Friendship is Magic

Cricket

"No tuning forks necessary: it's a tad pitch black. So, aye. Did that."

Mr.Face:

Alright then. Now what. How did I learn this. It had kind of been years, hadn't it? Since I thought about this... on a learning type basis. "Tell me what you can hear right now." I didn't expect much of him... he couldn't even hear a teapot... but still, I wanted to know where I was starting from.

Cricket

I tried to get what I knew from what I'd been told about the place out of my head, forget what I'd felt. Ignored the couch to see if I could hear it rather than feel it. Let's see. Nah, hear. Let's hear here. "Ah . . . it's a room. Ignoring th' fact that you've told me it's a room. Th' sound doesn't keep traveling nearly as far as in th' 'allways. And . . ." I tried to pick anything else up, but it was all a bit of a fog. "That's just about it, I'd say."

Mr.Face:

...Well... he wasn't completely hopeless. "Alright. Those are walls. You can pick up on walls. Hallways seem to continue on in a horizontal indefinitely because corners distort and reflect, meaning that some noises get lost bouncing down the hallway before you and never get back. Rooms aren't nearly that...annoying laterally." I explained.

"What you're basically looking for here are things that interfere with the sound hitting the wall. I use our voices to do it... and in some cases just my own breathing... but it would be pretentious and ignorant for me to think that you could do that after like...two minutes of realising that walls exist. I now invite you to go ahead and mess with the clicking. You should be able to hear it come back to you relatively unchanged. You're looking for instances where the uniformity of the other wall is interrupted." I continued, sitting there. I realised that at this point there would be a lot of ridiculous clicking going on for a while. ...Well... I made stupid extraneous clicking noises when I was little. Assuming that it didn't get preposterous, I would just sit there and deal with the onslaught of noobishness.

Cricket

"A'right, interruptions . . . so." So, clicking. I was hesitant to actual do that. He was annoyed by whistling and he would probably be annoyed by clicking. I'd gotten an invitation so I'd probably not get Mr. Face'd, but the chance was still there. Anyhow . . . I clicked once to start it off. Like the gunfire to the race.

Oi my my, the click was a lot easier to follow through the room than the lower voice tones. "There we are, that's quite a bit sharper than voices," I muttered, and tried a few more times, aiming at a random part of a random wall that I'd vaguely 'seen' earlier. If I really focused, I thought perhaps I could make out more distinctly how far away it might be . . . or was that my imagination? It was hard to tell.

I had to find something new. Anything. Focus, now, perhaps I wasn't focusing enough. I leaned forward in my seat and tried again, aiming at that same spot and pick what I heard to peices, memorize it. Was I actually hearing the sound come back to me, or was that me being an idiot? It was too faint. It'd also been a while since I'd been tested on something . . . but what I'd learned from being tested before is that I could more easily trust in the fact that I could be an idiot than in a clue that I might actually be onto something.

I'm not sure how long I kept at that before I aimed at slightly different angles. One paper-thin piece at a time, sweeping along the wall. Or what I thought might be a wall. After a while I forgot that someone else was in the room . . . which, might have been a good thing.

I still wasn't picking up on anything different. That meant I must have been doing something wrong, aye? There was some mistake that I couldn't grasp. Oi my my. I was failing, wasn't I? I probably wasn't being loud enou--

Ah! . . . Do that again.

I froze, pointed intently at that spot, that . . . what was that. It was a lot clearer, that spot. I waited, then tried again, softer, like before. It still didn't seem nearly as muddled. I continued down that line . . . and it was clearer. Only by a fraction that I could pick up . . . but clearer.

I aimed at where I'd been originally. Not as easy to pick up.

I aimed back. Slightly better.

Back? Gone.

Back back? Better.

Gone.

Better.

Gone better.

. . . I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that perhaps I was truly onto something there. Perhaps. A chance.

What do I do now.

. . . Aye, Mr. Face is still there. Alright. Ah . . . well. I suppose I should let him know, or something. " . . . Ah . . . that wall." I pointed at the less-clear space. " . . . Out of curiousity, is there something there?"

Mr.Face:

...And then the noobish onslaught ensued. I ended up sitting there and trying not to laugh as he mistakenly identified my stereo as a wall for a bit. 'Wall, not wall. Wall...not wall. Wall... waitaminute perhaps I was mistaken in my interpretation of wall and the flatter thing is the wall!'

"That would be my stereo system." I stated. "Congratulations." I added after a moment, suppousing that possibly that was what one was suppoused to say after a mundane victory is had. "May I ask what cued you into the fact that that was not a wall? It seemed to have you fooled for quite a while."

Cricket

Hah! I knew it. A grin plastered itself across my face. "Found a flatter wall."

Mr.Face:

"...You do realise that you could have started with the flatter wall initially... by finding everything else in the room that resonated in that way. The distance would have changed, but the sound quality wouldn't have."I stated. It all seemed ridiculously obvious to me, but I was quite certain that those things were not quite so obvious to others. "Now here's a challenge. Find all my furniture."

