Acoustic Isolation Music gets recorded in windowless rooms because glass is where the problems begin. It is better to imagine you are a singing bird than it is to see the bird as you stand before a microphone trying to remember to breathe. Acoustic isolation means no sirens or chainsaws pierce hollow core doors to invade silent rooms as dimmed versions of themselves sent out in waves once screaming at the source. We aim to keep outside sounds out, inside sounds in. To one, the other is noise. Still the sawyer leans into it, wailing the flat musical note A at 200 cycles per second as snakes register sound vibrations through dirt. Low waves from forgotten foot falls, idling engines, the high whine of a chain spinning, soon absorbed by soil, rock, leaf litter. Somewhere nearby a pebble splashes into a pond. If you were underwater, you might notice an absence of sparkle, the high frequencies of rock striking water lost to the world above. Underwater, only the midrange plunk scattered over fish gills, picked up by the inner ears of turtles, absorbed by sand, sediment. Sounds die when you greet them with mass.
Acoustic isolation does not enliven the tone of a room or how it feels to strike a note lifted on the wings of reverb, unconcerned with hollow doors, air gaps, glass, all the holes in a building. Still with the studio door closed you don't want to hear anything except yourself and whatever sounds you are making to the rhythm of your heartbeat sometimes poetically if wrongly compared to a bass drum (if so, it is a bass drum equalized by blood, bones, and skin into the tone of kicked cardboard). It is not the pursuit of ideals that slows me but the sight of rain I cannot hear because the room is too tight to allow for it. Instead, the soft thrum of a cardboard kick drum propels me to imagine not the bloom of reverb but the repeat of an echo that becomes ever softer over time. Time, time whose supposed voice leads us forever closer to a cliff in darkness where the wind catches our ears and the annoyance of cooling fans in silent rooms or jet noise too close overhead or the high zing of an electric box where all the buried lines converge to hum and fizz around the clock fades. Is it then that we realize our dream of acoustic isolation, finally shake everything we called noise in our pursuit of safety, separation?
Two sounds, both recorded phone-fi style, outside the studio…
An ice cube dropped into a (water) well -
Coyotes out back, reverberating through the night -