pooled at its edges, the vale of possibility murmuring under its breath, the furrowed brows of the alps reiterating their judgement: that you have been touched, that you have been taken, that you need only follow the waves, lilting themselves into your arms.

I have this recurring dream about a building made out of sound. It features Corinthian columns constructed by the middle school graduation band performing, poorly, “Pomp and Circumstance.” A roof tiled with the clink of silverware; floors bound by shuffling slippers; walls made of rock music. I wonder if the dream came from a Youtube comment I once read under the music video for Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl,” where someone wrote about the ‘walls of sound’ in her song. That got me thinking about the architecture of music. Like with Beach House, for example---I mean, it’s in their name---I am never sure of the size of sounds in a Beach House song, because it feels like they build rooms rather than songs. (Is that what they mean by bedroom pop?) Sometimes these rooms are endless, like hotel corridors in horror films. Other times, they’re college dorm rooms, packed on a Friday night, filled to the brim with indie records and bursts of laughter, where you’re straining to hear a philosophy major explain his love for Lacan. I’ve been revisiting the recent Beach House album, 7. There are different spaces in this one, not always rooms, but the backseats of cars, the glow of a grin. The sound dive in “Dive” is endless until it isn’t. The floor of the song opens, widens, and there I am, falling again, Alice in astonishment, wondering what sounds dreams make.

Somehow, I always return to the pool. On Thursdays, the synchronized swim team would practice in the deep end of the same pool as the competitive swimmers, and we would hear their music underwater, melodies muffled into a mythical presence. Often, it was Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber, transformed into head bobs and leg lifts. We all tried to sneak glances while underwater. As they wrapped up their routine, I clung to the gutter, waiting for my other teammates to finish their laps, waves slipping around my form, the bass notes tingling the tips of my toes, and I felt that we were all held in a kind of oscillating awe, as if together at the ecstatic end of an indie concert---needing to pee badly, and wanting never to leave.

Sounds that have passed through me: firecrackers; spit-roast; boots on grass; boots on sand; the in-between radio stations; a classmate’s voice reading aloud Derrida; city streets; train conversation; heartbreak parks; stadiums; a churn of synths reaching into the pit of my stomach; Carly Rae Jepsen’s emotions coursing through my veins; Rostam lilting from the back of the cab; the scrub of Okay Kaya’s voice humming low, impossible notes; the way Nina Simone whispers her way into Who Knows Where the Time Goes, live at Philharmonic Hall, 1969; Joanna Newsom’s plucky voice longing like an oboe reed; sparkling water; bubbles; friends belting out Whitney Houston lyrics underwater; Tracy Chapman singing be someone, be someone; tea leaves; clotheslines; how the one I love hums under her breath in the morning; 姥姥 telling me about the cherry tomatoes in her garden; Fazioli pianos; erhu strings; adhans protecting the neighborhood mosque; evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral; dramatic pauses; careful pauses; alien wails in sci-fi films; the clacking chorus of computer labs; the scrape of books pulled from a shelf; the hiss of a papercut; the groans of archives; the huff of a tire pump; the dive, the splash, the kick, the gasp; twin stars in the night sky, singing a language long dead; onomatopoeia; hand gestures; love. Where have they gone? Where are they now?

In Puerto Rico, there is an aluminum dish of a thousand feet in diameter, built inside the remains of a karst sinkhole. The dish is a part of the Arecibo Observatory, a radio telescope once employed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence program. In 2020, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decommissioned the telescope after its support structure buckled. Far off, the Voyager I spacecraft had already exited the orbit of our solar system. On it resides a golden record containing sounds, voices, and music of the planet. Had the Arecibo dish maintained its integrity, perhaps they would have heard us before the record arrived. Or perhaps we would have heard them first. To be a golden disk in space seems terribly lonely. Are there drive-thru cafes? Movie theaters? Disco parties? What does space sound like? A hundred years down the line, even after they have found it, listened to it, acknowledged all its beautiful and difficult and unlikely resonances, they will say, it sounds lovely, and they will ask, but what is it?