On Drones: Monotony, Perception and the Aesthetics of Infinity

I.

1964, Holmdel, New Jersey.

Two radio astronomers at Bell Labs had tried everything to get rid of a hissing rumble in the large horn antenna they had built to receive signals from satellites. They suppressed heat interference in their supersensitive receiver, using liquid helium to cool it within 4° of absolute zero. They removed two pigeons that had nested in the antenna’s throat. Then they cleaned out their droppings. Still the burr persisted like the sound of a distant rainstorm falling on a billion densely packed leaves. The sound was the same no matter what part of the sky they pointed their antenna at, forcing them to conclude that it couldn’t come from the Sun, or the Earth, or even from the center of the Milky Way. Something far vaster was humming.

As it turned out, it was a radio signal from the birth of everything, “radiation left over from an explosion that filled the universe at the beginning of its existence,” a droning telegram that continues to arrive in an unbroken sheet, the reception of which earned those two scientists a Nobel Prize. The accidental discovery of cosmic background radiation confirmed the Big Bang theory of cosmic genesis. The big blast of origin endowed the universe with a bed of buzzing in which everything lays: the sidereal whisper.

c. 60,000 BCE, Divje Babe Cave, Slovenia.

An ancestor sat in a cave, holding the femur of a bear cub firmly between her knees. Using a sharp stone, she carved perfect, circular holes into the shaft of the bone, perfectly spaced to produce a diatonic scale. Bringing it to her lips, she blew, like a creator god blowing over the surface of the deep. In an instant, the bone filled with resonant air, holding a sustained vibration that juddered through her fingers and up her arms, through her body and off the walls of the cave, making her start. The flute was excavated by Slovenia’s Institute of Archaeology in 1995. It is the oldest extant instrument known to science.

1960, Chambers Street, New York.

Four years before the discovery at Bells Labs, a shaggy-haired artist from Idaho unwittingly reproduced the yet-undetected primordial yawn of the universe in a work so completely pared down that many of his contemporaries refused to call it music. A student of music theory and composition, La Monte Young was deeply influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian emigré of radiant intensity who had pioneered atonal music, and particularly by John Cage’s experiments in chance and randomness, which Young would take to new extremes. Finding a welcoming listener in Yoko Ono, then a young performance artist, Young would soon unleash a new implaccable sound in her coldwater Tribeca flat, which attracted a stream of avant-garde notables the likes of Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.

The score of Young’s Compositions 1960 consists of gnomic directions that seem intentionally obscure — “push a piano through a wall” and “draw a straight line and follow it” — and are only occasionally accompanied by actual musical notation. The seventh and most famous composition in the set shows a treble clef and two notes, along with the instruction “to be held for a long time.” As guests settled in Ono’s loft, they were presented with a singular object: the sudden sound of the notes — played, and then simply sustained without further maneuvers. Just the sound. No changes or movements. Just a fifth hanging open mouthed, bristling with unornamented resonance.

II.

Of the first things we expect music to have — melody and rhythm — the drone seems to have neither. The relentless vibration of a drone presents itself first as a monolith, an unbroken wall of self-similar sound. But in the absence of larger gestures to latch onto, the mind attunes to micromovements, little dents and scratches in the tonal bluff, and as perception becomes more sensitive, we find those inflections to be practically infinite.

Apparent featurelessness is a quality common to both drone music and the infant universe. The moment after the cosmos came into existence, it was an endless mass of identical particles spread out evenly like a cloud across all space. There was only one thing in the entire cosmos that qualified as terrain, and it wasn’t much to look at: very small differences in density, regions in which particles were spaced ever so slightly closer together. These apparently insignificant variations in an otherwise unmarked universe held the seeds of all future structure. They gave gravity a variable on which to act across the aeons. If time is no object, the faint but irresistible pull between infinitesimal particles will eventually overcome distance. The regions of marginally greater density will become denser, and then denser still as they draw more mass to themselves, eventually forming galaxies. From those initial diminutive variations came everything — every element, star, planet, cell and skeleton. They are the reason there is something rather than nothing.

This basic pattern — a pregnant roar, rippling with tiny lulls that wind up being much more than they seem — repeats itself everywhere. There is a hum underwater and in the womb. The drone is the primary medium, the thing we hear when we go back to the beginning, whether of our own lives or the life of the universe. It has been our lullaby forever. There can be gloom in a drone too, some of that unflappable indifference that we associate with the universe itself. But perhaps therein lies its comfort; with no discernible mood imposed by the music, we are free to settle into whatever interior material we bring to the listening.

III

Although their novelty perplexed Young’s audience, drones must have been our first music. Early humans, holding hollowed out trees and bones and conch shells in their hands, would first have sought to reproduce the sounds of the ancestral environment — beginning with the hum of the wind, which was a more frequent aural experience than the boom of thunderclap or the percussion of hooves. The archeological record suggests that didgeridoos and proto-flutes are among the oldest tools wrought for music making.

Throughout its evolution, from basic blowing and knocking, human music acquired all manner of bells and whistles, becoming the field of complexity that we can hear across the globe today. Along the way, natural philosophy extended its inquiry into the Orphic realm. When Pythagoras codified the proportions that underlie music, he opened up radical possibilities for tuning and laid the fretwork for all of western music. But he also wrested from music some of its old hypnotic power.

When Terry Riley, another pioneer of twentieth-century minimalism, came upon Young’s compositions, he heard an ancient portal reappearing. “What becomes apparent on listening to an amplified, well-tuned drone,” he said, “is a molecular world of sounds whose workings are ordinarily covered up by fancy rhythmic and melodic footwork.” If it seems difficult to eulogize monotony, consider how Riley continues: “As the listener allows himself or herself to be drawn deeper into the sound, he or she becomes more and more astounded at all the elements that are functioning naturally without the aid of normal manipulation or musical performance. We enter with him here into the world of the sonic microcosm, where an interval becomes a landscape, each detail illuminated.”

