Ricardo Legorreta Campus
This morning I walked around the campus of the now defunct Santa Fe University for Art and Design. You can see a few of the photographs here and subscribe if you want to receive my World.Hey newsletter.
Sounds
I am convinced that the reason why quiet household sounds are relaxing is exactly BECAUSE they have no rhythm.
We hear music all day long. At home, in the car, in the mall, in each store, in the restaurant, practically 24/7. I don’t listen to music in my car and I will drive miles further to avoid a gas station that plays music. I detest restaurants that play loud music and malls are only for emergencies.
Being surrounded by different kinds of rhythm all day long it has to be the very quality of no-rhythm that makes ASMR so appealing.
The thing to do then, is to treat sounds as if they are ocean waves playing in the background while the guitar is the foreground.
Or perhaps I can sculpt a soundscape from such sounds, some slowly repeating, others coming and going. A walk through a landscape, where the hills are a sound, the trees are a sound, the ground cunching under our feet is a sound, and the distant caw of the crow in the tree is a sound.
Turning the Page
Yesterday I recorded turning the page of a ring-bound notebook and occasionally writing something with a nib and no ink.
I love listening to this. I wonder wether it would be more interesting to use this file as a background to some guitar music as is, meaning not in any rhythm, or whether I should try to fashion a rhythm from this raw material. Turning the page could become a “hi-hat”, the scribbling nib might turn into a shaker. Back to the lab for more experiments.
PS: experimenting with the sounds this morning I am thinking that I might not want to use them to create a rhythm. That’s been done by lots of people before. Matthew Herbert did an album called “Around the House” in 1998 and one called “Bodily Functions” in 2001. The former utilized lots of house hold samples and the latter used sounds like brushing teeth and cracking knuckles. Matmos released an album in 2001 that is called “A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure”. It uses sounds from surgery and has titles like “Lipostudio… and So On” and “California Rhinoplasty”. Yikes.
No, I feel that the a-rhythmic quality is actually what makes sounds soothing, like the bubbling pumpkin sound, or the paper turning. Bare feet on wooden stairs might be nice too, and could be a little more rhythmic.
In Praise of Boredom
Instead of boredom I should call it not-doing, perhaps.
By that I mean the moments between doing that used to be filled with… nothing.
They gave our minds a chance to process or to have new ideas or insights.
Those moments of not-doing seem to become exceedingly rare now. We tend to fill the time that used to become not-doing with other things.
a few things…
I learned that cold showers can help against dementia. Check out this blog post by the Age Well Project.
Either way, it appears that cold water swimming may be as good for the body as it is for the mind. Last year, researchers from Cambridge University found that regular cold-water swimmers had a cold-shock protein in their blood capable of delaying the onset of dementia. In mice, cold water immersion has been found not only to delay dementia but to reverse some of the damage caused by the disease.
and
Well, a study of over 3000 Dutch people found those who routinely ended their shower with a 30-second blast of cold water had 29% fewer symptoms of illness, colds or flu, than normal. In this study, the 30-second blasters had the same results as the 60-second and 90-second blasters. So if you fancy trying hot-to-cold showers, there’s clearly no benefit to enduring any more than 30 seconds of chill.
I learned that I quite enjoy 30 seconds of cold water. However, I would not want to increase that to 90 seconds. And to hell with dementia!
I learned that I enjoy jumping rope as a quick way to get my heart rate up each day. I never enjoyed the gym and will do anything to avoid them- the music!!! the TVs!!! I jump for eleven minutes (30 seconds of jumping followed by 30 seconds of not jumping – about 700 jumps) or until I hit my target heart rate – the rule of thumb is 220 minus one’s age. Between the daily exercise of jumping rope and walking four miles every morning I feel that I am in pretty good shape.
I learned that wearing glasses with a mask in winter isn’t fun. Glasses fog up. Sprays don’t seems to work. I learned that I have relatively soft ear cartilage and wearing masks that loop around the ear is not fun. My ears give up and fold forward. So much for my mother claiming that I have hard ears – meaning that I don’t listen. Ha! I was wondering whether my plight is unusual but I saw Robby the other day and his ears were leaning forward because of his mask as well. Maybe it’s a white-ear-thing, the soft ear cartilage?
My co-pilot, who is not white, has suitably hard ears and wears ear-loop masks beautifully. She also tells me that I have it wrong, I am her co-pilot. This Outlier Mask works for me, because it fastens around the head and because it has a strong and wide metal nose piece that allows less air to escape against my glasses.
