I do musical experiments with math. I think resonance is fascinating and expect it to have interesting results. I used to resonate vocally in subway stations, just slightly below real obvious audibility but pushing out some low frequencies that would usually snake in and combine with some machine sounds that might be thrumming at those Hz.
And then thinking about time, and math, got me to thinking about how music was just time, there was rhythm which was time, and even the notes were time, because each was defined as a series of frequencies, usually a fundamental and some overtones. And frequencies were time, inverted. Hertz just means “per second.” So what else could I resonate with besides subway stations? I thought I would try to resonate with the day, or rather the day and night. I mean, what else has such sway in our lives. Why not dig into it. Resonance is strongest with octaves, so if you double or halve the frequency, that’ll be a resonant peak. So if you go one octave up from a day, it’s 12 hours, another octave up is six hours, and so on until you cross over from the macro temporal to the micro temporal. Twenty five octaves up from the day is a frequency of 388.3614815 Hz. That’s a G on your piano keyboard, if you’re tuned to A=437.
So every day at the exact same time, for over a year, I can’t remember exactly how much longer, I sang this exact note for at least a couple of minutes, long enough to make sure, more or less, that I was singing it at exactly that moment ever day, adjusting for Daylight Savings when that came, sometimes sneaking off to a rooftop or an empty stairwell to sing my note, or doing it on the beach, or in subway stations.
Hurricane Sandy hit on October 29th. On 11-26-12, using the I Ching, I found out that the entity I’d been contacting on my “green telephone” (a bundle of yarrow stalks) was Guan Yin. Around that time I started having a lot of visionary experiences and changed a lot of things in my life.
Guan Yin is called The Perceiver of the World’s Sounds. Guan Yin hears every cry of suffering. Just knowing someone is listening is a big deal. At first it freaked me out (like back in 2009) but once you realize that the person listening is a person, has a lot of empathy and compassion, has been there, has seen it all, literally, and has a sense of humor, and that Guan Yin offers some really blanket protection (see chapter 22 of the Lotus Sutra,) it was really a turning point in my consciousness to be able to face some memories.
This song is part of a project to write 100 songs based on quatrains used in fortune telling at Buddhist temples, which are attributed to Kuan Yin. I have a score or so now, maybe even closing in on thirty. But this was one of the first and it’s based on quatrain # 41:
Beware of sweet and honeyed word that twist and spoil your paternal love. Once you treat a thief as your son. An unwise deed you’ll regret hereafter.