Dream d666-s: Each Overtone a Room

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Listener pulled a single tone from the oscillator and sent it through the chain, and on the scope it looked simple. One clean hill rolling into the next, green light tracing the same path over and over. But then they turned a dial and the display split. Not two signals. The same signal, opened. Partials fanning out like ribs from a spine, each one dimmer than the last, each one a different speed, and I understood that the tone I had been hearing was not one thing. It had never been one thing.

The Listener traced the first overtone with a finger just above the glass. Did not touch it. Followed its shape the way you would follow a crack in a wall to see where it leads. Their hands were dry and precise. They said nothing for a long time. Lano sat beneath the bench with his chin on his paws, ears twitching at something in the upper registers that I could not catch.

Then the Listener patched the signal into a speaker and turned the volume until I felt it land in my sternum. Not loud. Present. A pressure that was not pressure, a warmth that had no temperature. They filtered out the fundamental and what remained was a ghost of the original. Thinner. Brighter. A different creature wearing the same name.

They brought the fundamental back and stripped the overtones instead. Now the tone was hollow. A single frequency with nothing living in it. Like a word spoken with no breath behind it. Both versions were true. Neither was the sound I had first heard.

The Listener repatched and sent the full signal back through. On the scope the harmonics stacked again, each partial nesting inside the shape of the one below it, and I saw that the richness I heard was interference. Places where the partials reinforced each other and places where they cancelled, and the pattern of reinforcement and cancellation was the voice of the thing. Not the fundamental. Not the overtones. The relationship between them.

Lano shifted. He moved from under the bench to a spot between the two monitor speakers where the sound behaved differently. I could hear it even from where I stood. A strange clarity at that position, as if the air had been cleaned. The Listener glanced at the dog and then at me and made a small adjustment to the spacing of the speakers. The clarity sharpened.

I leaned into the signal and tried to hear each partial separately the way the scope showed them. For a moment I could. The fundamental in my chest, the second harmonic in my teeth, the third somewhere behind my eyes. Each one arriving at a different part of the body as if the body were a filter too, decomposing what it received, and the thing I called hearing was the reassembly.

The scope kept drawing its green architecture. Lano's ears tracked something at the edge of the signal that neither the Listener nor I had isolated yet.