My General Assembly experience began from the moment I stepped off Wellington Street, and into the mouth of a dimly lit alley. After a fair amount of clueless wandering, and help from one friendly coordinator, I managed to find the entrance. The venue – a modest looking little building – has no discernable features to hint at the truly left field events that take place in its interior. My expectations, already high from the near mythical status of Pauline Oliveros’ work within the avant-garde classical world, had peaked, and I felt a certain nervousness as I pried open the heavy door to the entrance. Fortunately, I came armed with prior knowledge of the composition of the experience, but nothing could have fully prepared me for what it was truly like to experience the world of a Sonic Meditation.

As the door closed behind me and the room broke out in a discordant hum. About a dozen participants were already comfortable, sitting cross legged, laying down, heads bowed with pensive looks on their faces that constitutes the greeting pre-meditation. This pre-meditation was described on the event page as; “after you are seated and comfortable, allow a tone to come into mind. Keep returning your attention to this same tone. Then, every time a person or persons enter this space, greet them by singing this tone.” The experience of greeting strangers purely through an acoustic medium was eerie, but not awkward. After a couple minutes, I began to feel surprisingly comfortable in the space. For someone who routinely suffers from social anxiety, I noted that this may be the most comfortable I had felt in a room of strangers in a long while. There was something powerfully communal about the atmosphere, no one spoke, but we felt each other’s presences acutely and sincerely. I settled into the room, ruminated on the pitch constellation of the participants, and selected a tone I found harmonious with the whole.

Sonic Meditations VI has a fluidity in its composition that breaks down structural boundaries: both between sections of the experience itself, and between performance and participant, commodity and spectator. The pre-meditation slowly fades as the house lights dim (scored as an 8-15 minute process). As the room became darker, I began to calm my mind to prepare for the experience; a soft sonic hum began at first imperceptibly, sliding slowly into awareness. According to the written instructions for the piece, the composition is prepared solely with a “white or random noise generator”, the requirements of which is the “band width of the white noise should be as broad as the limits of the audio range.” The effect of this is a sound that is mundane, and could just as easily be mistaken for any mechanical source in our everyday soundscape. When I first noticed this sound appearing in the space, I assumed it must be just the sound of a ventilation system activating, or something exterior to the building. About 20 minutes into the experience, I realized that this sound was the piece, and admittedly, I had a moment of disappointment. I anticipated feeling bored, having to endure two hours of sitting in a strange room with strangers listening to nothing but formless static. What had I gotten myself into! Was I really willing to sacrifice nothing short of my sanity in the name of art?

I wallowed in my misgiving for a moment, then resigned myself. I made a slight adjustment to lay down, examining the warehouse like ceiling of General Assembly. I had a sudden epiphany: the purpose of this sonic meditation wasn’t entertainment, I needn’t come to it expecting to be surprised or awed or provoked. It simply is. The sound of the piece replicated the everyday environment, but with very different conditions. Given the social contract and space to listen closely to something you ordinarily wouldn’t is a powerful experience. I found myself exploring various contours of the sound with my ears. The pace of sonic change was slow enough that any one point in time would seem to last forever. I began to note the ways that the sounds were layered on top of one another; I noticed an ability to switch what I was hearing based off of my perception. I began to hum along. Thirty minutes in my humming dropped a whole step. Was this because of my perceptions or a sonic change? Were the sounds really changing, or was my listening changing? I began to drift…

A blinding flash of white light filled the space. The darkness continued for a while before soft multi-coloured light (despite an uncomfortable period of technical difficulties) began to appear on the walls. The lighting came as a relief, something new to concentrate on. An artistic undertaking that fueled a certain sense of narrative rather than the meditative drifting and consciousness slippage I had been encountering for the last hour or so. These barebones instructions for the work managed to structure the experience, making it resemble in format some sort of combination between a Vedanta meditation retreat and an LSD trip. This blending of eastern spirituality with psychedelic counterculture works when considering Oliveros’ connection to the 60’s human potential movement, second wave feminism, and the academic avant-garde. In the tradition of composers like Le Monte Young, Terry Riley and others, Oliveros broke down boundaries between high and low art forms, and between performer and audience. In a New Yorker article, Oliveros calls the Sonic Meditation series a “response to the tremendous fear of our times”. This fear references the tumultuous climate of the early 70’s, when widespread anger at the Vietnam war reached its peak that is comparable to the current disillusionment that pervades our political climate today in 2017. Oliveros saw this series as serving “humanitarian purposes; specifically healing”, slowing down our daily experience, allowing us to more fully tune into our world.

As I stumbled out of the now quiet blue lit space of General Assembly and back out into the street I realized something had fundamentally changed in my perceptions. The cool air felt stiller, more serene, and the sounds of my feet and the sounds of passing vehicles sounded less muddy, sharper and in focus. In that moment, the words of the handful or more open-minded professors I’ve had in my time in music school started to make a whole lot more sense. Ear cleaning, deep listening, the slowing of experience. I felt these all, at least for the night. Of course, like the best drug induced experiences, my Oliveros afterglow did not just last the night. The next day I woke as usual, late, disorganized, caught up in my own head, and not paying attention to the world around me. The fear of the times came creeping back in as I turned on the news; tax cuts to the rich, Jerusalem signalling end times, global oligarchs manipulating markets and manipulating consciousness; no will by the people to stand up and fight. But what I kept is the memory of possibility; a possibility for a slower more contemplative existence, the possibility for a sliver of light in this fucked up world. The possibility for deep listening.