Moving Hands

One day in grade school, we had a “music visualization” assignment. I don’t remember what class it was for, but the prompt was to listen to a sample of music and then draw what the music made us imagine.

Even though my hearing aids provided really sucky sound¹ I gamely gave it a go. I don’t even know what the hell we listened to. It kind of sounded like air or water whooshing in parts. So I drew a toilet because it made me think of a toilet flushing and blissfully went on to draw random non-related crap all over my paper.

After a while, the teacher told us to put down our pencils and markers, then asked volunteers to share what they had drawn with the class. One student said, “I drew a whale being harpooned because it sounded like a harpoon gun so it made me think of that.” Immediately, I felt like an ass because I had mistaken such a serious and weighty subject for something as silly as a flushing toilet. Obviously, making such a fundamental mistake meant I could never interpret music correctly.

Recently, I was listening to a concept album – I love concept albums – by Ayreon named Into the Electric Castle. Ayreon does progressive metal and, basically, the album is an opera. There’s this whole cast of characters who sing the story, and there are spoken portions. I found the lyrics and read along with the story. Seriously, I think it’s beyond cool.

Anyway, I want to talk about this song called Mirror Maze. I’ve embedded the video. You can watch it and see if you think it is as awesome as I do. Click here to read the lyrics. Go on; I’ll wait for you.

Are you back yet? OK, good. The reason I bring up this song, beyond the fact that it’s just awesome, is the fact that I could visualize some of the stuff happening.² For instance, I could imagine them going through the mirror and to the other side.

I’ve never had that experience before, and it kind of makes me think of reading a book. I don’t know about you guys, but when I’m reading a book, I can sometimes visualize what is happening as if it’s a movie. When I was a kid, I barely even saw the words because the pictures in my head telling the story were a lot more overwhelming than the words.

A few years ago, that kind of immersive experience would have been unthinkable for me. I mean, hell, I didn’t even like music. In my mind, visual, tactile, and auditory experiences were completely different and compartmentalized in very distinct categories with absolutely no overlap.

So, later on, when I began to try to understand music, it was kind of like a puzzle for me. Why do hearing people like this so much? Well, I’ll apply my mind to this question and figure it out! Last week, I wrote about the emotional aspect of discovering music – well, another part of it was that I also applied my intellect. Since I didn’t really have a directory of songs in my head yet, I made a conscious effort to think of things to associate music with things that actually had meaning to me.

I started simple – this series of tones in this chiptunes song makes me think of lights blinking. This portion of Many Moons by Janelle Monae makes me think of the corresponding portion in the music video. Things like that. Then, before I knew it, I was imagining more abstract shit to go along with the music like red waves to go along with the instrumental opening of Sly by Massive Attack. And, interestingly enough, I’ve found there are some concepts, like the opening of Only You by Portishead that I just can’t express visually or in text – I think of the song sample instead. A hearing friend once told me that music was like a way to send emotions over the air. Now I understand what she meant.

At this point, I’ve been listening to music, really listening to it, for about a year or so at this point. In that time, I’ve listened to… God, I don’t even know how many songs. So many. So I’ve built up this kind of a database in my head with song associations, and every new song I hear is another variable in this gigantic equation. Every day I listen to music, I find greater meaning in it.

1. Later, after getting my cochlear implant, I would compare the audio from my hearing aids to hearing things underwater. Who knows if that comparison is accurate or not – delicate electronic equipment + water = bad, so I’ve never really experienced hearing things underwater. [↩]
2. Before you ask, I was 150% sober listening to the album. [↩]

First of all: I just updated my “About Me” and “About This Blog” page. Go check those out.

Okay, on with the post.

One of my hobbies is making CD mixes. I work pretty hard on my CD mixes. Now, I’ve known people who just throw random songs into a playlist and then call it “done.” No offense to those people – it works for them, after all – but I tend to be more obsessive about making the songs all fit with each other. For example, I wouldn’t put a quiet, serious, acoustic song about atheism next to some sort of crazy techno party dance music. I also like to make themed CDs – for example, one of my current CD mixes is named DRIVE FASTER!!! and it has all sorts of really fast-tempo songs.

One issue that I’ve encountered, though, is that I feel like I lack a lot of musical vocabulary. When I was in high school, I studied music theory for Academic Decathlon, but none of it stuck.
Part of it was that, although I liked some music in high school, I wasn’t super-interested in music until recently.
Most of it was just the way that AcaDec presents its information in general: they give you a pile of extremely dense text to read, then tell you to memorize it for the competitions in test-taking. Seriously, this stuff may not have as many big words like “semiotics” or “ontology” as I’ve encountered in college, but it is really really freakin’ dense nonetheless.

