Sennheiser, vintage 2009

Here’s a little journey into the rich acoustic world of the humble wine glass. In this clip (an abbreviated version of a longer composition) I’ve taken the sound of my moistened finger running along the rim of a wine glass, and transformed the scales of time and frequency to highlight some of the delicious details of singing glass.

Here I’ve layered a series of smoothly varying time-stretched recordings atop one another, in fixed harmonic proportions. The tones of the singing wine glass descend in an apparently endless waterfall (an effect known as the Shepard-Risset glissando1). This motion magnifies the subtle shimmering of the glass, as the shifting harmonics play off each other in unusual ways. Sometimes the glass seems to breathe audibly; sometimes it rings. Yet its sound always remains distinctively “glassy”.

This slow bottomless cascade of sound reminds me of the circular shape of the wine glass itself, as well as the tiny circular paths traced by the molecules of silica as each passing wave of sound continues on its long circumnavigating voyage along the rim. Circles within circles within circles: each one a continuous unbounded contour in space and time, possessing neither beginning nor end, driven by the laws of physics, and bursting with the possibilities of motion.

As I listen to this nearly endless descent, my thoughts turn skyward, too, to the nested elliptical motions of moons around planets, planets around stars, and stars around their home galaxies. Each celestial body falls freely through space, pulled by gravity to its neighbors, and carried forward by its own momentum into a long, looping orbital path. Each body falls ever downward, downward, towards a bottom that never quite seems to arrive. Of course, the laws of Nature do guarantee that, sooner or later, friction and entropy will eventually win: the orbits will decay, the bodies will collide; they will, like the rim of the ringing wine glass, fall silent. But, for now, the Universe sings.

All this — from simply listening to a finger touching glass.