February 7, 2025 | 10:19 AM

WITF Music: Gong Voyage

"Once you get one gong, you end up getting a lot more gongs."

Joe Ulrich

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Joe has been interested in audio and music since he was a kid. What started as a fascination with his parents’ vinyl records and cassette tapes turned into a love of both performing and recording. He grew up in Elizabethtown, Pa. and moved to Pittsburgh in 1999 where he majored in Photography at the University of Pittsburgh.

In 2004, he attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences in Tempe, AZ. He returned to Pittsburgh to work at a recording studio.

In 2008, Joe arrived at WITF, where his skills have found a good home as an on-air host, audio engineer and producer of WITF Music. In 2016, Joe earned a National Edward R. Murrow award for Best Use of Sound.

Jeremy Long / WITF

Gong Voyage performs at WITF Music on May 8, 2024. (Jeremy Long - WITF)

We sat down with Lori Stahl, a sound meditation healer, and her collaborators Benjamin Vo and Francois Byers. They delve into the origins of their experimental music project, Gong Voyage, that combines sound therapy and music.

Joe Ulrich: This is such an interesting project. How did this come to be?

Benjamin Vo: Lori is a sound meditation healer. I’ve been to one of her sessions and it was really relaxing. I guess I was just itching to do something different.

Lori Stahl: Around that same time, I started having lots of participants at my meditations say, is this recorded anywhere? Where can we listen to this?

[Benjamin] sent me a message and was like, would you like to collaborate with us? And I was like, yes.

Benjamin Vo: We didn’t know what to expect. . So it was just more of a big curiosity than anything.

Joe Ulrich: How did you all approach writing these pieces?

Lori Stahl: Usually you know what you’re trying to create, but in this instance, we didn’t know what the result was. So we had to go on the journey to end up there.

There were certain times when I would just have a prompt and I was like, I would love for us to make a piece that’s just about silence, about spaciousness, that feels like you’re at home and all wrapped up in your cozy blanket.

Francois Byers: At first it was hard to get it. We would record something and it wouldn’t quite get there. But then eventually I think we stumbled upon a language.

Joe Ulrich: Lori, tell me about how you got interested in, is it sound meditation therapies?

Lori Stahl: I call my practice the Vibrational Sound Therapy Center. Initially all of my trainings and my intentions were simply around doing one on one work with people. But when COVID happened and I could no longer work in the space that I used for individual sessions, people were challenged to stay in balance. I just knew that I needed to get a gong. I got a gong and basically said, I’ll be in this field on Monday nights.

And from the very first night I went and sat in that field with that one gong, people just came and were so blown away by the gong, the space that it gave them inside themselves.

And once you get one gong, you end up getting a lot more gongs.