Excerpts from Mighty Muso - Musings behind Violetta's adventures for adult minds and readers.
‘Ziqi said, “Well, may you ask such a question. Just now, I lost myself—you understand? You may have heard the pipes of man but not the pipes of earth; you may have heard the pipes of earth but not the pipes of heaven.”
“May I inquire the method for this?”
Ziqi replied, “The Great Clod belches forth qi: it is called by the name Wind. It has no point of arising, but having arisen, the myriad hollows begin to howl. Have you never heard their long drawn cry?
The twistings of the mountain woods, the caverns of great trees a hundred spans round—like nostrils, like mouths, like ears, like sockets, like bowls, like mortars, like gullies, like pools: rushing, shooting, roaring, sucking, shouting, moaning, chortling, wailing. The first gust cries out hoooo, the winds that follow cry out, ooooh. A small harmony in a tinkling breeze becomes the grand chorus of a whirlwind.”’
Have you ever listened to the wind? I must admit, I never have that closely; but I will now, and if I do happen to hear it chortle—or a great clod belching—I know it’s not just my imagination.
The above text from Zhuangzi—attributed to Taoist Master Zhuangzi—was written in the fourth century BC; so you can see people have been thinking about nature’s music for a long time. Taoism and the whistling wind also made me wonder; what do we hear when we listen to the wind in the willows? Is it the wind, or is it the willows? And when we hear the swishing noise of the leaves, and the whistling sound of the wind, how do we know which is which?
Before we delve into science, I feel the need for a musical interlude. This time, it’s the theme song from The Wind in the Willows, by Keith Hopwood & Malcolm Rowe, a cartoon we just loved growing up. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riltxsHIRqk).
The original story is by Kenneth Graham. Although I read it only recently, the tune is more firmly etched in my mind, from over thirty years ago, however, I found the words surprising. Mainly because I never really knew them.
‘The wind in the willows sang softly to me
Follow my voice wherever it leads
From mountains, through valleys, to deep rolling seas
Born on the wings of the breeze’
I’d always sung ‘follow my travels to old lemon-tree,’ or something along those lines, so as I was listening to it now on YouTube, I had to laugh. It also astonished me that my eight-year-old mind remembered the melody, in the correct key.
So what is it that helps us recall theme songs, or know how the wind whistles, or hear the willows sing softly?
Pitch is the first thing that springs to my mind. Especially obvious in whistling (or singing a theme song) as we hear it move up and down, getting higher or lower—like a Melody Lolly-pop. However, Leviten in his book This is Your Brain on Music observes; ‘the word pitch, refers to the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of sound,’ and it exists in our minds. It is only distinguishable because we hear it. Just like colour and taste, the relationship between the pitches defines them.
An example might be the colour green. There are lighter and darker shades, some with more yellow, some with more blue—but the only reason we see them as different is by comparison. In fact, Newton—our old mate with the out-dated aether t-shirts—was the first to notice, writing; ‘the waves themselves are not coloured.’
When I initially contemplated that revelation, my mind was slightly blown. I thought, colours are colours, aren’t they? How do we know what they are unless we see them? Well, out my window today, I watched a rainbow move from one side of the harbour to the other. I know, I’m very fortunate to have extraordinary harbour views at the moment, however a rainbow is a phenomenon of its own. Sunlight is reflected and refracted (bent) by passing through one medium into another, in that case—rain. But how are we seeing colours if the light-waves themselves are not coloured? Wavelengths? Red is said to have the slowest at 620-700nm, which is known as infrared, which we normally can’t see...
Of course, there is also the fact that an A is an A? After all, it usually has a frequency of 440—unless you’re playing baroque-pitch, where you might go down to 432, or even 392—and although I don’t have ‘perfect pitch,’ I can usually sing an A. As previously mentioned, I also tend to remember music in the same pitch and key I’ve heard it played, and so I thought: what am I remembering, if it isn’t the pitch?
Well, that’s where it gets complicated. At a certain speed, a frequency can sound unbroken, or continuous (like running your finger along the rim of a glass) however, a pitch is not just one frequency, but multiple frequencies played together. A frequency occurs at a specific rate of vibration and ‘all natural objects in the world have several modes of vibration.’ We just hear the frequency that has the slowest rate—called the fundamental—rather than the others; referred to as overtones. (More on that later).
