The Vibrations Within

During an artist residency at Kripalu in May 2025, I had the opportunity to record a large collection of gongs. Not only was the collection large, but the gongs themselves were too! I spent hours and days with them, and will release soundscapes based on those gongs on a regular basis here, though not all at once, so that you do not get overloaded with gongs ;) I will also make sure that each soundscape focuses on a particular aspect of these fascinating instruments.

Sound is a vibration that travels through the air (if you are interested, see Vlog Episode 2). Usually, we use microphones to capture that airborne vibration and convert it into an audio signal. This soundscape is different. It captures the vibration at its source, before it becomes sound in the air: a plate in motion. I used contact microphones, stuck with Blu Tack directly onto the gong surface. This bypasses the air entirely and captures what is going on "inside," as if you were a two-dimensional being listening to the gong from within (I know that is not scientific, but it is the way I like to imagine it).

What is certain, though, is that a gong vibrates with far more complexity than the air around it reveals. Some of its deepest motions stay mostly in the metal itself. By placing contact microphones directly on the surface, I captured vibrations that conventional microphones usually miss.

The result is a soundscape that is very quiet and introspective. Very deep in frequency, too. For those who are relying on low frequencies for healing, this one is very strong, despite being quiet. The first slider will remain mostly inaudible unless you have a subwoofer capable of reproducing 20 Hz, a frequency we feel more than we hear.

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