I listened, heard, and responded...

By falling asleep. He said it was o.k., right? "I have always encouraged people to listen with headphones, preferably while lying down in a dark room. As an artist, my ego still demands I list that possibility first." That was what I had heard and that is what he says on his website. So I proceeded to lay back and try to relax, even though being a darkened room with many people I didn't know was quite scary. His first piece started off with a low tone and what sounded like a helicopter or a boat making a repeated chugging sound. It is kind of hard to describe exactly the sound was that I was hearing, but it did have a very soothing effect. I remember that the same sound continued for a while, often moving a little bit in pace, but ultimately the same. Then I fell asleep. Aaron Ximm said that his edited field recordings were supposed to have that kind of effect and that he was very fascinated with it. I also find it very fascinating that his recordings can have that effect on people. There was another man in the crowd that said that he was also lulled to sleep by the first piece that he showed us, but the second piece was received in a much different manner.

I woke up again at the intermission feeling calm and relaxed and not really realizing that i had fallen asleep at all. Aaron Ximm describes his "music" as "pop" in his essay Sound, Art, Music: Searching for a Personal Aesthetic and I believe that in a certain way it is. He says that he found other artists that used field recordings and then tried to recreate something like it and succeeded. The "music" he makes is quite catchy and nice enough to listen to that it can put you to sleep. That is exactly what I would be looking for when listening to this genre of music. However, that is not completely what I got from the second piece that he presented. This one started off slow, like the other, and once more I drifted back to sleep. This time I was not awakened by the bright lights in the theater, but rather the sound of screams and moans. It was like I had stumbled into a nightmare, but when I was awake. Not my idea of calm like what I had expected. The same man that I mentioned from the first part also commented on this. He said that the sounds gave him actual nightmares and that the sound was so real in them. While some of the things he described were quite peculiar, this goes back to how Ximm said he was interested in how his music affects consciousness and the subconscious. This ability was of great interest to me, because even though I had a much less intense experience, I don't remember the sounds when I was sleeping, but I think they effected my subconscious in much the same way as the other man. If that is possible, and it appears to be, I can only speculate what power sound could hold in the future, if it is controlling my subconscious today.