A Natural History of the Senses

  CATHEDRALS IN SOUND

  For a long time, western music was homophonic, or “same voiced,” which doesn’t mean that only one person sang at a time but rather that there was one melody line or voice, and the rest of the music was harmony supporting it. Usually the main melody was the highest pitched, and identified the piece. Plainsong, the religious music of the fourth century, required no musical accompaniment at all; one voice sang the simple melody to Latin words. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I decided to govern music making; as a result, the Gregorian chant evolved, which was sung in unison. In the Middle Ages, people made the extraordinary discovery that many tones could be made at once without canceling one another out or resulting in mere noise, and polyphony was born. It seems impossible that it could have taken so long to reach that now-obvious conclusion. But music is not like vision. If you mix blue and yellow together, you lose the individual colors and make a new one; tones, on the other hand, may be combined without losing their individuality. What you end up with is a chord, something new, which has its own sound but in which the individual tones are also distinct and identifiable. It’s not a blending or, as one might expect when one hears a number of people talking at once, just noise, but something of a different order. A chord “is something like an idea,” philosopher of music Victor Zuckerkandl writes, “an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea.” For colors to stay separate without blending, they have to occupy space next to one another. They can’t occupy the same space. But notes can occupy the same space and remain separate. As Zuckerkandl reminds us, polyphony “coincided with the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, and the birth of harmony with the culmination of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern science and mathematics: that is, the two great changes in our understanding of space.”* This may seem an odd observation, given the fact that vision is a spatial art, and music a temporal one, which “unfolds in time,” a dynamic art that uses many devices, including syncopation, in which notes appear like hobgoblins where you don’t expect them, and vanish just as startlingly; or like repetition, which snatches us back to an earlier pattern or flings us forward as if on the crest of a wave. “Music is not just in time,” Zuckerkandl writes. “It does something with time.… It is as if the even flow of time were cut up by the regularly recurrent sounds into short stretches of equal duration: the tones mark time.” They stain time, then they reassemble it into small groups like so many lengths of cloth that have been dyed separately. At least our western music does; we’re used to measured time in music. When polyphony came in, the only way it could make sense was if each of the voices kept the same time. But if we look back about 1,500 years or so, we find unmeasured time in music. A Gregorian chant, like poetry, simply improvised time. Even today, unless everyone used the same metronome it would be hard to agree on the right beat in measured time, so the beats agree with one another, not with an absolute. Ravel’s mournful “Pavane for a Dead Princess” can sound lugubrious and heartrending when interpreted by one conductor, but almost sprightly by comparison when we hear a recording of it played by Ravel himself.

  If you look at the interior of an early Romanesque church, say Saint-Etienne in Burgundy, which was built between 1083 and 1097, you find a massive architectural style with a high vaulted ceiling, parallel walls, and a long arcade—an ideal space for processions, but also for the reverberations of the Gregorian chant, which fills it like a dark wine poured into a heavy vessel. On the other hand, in a Gothic cathedral such as Notre Dame in Paris, with its nooks, corridors, statues, staircases, niches, and complex fugues in stone, a Gregorian chant would be broken up, fragmented. But at Saint-Etienne many voices can rise, mingle, and fill the elaborate space with glorious song.*

  Western music has structures reminiscent of poetic verse forms. A sonata is as highly structured as the Malay verse form called a pantoum. The unstated warrant for the composer, as for the poet, is to stretch the limits of the form, to try to fly within the narrow corridors of a cage. That tension between the bright prison of a form and the freedom of imagination is what artistic genius is all about. Berlioz, for example, in his beautifully sensuous opera Béatrice et Bénédict, created music both grandiose and intimate. The duets shimmer with close, soulful harmony, the arias surge with an obsessive yearning that at some point breaks into melodic sobbing and sighing. It’s an emotional ordeal that’s personal and yet also larger than any one moment or heart. Zuckerkandl asks: “Who is man, that this almost-nothing, this ‘nothing but tones’ could become one of his most significant experiences?”

  In the Argentinean film Man Facing Southeast, Rantes, an extraterrestrial playing an organ in the chapel at an insane asylum, says, “It’s only a series of vibrations, but they have a good effect on the men. Where does the magic lie? In the instruments? In the one who wrote it? In me? In those that hear it? I cannot understand what they feel. Yes. I can understand. I just can’t feel it.” Later he explains that sensations upset the people of his planet, who can be destroyed by a catchy saxophone melody or a luscious perfume. He is not the only emissary from his planet sent to ours to investigate our one weapon against which they have no defense: human stupidity. Sometimes the agents lose their way, become traitors, destroy themselves. A young, beautiful woman, Beatriz, who visits him in the asylum, we ultimately learn, is one of those lost agents who have become dangerously infatuated by the beauty of human sensory experience, unhinged by hearing a clarinet solo, “corrupted by sunsets, by certain fragrances …”

