The Day I Fell in Love with the Sound of a Truck

How a gong, a city, and a student taught me to hear everything differently.

Imagine You’re Living in Paradise

Things around you are so interesting and beautiful that you wouldn’t dream of getting on your phone unless you actually had something to do on it. Headphones are used only when there’s something truly compelling to listen to, because the world around you is already providing the most interesting soundtrack.

Is this where you live? Is this how you live? Must you go on vacation to find this place?

What if paradise was right where you are — without needing to go to Bali or Spain, without a trip to the mountains or the countryside? Those can be adventures, but not escapes.

Imagine a life like this. Do you doubt that it’s possible?

This was me before I met Hezekiah. This story promises to be not only entertaining but perhaps the beginning of a love affair with the place where you already live.

My Complicated Relationship with the City

Don’t get me wrong — I have always loved cities. Big cities, small cities, cities all over the world. I have always been fascinated by people, by gatherings of people. It’s one of my favorite things in life, and it always has been.

And yet, if I’m honest, I have to confess that the city has also been a survival ground — at least before I had the liberating experience of playing gongs for Hezekiah.

For all its beauty and energy, it was also a field of invisible struggles. I struggled with people — with psychologies that triggered my psychology. I struggled with random smells. Mostly, though, I struggled with sound.

Sounds of cars, of trucks, of airplanes, of accelerating motorcycles, of random loud conversations — they all had the power to press against me, competing for the same air I tried to breathe.

The purest symbol of this struggle, my struggle with the audible environment, was that infernal invention: the leaf blower. When I used to hear the leaf blower, instantly there would be anger and judgment. My mind would scream about the unconsciousness of it all.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that leaf blowers ruled my life. If I saw one ahead, I’d cross the street. If I could, I’d even take a different street altogether. Leaf blowers became my invisible guides — determining where I walked, when I walked, and how far I’d go to avoid them.

That was my quiet war with the city. I thought I was protecting my peace. In truth, I was only surviving it — and at great cost.

Days would tire me out. I’d retreat into my cocoon, my self-made little womb, where the outside world stayed outside while I recovered enough energy to face it again.

All of this began to change when I started playing the gongs. And then, especially, when I met Hezekiah.

How Hezekiah Taught Me to Love the Sound of Trucks

Ever since that magical day I had the epiphany that now I could play gongs, amazing people have shown up in my life to push my gong-playing life further and further down the yellow brick road.

One such angel was Hezekiah.

It wasn’t long after I got the gongs that I started giving sessions. Not for money, mind you. I called it my apprenticeship. The sessions were at my home, in my living room. At that time, I begged everyone to come for a session.

Hezekiah, himself a musician, came early on. He immediately saw the value of receiving sessions to help him heal certain aspects of his psyche. Organically, we ended up having sessions together five days a week for six months straight. His consistent presence in my living room revolutionized my approach to the gongs — but it was something he said toward the end of our six months together that was to revolutionize my whole life.

One particular day, he was describing how after the previous day’s session, he was walking down the street from my house when a truck drove by. To his surprise, he found himself enjoying the sound of the truck — every aspect of it: the texture, the acceleration, the release, the braking. All of it was not only interesting to him — it was downright musical.

He described his encounter with the truck as someone might describe the taste of a fine wine. As a supposed sensitive artist in an “uncaring world,” I was flabbergasted to hear this — but it opened something inside me. A new possibility appeared on the horizon of my imagination.

From Sound Survivor to Sound Connoisseur

I can’t really say that hearing about Hezekiah’s experience with the truck changed me immediately. It wasn’t like I heard his story and instantly fell in love with truck sounds.

It was better than that. It was a great moment of realization, and great moments of realization rarely change one’s life in visible ways. Dramatic changes do happen — also in real life — just not usually right away. Most things unfold gradually, almost invisibly, until one day you realize how far you’ve come.

All that to say: I continued to struggle with the sounds of the city.

I pretty much forgot about Hezekiah and the truck. It wasn’t until eight years later, when I found myself living in Zurich, playing gongs in a studio on a busy street with trams, cars, people, and lately, road construction.

