Two Glass Jelly Jars, Fingernails, Ears, Computer Keyboard

I have about 8 glass jelly jars that I use as glasses. Six of the eight were the glasses that my family used as I was growing up. I took them with me when I first had my own kitchen. The jars are scratched and nicked around the edges. I started by running my fingernails across these scratched edges, and quickly brought the jar to my left ear to better hear the sound of the scratching. I first brought the side of the glass to my ear but soon shifted it to cover my ear with the opening. I could hear the canonical "ocean" sound and the fingernail sound was substantially amplified. I began tapping my fingernails against the base of the glass and soon found a few particular frequencies that seemed to recur with most taps. I noticed that I could change the mix of frequencies by varying the intensity of my tapping, or by changing where on the base of the cup I tapped. I experimented with volume as well, tapping softer and harder, faster and slower, and varying the number of fingers I used.

I soon began tapping on the side of the jar as well, and tried using both hands at once — one on the side of the glass, the other on the base — creating a more textural sound than a series of impulses. I tried my best to hold the cup in position, so as not to pull it away from my ear. Doing this completely changed the pitches from the tapping and overwhelmed the more subtle timbral variations of the tapping sounds. I discovered that I could create a duller, deeper sound by tapping the bottom edges of the glass, which seemed to transfer the force of my tap through the cup to the side of my head.

For a few seconds I tried contrasting the sounds of my fingernails clicking against the glass in my left ear to the sounds of my fingernails clicking against my computer keyboard in my right ear. I liked the contrast, but then went back to exploring more continuous tapping against the glass. I came back to the keyboard after about a minute but found that the sounds didn't seem to mix well anymore. It seemed, though, that there were a number of different possibilities for playing the computer keyboard, so I decided to try that again on a subsequent day.

After I felt I had explored enough of the subtleties of the timbral variety I could produce tapping the glass with my fingernails, I changed back to scratching and rubbing and found that I no longer noticed the ocean-like sound. I pulled the glass slowly away from my ear and brought it back, and while I could hear what sounded like a moving band pass filter over quiet noise as I moved the glass around near my ear, I could hardly hear anything while the cup was right on my ear. I picked up a second jelly jar and moved it toward my right ear, and found that I could hear the filtered noise through my right ear louder. Then I tried slowly removing both glasses at the same time.

The sound was spectacular in stereo. I tried a few times bringing the glasses in and then out, slower each time, and tried holding the glasses at particular distances near my ear to listen to the different filters. I tried making sounds with my mouth, speaking, breathing, and listened to the way the cups in different positions filtered the sounds I made — accentuating a few sounds, and dampening others. In particular some consonants, such as "s," "c," and "t" were quite accentuated. This sort of filtering made the air feel thick and viscous, and I started saying and whispering the words "viscous" and "viscosity" while holding the cups near and to my ears.

I then tried walking around the apartment, seeing how the cups filtered the different noise-producing objects in the apartment, such as my computer, the refridgerator, and my air purifier. The computer produed the most sound that passed through the glasses' filter. With that my fifteen minutes were up.