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 Music, Meditation, and the Skull as a

 Sound Chamber 

by David Metcalfe

(Originally published at The Teeming Brain)

The ancient Tibetan metaphysical texts state that all sound is music, all music is

mantra, and mantra is the essence of all sound. Through the use of ritual and mantric

 power, the Tibetans use sound to effect a specific change in the individual and the

environment.

 Mantra is a pattern of sound or sound vibration that is based upon primordial sound 

structures. By their sheer inherent potency and disciplined execution, these

concentrated essential energies bring about direct spiritual phenomenon.

– From the liner notes for Cho-ga, Tantric & Ritual Music of Tibet (Teldec, 1974,

 LP)

 When I was in college I worked at a small music store, often doing 10-hour days with no

managerial supervision. This meant that for four years I was privy to an intense engagement

 with a wide range of music on a daily basis, including everything from Edith Piaf to

Throbbing Gristle, and some of the more obscure pleasures in between. Faced with my own

predilections, as well as those of the regular customers, I became interested in deleting my 

preferences, or more importantly, my distaste for certain types of music.

 When you work in an environment like that, it’s easy to become a smug connoisseur. While I

 won’t claim to have avoided that arrogance altogether, I did pursue a program to erase my 

preferences by using some of the insights I gained from my academic focus on ritual and

cognitive philosophy. After four years’ worth of 10-hour shifts, if you’re too picky about what

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 you listen to, you’ll quickly go insane or become a raging asshole.

Each day while driving to work or school, I would randomly choose a radio station by 

spinning the dial and letting it land wherever it wanted. Then I would enjoy whatever music I

encountered. I would enjoy it even if I hated it, and during commercials, because I was brainwashing myself and wasn’t interested in letting others brainwash me, I would turn the

dial between stations and listen to white noise. White noise also replaced the station if I landed

on talk radio during the random spin. Again, I was interested in brainwashing myself, not

letting others do it to me, and this experiment was not about learning to enjoy propaganda

 but opening up my musical preferences.

 When I described the experiment to my collegiate advisor, he warned me that I was playing

 with fire and could end up erasing preferences that were crucial for having a self-identity in

society. However, I knew that initiation, even self-initiation, is a dance with a purifying

flame, so I ignored all warnings and continued on.

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groundwork for a much better understanding of sound and its effects on the way we

understand ourselves.

Recently, I was excited to see that the sound artist Kim Cascone is developing a program that

takes a more positive approach to this kind of aural meditation. He has designed what he callsa ‘Subtle Listening Seminar’ which engages people in developing a better understanding of the

nuances of sound:

 Subtle Listening is a mode of listening where one’s imagination is open to the sound 

world around them, helping their inner ear and outer world intersect.

The Subtle Listening workshop is an ongoing workshop for musicians, media artists,

 filmmakers, composers, producers, sound designers, or any type of artist who wants to

sharpen their listening skills.

The workshop uses a wide range of techniques culled from Jungian psychology,

 Hermetic philosophy, paradox and Buddhist meditation, as well as thirty years of my

own experience as a sound artist and electro-acoustic music composer.

Through guided meditation and various types of listening exercises, participants will 

learn techniques they can use any time to help heighten their sensitivity to the sounds

around them.

This methodology brings out the depth of experience that is possible when we interact with

sound. Cascone describes one of his recent compositions, “Lunar Gauzes – Alchemisphere

One,” which was featured in the Hermetic Library’s audio anthology Magick, Music &

Ritual 4, as “subtle lenses, azoth prisms & scrying mirrors to be listened to on headphones

during meditation.”

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 While this may sound obscure, it plays on the fact that

much of Cascone’s current work is created not just to be passively engaged but to be used . The

inclusion of binaural sounds in these tracks effects an active change in the brainwave patterns

of the listener, allowing these compositions to be what Stephan Schwartz, one of the scientists

active in studying Remote Viewing, calls a “ground for working” with the ambient mental

field.

Nuances of hisses, static, pure beats — all wash over the auditory field, activating a sort of 

sensory overload that heightens other forms of mentation. Increased ideation, mental visions,

and the emergence of memories bring listening beyond melody into the space. Images appear

unbidden, and a trans-cranial cinema emerges from the fully engaged senses.

