Fishing for sound in the Mill River. (Photo © 2006 Robert Jonas)

John T. Bullitt PO Box 37 Milbridge ME 04658 USA email: john [AT] jtbullitt [DOT] com

I seek Awe.

In writing, sound recording & installation, music, design, alteration of found objects, and in life I search for the tiny cracks that open to the realm where time, space, and thought stand still. A full day of ambient city sound unfolds in the span of a few short minutes, to the tempo of a neighborhood church belltower. An electromechanical sound-producing gadget, constructed with simple 19^th century technology, generates sonic complexities of a high order. A simple graphic design questions the role of time in the pursuit of spiritual truth. A walk-through installation places the listener at the center of the Earth, enveloped in a great sea of natural seismic sound.

By upending the observer’s point of view, by exploring alternate scales of time and space, I hope to cobble together a few guideposts to mark the trail that leads into the vast interior terrain of the miraculous that we all share.

Bio

John T. Bullitt (b. 1956) has been a student of sound and of the Earth for many years. He briefly studied piano and composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, then graduated in 1980 with a degree in physics from Grinnell College, where he built the college’s first seismograph. After receiving an MA in geophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, he joined the research staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue graduate studies in geophysics and conduct basic and applied research into the nature of seismic wave propagation in the Earth’s interior. During this period he also taught physics at Bentley College and worked as a freelance computer consultant and software designer. He made his first audio realizations of earthquakes in 1985 on an Apple Macintosh computer. A year of births, illnesses, deaths, and a chance encounter at MIT with multimedia artist Juan Geuer led to a deep reevaluation of his approach to scientific and spiritual inquiry. In 1988 he left academia to pursue Buddhist philosophy.

His studies led him, in 1993, to launch Access to Insight, now a major online repository and publisher of Buddhist texts, of which he continues to serve as editor.

In 2003 he returned to his explorations of the natural sounds of the Earth. He lives in rural coastal Maine and hangs out with TIDAL Arts.

Acknowledgments

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