Sound Waves

The Shape of Experience

Hi Folks, What you are seeing above is a digital image the finished recording of the song “A Great Wild Mercy”!

I find it interesting to see a visual image of an auditory creation. Music is not made of solid stuff. You cannot actually see it or hold it in your hands. We can see the effect of a song, but not the song itself. Music is actually pretty ephemeral. Before recorded music, the only place a song existed was at the moment it was sung, and then carried away in the heart of the hearer. It is heavy as grief and weightless as smoke, it is unseen as the air we breathe. When filling out forms that ask me my occupation, I’ve never found making air on the drop down menu, the closest thing being the open space after the word “other”.

But there is a power found in ephemeral things, the things that are real in the way that true things are real, lasting even as the last chord of the song fades.