For a follow-up activity a few weeks ago, we were asked to make a thick description of a sonic experience we have had before, and while this experience was one-of-a-kind for me, it strangely was a sonic experience I took part in making.
“The sonic experience I’m about to describe was a jam session that took place in room M112 after uni.
Myself and someone I would call a best friend arrived at the LCC after normal uni hours to have a small jam session as I had coincidently brought my electric guitar and it was the day of the week we would meet up to have a coffee (she goes to Camberwell).
After settling down and setting up in M112, we started to jam, with myself singing and my friend playing guitar, practicing songs we were going to perform later that week as well as improvising and coming up with new material.
I have never had a jam session as intimate and as impromptu as that one, mostly because I usually jam by myself and I never sing stuff I’ve created with anyone else, so I already felt like I was in a vulnerable position as I was expressing very personal thoughts and feelings through my lyrics.
Despite all this, my sonic experience came from listening to my best friend playing her original compositions. I have always known that she song-writes but I also knew that she was the reserved type and didn’t like to share things like that with people. This friend in question has a beautiful voice and is brilliant at guitar, and that was interwoven with songs that represented who she was, what she loved, and what she felt, which made me nostalgic. They made me remember the number of experiences we had together and who we are now.
She then proceeded to play the song “Don’t Know Why” by Ghostly Kisses, a song we both love and a song she was going to perform that Friday. That song sent me on a rollercoaster of emotions, from sadness to inner peace, from happiness to regret, but most of all, pride. This wasn’t something she would do in the past, and hearing that talent flourish right before me is a state of being I cannot forget, a vast emptiness filled with a low rumble of pride and excitement.
On top of this, that Friday when she performed that song on stage, that low rumble was made loud. I cried for the first 30 seconds of that performance because of the happiness and relief that came over me.
Those types of experiences a far and few between yet the emotions I felt then were so visceral that every time I think about it, it makes me pause because I realise that the feeling never really went away.”
What I originally wrote did not include that last paragraph because I thought it wasn’t relevant at the time, yet now I realise that it was probably the most important part of the whole thick description. Honestly, I felt this exercise was a really interesting one for me due to what happened to me recently and I thought was really thought-provoking to make the experience tangible and real through words instead of staying emotions and intangible thoughts.
I also realised that there are a lot of personal details and “fluff” in my thick description that doesn’t really talk about the sonic experience; however, I do believe that it is important to set the scene/tone in context with myself because I thought it was meant to be a personal experience and not just an experience.