This is the title of a book by Oliver Sacks which I want to write about. But it is also a feature of my life, which kept growing in recent years. I have diverse preferences and quite often I mix in a single listening sessions genres or at least songs which wouldn’t normally fit the same playlist. My last.fm profile (which is only tracking the last three and a half years) is testament to that. For me, listening to music is active, it has never been the background for some other task or chore, except if looking through a window, a walk in the city or lying in bed could be considered tasks or chores. I don’t pretend to know music theory or that I make an academic analysis of the music I listen to, nor that I am an audiophile who’s always search for that particular frequency. In fact, I must commit a sacrilege and testify that in most of the cases, I don’t even listen to the lyrics of the songs that are playing. Better said, I hear them, but I’m not listening. That’s why many times I’m missing the message of songs. However, music is for me a state, which more often than not needs to be wordless, hence my preference for instrumental songs in many genres. I have listened to poems or theater plays with background music and I am aware that music and words complement each other exceptionally. But perhaps my brain is simply not ready for two layers at once, perhaps it is already overwhelmed by the instrumental part, hence it cannot grasp the words as well without losing focus of the instruments.
Nevertheless, even in this personal way (come think about it — shouldn’t art be just like this, to speak to all at once and to each of us individually?), I can confidently say I’m a musicophile. I have set for myself the daily goal of listening to music for at least half an hour. And as I wrote earlier, this means not doing anything else in the meantime.
I could say that it is only natural to develop related curiosities. An example is music theory, which I’ve been reading some elements of and can follow simple analysis of classical or modern songs. Another one would be a fascination for oriental music, which if one tries to analyse more rigorously, one finds a whole new universe of musical notes and their organization. Arab music, for example, contains microtonality, which consists of notes that are in between consecutive notes in Western music. Here’s a mathematical analogy: imagine the sequence of positive integers (0, 1, 2, 3, …), just like the notes we learn (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti or C, D, E, F, G, A, B). Arab music adds notes in between those, just like fractional numbers are added between the integers. Between do (C) and re (D), Western music only adds do# (do-sharp), which is something like do and a half. However, the Arabs add yet another note, which is like do and a quarter. The Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other Eastern peoples have their own special intervals.
This rich musical vocabulary has implications which are not alwas obvious. One example is the building and playing technique for traditional instruments. Another one is about composition: whereas the Western music prides itself with symphonies, suites, concertos, all of which are masterpieces of harmony, where many different instruments play together, Oriental music usually showcases small ensembles, made of percussion or atonal instruments and only one or two soloists.
It is not my purpose here to give examples of songs or go into more technical details, which I don’t even know that well. Moreover, the fundamental idea of this article is, in some sense, quite the opposite: that of describing the abstract of music, which is so powerfull, starting from a book by Oliver Sacks.
Except for some YouTube videos and a skim through his memoir, I haven’t read any books of his, although I am aware of the importance of his research and publications. In a spur of the moment, while thinking about the parameters one could control in electronic and computer music, I set myself to learning more about our interaction with music, including a scientific, objective viewpoint. My degree in physics already gave me the basics of sound waves, but I felt this is not the right direction. Hence, after watching some videos on generative music and genetic algorithms used for some computer synthesizers (such as Synplant 2, if you were wondering), I thought I should read more about the interaction between our brains and music. I had this book in my library, I noticed its very clever design of the cover title and decided to read it.
I will do my best not to spoil much about the cases it presents, but I have to say that Sacks’ storytelling gift is really easy to love. Although each chapter and case it presents is worthy of a detailed discussion, I will give you an excerpt of what geve me a lot of food for thought. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the very first paragraph of its preface:
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species— billions of people— playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call “music.” […] This thing called “music,” […] is in some way efficacious to humans, central to human life. Yet it has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world.
One could argue about the truth of certain parts of the excerpt, but the main idea which stuck with me is this: music is one of the most abstract arts. Its abstract nature is given by its way of expression which is totally indirect, invisible even for the mind’s eye. It does share with all other arts and with all things, actually, the feature that it does trigger memories and associations, that is true. But if one could take a glance at a painting and immediately see the scene it represents, for music, most of the time, one could recognize only the instruments that are playing. It is not immediately obvious, at an ear’s glance, so to speak, that it is a counterpoint, a coda sequence or a modulation in F#, and most of us can’t even identify an individual note only by listening to it. Surely, back to the painting example, an untrained eye will not see the artistic movement, the painter, or some original or meaningful color combinations. However, my impression is that at least when restricted to a first short listen, music gives us much less information than a painting, a sculpture, or a poem. A musical instrument could mimic the song of a mockingbird, a drum beat could sound like a machine gun, in both cases the listener getting the message. But unless one has a rigorous formal education or some genetic traits such as perfect pitch, it is almost impossible to identify the meaning or even a message in a musical piece.
In spite of this fact, the information does reach us, sometimes beyond our control. Music triggers emotions, even when listened to the first time. More surprising is the fundamental, physiological level it touches us, and for this, Sacks’ examples are really incredible. I will tell you of one.
Some patients were left aphasic by brain lesions. They simply could not talk any more. In 1973, in Boston, Martin Albert proposed a new therapy: melodic intonation therapy. It relied on learning techniques we all used in childhood: putting some information into songs. The little nursery rhymes and limericks we used to learn the alphabet or the days of the week. Albert and his team used this technique to aphasic patients, with an important difference. The patients had not forgotten the basic information; they did know the days of the week, months of the year and everything; they simply could no longer speak. So they were proposed a regular conversation, but with a melodic line. The questions and answers were sung to a simple tune. The amazing outcome was that patients started talking (well, singing) almost immediately! As the therapy progressed, the melodic line was simplified until it was removed, and the patients could still talk! An example is that of a 67-year-old male patient, who had been aphasic for eighteen months (he could only produce meaningless grunts), which two days into therapy he started articulating words. Two weeks later, his vocabulary was of about 100 words, and six weeks into therapy he could hold a conversation!
In closing these first pages of my reading journal, along with the amazement produced by cases such as the one I told you about and the pleasure of getting acquainted with Sacks’ writing, I am left pondering this: the language of music is abstract, but it touches fundamental parts of our making. Let us all enjoy the privilege of experiencing and feeling and being touched by all arts and may their formal, technical, scientific exploration only enrich our experiences and delight!