The challenge of course being that they weren't actually touching the walls. So... depending on the wall...you could be actually ignoring a piece of furniture unless you knew it was there. I prepared for another onslaught.

Cricket

I ran a hand through my hair and felt the grin fade off my face. "Well I realise that now, but what can I say? Assumed I 'ad th' flatter wall at th' start. But 'ey, I got it, didn't I?" Eventually.

I had to wonder how much furniture he actually had. I hadn't run into anything except the couch I was sitting on. Well, more like sitting on the edge of at this point. "A'right, a'right . . . furniture. I've got this. One!" I patted the couch, then pointed at the sterio. "Two. As for th' rest, this might take a while." I almost asked exactly what I was looking for, but perhaps that was part of the point not to know.

I clicked at the part of actual wall I'd discovered and tried to memorize the sound, then tested other random sections of wall. It was a tedious process, skipping back and forth between the wall and the might-not-be-wall to compare, usually quite a few times to be sure, usually deciding in the end that I was comparing wall to wall. I tried aiming lower. If there were anything shorter that was not a wall in the general direction I happened to be clicking at like some bird clucking dumbly at air, perhaps I would pick it up. Perhaps.

There was one section I kept coming back to. A larger sort of section, just suspiciously tall enough to pass as another part of wall. Much too tall to be a couch or anything of the like. Sometimes I'd hit it and it would seem only different enough to be something new, but when I'd test around it more it'd get to sounding about the same as anything else. Several times I passed over it, and several times I wrote it off as my mind playing tricks.

Ah, what's this? Something was odd over there . . . this one shorter than the rectangle of mind tricks.

. . . That damn rectangle-resembling piece of wall. It was tempting, but . . . no, it probably didn't exist.

. . . but it could.

What the heck. I turned to face it again and clicked once.

Gah! Alright, that's it. I had to ask about this one. "Aw for th' sake of 'ell, is there something . . . there? Or am I only insane?"

Mr. Face:

"It is at this time that I invite you to be much more specific about what you mean by the word 'there'." I informed him, intentionally playing myself a bit daft to pry more from him. "Explain to me what the source of your vexation is." I expounded after a moment.

Cricket

I knew that game. Pretend like you don't know what they're talking about so they'll go on trying to explain. Tickety especially used to play dumb to get me to talk. Or at least, I hoped he truly knew what I was talking about. "There, that direction, there's a tallish rectangularish space o' something that keeps coming back oddly. I think. It's 'ard t' tell th' difference, truly, but it's 'appened in that same space enough times that I'm starting t' wonder."

Mr. Face:

"You're not incorrect. Tell me what it is." I demanded smoothly. That was a bookcase. Of course he'd want to identify the wall dwelling things first. They were easier, because the wall was immediately next to them, for easier comparison. Finding the other sofa would be a fun traipse through paralell lines and finding far edges of things. Meaning, unfortunately that there would probably be a more severe deluge of nonsense.

When one was expecting things to travel back, it normally resonated primarily on one or two planes in three dimensional space. If done badly this could result in the impression that the sofa just protruded some twenty feet from the wall because there was effectively a blind spot at the other end of the sofa.

Cricket

Ah. So I wasn't crazy. That was reassuring. I was actually doing this? No, key word, I was doing this right, somehow? Or in the least I must have been on the right path. Nah, it still wasn't as if I could simply walk in to any room and know where and what was there without looking up. But still . . . it was a bit. Just a small bit that, to be honest, I might have been a bit proud of.

Rectangular thing . . . big rectangular things. Big rectangular things that might be in Mr. Face's living room. "First guess . . . shelves?"

Mr. Face:

"Don't guess. I'll tolerate nothing of guesswork here. You're suppoused to be learning." I said almost immediately after he mentioned that he was guessing. "Figure it out. Tell me something with absolute certainty." I requested.

Cricket

Well, that was unexpected. No guessing. Alright . . . that put pressure on things. I wasn't much of a 'certainty' guy when it came to some situations, especially something I didn't have any experience in whatsoever, since . . . well, you guess at something, get it wrong, and you can shrug it off and say you rushed through it. I'd won quite a few times with sheer dumb luck. But if you say you're absolutely certain about something you could also very well be absolutely certainly wrong, no exceptions and no excuses.

I was silent a moment, biting my lip, thinking, and it turned to thinking out loud. " . . . It seemed flatter in some places than in others, I think . . . a bit uneven," I muttered. Snap out of it, mate, don't feel so nervous. It took a great deal of effort not to whistle or sit 'oddly' or feel my neck or something of the sort. "And it's big and rectangular and against th' wall, so it'd 'ave t' be something around th' same idea as shelves or some kind of storage or display. Of . . . something somewhat flat, or more of t' sound would be lost per'aps, so . . . books, boxes, ah . . . books possibly?" That made sense. It could be that. "Bookshelf?"

