Memories from Xiahe (2011)

For recorded soundscape and interactive system

Duration: approx. 10 minutes

Channels: 2

In August 2007 I set off from Beijing into inland China, without a clear plan. Led by travelling companions met along the way, I ended up in Xiahe, home to the Labrang Monastery and its perimeter lined with 1,174 prayer wheels. A prayer wheel (mani-chuskor) consists of a cylinder containing a long scroll of paper bearing countless repetitions of the Tibetan mantra "Om! Mani padme hum" (literally, "Hail! Jewel in the lotus"). Some of the largest wheels are said to contain as many as a million printed repetitions of the formula. Practitioners believe that every rotation sends a stream of prayers skyward. At Labrang, most of the prayer wheels run along the monastery walls, occasionally interrupted by doors leading to rooms that each house a single larger wheel with a bell on top. The bell rings once per rotation, creating a rhythm whose loudness and tempo are proportional to the force applied: when the flow of practitioners is steady enough, the rhythm never stops, its pace rising and falling with that flow. Most wheels, when spun, emit a high-pitched squeak — loosely cyclical, its cycle tied to the rotation — so the rhythm marked with such precision by the bell is also present, in subtler form, all along the perimeter.

The source material for this piece consists of two field recordings made at the prayer wheels. The first captures the wheels along the perimeter, at the spot visible in the background; the second captures the sound of one of the large wheels with the bell. I recorded these sounds on 14 August — the annual summer Buddhist ceremony had ended in mid-July, and it was an ordinary weekday morning. Even so, during the hours I spent there, the flow of practitioners remained constant and the sound never fell completely silent, with only rare interruptions, none lasting more than a minute.

The piece centres on the interaction between real-time synthetic sounds and these field recordings. A first section is driven by the perimeter wheel; a second by the wheel with the bell. The computer analyses the recordings and extracts parameters that are mapped to the synthetic sounds: pitch extraction from the squeak in the first part, onset detection of the bell in the second. Most of the compositional work lies in the mapping. These two parameters were chosen to keep the rhythm intelligible even in the most chaotic moments. The recordings play back unedited — they are not always audible, but they shape the material throughout, preserving all the rhythmic nuance of the original phenomenon.

Ultimately, Memories from Xiahe is about the thoughts that came to me afterwards, when recollections of this seemingly idyllic place became entangled with memories of the Shanxi region, its noisy coal mines, and the chaos of Lanzhou. In act of imagination, I let the rhythm of the wheel give shape to that chaotic noise.