This week the composer and musician Sam Nester asked us to do something unusual. Gathered in a circle, we closed our eyes and hummed together on similar and divergent pitches. As we did so, Sam asked that we listen to each other while also tuning into our surrounding environment. As we hummed, we heard church bells ringing, cars passing, the trees moving with the wind, and children playing. It was an experiment in eliminating our often dominant sense (of sight) as a way to drop into listening to the world around us.

After experimenting with this process outdoors, we moved inside, into a hushed cavernous environment. In there, our voices became simultaneously blurred and acoustically amplified by the largess of the space. In this new acoustic setting, we recreated our circular formation, organizing ourselves around the imposing white marble edge that outlined the space. Now, as we closed our eyes and began to hum, it wasn't the sound of trees or children that we heard, but the natural crescendos and decrescendos of each other's voices as they moved around us. It was a delicate sound, one that required patience and trust, teaching us a lesson in listening and creating on location.

The composer and musician Sam Nester, professor at Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music, has spent time in some unusual places. You can find him performing on trumpet in cisterns, reservoirs, and other unusually resonant spaces.  In these environments he uses the site as an "instrument" as his playing responds and dialogues with the natural acoustics, reverb, and delay inherent to the specific place.

This method of creating music in unique spaces has a long storied history - Pauline Oliveros famously descended into a fourteen-foot underground cistern at Port Townsend, Washington to create the recording “Deep Listening”. This album changed the way we can imagine recording on location. Oliveros coined the term "deep listening" as a pun that grew into an aesthetic that lives on today.

Today, in our class, we tested this method for ourselves - closing our eyes, and opening our ears to the surrounding sounds. In our time with Sam Nester, we explored how to activate a space through the use of our voices and discover its hidden features.