Musical Waves

Eric and I were sitting at Matthew’s Beach and I said to him, listen to the waves lapping on the beach and against the wall - try to hear what music you can from them. Then I listened myself, and I found that they sounded musical, instead of random, as I laid their sounds on a rhythm that depicted the grid of waves out on the water. It was a 12-8 rhythm - or a pair of six-beat measures.

I’d tried before to hear music in the waves, and was brought up short because the waves didn’t break rhythmically - the pause between the breakings would always be unpredictable. My attempts to find melody would lurch and fall back like the waves, and slap against each other. Now with a rhythmic background underlying them, the waves brought interesting highlights of melody and rhythm - often coming in on the two- or three-count of the beat. And different waves could finish their pattern while others joined in, overlapping - I could imagine setting up an orchestration on Eric’s music composition software, where different instruments would follow the tune of different waves, and others would hold the grid pattern that I could see spreading out across the water.

I noticed again the next time that the fast cycle of threes - two or four three-beat pulses - was a pervasive part of the wave’s rhythm. I wondered if it was just me imposing that on them, so I tried to think of them in 4-4 time. They would accept a four pulse, but within each pulse there was still a three-pulse. I wondered if it was related to waves being made from circles, and circles being associated with the number six.

Riding home, the music stayed with me, and I thought about rhythm as the matrix upon which melody is laid out - matrix being the net upon which ideas can be hung, what stretches out the possible, upon which what is can then develop. I thought about how the word matrix comes from the word that means mother. But mostly I listened to the music, the memory of the wave music mixed with the bicycle’s rhythms.

Today when I rode to Matthew’s beach and sat up on the lifeguard’s seat, I heard the waves singing to me. I didn’t need to construct the music or think about its underlying rhythm - they just sang, and I listened and watched the dance of blues and almost-whites and dark green, the interlacing of transparency and sheen, on the water.

Riding home, accompanied by the music, I thought about resonance - how it feels to vibrate with the music - having it awaken places inside of me and define their chambers, feeling alerted from my core up through the place behind the roof of my mouth, feeling harmonized, aligned. And I thought about Love as the matrix - the rhythmic background that arranges everything in its proper place and time, so it can sing.