Then, there is the swishing sound the trees make, and the reason we know it’s the leaves moving; is due to the tambre. Overtones are unique and vary with each instrument, every object and every sound. Leviten uses the example of a lion roaring. If you imagine the sound, and think about it, really carefully; you perceive a number of pitches, frequencies and overtones giving it the roar-like quality. Otherwise it could sound like a kitten purring, and you wouldn’t want to confuse them.
Luckily, our brains’ synapses leap into action when we hear a noise; and the most life-threatening, demand our attention.
Ah ha. I’ve just had one of those moments. Actually, it was more like a flash-back of a teacher leaning over me—not observing any kind of social distancing—and telling me he can’t believe how careless I am with my dotted rhythm, then asking me to play; whilst saying ‘no, you aren’t listening,’ as I attempted to do so.
That is not at all uncommon; but when something sounds threatening, our brains are wired to listen to that, never mind all the internal responses geared towards escaping. Therefore, paying attention to all the sounds around us is quite difficult. For example, if you stop and listen now, what do you hear?
Unfortunately, I am sitting in a room filled with man-made noise. There’s the noisy heat-pump, the fridge, a phone charger buzzing; and outside, there are cars, machines, horns, people’s voices, and a motor-bike. Few of us—myself included—can go anywhere without our mobile phones, and it’s hard to imagine life without a fridge, or heating. But all that electronic noise can be deafening, never mind the carbon emissions clogging up the ether.
However, most of the time we do block it out, using selective hearing; or the opposite of Monty Python’s Blind Pew: (Yellowbeard ~ Blind Pew ).
‘I may be blind,’ says Blind Pew to the inquisitorial gentleman, ‘but I ‘av acute ‘earing.’
‘I’m not interested in your jewelry, cloth eyes.’
Blind Pew looks suitably unimpressed.
‘Yellow beard was ‘ere,’ he says.
‘How did you know it was him?’
‘Because he sounded about forty seven. And his clothing gave off the unmistakable fibrous cracking sound of the eighty-percent hessian…’
If you haven’t seen, or heard of Monty Python you really must check it out. Anyway, it all goes to show, there could be a heap of things we are missing. Not only wind in willows, or the fibrous cracking of hessian, white goods and electronics, but countless other things.
“Confucius said, ‘Unify your will. Don’t listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don’t listen with your mind, listen with your qi. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but qi is empty and waits on all things. The Dao gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.’”
Simple. Well, not for me, and I’ve often attempted to listen with an empty mind. Playing a fretless instrument tends to call for this intervention—surplus to usual requirements. However, it can be really difficult! Sometimes, there are so many instructions, distractions, directions, and personal insecurities; it’s like having cotton wool shoved in there. Then there are those dancing flamenco emojis that pop up when you are anxious—stomping away on your ear drums, flapping their frilly dresses and making it really hard to concentrate. (If you are unlike Homer Simpson and I, and have never experienced this ailment; you are very fortunate (Homer Simpson not listening).
To make matters more confusing, our mind also pays attention to the distance of sounds. Not quite as cleverly as owls, or bats or whales, but like them, we are wired to do so. After all, you’d want to know how far away that roaring kitten was before it pounced.
So, if we go back to the whistling wind in the willows, our minds tell us what we are hearing. If we weren’t there, we wouldn’t hear it; in the physical sense. However, when we play, there are so many things demanding our attention. The bow makes the strings resonate, the wood vibrates, air flows through the body of the violin, producing multiple frequencies, blended to become a pitch within our ears, and the tamber tells us, it is a violin playing, not a clarinet.
However, our minds are often so busy thinking about so much other stuff, from whether we are in tune, in time, even what’s for dinner. So how on earth do we make musical cents of all of that?
Notes:
“Ziqi said…” Eno, R. trans. (2019). Zhuangzi: The Inner Chapters. p17.
“The word pitch” Levitin, D. (2006). This is Your Brain on Music: The science behind a human obsession. p.21.
“The waves themselves…” ibid., p.23.
“All natural objects…” ibid., p3.
“Confusicous said: Unify your will one…” Eno, R trans. (2019). Zhuangzi: The Inner Chapters. P.33.