Such an experience hinges on the difference between hearing and listening.

In 1988, a Texan marimacha well into her fifties descended into an empty cistern and felt its sonic details illuminated. She was the composer Pauline Oliveros (incidentally or not, a player of conch shells) and she punningly referred to her experience in the well as an initiation into “deep listening.” The term would come to define a lifetime spent coming up with ways to dilate our perception of sound, for which she developed an array of games that range from bodywork to participative performance. In Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, a compendium of practical philosophy that teaches breathing, remembering, and extremely slow walking, Oliveros quotes a little-known Polish-American composer and inventor of percussion instruments: “The first concern of all music,” Lucia Dlugoszewski announced, “is to shatter the indifference of hearing, the callousness of sensibility, to create that moment of solution we call poetry.”

Phill Niblock was a purveyor of just such solutions. He became an unlikely legend in the New York underground by flooding spaces with thick, overwhelming drones. Having no musical training, he assembled his sounds by making recordings of various instruments — hurdy-gurdies, cellos, trombones, synthesizers — and then overdubbing them into dense tracks, first on tape, then on computers. By choosing pitches that sit very close to each other he produced rich microtone quilts that may feel either harmonic (as in Winterbloom Too) or distinctly dissonant (Nothin To Look At Just A Record). A Niblock work begins all at once and then just goes. It is completely free of scales and also something outside of atonal.

Strangely, this music is compelling enough that it has been presented in nearly every country on Earth, keeping Niblock touring well into his nineties. “It’s as if the piece was always there, and you just opened the window to it,” comments Simone Merli of Soundwalk Collective, which has programmed works by Phill Niblock, La Monte Young, Yves Klein and other minimalists at Reethaus. A universal intuition for the timeless explains part of this sound’s attraction. “The music of Phill Niblock is so completely different from other music that it sounds like it is from another planet,” remarks the music scholar Frank J. Oteri.

In Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe, it is time that seems to be lost in the outer solar system. We are submerged in a swelling horn. At some point, we notice the sound has evolved; another tone enters the air. But by the time we become aware that it has, the change is already somewhere in an indeterminate past. And it is the same when a tone leaves. Whole regions of sound migrate like dunes overlapping across a desert, but we can never tell where they begin or end. The bottom has fallen out of time; from here we can go anywhere. (Incidentally or not, Spiegel’s Harmonices Mundi, a tribute to Kepler, has been part of the firmament since 1977 when it traveled into space as part of the Golden Record aboard Voyager 1.)

IV.

Mothers coo to their babies. Yogis are instructed to apply ujjayi breath in the backs of their throats to induce a fuller state of awareness. Cats purr, calming both themselves and their human attendants. Whales broadcast songs into the breadth of the oceans, and in their own sternums those enormous shouts must feel like a hum.

The frequencies of our own voices send sound waves through our bodies. When we sustain a murmur, we stimulate a fifteen-fold increase in nasal nitric oxide production, a gas produced in the sinuses which, among myriad other functions, relaxes blood vessels, rushing the body with oxygen. We also tone the vagus nerve, the main corridor through which the body practices electric self-attunement, balancing sympathetic and parasympathetic activation throughout the varied beats of the day. Humming is an ancient technique for acting consciously on the unconscious process of the body. It offers medicine both to the hummer and the hummed-to.

Perhaps all this was known in some essential way to cultures that gave these sounds pride of place. The tanpura, a four-stringed instrument that rings uncannily of a modern synthesizer but is at least as old as Pythagorean tuning, holds a center of gravity both in Indian classical music and in the shala of yogic practice.

The overtone chants of the Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir of Tibet have a much more raucous character but are patterned on the same sensation. Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead drummer, heard the thunder of the Tibetan monks in Dharamsala and persuaded them to let him bottle it. In the liner notes of the resulting 1986 record, which is also programmed at Reethaus, he wrote, “After an hour of their sound, you’ll be different, cleaner, lighter.”

The harnessing of this effect extends to traditions beyond Asia. In the Christian Orthodox church, the bass ison that can be heard underneath the melodies of Byzantine chant is somehow both rattling and soothing in a way that only the chthonic can be. Then and now, here and there, ritual practices that do the work of mediating between time and eternity — parsing death and birth, grief and rapture — often rely on drones.

V.

In a story he was wont to repeat, John Cage described entering Harvard University’s anechoic chamber for the first time. Built during World War II by the Office of Naval Research, it was engineered to be a perfect sound vacuum, a bastion against noise fortified in concrete and fiberglass. But Cage heard something. The attendant engineer explained: the low rumble was his own blood running through its channels, amplified by the conch of his inner ear. You can hear it now too if you cup a hand over yours. Persuaded in that moment that there is no such thing as silence, Cage composed his famous 4’33” the following year — four and a half minutes of absence — changing the direction of modern music.

An intriguing pattern emerges from the reports of those who have crossed the threshold of death and returned. They mention a buzzing, ringing or crackle just before being ushered to the other side.

Some interpret this aural phenomenon as the sound of the soul detaching from the body, the pulsation of the approaching afterlife, or the rip of the veil finally rending. A darker ear might prefer to hear it not as divine but as the byproduct of a false reality, the sound of the simulation running in the workshop of the demiurge.

In the applied metaphysics of Nāda yoga, we find the concept of anāhata nāda, a sound without end that exists within every being. Adepts train to attune to this unstruck sound, which is said to grow louder as one deepens into meditation, progressively widening into the cosmic drone of Om.

In that instant, infinity lurks. In a final gasp, we return to the roar.