In Pursuit of Silence

I was waiting for Dan in the public library (which seems to be a perennial situation) and looking for a book that seemed interesting enough to fill the time. Just while I was (perhaps wrongfully) lamenting the selection available, I chanced upon a spine that caught my eye. I spent the next 15 minutes engrossed in George Prochnik's In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise.

Needless to say, the book came home with me, and I promised to never doubt the library system again.

The inside cover sets the stage perfectly: "More than money, power,  and even happiness, silence has become the most precious- and dwindling- commodity of our modern world." While that's a pretty bold, and perhaps melodramatic, statement to make, I was intrigued from the first page. I'm only about 100 pages in, but Prochnik has charmed me with his vacillation between philosophical musings on the very existence and pursuit of silence and his search for explanations in the biological sciences. Thus far I've been treated to the exploration of silence as a means of connecting with the divine reality of the universe (thanks to interviews with various monastic sects), conjectures from evolutionary psychology on the origins and reasons for hearing in the first place, and speculation on the adaptive purposes for animals' vocalizations. At page 97, I began a foiree into the strategic use of sound environments by the corporate world.

Prochnik's variety perhaps compensates for his lack of depth, but I'm intrigued, nonetheless. Cage's evolving ideas about the significance of silence, and the significance of all sounds are recurrent. though Prochnik has yet to concede to the value of "noise," and has instead focused on the negative physiological and psychological impacts of some sounds in contrast to others.

I'm excited to see where he goes.

Here's a favorite passage of mine from Chapter 1- Listening For the Unknown:

"All the time I'd been in the monastery, I'd been searching for some kinds of clear, encapsulated lesson in silence- something that I could take home with me. But what I'd received instead was a powerful reminder of the good that can come from not knowing, from lingering where the mind keeps reaching outward. I remembered speaking earlier to Vinod Menon, a neuroscientist who has done fMRI studies of people listening to music. Menon discovered that the peak of positive brain activity actually occurs in the silent pauses between sounds, when the brain is striving to anticipate what the next note will be. The burst of neural firing that takes place in the absence of sound stimulus enables the mind to perform some of its most vital work of maintaining attention and encoding memories."

The Movement of Air: Dance and Digital Projection

If you happened to be in the country of France last month, well, lucky you. Aside from visiting historical and cultural sites, drinking wine and eating the best bread on Earth, you might have had the chance to see a magical dance performance orchestrated by Adrian M and Claire B. The hour-long piece, performed by a trio of dancers, was unique in that it combined choreography with digital projection imaging- and did so in a novel way.

Unlike more common uses of digital projection, rather than projecting prerecorded scenes in which the dancers performed, Adrian and Claire utilized fully-interactive scenes that responded to the dancers movement. That is to say, nothing was animated beforehand and the final visual performance was rather spontaneous, or, one could say... indeterminate.

As a dancer myself, I'm skeptical of many visual gimmicks that aim to enhance what is already an excellent (and stand-alone) dance performance. But I appreciate that, in this work, the digital imagery isn't added as an afterthought, and is actively responding to the dancers' movements. In a way, it creates a more complex dialogue between the dancer and the space: the projection responding to the dancer, the dancer responding to the unplanned projection.

Watch a montage of the performance highlights here.
Then curse yourself for not being able to see it performed live.

A Music-Friendly Implant

Read this captivating article on the experience of music via cochlear implant:

What I found most interesting is the difference in music preferences associated with a hearing aid versus a cochlear implant. Sam Swiller, who is featured in the article, preferred lots of drums and bass when he had a hearing aid, but these sounds proved too intense when he switched to the implant. Instead, he says became drawn to folk and alternative music.

I've always wondered if the difference in the musical preferences of my brother (death metal, hard rock, gangster rap) and myself (folk, Celtic, Classical Indian) had less to do with ascribed culture and more with how we hear things. My brother is a bit hard of hearing, and I seem to have a better ear for higher pitches. When my cousin became an interpreter for the deaf, I further wondered about the preferences in music among her friends in the deaf community (they are as particular as anyone else about what music they like to experience).

