Four Bowls & The High Desert: Field Recordings In Northern New Mexico
Shane Aspegren
Commissioned by Mountain Standard Time // Created in residence, May 31 – June 6, 2026
Since the early 1990s, a small percentage of residents in and around Taos have reported hearing a low, persistent hum — a drone just at the edge of perception, like a distant engine that never arrives, or a tone swelling from the earth itself. Investigations commissioned by the U.S. Congress, involving researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of New Mexico, produced thousands of data points and no definitive source.
Multidisciplinary artist, musician, and somatic sound practitioner Shane Aspegren spent a week in northern New Mexico in late spring 2026 with a field recorder, a camera, and four carefully chosen singing bowls. The residency, instigated and supported by Mountain Standard Time, was intentionally open-ended — an invitation to engage with the landscape and its layers through whatever instinctual response emerged.
Aspegren's entry point was research into the mythological and spiritual histories of the region. The congressional investigation into the Taos Hum had established that hearers who were musicians tended to identify the sound as a tone near E-flat — specifically, measurements placed it in the range of 38.9 to 41.2 Hz, straddling the boundary between Eb1 and E1 at the bottom edge of what most humans can distinguish as pitch rather than vibration. These are frequencies felt as much as heard — a foundational element of somatic work that has occupied the last decade of Aspegren's practice.
Taking those two frequencies as a starting point — Eb1 at 38.891 Hz and E1 at 41.203 Hz — Aspegren transposed them upward by two octaves, arriving at Eb3 (155.56 Hz) and E3 (164.81 Hz). Played simultaneously into separate ears, these two tones produce a binaural beat: the brain, perceiving a slight difference between what the left ear hears and what the right ear hears, generates a third frequency equal to the difference between them — in this case 9.25 Hz, squarely within the alpha wave range associated with relaxed, open awareness.
This was artistic license, not scientific claim. But the logic felt honest: take the frequencies of an unexplained phenomenon, transpose them into an audible musical register, and see what sparks.
Before departing for New Mexico, Aspegren selected four singing bowls from his collection while listening to this specific binaural pairing — chosen not by analysis but by instinct and resonance. Over the course of the residency he carried them into a range of environments — sacred, natural, and somewhere between the two — recording them in open air and in man-made spiritual structures of the high desert. He also spent a large portion of the week simply recording the land and its elements.
The spaces included some of the most spiritually concentrated land in North America — Upaya Zen Center, the Hanuman Temple in Taos, Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, and the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Chama Canyon. He also recorded on the banks of the Rio Grande, on mountain paths and ranch streams, in open country where silence is always kept company by a jet passing overhead or a car engine in the distance. These sounds remain in the recordings, mostly unedited and kept in their raw form.
There are no binaural beats in these recordings.