Mens Agitat Molem

"My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay."

    -Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe, and Everything)

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.

Asylum

 

There is something intriguing about the mental hospitals of past times. The curiosity in the people housed there, the disgust at the treatment of patients, or simply the fear that we may be crazy enough to be stuck in one ourselves. The grim notions that are so tied to the idea of an asylum now are stark contrast to the intentions of the people who pioneered the effort to build these facilities. The idea that with special attention and care, they could help the mentally unstable, and make the treatment available to anyone who needed it.  

From mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the United States built hundreds of public institutions for the insane, and thousands of Americans were treated. There were asylums everywhere across the country to remove these "disturbed" people from society, to help them heal and push them to reenter the world. While a noble cause, the scientific knowledge needed to truly help their patients was still not available, and the public started seeing these hospitals as negative places of practice.

 

Even while in the height of their existence, asylums had bad critics like Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, a novel primarily focusing on the evils of state hospitals, and the bureaucracy that controls the lives of the patients. He questioned the use of electroshock therapy, lobotomy, and other treatments, and portrayed them as punishment rather than remedy in his novel. This era was the beginning of the end of state-run institutions. 

Eventually new drugs and a shift in policy helped lessen the patient population in these hospitals, and they soon lost funding and importance in American society. After the peak of the 50's, the era of deinstitutionalization saw very few of these asylums survive. Many of the beautifully built, immense buildings are still standing, but are of no use to us because of the distinctive nature in which they were structured, and the stigma attached to their history. Now, with peeling paint and rotting machinery, they are scarier than ever, and remind us of a place that nobody wants to end up.

Payne, Christopher; Oliver Sacks. Asylum: Inside the closed world of State Mental Hospitals. Cambridge MA: MIT press, 2009.

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in, some of us just go one god further."

- Richard Dawkins

"Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation."

 - Samuel Johnson 

Computers Mimicking Human Behavior

The more we know about human mannerisms, the easier it is to make technology perform the same feats. A simple blink of an eye, a tilt of the head, or vocal sound is interpreted by humans in an instant, even though we consciously aren't aware of it. This makes programming computers to understand nearly impossible, however we are getting closer. Golan Levin, a self-described artist and engineer, describes his work in art that works with the simplest of human movement and speech.

Ted Talk: Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you 

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?

"The best thing for being sad, is to learn something... you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn"

    - Merlyn from "The Once and Future King", by T.H. White

Steadfast, Unchangeable, Love

"No - yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

    Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell

    Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever - or else swoon to death."

- John Keats, from "Bright Star."

This sonnet was Keats' last, written while traveling to Italy where he died at the young age of 25. It was written about the love he had for Fanny Brawne, whom he had just bid goodbye for the last time. While tragic, the poem shows hope for a lasting love, something that would live beyond himself.   After watching the portrayal of Keats' love and death in the movie Bright Star, I wondered about the true nature of love after death, how that such earthly connection stay so strong when those attached are so far away. I wondered, of course, but thats still a little to heavy for me. Its enough to wonder what love is in general. For me, as well as nature's purpose for the strong emotion. 

There are explanations that have been tested, of course. Formulas, chemicals, and results that define love to a science. One of the more famous being Harry Harlow's monkeys, showing the need for touch in a young animal's childhood. 

He explained the connection created between a mother and child through not only basic needs, but through a deeper attachment that lives longer than the young's need for food and protection.

Is it the same for mates as well as familial connections though? The touch cannot be the only thing holding us together. Not even Harlow's monkeys could survive through a normal life after being subjected to only touch. He added motion to the equation, and the monkeys got slightly better, but could not function well with others of their kind. They would not reproduce. Did they lack some basic requirement for farther love, love that could translate to real monkeys, not some stuffed dummy. And this poses another question, if these factors are the requirements for a connection to form, how do we still love those who have died? Those who have moved away? If we can't see them, or touch them, we can still love them. Brawne was said to have mourned Keats' death for 6 years, much longer than the touch could stay on the skin. The human mind is shaped by much more than a simple set of rules. We call upon our memories, and we still love just the same.

And although we can find the pieces of the puzzle, we will all still asking "what is love?" (baby don't hurt me...)

Listening to Authority

In 1968 during the Vietnam War, American soldiers shot at, raped, and killed villagers in a suspected Viet Cong stronghold without warning, and without any resistance from the vietnamese. The My Lai massacre wasn't heard of in America for over a year, but when word spread back to the homeland, the public was in outrage. How could our own soldiers be so heartless to shoot harmless villagers? They didn't fight back, couldn't they see the horrors they were committing? Didn't these men have morals? 

 

The issue, however, is not with the soldiers' morals, but with the force of their authority. A soldier is trained to fire when their officers tell them to, but this action is already imbedded deep within our minds. We have the unwavering desire to obey, even if we "know" what we are doing is wrong.

In 1961, even before the My Lai massacre occurred, professor of psychology at Yale Stanley Milgram wanted to study this fascinating human need to obey the commands of authority. He wanted to see if there was any correlation between gender, race, or background and the desire to follow orders. He created a fake 'shock machine' and hired an actor to feign death after a certain shock level. Then, he found volunteers to participate in what they thought was a test of learning. Instead, they were being tested on their ability to rebel.

When brought into a room, they were told by who they thought was the doctor running the experiment, to shock the man on the other side of the glass with an increasing voltage each time they answered a question incorrectly. They heard the screams coming from across the glass, the man in pain telling them to stop. However, the doctor assured them that the man would be fine, and urged them to continue. After a certain level, the man behind the glass slumped over, seemingly dead.

62%-65% in Milgrams experiment followed orders of credible authority to the point of lethally harming someone. Even those who answered that they would never kill another, that they knew it was wrong, were among those who 'murdered' that man. That is how susceptible to orders humans are.

That is what happened to the men at My Lai. Officers told the men to shoot at the enemy, so they shot. Any rebellion, if it occurred, was repressed, "when one soldier refused to fire, his commanding officer, Lieutenant William Calley, threatened to report him for disobeying an officer's order." The atmosphere was prime for human nature to be revealed. 

There is some hope, however. Individuals who had participated in Milgram's experiment reported back that they had in fact learned from the experience, and now checked themselves instead of simply following orders. While the names of the participants in the experiment have not been released, there is a story that one man ended up being a soldier at My Lai, and was one of the few to refuse to shoot. 

What does this mean for us? Are we slaves to our awful human nature, or do we have a chance to choose to be good? 35% of unknowing participants did refuse. If we don't ever doubt our beliefs, can we always do good? Or is that not enough? All we can do now is learn from our past mistakes, and see to it another tragedy such as My Lai can't occur again.