Mr. Face:

"your solution is correct but some of your reasoning is flawed or malexpressed. The presence of the books is one of the main reasons it sounds weird. Books have the acoustic resonance of dense mud. There's much air inbetween the pages. As a result of this principle, four stacked phonebooks would sudfice as effective budget soundproofing. No sound is actually reflected from them. They absorb it." I explained.

Cricket

"Aye? Th' 'ell . . . lucky guess?" Alright, now I was doubting myself all over again. If books didn't make sound and that was a bookshelf then I couldn't have been hearing much from it at all which means I'd been imagining the times I thought I did. Which, to be honest, didn't surprise me as much as it probably should have. ". . . A'right, t' be honest, it's not always crystal clear when it comes t' what's actually something I'm 'earing and what's my imagination anticipating 'earing something. I'll, ah . . . I'll work on that."

Mr.Face:

"I now invite you to rid yourself of acoustic imagination completely. You don't want it here. You want that when you're composing something...or... doing something that isn't so... bluntly...literal. Just... get rid of it." I stated. Imagining things... what was this, the dreamscape of my living room? Nonsense. Completely stupid.

Cricket

Oi my my, I know. I'm an idiot. "Aye, aye, I know. I'll try 'arder." I had no clue exactly what it meant to try harder than to focus harder, which, I'd been attempting to do that for the past however-long I'd been attempting this.

Mr.Face:

"You should have been attempting things at that magnitude in the first place, you do realise...?" I stated somewhat irritatedly. If you just started out trying as hard as you possibly could, then there wouldn't be an issue with trying harder. "Keep going. What else do you hear?" I prompted after a moment.

Cricket

I ran a hand through my hair. I thought I'd been 'attempting things at that magnitude in the first place', but it still left much to be desired, apparently. But I bit my tongue. Alright. Let's not mess up this time around . . . focus. Oi my my, focus.

How would someone turn off their imagination, anyhow? Was there a lesson on that, or what?

Focus.

I got back to clicking at some other areas that had been bugging me earlier. I tried considering each bounce-back seperately and carefully, rather than rushing the clicks like some fast-running clock. Perhaps if I took more of my time. Which also meant taking more of Mr. Face's time, but . . . y'know what? Who cares, anyhow? I'd gotten it right the first time with the sterio after I'd forgotten he was there. Perhaps it was my nerves. Time to forget.

Starting . . . now. He didn't exist.

Nah. He wasn't there.

And my thoughts were wandering from the task at hand again. Oh bother. Why was it so hard to keep my mind on track for five minutes when I was conciously trying to do so?

Back to focus. There were a couple spaces that seemed odd, but I zeroed in on the one that was . . . odder? It was a smaller space, and it simply seemed different. I compared several times over, and . . . there was something new about this one. I think. I kept getting about the same results, so perhaps I was onto something. Took a while to notice it. It was a timing thing that hadn't been there as much with the bookshelf or the sterio.

Same way I could tell a smaller room from a larger room . . . so, distance? Closer?

I clicked a few more times to be sure. Tried to clear my mind and make sure I was actually hearing what I thought I heard.

Time for Mr. Face again.

"There?" I paused. " . . . Right, no guessing. Ah. Something closer, shorter, smaller than th' other pieces . . ."

Mr.Face:

That would be my coffee table. "Alright. Yes, there is something there. Base materials. Identify them." I requested. I realised that he might not be able to do that with much competence, due to the fact that most people, I noticed, payed no heed to what materials sound like. Oh well. We'd see what happened with that. It would be a learning experience either way.

I steeled myself for another onslaught of clicking, and continued sitting calmly on the sofa.

Cricket

"Base materials?" I raised an eyebrow. Wait a moment. Was I supposed to know that? . . . Books absorbed sound because they were . . . ah . . . full of air between the pages, apparently. Which meant if they didn't have pages they would be solid and therefore not have air between the pages and therefore solid things would echo more sound and therefore . . .

Aha! I got it.

The thing was not books.

". . . I'm guessing it's not books. Any 'ints?" I paused. Bah, no guessing, no guessing. "Th' 'I'm guessing' bit was sarcastic, in case there were any doubts. On that note, I'm very sure that it's not books and otherwise 'ave no clue. So, pardon . . ."

Mr.Face:

I facepalmed audibly at that. "You have a grasp of at least two other materials that you can also rule out. My walls are concrete. The bookcase itself is wooden." I stated. "Cross reference the two and eliminate them summarily. And then I will actually tell you what it is."

Cricket

I think I'd heard him slap his forehead. "Pardon me for not knowing th' subtle differences between th' sound of concrete and th' sound of th' whatever that is by 'eart on th' first try. It's not wood or concrete or books, then." I clicked at it once more. "What is it?"