I first heard it the night of the blackout.
The studio was silent—no hum from the equipment, no glow from the monitors. Just the breathless dark and the creak of the old floor beneath my chair. I sat in stillness, letting the tension of the city outage settle into my bones. The storm outside had stripped the skyline of its lights, turning New York into an ancient cave.
Then, I heard it.
A note—just one. Faint. Echoing not from the room, but from inside my skull. It had no pitch, yet it wasn't flat. No instrument I'd ever played or sampled could have created it. It was pure, enormous, not music but the idea of music—a vibration that sang through bone, rattled teeth, and filled me with wonder... and dread.
I stood slowly, suddenly unsure of the shape of the room around me.
The sound stopped.
And I was utterly alone.
---
For days I thought I had imagined it. A side effect of sleeplessness, the long hours in the studio, the creative pressure I'd been forcing myself to endure. I was overdue for a break. So I tried to forget.
But I couldn't.
That note echoed in memory with such vivid presence that silence felt wrong without it. I began humming it—though I couldn't name the pitch or even replicate it properly. I tried to record the hum, sample it, bend it in software.
Nothing was right.
So I started building it.
---
The first attempt was analog—strings, synth, dissonant chords stretched with impossible reverbs. But the sound always rang hollow. My instruments refused to obey. It was like sculpting fog with a hammer.
I found myself chasing it deeper—into digital spaces, mangling sine waves and tape loops, inventing oscillations I had no name for. My sound library swelled with strange, unusable noise: things that sounded like organs dying underwater, or wind moving backward.
I stopped sleeping. Food tasted like paper.
But I knew the note was real.
---
One night, a package arrived with no return address.
Inside was a black vinyl record, unmarked. No label, no sleeve. I stared at it for an hour before placing it on the turntable. The moment the needle dropped, a cold wind moved through the studio.
And then—
The note.
Perfect. Unfiltered. Undeniably it.
My nose bled instantly.
I couldn't move. My chest locked. My mind froze not from fear, but from recognition.
It didn't just play. It opened something.
Somewhere behind my eyes, I saw a vast emptiness—something watching, sprawling, waiting for the final chord to be resolved. The sound was only a key.
And I didn't yet know what door I was unlocking.
---
I replayed it, again and again. I couldn't resist. I began obsessively analyzing the waveform—thousands of microfrequencies, some in ultrasonic ranges, some so low I could feel them in my molars.
But the real horror wasn't in the sound.
It was what it did to the studio.
My monitors began flickering in patterns—pulsing in rhythm with no input. My mixer bled static even when powered down. Mold bloomed on the acoustic foam in spirals. One night, my reflection moved half a beat out of sync with me.
And still, I played it again.
---
I began seeing them.
Faceless figures in the corners of rooms that shouldn't exist. In dreams, they stood silently behind me while I composed, their elongated heads swaying to the beat.
I woke one morning to find my own sheet music filled with symbols I didn't remember writing—circles inside circles, arcing lines, glyphs that moved when I blinked. My fingers bled from playing chords my anatomy shouldn't have been capable of.
My producer called. He begged me to stop.
Said he heard something when he opened one of my demo files. Said it gave his dog a seizure. Said he'd had dreams about a mouth opening in the sky.
I hung up on him.
He disappeared three days later.
---
I had to finish it.
There was more to the note. I could feel it. A harmony existed, just out of reach. It wasn't done with me—not yet.
I stopped leaving the studio. I ordered modular synth equipment from obscure manufacturers. Some arrived with handwritten notes in foreign alphabets. One came with a sticky black residue that burned my fingertips but made my samples sound closer.
One morning, my bathroom mirror cracked in concentric circles after I played a new version of the sound. I understood then.
It wasn't a note.
It was a summons.
---
Neighbors stopped coming near. Even the pigeons avoided the window ledge. The city around me seemed... thinner. Like I was living behind the curtain of the world.
I recorded a version of the note onto a USB and sent it to a friend—a violinist with perfect pitch. She didn't respond for a week. When she finally did, it was one sentence:
"There are frequencies that hear us back."
I never heard from her again.
---
Then, it came back.
The original sound—not from the vinyl, not from any speaker.
From everywhere.
I was asleep, tangled in cables and stained notebooks, when it began again—low, enormous, resonating through the walls. The studio shifted. Dimensions warped. Angles bent. Every light in the city went out, as though reality itself dimmed in fear.
And in the floor beneath me, a crack formed.
Not a normal crack—a spiral, descending inward, impossibly deep. I watched as darkness poured upward from it like steam. The note continued, now layered, growing, complex.
I heard choirs of voices behind the tone. Not singing.
Calling.
My name.
---
I didn't run.
I did what any true artist would.
I recorded it.
Set up the mic. Hit record. Captured everything. The spiraling blackness. The chorus of not-voices. My own breath hitching as I began to play—along with it. The harmony I had hunted was here, offered in full.
I played like my fingers belonged to someone else.
And then I understood.
This was not a sound to be heard.
It was a sound to awaken.
---
I don't know how long I've been here.
I'm not in the studio anymore. I'm not in the city. I'm somewhere beyond, where sound has shape and time is a waveform.
The figures are with me now—hundreds of them, faceless and swaying, playing impossible instruments. The walls are alive. The sky pulses with rhythm.
And at the center, a mouth without form waits for the final note.
The song is almost complete.
---
If you find this entry, burn it. Don't seek the sound. Don't try to recreate it. Some songs are not made for human ears.
Some vibrations are invitations.
And if you ever hear it—that note without pitch, without source, vibrating in your skull when the world goes quiet—
Do. Not. Play. It. Back.
It hears you too.
End
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I have a song stuck in my head which gave me this idea