Mens Agitat Molem

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is the blending of senses: where a stimulus for one sense such as sight or hearing, leads to the involuntary activation of another such as smell or touch. (For cognitive pathways in general). It comes in many forms, and the cause is still being debated. The main theory is that we are all born with synesthesia, and eventually lose the connective pathways until we only experience a stimulus in one particular area of the brain. People who experience these later in life are called synesthetes.

I've always been fascinated by this condition. I would think it would add another dimension to the world, and allow for creativity like it did for Kandinsky's art, or Duke Ellington's jazz (both said to have been synesthetes).

There are many different kinds: Grapheme-Color is the connection of numbers and letters to colors, and is the most common. Sound - Color is common as well, and is when people see colors when they hear sounds or music. All types of synesthesia are highly personal; each experiences their synesthesia their own way. For example, the letter P might be Blue to one person, or Purple to another, and it disturbs them to think of it any differently. (Which makes reading colored print difficult.) A girl in my gym class said her favorite number was something like 245 because of the color it was). In sound - color synesthetes, the sound which produces a certain color may vary. Some experience a color for a specific pitch (such as a B flat) or for a certain key of music ("C minor is dark green!") or for a specific instrument (One man describes french horns as an awful color, so refuses to listen to symphonies that feature that instrument.) Other even stranger types include personification (ordered sequences have personalities), and lexical gustatory (words to taste) synesthesia. 

 

Absolute Pitch

We recently discovered that one of the piano players in my jazz class has absolute pitch. I've been in her class for over a year, and it never came up. "I guess I never thought it was that important," she said to me.

 We found out during an ear training session, and instead of responding with an interval, she replied, "The first note is an A flat, the second is a C?" The teacher looked puzzled for a moment, and then told her she was correct. We spent the next few minutes testing this newly discovered talent; she answered every note correctly, and we were amazed every time.

For a long time, I've wondered about having that ability to instantly name a note as easily as we see can name colors we see as blue or green. I've often wished for it, because it would surely make my life easier during band. But I've found that is not often the case. With the ability, many are disturbed when instruments are out of tune because they can tell without a reference pitch. When a familiar piece is transposed into another key, they can't bear to hear it. Having perfect pitch is not necessarily a good thing.

What is interesting about it however, is the implications that it can somewhat be learned. There is a higher percentage of people with absolute pitch within musicians than the general public, especially those who started training young. Also, throughout cultures, the countries which have tonal language (like China) have a higher occurrence of absolute pitch in their populations. The ability also has a way of developing based on what the person learns musically. In some eastern scales quarter step pitches are common, but someone with absolute pitch accustomed to western music would perceive this foreign music to be out of tune and painful. 

While I would love the chance to have absolute pitch, what I can do now is ask those I know with the ability what it is like. They all tell me it isn't a big deal, that it is just part  of the way they hear music because they remember having it their whole life. The girl in my jazz class even thinks it might be worse, since she thinks of intervals as two notes instead of the sound of the distance between them. Either way, I still find it an amazing ability, and I am always amazed and a little jealous of those who have it.

World Music

I wonder why music tends to stay so solidly grounded in genres and we have the desire to name the style we hear in bands, when the world cultures are mixing to such an extent that a lot of people are hard to define anymore. Even those that mix a couple styles together have a name: fusion. "Oh, thats jazz-rock fusion," for example. 

 Many times styles start blending when cultures blend in a specific area. It is how jazz was born during the turn of the 19th century. Mainly African Americans bringing together the traditions from Africa, the Caribbean, and European style classical training. It became the first, and maybe only, purely American music genre. But how American is it if it simply brought together existing ideas? It was a blending of world cultures, that took place in America.

But now, when world travel and communication is so much more available, a blending of musical style is taking place by traveling individuals rather than entire migrating cultures. More and more, we cannot define the music we hear, but it tends to strike a chord in us deeper than the music we are so used to hearing. Different scales and rhythms come from all across the globe.

 

Move It - Balkan Beat Box 

I've been listening a lot to Balkan Beat Box, an Israeli band that combines balkan scales with hip hop beats, arabic and spanish influences, and sometimes even reggae. The band has said that the music of our generation can't be stuck in old traditions of singular influences, and move forward with the culture blending happening all around us. 

Guyamas Sonora - Beirut

Many bands are picking up on world influences to create their own fusions. Gogol Bordello is a gypsy punk band with a style similar to Balkan Beat Box, as Tamir Muskat was part of both bands. Beirut's Zach Condon uses Eastern European and Balkan influences, as well as traveling to Mexico to record his own style of folk music. Enter the Haggis is a Celtic rock band. And famously, Fela Kuti created the style Afrobeat, combining jazz with funk and Yoruba music. 

I want more of this music. Music I can't categorize, put in a slot with others that sound exactly like it. I want to have to explain what I listen to, not put it into one word. Not many of us are left very purely one culture in this world, so why does our music have to stay that way?

Musical Dreams

A while ago I had a strange dream. People I knew were standing around in a circle, and one girl was playing her watch as an instrument, sounding much like a flute. It was slow and in an unfamiliar sort of scale. It sounded foreign. When I woke up, the song stuck in my head and I went straight down to my piano to transcribe the dream tune.

When I got to jazz class that day, excitedly I told the flute player sitting next to me about my dream song, and asked her to play the notes I wrote down so I could hear it with the right sound. She agreed, and soon the whole class was listening. My teacher seized the opportunity, and started teaching the class the melody, and putting it to a C minor blues. What started as a slow mournful aria in my head became a fast tempo layered Mingus style jazz tune. I fell in love with the idea of composing.

But did I really “compose” this piece? I sure didn’t hear it anywhere else before, and it was in no style or key I had ever played in before, but I had also not gone and thought of it in my conscious mind. How did my unconscious create something so melodic that I could recreate it when I awoke?

Indeed many famous composers have written pieces while dreaming, from just inspiration, to a full-blown orchestra in their heads, people like Ravel and Stravinsky spoke of the musical dreams that lead to their compositions. Wagner describes how he found the introduction to “Das Rheingold” in his dream, saying “I fell into a kind of somnolent state in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed in my brain into musical sound, the chord of E-flat major, which continued re-echoed in broken forms; these broken forms seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion…”

Irving J. Massey says that, “music is the only faculty that is not altered by the dream… music in dream does not become fragmented, chaotic, or incoherent, neither does it decay as rapidly as do the other components of dreams on our awakening.” For me, this means that I didn’t just imagine I heard a song, and go on to make up a melody. I could really comprehend the notes in my sleeping state, and wake up remembering the tune. I only wish I could have more musical dreams to enjoy.

My class went on to perform my song at Discovery day in our town. We played some Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, and… me? It was surreal. Here is the melody and bass line for my piece. (In bass clef, because I play trombone) I call it Dream Watchin'

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Randomhouse, 2007.

A Glorious Dawn

While wandering the vast expanses of youtube, I found a rather curious video. Carl Sagan, an astronomer and astrophysicist responsible for popularizing these sciences as well as other natural sciences, severely autotuned to an original song composed by "Symphony of Science". 

While I'm still somewhat confused at what I just saw, I'm extremely happy that Sagan's beautifully constructed explanations of science are standing the test of changing media, and are still popularizing science for the public.