big Small
“Look after the senses and the sounds will look after themselves”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Some of my earliest and most vivid memories are of a recurring sensate experience I called “big-small.” Through subsequent online research, I found several forums where people shared similar experiences. Common features include radical perceptual shifts in the relative size and proximity of objects and the body, especially the hands; sounds simultaneously loud and quiet, machine-like; inarticulate voices; the thought of something smooth and massive balancing on something thin and hard like a needle; profound stillness and/or impossibly rapid movement; the impression of an empty landscape or blank white surface progressively filling up with ‘noise’ and scribbles.
In one forum, I found a link to the Wikipedia article quoted below:
Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome (AIWS, named after the novel written by Lewis Carroll), also known as Todd's syndrome or lilliputian hallucinations, is a disorienting neurological condition that affects human perception. Sufferers may experience micropsia, macropsia, or size distortion of other sensory modalities... AIWS affects the sufferer's sense of vision, sensation, touch, and hearing, as well as one's own body image.
While these explanations and accounts point towards a shared perceptual phenomenon, AIWS is an experience that seems almost actively resistant to description through language. Considering that language is predicated on a shared framework of Aristotelian logic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian physics, it seems fitting that an experience which so thoroughly distorts that framework would beggar description. So, paraphrasing Hans Christian Andersen, ‘where words fail, sounds speak.’
With big SMALL I invoke the perceptual shifts and irregularities experienced in AIWS through sound. Combining live electroacoustic and sampling techniques, I endeavour to communicate the physical character of this experience in a process of synesthetic exegesis, as visual and proprioceptive phenomena are theoretically ‘mapped onto’ analogous acoustic features. What results is an extralinguistic totality that aims to express something of the ineffable.
Listen to excerpts from the first iteration of bigSMALL here
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Some of my earliest and most vivid memories are of a recurring sensate experience I called “big-small.” Through subsequent online research, I found several forums where people shared similar experiences. Common features include radical perceptual shifts in the relative size and proximity of objects and the body, especially the hands; sounds simultaneously loud and quiet, machine-like; inarticulate voices; the thought of something smooth and massive balancing on something thin and hard like a needle; profound stillness and/or impossibly rapid movement; the impression of an empty landscape or blank white surface progressively filling up with ‘noise’ and scribbles.
In one forum, I found a link to the Wikipedia article quoted below:
Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome (AIWS, named after the novel written by Lewis Carroll), also known as Todd's syndrome or lilliputian hallucinations, is a disorienting neurological condition that affects human perception. Sufferers may experience micropsia, macropsia, or size distortion of other sensory modalities... AIWS affects the sufferer's sense of vision, sensation, touch, and hearing, as well as one's own body image.
While these explanations and accounts point towards a shared perceptual phenomenon, AIWS is an experience that seems almost actively resistant to description through language. Considering that language is predicated on a shared framework of Aristotelian logic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian physics, it seems fitting that an experience which so thoroughly distorts that framework would beggar description. So, paraphrasing Hans Christian Andersen, ‘where words fail, sounds speak.’
With big SMALL I invoke the perceptual shifts and irregularities experienced in AIWS through sound. Combining live electroacoustic and sampling techniques, I endeavour to communicate the physical character of this experience in a process of synesthetic exegesis, as visual and proprioceptive phenomena are theoretically ‘mapped onto’ analogous acoustic features. What results is an extralinguistic totality that aims to express something of the ineffable.
Listen to excerpts from the first iteration of bigSMALL here