This sound work is a Ganzfeld audio experiment.

Ganzfeld is a Gestalt term describing a phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field. The effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual (or audial) signals. James Turrell or Max Neuhaus installations may elicit the Ganzfeld effect.

Many composers, such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Eliane Radigue, have worked with a form of composition that combines their spiritual (often Buddhist) practise with a sonic minimalism. Many academics refer to this work as requiring a focussed, reduced, deep, layered or quantum listening. 

The sound source for this work is a field recording of a street scene in Katmandu, Nepal. The city lies in a valley called the Nepal Mandala.

A mandala is known in some faiths to represent a spiritual journey. This journey passes through transformative and increasingly enlightened layers and starts from an exterior and ventures into an interior core.

The mandala is a meditative simulacrum to be repeatedly contemplated to the point of saturation, such that the stimulus becomes fully internalised in even the minutest detail and can then be summoned and contemplated at will as clear and vivid.

A mandala traditionally has four gates. This Ganzfeld study imagines gatekeepers who offer wayfinding in four different directions:

1
A spiritual meditation on the four stages of enlightenment.

2
Focus on the four deracinating stages of culture shock: disorientation, negotiation, adjustment and assimilation (or repulsion).

3
The path from simulacra to simulation. En route, we realise we no longer experience a faithful image or copy of a place but now only a perversion in which our experience has no relationship to any reality whatsoever.

4
The final gatekeeper suggests we reflect on the environmental and ecological consequences of our journey and our impact on this place of pilgrimage. Like many civilisations the existential arc embraces creation-germination; croissance-augmentation; existence and division; degradation, collapse and extinction.

Technical Notes

Dillon Bastan’s Max instrument Emit was used for the work. There is no signal processing other than slowing the sample down by a factor of 40,000. A fragment of the whole sound piece is represented here. The full work runs for ±330 hours.