Halfway To Spain

The Voice announced that we were halfway across the Atlantic as of this morning. So, that means that I'm about as far away from anything as I can be while still being on the planet. It also means that we're getting closer to land every minute.

My Ecoacoustics teacher led us through a wild exercise. We all closed our eyes for 60 seconds of silence, and concentrated on the ambient noise of the ship. Engine rumble, creaking of the room and furniture, waves splashing, the voices of students walking by. We discussed what we heard, and then repeated the exercise, with the instructions to first shift your attention rapidly from element to element, and over time pick one to concentrate on. The third time we ran through it, he told us to concentrate only on the creaking sounds, and we drew visual representations of what we heard on paper. Then we compared the different drawing techniques we all used. All this is training us for deep concentration techniques that we'll use to guide our "sound walks", where we'll record various elements of natural sound environments and later assemble them into musical compositions. This is blowing my mind.

Everything is picking up steam and it's starting to feel like school. Last night I decided to take a walk around the outside decks before bed. The sky was clouded over, and without starlight, all you can see is pitch blackness. I've never faced anything like that and it's still on my mind.