  EARTH CALLING

  We think of music as an invention, something that fulfills an inner longing, perhaps, to be an integral part of the sounds of nature. But not everyone perceives music in that way. About eighty miles north of Bangkok, in the foothills of Wat Tham Krabok, is a Buddhist temple where a group of concerned monks help drug addicts to recover. They use a combination of herbal therapy, counseling, and vocational training. One of the monks, Phra Charoen, a sixty-one-year-old naturalist by disposition, also busies himself in the music room, where, with electronic equipment, he records the electrical phenomena of the earth, which he then translates into musical notation. Charoen and his team of monks and nuns trace the fluctuating sound patterns onto transparent paper, then transfer the graphs to thin strips of cloth that can be catalogued and rolled up for storage. The graphs match up with the traditional eighteen-bar phrases of Thai music. These “pure melodies” are then played on a Thai instrument with an electronic organ as backup, and the result is recorded. Charoen’s group are not musicians themselves, but they believe that music is not an imaginary thing, nor even something produced only by people; music falls out of the earth’s rocks and roots, its trees and rain.* One western woman wrote that “under the temple trees, with birdsong filling the musical pauses, the visitor sits … and hears the earth of ancient Ayuthaya sing, or the stones of the Grand Palace, the sidewalks of Bangkok—or the cracks in the Hua Lampong Railway Station forecourt.”

  This would no doubt strike a familiar chord with the American composer Charles Dodge, who, in June and September 1970, recorded “the sun playing on the magnetic field of the earth” by feeding magnetic data for 1961 into a specially programmed computer and synthesizer. The performance has a subtitle—“realizations in computed electronic sound”—and three “scientific associates” are prominently mentioned on the album’s cover. The result is at times booming, at times squeaking, but consists mainly of shimmering, cascadingly melodic violin and woodwind sounds. Harmonious and breathy, they often create small flourishes and partial fanfares; they don’t seem random at all, but rather energized by what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call entelechy, that dynamic restlessness working purposefully toward a goal we associate with composed music. I also have a recording of Jupiter’s magnetic field, a gift from the TRW corporation to visitors to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the encounters of Voyager I and II with Jupiter in 1980. An electric-field detector aboard the spacecraft recorded a stream of ions, the chirping of
heated electrons, the vibrating of charged particles, lightning whistling across the planet’s atmosphere, all accompanied by an aurora we hear as a hiss. Gas from a volcano on the moon Io adds a tinkling and a banshee-like scream of radio waves. Fascinating as this concert is, and useful to scientists, it doesn’t sound like music, nor is it supposed to, but music could easily be woven from or around it. Artists have always looked to nature for their organic forms, and so it’s not surprising to find a rather pop-sounding composition called “Pulsar.” Over four hundred pulsars are known, at various distances from Earth. Using the recorded rhythmic pulses of once-massive stars about 15,000 light-years away, the composer offers Caribbean-like melodies, in which his “drummer from outer space,” as he puts it, supplies percussion. The pulsars are identified on the record sleeve by number—083–45 on side one and 0329 + 54 on side two—as if they were indeed side men who sat in on the session. On another occasion, Susumu Ohno, a California geneticist, assigned a different note to each of the four chemical bases in DNA (do for cytosine, re and mi for adenine, fa and sol for guanine, and la and ti for thymine) and then played the somewhat limited-sounding result. Our cells vibrate; there is music in them, even if we don’t hear it. Different animals hear some frequencies better than we do. Perhaps a mite, lost in the canyon of a crease of skin, hears our cells ringing like a mountain of wind chimes every time we move.

  When the earth calls, it rumbles and thunders; it creaks. In towns like Moodus, Connecticut, swarms of small earthquakes rattle the residents for months on end. The seismic center of the quake storm is a very small area only a few hundred yards wide near the north end of town. I’m amazed there haven’t been horror films about a devil’s sinkhole, or some equal abomination. Ground grumblings of this sort are now called “Moodus noises,” but long ago, when the Wangunk Indians chose the area for their powwows because it was there the earth spoke to them, they called the spot Machemoodus, which meant “place of noises,” and their myths told how a god made the noises by blowing angrily into a cave. Cluster earthquakes can sound as light as corks popping or as relentless as cavalry charging. “Thunder underfoot” is how some have described it. “It’s like you got hit on the bottom of your feet with a sledgehammer,” one resident complains. The Moodus quakes are noisier than most because they’re shallower (only about a mile deep; quakes along the San Andreas Fault are usually six to nine miles deep). Normal deep quakes lose much of their voice to the ground, which dampens and stills it. It may also be that the earth around Moodus simply conducts sound well. Since the town is located between two nuclear power plants, its residents grow anxious when the quakes rage for months, shifting and cracking the earth and sounding like a chronically rattling pantry.