Basically, AcaDec threw me into the ocean in the middle of a stormy night. Not exactly a great way to learn how to swim. I definitely feel like I could have used some “Music Appreciation 101″ texts. Stuff like “major key songs are usually happy” is a lot more useful for a beginner than “Newton believed that the diatonic scale corresponded to the seven colors of the rainbow.” Especially when you don’t even know what the fuck an octave is. (I’m sorry if this last fact about Newton is incorrect, by the way – after five years, I’ve forgotten the music theory I learned in AcaDec.)

Incidentally, one thing I’ve found really helpful in the intervening years? Don’t laugh, but – last.fm. Its tags are like a freakin’ goldmine of knowledge that explain musical history and the key features of certain genres very well. From last.fm, I’ve learned the definitions of dreampop vs trip-hop, hardcore vs metalcore, etc. Yeah, some genres are totally made up by the listeners – just look at “lolicore,” if you dare – but even trash can be educational. All in all, it’s a much better way for me to learn about music than “Please memorize these key facts about Beethoven’s symphonies, then answer A, B, C, D, or E.” Also, bugging my hearing friends who are music geeks (or who just really like music a lot) has helped. Thanks, hearing friends, for putting up with my questions!

What’s that? Oh, how does this relate to CD mixes, you ask?

Well, right now, I usually end up saying, “This is good enough – I’m gonna burn it and go for a drive with this CD now.” (I really like listening to music in a car, especially one equipped with strong speakers with good bass, but that’s another post altogether.) I have fun making CD mixes – I just listen to everything and try to fit it all together by ear. But I wonder, what if I could say, “Hey, so, this song has jargon jargon jargon and is in the minor scale; it’d go just wonderfully with this song that is also in the minor scale but is jargon blah jargon etc”? If I could identify what is going on in the songs, would I be able to make more precisely matched mixes?

Or is it better that I don’t know the vocabulary? After all, “This slow and serious song about atheism would go well before this song that starts out slowly, then builds up to something louder and faster – then I’ll put the crazy party techno song after that” works pretty well for me at this point.

I think that, in the end, I’d like to learn more vocabulary so as to better identify what kind of mix I’m making. But, when it comes down to it, the thing that really helped me to enjoy music was saying “Screw this, I don’t care what hearing people say, I’ll enjoy it on my own terms.” I mean, this is just a hobby – I don’t have any career aspirations to become a professional DJ or anything like that, so having fun making CDs is more important to me in the end than making 100% perfect CDs.

I recently came across an essay that I wrote a while ago. It was for a required freshman English composition class. I forget what the prompt was, but I thought it was interesting.
I’d like to note that I found this essay with the disclaimer, “I wrote this while watching Pieces of April,” so the prose isn’t super awesome.

Nov. 28th, 2006

I am deaf and I know American Sign Language, but I was mainstreamed and can interact freely within the hearing or deaf world. Nonetheless, my fundamental difference from hearing people allows me to observe their culture. Therefore, I have been acting as an anthropologist of the hearing culture almost from birth. In this paper, my central observation revolves around music.
When a hearing person asks me about my deafness, he or she invariably asks me, “Do you enjoy music at all?” I call this The Big Question. If I answered it truthfully, I would tell the hearing person that I do not listen to music because I never learned how to listen to music. An astute hearing friend of mine once compared music to a second language that hearing people learn automatically at an early age. It must be true because I am not “fluent” in the language of music. I like to watch music videos and listen to the music that they play in church, but I simply do not care about music in general because it does not make any sense to me. As an illustration of how foreign music is to me, my friend once played Madonna, then death metal – and I could not distinguish between the two.
Faced with The Big Question, however, I do not say any of this. I usually lie and simply say, “I can enjoy music sometimes.” When I was younger, I told the truth and said, “No, I don’t listen to music very much.” When I told the truth, hearing people became shocked. “Well, what do you do instead of listen to music?” Most hearing folks cannot imagine somebody exists out there who does not listen music. I have learned that music is akin to religion or politics in many respects. I have learned not to say that I do not like music because, when I say this to a hearing person, he usually reacts viciously, as if I were insulting his very existence. I honestly do not understand this explosion because music is just a bunch of sounds to me. However, if I say, “Music is just a bunch of sounds to me,” the hearing person becomes even angrier.
Another aspect of the hearing fixation on music is the fact that they think that I am somehow deprived since I cannot listen to music. Now, I can understand why Beethoven’s story is sad – he devoted his life to composing music, but he went deaf. I will never understand why music occupies such a central position in hearing people’s lives, but I can respect the importance that hearing people attach to music. Still, the fact remains: my life is not any less complete because I do not listen to music. To expect me to enjoy music is like expecting somebody who cannot see any colors at all to enjoy a Rothko painting. I often cannot distinguish the singing from the instrument, I did not know that music has “color” until eleventh grade, and it was only last week that I learned that many hearing people associate certain songs with specific events.
Honestly, there is so much more to life than music. Movies, people, books, paintings, writing, making books, falling in love, and so on and so on. Why does music occupy such a central position in hearing people’s lives? As far as I am concerned, hearing people’s attitudes towards music are as fascinating to me as the African Bushmen’s attitudes towards Hamlet are to American anthropologists. Despite my best efforts, I worry that I will never get a straight answer about music because hearing people seem to operate on a central assumption: everybody listens to music, and those who do not listen to music are either crazy or hopelessly deprived. I hope I can open a dialogue despite my unorthodox views on the one religion that all hearing people seem to believe in.

