01. Walls and Whispers
Listening online vs in person, and what baby whales teach us
Hello! I’m Anjeline, a sound healing practitioner, singer, and cultural geographer. Every month I’ll send you a dispatch of upcoming session offerings, as well as my reflections on the cultural and intimate practices of listening.
SESSION OFFERINGS
My monthly free sound baths are welcome to anyone who could use a pause or a deep dive inside a bubble of collective listening. The next one is on Saturday, July 31, 8:00-9:15pm (GMT+8), using this Zoom link. The passcode is 843837.
In-person group sessions are available for Hong Kong-based folks. I’m happy to find a home in Ascolto Studio in Sheung Wan, which hosts my sound baths every 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month. Next one is on July 24, 5:00-6:15pm.
My books in August and September are open for private sessions, for 60-minute sound baths (in-person or Zoom) and 90-minute tarot-astrology readings (Zoom). To book, send me an email at anjeline@protonmail.com or a Whatsapp message on +85256017540.
1. The will to live(ness)
In the world of sound, we are always in the present. We can usually tell the difference between actual vibrations we’re picking up versus something we’re hearing in our heads as a kind of hallucination. Our ears trick us less than our eyes do.
One thing that stadium rock and sound healing have in common is the reverence that both place on liveness: we instinctively know that there is something irreplaceable and precious in the audience and performer’s being-together. The communal act of sharing the moment, and the ephemeral vibrations that travel through this moment, creates a circuit of energy that seems to generate the very essence of life itself.
But where—and when—is liveness? This is more than just a befuddling philosophical puzzle. The event of hearing ‘now’ branches out to other times and other places. We could be listening to sounds that are produced live (that is, in real-time by living fleshy bodies), or sounds that are played back live (produced live and recorded in the past, then re-sounded in the present through a device with a speaker). And then, even if we are hearing a sound simultaneously as it’s being performed anew, we know from our immersion in video livestreaming platforms that we don’t need to be physically close to experience togetherness.
Our dominant sense of co-presencing—as spontaneous, unfolding, and alive—is simultaneous in time and distantiated in space. What a strange way to live, and yet how quickly we have adapted. (When the 2019 protests in Hong Kong led to an unprecedented closure of universities, my department colleagues and I elected to continue with a scheduled meeting—but on Skype instead of on campus. I remember how unreal it felt to be staring at 10 little tiles, one for each colleague, conversing as though we were in our usual meeting room. How laughable that disbelief feels now!)
I am compelled to resist this amnesia of normalcy even as I submit to the compulsory nature of livestreaming—working, planning, learning, socializing, catching up, performing, serving, and loving online like everyone else. Conducting sound baths over Zoom helps me remember the fragility and amazement of liveness as something that is made up of time and space, yet transcends both.
To build a chant, I sing into a microphone connected to my vocal looper pedal, which captures and plays back my voice as an endlessly repeating fragment. I then sing over the microphone to layer a line in real-time, stacking the vocals as I go. These sounds come out of a little Roland CUBE amplifier, like the ones used by street buskers. The internal microphone on my laptop captures the sound from my amplifier and funnels it through the Zoom app, which then travels over through and out of the listener’s device, and into their ears. Like all singers and sound healers, my song comes from an intensely personal, intuitive, and emotional place that is hard to externalize or explain. The fact that it can cross over to another person’s interiority, despite colossal hesitation and technological contingency is, for me, proof of a mysterious shared space to which I am beholden. There is a will to connect in the moment that transcends me and my listener, but emerges from our polarity.
2. Walls
While it’s a constant astonishment that these hurdles do not prevent people from having experiences that are intensely visceral and meaningful (even synchronistic) across great distances, what I find even more fascinating is that people who are physically close to me do not automatically access the same experience. When I do my Zoom sound baths, my singing seeps through the wall that divides my room from my flatmate’s. He gets ‘more’ of the vibrations because he’s right beside me—or so we think. ‘Why is it that I’m physically closer to you but can’t feel anything, but those in your Zoom in a different country felt something intense?’ he asked.
There’s another incident that makes me think about the complex ‘where’ of liveness. At a recent in-person group sound bath, one of the participants made a last-minute request for her husband to join us. ‘He has some work issue problems, he needs this healing so much,’ she told me. I gladly welcomed him in—and found myself amused when he retreated to the far corner of the room, pulled out his phone, and politely told me to not mind him! As the participants shared their post-sound bath sensations and impressions with one another—one cried, another got a mysterious headache, and still another was visited by an inchoate feeling she finally described as ‘hope’—the husband quietly kept his eyes on his phone. He had effectively stayed out of the whole session even when he was physically immersed in the sound as much as the others.
So the ‘where’ of the sonic present is contextual and relational as it is physical and material. I suppose you could call that good husband’s presence an act of un-listening, the opposite of eavesdropping: when someone is physically there, but not there to listen (where is this second ‘there’?), what’s present is an absence of inner hearing, an absence of the attention borne of desire and intentionality. My flatmate was in a different headspace than the Zoom participants; and the husband was merely there, I guess, to humor his wife’s good intentions through physical, if not psychic, presence. Think of being in a crowded train, in tactile contact with so many bodies, yet feeling your sole connection emanating from the pixels and signs on the screen in your hand.
This inner hearing is our first and last space of autonomy. It is primal and immediate. Even the most gifted healer or performer cannot transgress this boundary of attention if access is not granted. Receptivity is sacred.
3. Whispers
Fredrik Christiansen/Functional Ecology
What is the culmination of being-together, then—when inner and outer hearing, psychic and physical proximity—interpenetrate? I seem to know less and less these days, coping with the fragmented version of togetherness that we humans need to make peace with. So I find myself enchanted by this scientific discovery of acoustic communication between baby humpback whales and their mothers. Essentially, newborn whales whisper to their mothers when they are swimming closely together (less than 100 meters apart).
The need for discretion is dictated by the precarious nature of that stage in their journey: the newborns are suckling and gathering strength to prepare for a long migration back to their home across the Antarctic, 5,000 miles away. Like us, whales and other cetaceans vocalize to maintain connection and cohesion. There is a threat, then, of the mother and newborn being acoustically detected (i.e. overheard) by distant and unwanted listeners: like killer whales that might prey on the calf, or mate-seeking males that might interfere with the pair through what scientists call ‘unwanted dangerous escort attention.’
The scientists found that baby whales ‘grunt and squeak’ when they’re swimming, and thus believe that these low-level vocalizations are a way to keep track of (and be kept on track by) their mothers while they’re in motion, in sharp awareness of their listening environment.
Keeping close and listening for each other’s call. So much of life depends on this acoustic intimacy: a mutual agreement to be there for each other, and a performance of that agreement as we vocalize and listen. There are, of course, other questions that belong to another newsletter. Who should populate this togetherness, if we are aiming for survival, or healing, or mutuality? Who is an unwanted listener? How do we reach distant listeners? To whom do we grant our listening?
Perhaps we should listen more to nature, both what is deeply within us and what lies beyond our species. I think of baby whales whispering in the sacred space of a mother’s attention, trusting that they will be known, that they will be loved. That they will be heard.