Cascone’s creations are hand-crafted, psyche-summoning sound sculptures that indeed invite

“a mode of listening where one’s imagination is open to the sound world around them,

helping their inner ear and outer world intersect. ” These tracks act as substructures that bring

about visualized equations of symbolic exchange, with sound acting as the ambient bed on

 which a lucid mental field emerges in which to work.

“My skull is a sound chamber, a place for an aural

engagement that can lead to spaces in which it ispossible to work directly with the mental states

and symbolic imagery evoked through a dutiful

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attention to the art of listening.”

 With this kind of active listening, the value derived from the experience is very much reliant

on the capability of the listener him/herself. The delicate sound sculptures Cascone is creating

for these meditative pieces develop from a deeper understanding of what he discusses in his

2000 essay “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer

Music”:

Concepts such as “detritus,” “by-product,” and “background” (or “horizon”) are

important to consider when examining how the current post-digital movement started.

When visual artists first shifted their focus from foreground to background (for

instance, from portraiture to landscape painting), it helped to expand their perceptual boundaries, enabling them to capture the background’s enigmatic character.

The basic composition of “background” is comprised of data we filter out to focus on

our immediate surroundings. The data hidden in our perceptual “blind spot” contains

worlds waiting to 14 be explored, if we choose to shift our focus there. Today’s digital 

technology enables artists to explore new territories for content by capturing and 

examining the area beyond the boundary of “normal” functions and uses of software.

– Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary

Computer Music,” resonancias, 2002 (originally published in Computer Music Journal 

Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 2000)

One of the common critiques of the compositional methods outline by Cascone in this essay is

that they forgo the long history of traditional musical development and the understanding of 

the complex interrelationships of harmonics that underlie Western music. However, Cascone

has taken these “glitches” and reenvisioned them with a new kind of formalism that relates

directly to a neurological harmonization moving far beyond expressionist abstraction.

To listen to these pieces with classical composition in mind is to miss their importance as

meditation tools, which require the active intention of the listener to engage them through a

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contemporary matrix of science and the sacred. This kind of work accesses all of the insights

gained from contemplative traditions, such as the Hermetic and Buddhist influences that

Cascone mentions, and brings them into a contemporary setting where they can interact in a

relevant way with our current media-saturated culture. With a background that includes

professional audio work for film and video games, Cascone brings a craftsmanship to these

pieces that isn’t found in most contemporary music of this nature.

For me, Cascone’s work further develops the transformation of ambient urban noise into

complex meditation with a delicacy that I’ve never found in the Futurists, the Musique

Concrete movement, or the more recent Industrial, Glitch, Ambient, and attendant

sub-genres. The focus on an active engagement with the soundscape has made me think 

more of my skull as a sound chamber, a place for an aural engagement that can lead to

spaces in which it is possible to work directly with the mental states and symbolic imagery 

evoked through a dutiful attention to the art of listening.

“The ancient Tibetan metaphysical texts state that all sound is music, all music is mantra, and

mantra is the essence of all sound.” And our current understanding of physics shows that all

sound is light, and all light is matter, matter making sound, and on and on into that sacred

ouroboros. Accessing this timeless state is easy. It’s simply a question of what doorway you

choose, and how dedicated you are to finding the right key.

-

David Metcalfe is an independent researcher, writer and multimedia artist focusing on the

interstices of art, culture, and consciousness. He is a contributing editor for Reality Sandwich,

The Revealer, the online journal of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and The Daily 

Grail. He writes regularly for Evolutionary Landscapes, Alarm Magazine, Modern Mythology,

Disinfo.com, The Teeming Brain and his own blog The Eyeless Owl. His writing has been

featured in The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized 2011), Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color

& Music (Alarm Press, 2011) and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness (North

 Atlantic/Evolver Editions 2012). Metcalfe is an Associate with Phoenix Rising Digital Academy, and is currently co-hosting The Art of Transformations study group with support

from the International Alchemy Guild.

 For more information on Santa Muerte, and the sanctification of death in the popular faith

traditions of the Americas, check out http://skeletonsaint.com, a collaborative project 

hosted by Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut, David Metcalfe and Liminal Analytics.

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