Close Your Eyes And Listen
On an unseasonably warm night in October, a group of people gathered in University Lutheran Church in University City and sat in darkness as the sounds of the gurgling Saltan Sea surrounded them.
According to Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff, the creators of the radio show The World According to Sound, the gurgled burps and pops the audience first heard are called mud pots, formations of mud and slurry that pass bubbles of hot air.
Harnett and Chris Hoff are traveling around the country for the month of October and giving live performances of The World According to Sound, which explores different sounds and how we interpret them.
Harnett, an NPR reporter, and Hoff, a sound engineer, created The World According to Sound in 2015. The 90-second show is featured on public radio stations across the country and posts twice a week with a new sound on Soundcloud.
According to Harnett and Hoff, The World According to Sound does not seek to tell a story, but instead to let listeners separate themselves from the visual world and “to get deep into a sound and play a long, unnarrated stretch so you can really lose yourself.”
The duo set up eight, high definition speakers around the audience and handed out blindfolds to eliminate any visual distractions. Each speaker was individually controlled, enabling Harnett and Hoff to make sounds move across or around the room, creating a surreal and fully immersive experience.
The show spanned across an hour, and featured an eclectic collection of sounds and compilations with brief interjections by Harnett and Hoff to provide context.
The audience got to sounds that they would not have been able to experience without the use of professional equipment such as the furious scurrying and scratching of thousands of ants as they passed over a special contact microphone or the infrasonic rumblings of an earthquake.
One of the more eerie sounds that Harnett and Hoff played was a simulated recording of auditory hallucinations. At full volume, the audience felt the chilling effects of people whispering things like “You are so stupid” and “Jump in front of the car.”
They also played various clips of interesting music such as songs made completely from noises from a washing machine or recordings of a stalactite organ. Harnett and Hoff also included their own sound compilations, including a piece that was a sequence of grunts and shouts from professional athletes playing sports.
