What gaze direction is teaching me about expansion, awe, and feeling less alone
Over the past month I have been paying more attention to where I look. Not to focus on what I am looking at but to notice the direction I am looking towards.
I’m noticing the way each orientation of my gaze (down, ahead, to the side or upwards) feels in my body, and how it changes the sound of my voice when I vocalise.
Outward, not upward
When I look down, my voice feels contracted and held, and when I look in front of me my voice is stronger and more stable. But I also noticed that it wasn’t necessarily the upward direction of my gaze that opened my voice up. I assumed that it would sound free, light and airy whilst looking upwards. But instead it sounded thin and airy and felt like it was underneath something.
It was when I looked outward into the distance, not upward, that my voice felt wide and expansive but also strong.
This has made me reconsider what I had assumed I would need to do to compose expansive sounds. Instead of reaching for high frequencies and adding more air/high end to other sounds, what I find instead is that the grounding, and the width and the sense of space matters much more. It’s about balance, width and also unexpected strength, build and width and height. Space AROUND the sound, rather than just height above it.
Update on my project
Maybe I should say where all this is coming from. Three months ago I was very honoured to receive funding from the Arts Council Wales’s ‘Creative Steps’ fund to follow an enquiry that has been whispering at the back of my mind for a long time. The work I’ve started is a series I’m calling The Opening Series, and I’m beginning with Part One: FEEL. My enquiry is about how the way that we feel is not only about our inner thoughts and sensations but also about how and what we are sensing outside of ourselves from the spaces we are in.
I am particularly interested in how we can paradoxically feel more connected and less alone when we connect to expanded feelings.
The way I am exploring this is through a convergence of sounds and visual moving images.
The feeling of expansion that I am exploring is a feeling of moving from a contracted, isolated space, to feeling part of something bigger than you are. It shares elements with the feeling of awe.
In my FEEL piece I am exploring the sound of the gaze (what I see), and the sound of the space (what my voice is sensing).
The two are in a relationship with each other, just as we are with the space around and between us.
Vastness and felt space
This felt space matters when music evokes certain feelings.
When I was researching vastness and awe for my MMus, I came across Landon Peck’s work on musical awe (2022). One of his findings stayed with me. People described music as feeling ‘big’ when it felt as though it was in the space with them. The expansion wasn’t in the music alone, or in the listener alone, it was in the relationship between them. Both in it together.
I think a lot about how we sense the space around us. How, when I see a wide landscape it shifts something inside me. Also, the way that crossing a very high bridge makes my stomach drop towards my feet. The way that a low ceiling or small space makes me frown and feels like it presses down on the top of my head.
To open outward is to feel ‘met’
When I look outward, I take a deeper breath and I feel wider, as though I’m not only sensing the distance but letting the space come to meet me. As if by opening outward I am also letting something come in. As if opening outward is in some way to be met. As if expansion and connection are related.
I’m still exploring this but I am starting to feel like I am on the right path.
I would really love to know your thoughts if any of this resonates.
Peck, L.S.-L. (2022)Â Empirical and modelling approaches to the psychology of musical awe. PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