Reading this four years later, it’s interesting to see where I am now compared with where I was then. I’ll focus here on my changed attitudes towards music.

I forget who the “astute hearing friend” was, but I would have to agree that music is almost like a different language. Growing up, I didn’t learn it, but I’d say that I understand it a lot better now than I did in the past.

I’d like to pause here and point out that people did try to teach the “language” of music to me while I was growing up. I took lessons for a few different instruments and studied music theory/history. It simply never stuck. In college, others gently tried to nudge me into the world of music. I’d hear stuff that I liked sometimes, but it wasn’t really on top of my list of things to do: there were so many other things I could be doing instead of listening to music!

One major reason that I didn’t actively listen to music to was that I unconsciously did not trust my own taste in music. Somewhere along the way, I got this idea in my head that deaf people couldn’t be decent music critics. This meant that, when I was 12, it was totally logical that boy bands were the best thing ever to happen to music because all of my hearing friends liked them. Therefore, because I didn’t like *NSYNC or Backstreet Boys, that meant that I was missing something profound in the songs. Later on, when I went to college, I still believed this deep down inside. So I was wary of exploring music myself because… what if a hearing person somewhere informed me that I was listening to music that I’d thought was good but was actually totally shitty??? Totally irrational thinking, but it persisted despite the fact that people constantly assured me that everybody has a different taste in music.

Then I went through a phase: I didn’t wear my cochlear implant at all for an entire year. I didn’t wear it to work, I didn’t wear it to school, I didn’t wear it at home, I didn’t wear it to hang out with my friends. I even managed to avoid wearing it around my family. But you know what? As strange as it may seem, I actually gained a newfound appreciation for music during that time.
Part of the reason is because I began going to a local nightclub where the DJ played awesome thuddy industrial music. Since I dance poorly and I was under 21 at the time, I usually ended up sitting in the corner next to the speakers and ‘listening’ to the music by leaning against the wall. Since the wall was made of conductive material, I could feel the vibrations. Eventually, I realized that I also enjoyed ‘listening’ to music at home in the same manner by placing my hands on my laptop speakers while blasting music at full volume. (Looking back at my play history, it appears that I mostly listened to Lady Gaga, Less than Jake, and MGMT – in that order. Oh god, my neighbors must have really hated me. In my defense, I refrained from playing music past 7pm or before noon.)

At some point, I said to myself, “I think I’ll wear my cochlear implant again.” So I took it out of the shoebox in my closet and put it on. After I listened to music with my cochlear implant in, I realized that I like listening to music with my cochlear implant. I subsequently got “headphones” for my cochlear implant and now I listen to 99% of music that way, although I still do enjoy taking off my cochlear implant and ‘listening’ to thuddy music via the vibrations.

-~-~-~

Remember my first post about music? I said, “I think I will try to listen to EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD.” It’s led to interesting results: the more music I listen to, the more accepting I am of themes that I previously didn’t like. An example would be high-pitched sounds: I can enjoy chiptunes and harsh guitar riffs now. In fact, one of my new favorite genres is Scandinavian metal, especially the band Týr. Also, my constant quest for new material has helped to stem a problem that I’ve had in the past: sometimes songs or bands get stale after listening to them over and over again. If I have a million different types of music to listen to, this doesn’t happen as easily.

To sum up where I am now compared to where I was in 2006: I’ve finally taken it to heart that everybody has a different taste in music. My taste is no more or less valid than anybody else’s! Now I open up iTunes with the attitude that it’s okay if I like this song. Since I can now trust my own judgment in music, I’ve found that listening to music is actually not a bad way to spend my free time.