There is this phenomenon where the beginnings of phenomena are clear in the A&P, but the endings of not experienced, and the beginnings of phenomena are hidden in the dark night, and the endings are clear.
I've experienced this most clearly with mantra-based vipassana jhana (described in MCT

I was wondering if it might not be possible to design a soundscape where there was a message or melody hidden in the beginnings or endings of small composite sounds, such that it would be hidden in either the A&P or the DN.
Ideally, there would be things hidden in both the beginnings and endings in such a way that noticing both clearly (equanimity) would result in a third melody or message.

So, for example, if you were in the DN and heard this sound, you would not hear what was hidden in the beginnings of sounds, but would hear what was hidden in the endings of sounds.

I have no idea if this is possibly, and it would probably take a good sound technician, an experienced vipassana meditator and preferably someone who knows how to design experiments of this sort to scientific standards.

Does this sound feasible? Any ideas on how to actually do this or related experiments? Has this already been tried?

My first thought is that it's not that linear. The mind moments that are seen either the beginning or end of would occur out-of-sync with the small sounds.


This is how you're thinking it would work:

|-----------Start of sound----------||-----------Middle of sound----------||-----------End of sound----------|

|-----Start of mind moment-----||-----Middle of mind moment-----||-----End of mind moment-----|



This is how I imagine it actually works:

|--------Start of sound-------||-----------Middle of sound----------||-----------End of sound----------|

|--------Middle of mind moment------||---------End of mind moment---------||--------Start of mind moment--------|

Sounds like an interesting experiment, I think it may be beyond my current sound design abilities but I'll throw some ideas around anyhow. It seems plausible enough if we take the general frequencies observed in each ñana and create some kind of interference to cancel them out during specific sections, however it would probably need to be more of a rhythmic pattern than a melodic or verbal one as that would require the phrase to be played over more than one frequency.

The more I think about it, especially the idea about having endings and beginnings of sounds being audible or inaudible during certain ñanas, the more it sounds like it would be overly complicated for very little practical value; it'd be a cool thing to try but the logistics of it would be nightmarish. There's also things like the variability in a persons ability to hear certain frequencies which could prevent it from being effective; the frequency response range on the equipment being used to listen to the recording would also affect the playback; depending on the quality of the recording the person hears, the effects may be negligible due to variability in audio quality in various formats.

Something I'm experimenting with is composing an entire piece structured around the progress of insight, I haven't got 'round to finishing it yet but here's a link to a magickally-inspired piece I wrote in a similar experiment: Veiled Sentinels of the Onyx Causeway (My musical stuff is quite diverse, experimental and will definitely not be to everyone's tastes, just to let you know before you click on the link.)

[Edited to add a shameless plug: This is a track I recorded called "Apperception" which is an acoustic improvisation with me reading part of the AFT site about attentiveness over it. Yes, my voice does actually sound this low and this heavily Scottish... ]