I am not exactly sure I know how I managed to reach the St. Ann’s Church that night. It was about eight and I couldn’t remember if I already consumed 8 or 10 drinks, one thing was sure, my thoughts were more than blurred by the alcohol. That church was unbelievable, high ceiling, carved…or sculpted ornaments, large columns, and some amazing purple velvet seats—well that’s as far as I can recall. The band started playing—(wow!) how did I get to that seat—everything around me stopped, and I could feel the music taking over my entire body as if I was enveloped by their sweet playing. Not sure if it was the alcohol speaking, but it seemed like every note was just for me—mandolin, violin, double bass, banjo and classical guitar all being played just for me. After a couple of songs, the music got quieter, and I could feel the transition from the concert towards my inner thoughts; I took over the situation: How did they manage to balance the sound so well in this enormous echoing chamber of a church?—large columns, marble (not 100% sure about that), concrete or some kind of rock-based material. I could barely hear the country-folk singer by then, what a magical night!
The evenness of the music allowed me to delocalised myself from the space and experienced another form of listening—a state of transcendence—where I turned to internal listening as an addition of the wholeness of the music that by then all merged into one constant pitch. Instruments, voices, and reverberations were no longer the main concert; I was part of it. The sound space cuts out between the beautiful music and my messy inner reactions to singing about Mississippi in downtown Brooklyn. I guess I was trying to get to the point where listening is more than an outer activity of the self; it is also an induced activity in a variety of addition and subtraction—balancing—of sonic perceptions by that self. I was performing a movement away from the space and towards my body since I was distracted and influenced by my own mental masking. It is not now more than Augoyard and Torgue’s hearing perceptions as it is a tool for emphasises performed in real time and often out of my own consciousness; it is a ‘true’ construct of hearing between the self and the space as a heavenly entity.
On the other hand, a couple of weeks before, someone dragged me to this terrible Tiki Bar in East Village for a punk-cabaret (perhaps goth and eccentric too) concert in a basement room filled with mirror amongst other reflective surfaces. Even though I wasn’t that affected by alcohol that night, I barely remember anything since the spaces seemed to shrink on me as they kept on playing. The distortion from the amplification of poorly tuned instruments, in addition to the reflections of that cacophony on all the shiny surfaces in the room, made it impossible to localise any of the sound sources. The disturbance of the music provided me from hearing my internal masking. Hearing in such is more than managing all signals and noises, but it is affected by the sound space and the way in which I hear that sonic event—drunk or sober.