Harmonics

As a tinnitus sufferer, I'm cautious about mentioning, let alone hunting down what seem to be strange noises in the real, objective sound-world; that is, the one that exists outside my own internal acoustic wonderland. It took me years to realise, for example, that a neighbour somewhere was not playing bass-heavy music into the small hours, or that water was not trickling continually through a sonorous network of pipes somewhere in our loft. It was only when I could still hear these same nocturnal annoyances in the absolute silence of the countryside, in a cottage with no central heating and no neighbours for miles around that I concluded that in fact I was generating these sounds myself, from somewhere inside my own skull. But, walking down a lane near Lake Llynheilyn in mid-Wales, I began to be aware of a strange, haunting music coming from somewhere nearby.

The music had an eerie, hollow, bell-like quality that varied unpredictably in pitch and volume, and occasionally cracked into a harsh, wavering split-octave effect. It was exactly the sort of soundtrack you might use in a film to presage an imminent spooky happening, or the precarious mental state of a character. Now, given that I was neither in a movie nor, as far as I was aware, in the early stages of a psychic collapse, I was pretty sure these sounds were real. They were also very good.

Perhaps being a little odd, I really enjoy the sort of aleatory "music" that the complex interactions and interference patterns of the material world can spontaneously generate. I recall being lulled into a virtual trance state by the tintinnabulation of cowbells on a sunny hillside in the Auvergne, and will admit I was frequently detained rather longer than necessary by the mellifluous, lark-like warbling of a certain ancient lavatory cistern at work, intrigued by the rising urgency of its notes as the tank refilled, eventually fading away into silence, punctuated by increasingly infrequent, percussive dripping. OK, so perhaps I can be more than a little odd: let's call it creative. Anyway, the music I was hearing in that Welsh lane was an outstanding example of its kind.

Now, it has to be said that, in that part of Mid-Wales, you are never very far away from the sort of creative individuals who have shunned city life, in order to be alone with their creativity. It was not impossible, therefore, that this strange but compelling music was emanating from some nearby but unseen cottage, where, say, Brian Eno was enjoying a long weekend, or Harrison Birtwistle was giving his neighbours a much-deserved break. But it quickly became clear that the rise and fall of the music corresponded to the rise and fall of the wind and, as I got nearer, was evidently coming from a new, all-metal gate set in the fence around an otherwise empty field.

It was mesmerising. Really. You could not have designed a more perfect aeolian harp. The spacing and shape of the bars seemed to set up sympathetic vibrations at the lightest breath of wind, vibrations that were amplified and given voice and character by the galvanised hollow square tubing. The gate was not merely vibrating, or thrumming, it was singing. And the song it sang was a perfect expression of its situation, beside a track at the edge of a marshy field running down towards a hill-country lake, a situation which I might only semi-facetiously describe as the gate way, or perhaps a boundary condition. Heh. I only wish I had had the sense to record it on my phone [1]. In 2013 I was slightly mocking of an album called The Cattle-Grids of Dartmoor, but I once was deaf, and now I hear...  The Singing Gates of Radnor? It has "hit" written all over it.

1. I'm only dimly aware of the many miraculous things my "phone" can do. Just today, one of those blue-clad "geniuses" that lurk in the Apple Store explained how I can use my phone as a "personal hotspot" to connect my WiFi-only iPad to the internet. Crikey! How useful is that? Thanks, genius!