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1.9

Post-Encounter Deposition

Selita Harris, PhD

Department of Music,

Stanford University


When I got accepted to the Juilliard School of Music, my parents worried I’d be wasting my life. I’d be chained to a half million dollars in student debt, minus the grants and scholarships I dogged for, and the pittance they scraped together over my childhood. With no job to pay it back.

My mother said: “You treated high school like college. You think college be some streets-paved-gold shit? Music theory, huh! What even is that, girl?”

My father said, “Learn a third instrument, sweetie. Everybody plays guitar. Everybody plays piano. There’s always studio work, you learn the saxophone. You learn bagpipe, there’s always funerals.”

As if the world would ever be ready for a Black bagpiper. Racism meets cultural appropriation!

Well, Mom, well, Dad, I’m a professor at Stanford now, who gets paid to speak her own vernacular to impressionable minds. I publish papers in our dialect, too, and to heck with those don’t accept it. That good enough for y’all? I rode a starship out to sing with the angels, so there you go. You happy now? And yes, I got paid. Igbal Renz himself cut me a fat wage, the two years I was gone.

I say “sing” because that’s what it was like. What else you call it, they got no instruments? Hobie Prieto, back at ESL1, they froze that young man solid, and when he woke up he was ranting about Igbal’s Beings, and how they sang to him. Not like any ordinary music, either. So Igbal goes out to meet ’em, he brings a musicologist to classify it.

Now, that’s no easy task, y’all. I could say it was bells or xylophones or pipe organs, and it kinda was. Or I could say it was theremin music, and yeah, it was a bit like that, the way the notes sometimes slid together. I could say voices, and probably that would give the best idea what it sounded like, but without lips or lungs or vocal cords, or any solid piece to make the sounds. Or I could say “pure vibrations in the ether,” and that doesn’t communicate so well, even if it’s the exact truth.

I wouldn’t say I saw the Beings, as the experience for me was not particularly visual. But I perceived them as colorless spheres, a lot of them, each giving off a pure note according to its size, like Tibetan singing bowls or some such, although the sizes were always changing. Soprano beach balls and baritone weather balloons, and everything in between, all pulsating in different time.

You could call it a symphony, but that would mislead you more. A choir, too; it wasn’t that kind of organized. I’d call it more of a techno opera, with each individual part sung by a choir, and with other voices howling and beat-boxing in the background.

There were words, but I didn’t catch any of them; it was in some language I didn’t know, stranger than Tolkien’s Elvish or the jibber-jabber of toddlers. Now, some other humans out there heard music, too, and some say they caught the words with it, and that may be. Me, I only understood the notes.

It was a dense sound, just full of notes, but built up from simple patterns. No one Being had a complicated part to play.

Now, I’ll tell you, an octave is a basic property of the universe. It’s the interval between one frequency and its double, and you can hear the similarity between the same notes on different octaves. You can see it in the way a guitar string naturally vibrates. No different for the Beings. But how you divide up an octave, that’s cultural.

In the west we use eighths, which sounds good, because those split the octaves up by powers of two—non-prime whole numbers, just the way a guitar string wants to twang—with the sharps being a semitone higher and the flats a semitone lower. Those aren’t as pleasing to the ear, because they’re not these pure harmonics. But there’s nothing inherent or universal about that. In Ancient Babylonia they used thirds, and in places like Japan and India they still use sevenths, which produces that slightly discordant Asian twang.

The Beings, in my opinion, don’t divide their octaves any fractional way whatsoever. They’ll sing three notes one octave and then the same three in another, but the notes fall any old place. There’s purpose and math in there, sure, but they ain’t writing any of this down in no staff notation. Wouldn’t surprise me if the notes were irrational numbers, or even just random, but from each basic seed there’s a call and response and a variation, so the thread of it gets more complicated until it just suddenly quits. But there’s multiple threads weaving in and out, so the music never quite stops.

For timing, all humans tend to space our notes between maybe three seconds and a few tens of milliseconds apart, with faster time sounding frantic or urgent or sometimes playful. Middle speeds sound happy, and slower ones sound lazy or sad. The Beings, at least the notes that I could hear, were similar. Whether that was inherent, or staged for our benefit, I really couldn’t say.

It’s also . . . there was a twentieth-century comedian named Martin Mull, who said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and I believe that’s very true in this case. I can’t really convey it, and I sure can’t sing it. But since my job is to describe, I’ll say there were layers to it. Call it three layers.

The first layer was the loudest, lowest, slowest, and the most blurred together, and it communicated a sense of awe that bordered at times on sadness or alarm or even anger. Something like a Gregorian chant, or Tuvan throat singing, or the groaning and shrieking of Koyaanisqatsi.

On top of that, a quieter, clearer layer that was more like an actual song. Not simple enough that you could quite call it “happy,” but it would have been pleasant if it weren’t so damned overwhelming.

Third, in the background, was a high, fast, staccato layer, like structured rain, conveying excitement. Trance music is the closest thing I can describe to it, if trance music were produced by a hundred separate voices.

I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but even if it does, it’s an approximation. That’s all. If it were rendered in human time with human instruments, it wouldn’t have the same effect. The DMT high lasted maybe ten minutes, so I couldn’t have heard the music any longer than that. But I’ll tell you, it did seem like a much longer time. If time had any meaning, I would say it was several hours at least, and I came away with that kind of heavy, exhausted feeling you get after a mind-blowing concert. Actually, more than that; I believe I was a sphere as well, or shapeless. I might have been pulsating with the music, too. My voice might have been part of the chorus.

I’m sure people would like me to say it was the most beautiful sound I ever heard, and unfortunately that would not be the case. It was beautiful in its way, but it was not human. Think of some complicated, possibly venomous undersea creature, and ask yourself how beautiful it is, really. But this music was the most extraordinary I’ve ever heard by a good mile. Of course, it faded once the DMT wore off. Best I can remember now is just a few fragments, that in no way do justice to the experience, and the best I can transcribe of it is, like I said, an approximation.

Sometimes I hear more of it in dreams, and I try to scribble down a piece here and a piece there. People ask me when I’m going to publish or perform the thing, and that answer is never. Definitely never. But as long as I live, every damn thing I write is going to have “influenced by” stamped all over it. And that’s a paycheck, too, Mom, so just maybe music theory is a thing after all.


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