If someone were to have wandered around the McCalla School at 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, they might have been a bit concerned by the guttural, off-key noises coming from the building’s multipurpose room.
The noises came from a sonic meditation led by Jacobs School of Music Associate Professor Jiji Kim. Kim led a “sound bath” — an experience where people are “bathed” in resonant sound waves. She instructed the event attendees to vocalize when exhaling and encouraged them to try harmonizing with others. It was one of her final pieces but included the most audience engagement of the night.
“Sound bath Concert with Jiji Kim” entertained 25 attendees at its peak during the 75-minute event. Guests were provided chairs to sit on but were encouraged to bring their own yoga mats for their comfort. After attendees were invited into the room and made themselves comfortable, they were gently brought to attention by guitar strumming before McCalla School Events and Engagement Coordinator Emily Zarse spoke to introduce the event.
“Please enjoy, de-stress and again, welcome to this space,” Zarse said.
Sound baths originated thousands of years ago from multiple ancient civilizations like Greece, India and Egypt. Research has found that the parasympathetic nervous system can activate when playing certain frequencies and tones, leading some to seek out sound baths as a form of healing therapy.
Princeton doctoral student Gulli Björnssen played the first set of the night on his guitar. Bjornsson is originally from Iceland and practices in improvising live sampling and composing. He plays his guitar and will use computer software to sample and layer is music in real time.
“My specialty here is making audio effects that kind of expand the sound of the instrument in simple way, and I don't always know what that's going to be until I put it together,” Björnsson said.
He described his first piece as the “least sound bathy” of his set. Björnsson and Kim make up the guitar duo “LINÜ.” The two met while studying at Yale School of Music in 2015 and have performed together since then.
While Björnsson played, attendees did whatever they pleased to best appreciate and absorb the music. Some just sat and watched him play. Others laid on their yoga mats and stayed still or rocked from side-to-side in gentle movements.
IU freshman Aiden Huffer is taking the “East-West Encounters in Music” course, which requires its students to attend a concert for class credit. Huffer had never attended a sound bath before and thought that the concert would be an interesting way to get class credit.
“It was a new experience,” Huffer said. “More engaging than I thought, a lot of cool sounds like the guitars and stuff.”
After Bjornsson’s 20-minute set concluded, Kim ventured onto the informal stage. It was a simple set up — just a few plastic chairs, one electric and one acoustic guitar, a microphone and a propped-up computer.
Kim’s first piece was written in the 12th century by German abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Though it was originally written as a chant, Kim performed it with her electric guitar and pedal board, calling it a “doom metal” interpretation of the piece.
“She literally thought beer could heal people so she would put mugwort and dandelion in it and then she'd give it to people and heal people,” Kim said. “Her music has a lot of power in healing, so I thought with everything that's going on, we should have some healing time.”
Kim then wanted the audience to be involved in the music making process. To do this, she instructed the audience in a tuning meditation by Pauline Oliveros and reassured them that it was a simple process. Oliveros pioneered tuning meditations as a subset of her sonic meditations, which is a form of music experimentalism. During sonic meditation, one “tunes their mind and body” while meditating by embracing and expanding on random noises that the person or group meditating would make, as opposed to the silence or organized sound created during traditional meditation.
“There's no such thing as wrong notes,” Kim said. “That's what Pauline Oliveros was trying to teach us.”
The audience practiced sonic meditation for four minutes, verbalizing new pitches at every exhale. They started at very dissonant pitches but came close to a harmony by the end of the piece.
“The really cool thing about this piece is that she’s teaching us to be better citizens of society,” Kim said. “We have to speak our truth. But it only works when we're listening to them.”
At the conclusion of the concert, many audience members were slow leave the room, almost as if they were in a trance. Some clearly fell asleep during the concert, which sound bath attendees are actually encouraged to do, as their brains still absorb the frequencies.
“It was so magical, it almost made me cry,” one event attendee said to another as they left.
