Names: Jacob Rudin aka NTHNL
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, instrument builder
Current release: NTHNL and Sphente's new album Awareness of the Wind Within is out via Protomaterial.
Recommendations on the topic of sound:
An Immense world by Ed Yong is really good for understanding Animal Sensory worlds.
This NHK series on Kanzi on youtube is super awesome, you will fall in love with this Bonobo and learn that animal communication has already happened.
Keywords in Sound edited by David Novak is a really wonderful collection of essays on sound studies. Sound studies is really cool.

[Read our Sphente interview]

If you enjoyed this NTHNL interview and would like to know more about his music, visit the official NTHNL homepage. He is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, and bandcamp.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I close my eyes when I am trying to understand fully what is happening. If passively listening, I am able to listen with my eyes open.

But vision is a very active and demanding sense so it’s best to not deal with it when listening for detail.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

I think that headphones offer massive potential in terms of sound’s psychosomatic effects.

In the form of binaural beating and bilateral stimulation, headphones allow for spatial effects to really work on the brain via simulating difference tones between the ears and stuff like that. Of course, you lose out on low frequency effects on the body and feeling immersed in that way, but spatialization via headphones has really strong medicinal potential.

Stereo systems let you listen with your friends and really unlock the social dimension of music. That’s cool, also you can hear the sound interact with your environment.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

I love all of the sounds of nature and natural environments. I also love complex human sounds like traffic and boat noise as long as they're not too loud.

I am bothered by individual sounds which are very loud (motorcycles and loud engines, alarms, etc). I live in a very loud city so, I would prefer it if people would respect each other by minding our soundscapes.

People also litter a lot here so there is a general environmental unconscientiousness which extends to the soundscape. I think a lot of this is a byproduct of chaotic urban planning and things like super loud above ground trains. Idk I still love it …

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

I think thunder is the best sound in the universe. I think if I listened to it for long periods of time I would be very confused.

I think consonance is a sonic miracle and I could listen to a just-intonation major triad forever. Just imagine there are infinite dissonant combinations between notes and really just a few consonant relationships … amazing. I think there is just as much potential in modulating consonance as there is in exploring dissonance …

An irritating sound would be the J train at Myrtle Broadway passing overhead and shrieking around a corner in both directions while these big machines sand-blast lead paint off of the train supports.

This is the soundscape I find myself in when I get off the train to go to my studio. It feels like danger.



Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

Yes! Anechoic chamber was cool because I could hear myself blink, which sounds kind of wet and squishy.

I am suuuper interested in caves as acoustic spaces but have only been in smaller ones so they were somewhat dry sounding (despite being damp places themselves).

I recorded an album in train tunnels once, I love tunnels. I think they sound amazing. Reverberant spaces are a passion of mine and I hope to spend a lot of time in them. I am dying to record in a cistern.



Sphente and I started out recording in the subway and that was really impactful for us in terms of sounding through lots of noise and distilling what matters most to the sound.

What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music?

I like to play and record in the open air a lot and I equally like to spend hours in my studio on the computer editing material in a detail-oriented way.

To me I need both to feel my practice is whole.

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

Once recorded, maybe it feels material: then it can be shaped, recalled, re-sounded.

In process, though, it feels immaterial, and in a way it is immaterial being a mechanical wave and not a medium (a medium is a material) and this is what makes it so powerful to me. It is inherently temporary. It can’t be held! It can’t be had!

I think this is what makes playing live so important and valuable to a world so invested in encoding and saving and believing that things are and can be permanent!

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

Waves are universally amazing, I think because, like our breath, waves are a tidal rhythm.

Traffic on a wet road sounds kind of like waves, if the rate of the cars is just right it makes for a calming sound too. Waves tend to move at a speed which is pleasing and relaxing, which I would imagine corresponds to a relaxed breathing pace.

Our minds and bodies are very porous when it comes to sound: we resonate with our environments.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

Not to be too R. Murray Shafer about it, but I do think louder, noisier ambient environments make for higher ambient anxiety and stress.

It’s a chicken or egg situation which becomes a feedback loop. A noisier environment is more chaotic and a louder environment is more active,

I think as far as health is concerned how we mediate these environmental symptoms is more significant than the symptoms themselves.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?  

I think it’s extremely important, especially if we are going to get people to care about them.

I think it’s possible to an extent, we’ve had success communicating with the great apes - especially bonobos (RIP Kanzi!!!)- and Koko the Gorilla definitely touched a lot of hearts. I think we should really invest in this to make people care about animals because we need animals and they really need us.

There’s that fun video of the guy playing clarinet to a dolphin and they’re kind of jamming back and forth. I think the communication there was “This is awesome” which seems to be the extent of most of our animal communication, but that seems like a great starting place.



Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

Yeah I have a bit of Tinnitus.

Helps to have air moving around, there are some ear oils which actually help.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I think if Glenn Gould could see the extreme that this idea has been taken to with short form content, he might have revised that statement. Any ultimate delight turns into an ultimate hell if it becomes your reality.

Anyways, silence is super important. I wish I had more of it. I’ll make an effort to have more of it and so should all of us.

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

I think that’s inaccurate but I see where he’s coming from.

You can understand a lot more about your environment through seeing it I think, I think it’s definitely more acute / accurate / faster. First of all, light is way faster than sound, and it contains all manner of information about the wide variety of things around us.

I think hearing is more embodied, more sensuous, and more mindful. I consider truly listening to any soundscape to be a form of meditation, because focusing on the sound around you quiets and focuses the mind.

I don’t think the same can be said of vision. I think looking at a landscape is stimulating, not really grounding.