I’m not sure I could have properly figured out how I wanted to end Sound Effect Infinity if it weren’t for experimental composer and sound designer Susan Alexjander. Writing novels is a funny sort of partial slow-dance with near ecstasy coupled with the frustration of an endless cross-country car ride when you are both driving and sitting in the back whining, “Are we there yet?” I’ve had my fair share of those long-term commitments. One thing I decided about a decade ago is that such endlessly nirvana-esque frustrating slogs should end either with everybody dancing, a major cosmological connective event, or both. That’s easier said than done. Artists are supposed to adhere as well to principles of subtlety. Anyone who knows me, knows that’s a hard principle for me to follow.
So as I attempted to complete my long-ass cross-country drive (and tai chi dance) with Sound Effect Infinity, I was struggling to figure out a mechanism and a theoretical framework for some sort of cosmic dance or balletic game of natural science. Susan Alexjander’s video “Zero Waiting” totally fit the bill. It’s a short collaboration with visual artist Diana Hobson. The subject is the concept of zero point energy–the base vibrational state defined in quantum theory. Susan does brilliant work converting natural streams of energy frequencies into human levels of sound. In this video, she and Diana Hobson manage to both sonically and visually depict the quantum field from the inner space of atomic reality to the deep space of the universe.
In the liner notes for the video, they write: “Everything is trying to express itself and all life is aware of itself.”
Sound Effect Infinity is working hard to move in that same direction. I won’t give away the answer here, or the question for that matter, but the insights I gained from watching and listening to “Zero Waiting” made it possible for this story to end the way it needed to.
Her book Our Sound Universe: I Heard the Painter Whistle just came out this summer. It is a wonderful autobiography of a very special composer, but it is also an account of frontier musical thinking that everyone from Bach to Hendrix would have loved to read about.
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