I have always considered my gong playing to be an art. Before moving to the studio in Zurich, I had the gift of near-perfect quiet conditions to perform this art. But that was to change when I moved to the city and took residence at the studio in question.

Initially, I struggled with the sounds that weren’t the gongs. I wanted to eliminate them. To get away from them. I wanted a perfect environment for my art.

I considered these sounds to be distracting. Unmusical. Noisy.

But here’s something that, if you reflect on it regarding your own life, must seem familiar to you: my negativity toward the environment had no effect on the environment itself. The sound was there, same as always. No amount of wishing or complaining was making those sounds go away.

So I had to make a decision. If the city wasn’t going to be quiet for my art, my art would have to learn to live with the city.

That realization became the beginning of a new practice. I began inviting participants to hear all sounds as part of the gong bath.

“All the sounds you hear,” I would say, “belong to the gong bath. The gongs, the trams, the footsteps in the hallway — everything belongs.”

At first, I said it to help people relax, to make peace with the noise. But over time, session after session, I began to recognize the truth of what I was saying.

The city stopped interrupting my music and became part of it. I stopped ignoring or resisting the tram sounds and started playing along with them — like a duet.

The rhythm of the street began to flow into the phrasing of my playing. Even the pauses between the traffic seemed to breathe with the vibrations in the room.

Eventually, participants took notice. Initially, they remarked how the idea “it’s all part of the gong bath” helped them accept both outer sound and inner thought. But later, like Hezekiah long ago, they started telling me they were enjoying the tram sounds. Some even said they couldn’t tell the difference between the tram and the gongs — they blended so perfectly.

That feedback was deeply satisfying. It got me thinking about other kinds of music through the ages — and how they related to the sounds of their environments.

Listening Through History

Once you begin to hear the world around you as music, you realize musicians have always done this. Across time and cultures, music has mirrored the soundscape of life.

In early twentieth-century America, the industrial age found its rhythm in trains. Composers like Duke Ellington translated steam, motion, and momentum into swing — the pulse of modern life.

By mid-century, the city itself became a soundtrack. Miles Davis captured the slow rhythm of walking through a city at night — footsteps, traffic, neon — transforming the everyday sounds of urban life into atmosphere and emotion.

Across the vast steppes of Mongolia and Tuva, music emerged from the rhythms of horses, wind, and open space. Throat singing mirrored not imagination but environment — gallop, breath, horizon.

Further north, in Siberia, a woman imitates the calls of birds and animals — not as performance but as participation. Her voice extends the communication of the forest. In her world, sound is not an art form. It is relationship.

In the End, It Turns Out Every Sound Has Its Value

It’s taken years to understand this. There are no “good” or “bad” sounds. There is only sound — vibrating, disappearing, inviting us to hear it just as it is.

When I stopped dividing the world into what I wanted to hear and what I didn’t, my life became not only quieter but more alive. As my resistance to street sounds gave way to creative listening, I began to experience wonderful moments of random appreciation in places I had never seen or heard as beautiful before.

Every vibration shows you its nature — how sound reveals distance, direction, texture, and space. A door closing, a tram passing, a dishwasher hum — each sound has its own geometry. When you really listen, the sound teaches you what it is. It doesn’t need to be anything else.

“Sound points to itself; music points to something else.” – John Cage

He was pointing to the freedom that comes when we no longer ask sound to be anything other than itself.

Coda: When the City Itself Becomes the Gong Bath

Over time, something remarkable has begun to happen. People who come regularly to the gong baths have started noticing that the sounds of the city around them feel different. The trams, the footsteps, the hum of daily life — they no longer interrupt their peace.

Some even tell me that when they hear a tram pass by, they’re reminded of the inner stillness they felt during a gong bath. Instead of searching for quiet spaces to find peace, they now find peace through the very sounds that surround them.

The city itself, it seems, has become an extension of the gong bath.

Appendix: A Simple Way to Listen Differently

Find a place to sit — with eyes closed — where there are sounds you would ordinarily avoid.

Imagine that what you’re hearing is part of a piece of music you created. Listen as if it’s your own art piece.

Remind yourself that it doesn’t have to be different than it is. Just hear it as music. Your music. Just like that.

And also — come to gong baths. Like Hezekiah, they can help you reshape your relationship with the sounds of this life.