  At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a pipe organ plays the sounds of San Francisco harbor as tide sloshes through its hollows, ringing with a thick brassy murmur. Now that the Russians and the Americans are planning a joint trip to Mars, I very much hope they’ll take a set of panpipes along with them, so perfect for the windswept surface of Mars. Pipes would be an especially good choice because, although every culture on our planet makes music, each culture seems to invent drums and flutes before anything else. Something about the idea of breath or wind entering a piece of wood and filling it roundly with a vital cry—a sound—has captivated us for millennia. It’s like the spirit of life playing through the whole length of a person’s body. It’s as if we could breathe into the trees and make them speak. We hold a branch in our hands, blow into it, and it groans, it sings.

  *Carol Burke, a folklorist researching military marching chants, sent me this typical one. Most of them, she informs me, are equally crude, repetitive, and insulting.

  Rich girl uses Vaseline

  Poor girl uses lard

  But Lulu uses axle grease

  And bangs ’em twice as hard

  Bang, bang Lulu

  Bang away all day

  Bang, bang Lulu

  Who ya gonna bang today?

  Rich girl uses tampons

  Poor girl uses rags

  But Lulu’s cunt’s so goddamn big

  She uses burlap bags

  Bang, bang Lulu

  Bang away all day, etc.

  *A creation myth found in the Popol Vuh, a book sacred to the Maya, explains that the first human creatures to appear on earth were “Jaguar of Sweet Laughter,” “Black Jaguar,” “Jaguar of the Night,” and “Mahucutah, the Not-Brushed,” with one thing in common: all could speak.

  *Another Saxon word for having sex was swyve, which the British still sometimes use.

  †Ultimately documents began doubling up their terms to include both French and Saxon, and that’s how legalese has stayed to this day, as in the phrases “let and hindrance,” or “keep and maintain.”

  *Research has shown that a quiet woman’s voice got a pilot’s attention faster than a man speaking quietly or a man or woman speaking loudly.

  *Finnish researchers studying diet and heart disease discovered that a low-fat diet can improve hearing. Apparently, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, and drinking too much caffeine, which can slow up the circulation, limit blood flow through the ears, too. When rats on low-fat diets were exposed to loud noises they didn’t have as much ear damage.

  *From a letter to Dr. J. Kerr Love, March 31, 1910, from the souvenir program commemorating Helen Keller’s visit to Queensland Adult Deaf and Dumb Mission in 1948.

  *In a letter to the editor of the National Geographic (December 1989), Armand E. Singer reports that “I was riding an elephant in the Terai jungle of Nepal when I heard, so low-pitched as to be almost inaudible, a vague thudding like that of a distant diesel generator. It turned out to be from my elephant, expressing fear of a nearby rhino whose scent it had caught.”

  *Just as there are niches in the sky, there are altitudes that various birds, bats, insects, pollen, and other fliers prefer (blue jays fly low by day when they migrate, shorebirds fly high by night), so that they won’t be in extreme competition with one another.

  *He wrote this music for Martha Graham while living in a Hollywood block house with no windows.

  *Lord Byron wrote a famous poem about the waltz, whose excesses he admired.

  *“Any space is as much a part of the instrument as the instrument itself.”—Pauline Oliveros.

  *This very modern-sounding observation was also made by Abbé Suger, a counselor to Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the twelfth century.

  *In The Heart of the Hunter, Laurens van der Post reports that Bushmen speak of someone’s death like this: “The sound which used to ring in the sky for him no longer rings.”

  Vision

  The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something.… To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.

  John Ruskin,

  Modern Painters

  THE BEHOLDER’S EYE

  Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret: You are looking into a predator’s eyes. Most predators have eyes set right on the front of their heads, so they can use binocular vision to sight and track their prey. Our eyes have separate mechanisms that gather the light, pick out an important or novel image, focus it precisely, pinpoint it in space, and follow it; they work like top-flight stereoscopic binoculars. Prey, on the other hand, have eyes at the sides of their heads, because what they really need is peripheral vision, so they can tell when something is sneaking up behind them. Something like us. If it’s “a jungle out there” in the wilds of the city, it may be partly because the streets are jammed with devout predators. Our instincts stay sharp, and, when necessary, we just decree one another prey and have done with it. Whole countries sometimes. Once we domesticated fire as if it were some beautiful temperamental animal; harnessing both its energy and its light, it became possible for us to cook food to make it easier to chew and digest, and, as we found out eventually, to kill germs. But we can eat cold food perfectly w
ell, too, and did for thousands of years. What does it say about us that, even in refined dining rooms, our taste is for meat served at the temperature of a freshly killed antelope or warthog?

  Though most of us don’t hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being farther off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do—bats and dolphins, for instance—seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes’ elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn’t, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze—the sudden close-up of the loved one’s eyelashes and hair, the wallpaper, the clock face, the dust motes suspended in a shaft of sunlight. Lovers want to do serious touching, and not be disturbed. So they close their eyes as if asking two cherished relatives to leave the room.