The Nature of Intervals
A bamboo pipe pivoting like a scale on two lateral wooden posts guides me into my first visit to the garden of Shisen-dō in the suburbs of northern Kyoto. Water pours into the upper part of the bamboo pipe until it tips the balance, empties, and finally falls back into its original position, at which point its tip gently—elegantly—strikes a carefully placed, smooth stone. The resulting high-pitched impact sound reaches my ears even before I arrive at the entrance gate. The tonality and level of this sound, shifting with the growing and waning distance between myself and the sound’s source, give a strong spatial sequence to the experience of strolling through the garden. In contrast to the auditory ubiquity of the recurrent impact sound, the instrument itself remains barely visible, even from up close; it is hidden at the arboreous edge of one of the garden’s open sandplains. I find it set within the course of a small water channel which has been deviated from the river that delimits the garden’s eastern edge, now surrounded by lush foliage. Listening to it up close, the impact is just one sound in a sequence: gently gurgling, the rivulet in the channel; suddenly whooshing, the water being released from the bamboo pipe which will soon be poised to tilt back again and meet the water jet; a resounding splash, just before the other end of the pipe hits the stone. The little trickle in the channel, still gurgling, resumes even more delicately in the wake of this sonorous impact.
Mii-Dera, July 2016
Text & Sound: Nadine Schütz
Animation: Matthias Vollmer