Personally, I'm easily overwhelmed by sounds. For instance, I can't eat and listen to music at the same time. I even have trouble eating during a particularly enthusiastic thunderstorm. As my interest in improvisational jazz and experimental music grew, I continually had to find ways to experience it without needing to stop after just a few minutes. I've discovered that coffee-house style performances, I can handle. Rock concerts, I cannot. Even with ear plugs. The lights and the vibrations and the sounds are just too much stimulus to take all at once.

Given my personal experience with being overwhelmed by sounds, I can only imagine the adjustment required when switching from hearing aid to implant. As the article states, a cochlear implant is designed to do one thing really well — allow users to understand speech. What it lacks is nuance in relating information about pitch and timbre. Current implants simply leave out much of the information needed to tell the difference between notes that are close together on a keyboard or instruments that sound similar. And while it may not be at the forefront of doctors' and manufacturer's minds, I have to agree that the creation of a "music friendly" implant is certainly worth consideration.

Cage at the Movies: Sound of Noise

Saw a great film last night with such a whimsical, Cage-inspired premise, that I thought it would be worth mentioning here.

Sound of Noise is a 2010 Swedish-French film about a police officer from a family of prestigious musicians. The black sheep of the family, the officer is tone-deaf, has no musical talent and does not enjoy listening to music. Meanwhile, a group of "anarchist musicians" begin staging some less-than-legal performances around the city. During the officer's investigation and pursuit of the guerrilla musicians, the everyday objects they use to create their music are rendered soundless, and the audience also experiences his literal tone-deafness.

In the spirit of Cage's all-sound music, the film is an entertaining introduction into the musical sounds of non-musical instruments. The story is a follow-up to the 2001 short film Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers. The title of the film purportedly comes from Italian futurist Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises.

You can watch the trailer here

image credit: Nordisk Film

Sonic Dining

I knew it!
With the right music, you can influence the taste of your food.

Heavy Metal Macaroni.
Monk Monkfish.
Edith Piaf Pilaf.
The possibilities are endless...

Read the story here.

The above image is the cover of author Kara Zuaro's book, I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In The Kitchen With Your Favorite Bands.

Cage the Mycologist

A new exhibition opened last week at the Horticultural Society of New York to celebrate John Cage the Mycologist. It's called, “By Leaves or Play of Light- John Cage: Artist and Naturalist." (I always knew he was a naturalist at heart). His fungal legacy, I've learned, consists of his revival of the New York Mycological Society in the 1960s and his extensive fungi collection, now at the University of California, Santa Cruz (and, of course, his phenomenal success in game show history). I've also recently learned that Cage did some visual art projects that will be on display at this exhibition. Most notably some of his 1990 "Edible Drawings" made from snow peas, bitter melon, hijiki, and black beans — ingredients in his macrobiotic diet at the time.


He also collaborated on a project with mycologist Alexander H. Smith called The Mushroom Book (1972), a collection of disjointed poems alongside beautifully mushroom illustrations by Lois Long, as well as fields of seemingly random text with sporadic mushroom drawings and details scrawled by Cage all over the page. As he described it in a 1991 interview with John Retallack, this writing was meant to show ”that ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, by just looking”; you can’t just come upon them directly, they “come to you as things hidden.”


Learn more about the exhibition here: http://thehort.org/programs_exhibitions.html

Then, buy me a ticket to New York so that I can see it.

Moo-d Music: The musical preferences of the working bovine mother

Some dairy farmers have long suspected that playing a bit of mood music can boost milk production in dairy cows. It's not unheard of for farmers to play relaxing jams for their herds, and the picture above shows a vaudeville act serenading the cows in the University of Wisconsin, Madison's dairy barn in 1930. The show was apparently part of an experiment to see whether the soothing strains of music boosted the cows' milk production.

Read more at:http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/03/06/285314648/secret-life-of-cows-part-deux-milking-mood-music