Spirited Thought

The human relationship with music is an interesting one. For all of its meaning in my life, it is not something I consider a passion. I have always admired friends who are musicians or loved and immersed themselves in music. One of the projects my team has worked on over the last twelve months is an internal media library, a corporate youtube if you will. The parts that have me engaged are the social interactions and the implications of leaving tracks in online spaces.

I was listening to Regina Spektor, Lucinda Williams and Rickie Lee Jones this morning. The first I heard about from my mom, the latter two from CBS Sunday Morning. Both cases were high-touch interactions, my listening to the direct recommendation by sources I trust. Finding the music on iTunes to buy and then transfer to my iPod is actually a subtly intimate affair. I have to remember the artists, find them in the iTunes store, identify the album, part with my money and then transfer to my device so I can experience the music. iPods are inherently personal. They offer custom engraved messages letting the world know mine is mine. They communicate through an 1/8th inch jack and often into ear bud speakers directly into my head. That is the bridge from the artist’s inspiration to my brain. Now the music has access to my innermost ticking.

There is plenty of work done on the impact of music on the human being – playing classical to babies in the womb to Tibetan singing bowls. Listening to music is intimate in that we construct relationships both with those who share and we share it with but also the artist, the words and sounds that resonate with us. We time code life with it and connect with other people through gifts and gifting. In addition, we are now annotating it with ratings, tagging, comments and play lists.

WNYC runs a series called Radio Lab, a curious investigative exploration of the world that distinguishes itself with an immersive layering of sound and narration. I recently listened to the Radio Lab podcast, specifically show number 202, Musical Language, originally aired on April 21, 2006. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich host a trip looking at how the brain processes sound, and a fascinating trip it is.

Our hosts focus on how we perceive music and how language is actually very close to song. Most of us are verbally expressive and we are expert in changing the execution of our speech to communicate overtones and undertones. They interview a series of academics to explore what we understand about sound and how it is understood.

Diana Deutsch, is a professor in University of San Diago’s psychology department studying tone languages, where the same word has different meanings depending on the tone they are spoken in. Anne Fernald, Stanford Associate Professor of Development Psychology, has looked at how specific tones communicate to young infants – universal across languages. “Sound is more like touch at a distance.” Tone is a fundamental component in communication and it begs the question - What happens if you are tone deaf? Does a person of perfect pitch understand language differently?

Jonah Lehrer, author and Rhodes Scholar with a degree in neuroscience, helps us understand how sound transmits from speaker to ear. The voice box compresses air, sends waves to the eardrum, vibrating the bones, rippling fluid in the ear, releasing electricity and then our brain interprets that as sound. Mark Jude Tramo, Harvard Assistant Professor of Neurology, actually listens to the electricity and even at this low level, pleasant sounds have consistent meter, while unpleasant sounds have inconsistent meter. The word pleasant is obviously subjective, but establishes a point for discussion, after all people seem to be able to appreciate even the unpleasant – the pleasant can often become pleasant with repetition, time and linking to other highly valued experiences.

What happens when you cannot hear? Obviously, these electrical pulses are not stored along with other information in the brain. Yet it is common to read how people with disabilities develop higher sensitivity with their other senses. Considering that these tuned senses reflect the human potential, can everyone develop heightened senses, or do we need to lose one to gain development in another? Do people who do not have the use of one sense store additional information – understand and experience at a richer level, or is it just different – can it be richer if it is missing a key sense such as smell?

What is it that we find pleasant and why is it that we can so easily shift the unpleasant to the pleasant? Lehrer describes how our brains are always trying to assimilate foreign changes in audio input. Can we extrapolate that to other senses? People have different pain thresholds, derive a certain level of enjoyment from it – an outdoor hot tub in the winter can be particularly biting, but relaxing all the same. Different types of alcohol require an acquired taste – whisky is not exactly hot chocolate. Almost all alcohol varieties cultivate experts that can discern even the most subtle elements from seeing, smelling and tasting. One person’s Syrah is another person’s Sancerre, yet to a new wine drinker both might offend.

Another question: What is it when we develop addictions and what are we addicted to – the signals to the brain or the experiences we engage in? What does it mean to abuse an experience? Society tends to see harmful behavior, such as smoking and excessive drinking as addictive and abusive. If my addiction is to coffee, reading or love then it is generally accepted, even though I might actually be damaging something unknown or unseen. I am not convinced that there is anything substantially different from one compulsive behavior to another – our brains (and our bodies through our brains) create custom drug cocktails of pleasure and the vices we have affinity for might very well be arbitrary.

Music has the wonderful property of time coding life. At first, I thought maybe that was because music is released over time, but I think that is only a partial contributor. This would be most noticeable if you are a fan of contemporary music, regardless of genera. I am a sucker for pop hits, and so for me, it is very obvious that what I am listening to is associated with different periods of time, because the music itself gained popularity over the course of a specific year. I like a lot of music and tend to experience it in bursts, almost obsessively. When this happens the music is not specific to a time period. Usually, it is music that someone has shared with me and was good enough to not put down. So, the other part of associating music with life is tied to the act of listening enough to imprint the experience alongside memories.

I can revisit a feeling or memory just playing a tune, like Ella Fitzgerald singing Baby its cold outside with Louis Jordan. It takes me back to a winter season about the same time the movie Elf came out – which had a fun rendition of the duet. Another example is the first time I heard Father and son by Cat Stevens. I was in Switzerland, coming down from hiking glaciers in the Alps, heading toward the hostel in the town of Interlaken. A friend had told me find her bag and borrow her cassette mix. I cannot recall all of the songs, but I know them when I hear them. The memories are strong enough that I know how I felt listening to them and the excitement of having connected with a life-long friend. Most recently, I have been obsessed with the same few songs, one in particular, Major Label Debut by Broken Social Scene. I am sure years from now this song, along with others, will let me recall this time, this year.

I once heard that eighty percent of what we think of today, we thought of yesterday. I enjoy optimizing my world, so increasing the percentage of new thought seems a worthy goal.

Wikipedia lists the United States having a 99.9% literacy rate, citing the CIA World Fact Book. Check the footnote reading that 44 million people (one in seven) can read but not to level of understanding a job application, a food label or utility bill. Consider the fact that when I consider literacy, I do not include this group of 44 million.

Among the educated workforce – college level and above – I routinely witness great disparities in literacy. Being able to read and write are the single most important capabilities of an educated mind and those who write well often read.

Reading is an activity where the brain is engaged. Active readers comprehend the content, exploring what it means. The content influences the formation of language and founds our ability to create more complex conceptual relationships. This complexity adds layers of depth to our thinking and appreciation of the world around us.

Add to the list of what it means to be literate the appreciation of art and music and we get closer to what real literacy is about. There is a texture that only can be felt by wide exposure to new ideas through the mediums of text, images and sound. More importantly is for us to share the pieces of our overwhelming vast and growing collection of media that we believe are of meaningful quality.

The more we read the more we change and the less yesterday’s thinking is today’s.