Listening with Your Whole Body: Better Hearing Through the Somatic Experience of Sound (Feldenkrais based) [2nd Edition] 9780978401467

Table of contents :
Foreword – xi
Dedications and Acknowledgements – xv
Part One: Basics of Hearing and Listening – 1
Chapter 1: Sound is a Spatial Event – 1
Chapter 2: If a Tree falls in the Forest – 7
Chapter 3: Sensing and Attending – 9
Chapter 4: A Pair of Impairments – 13
Chapter 5: The Visible Ear I – 15
Chapter 6: The Visible Ear II – 19
Chapter 7: Vibrating Bodies I – 21
Chapter 8: Vibrating Bodies II – 25
Chapter 9: Particle and Wave – 29
Chapter 10: Music and Cognition – 33
Part Two: Growing up Listening, or Not – 35
Chapter 11: Rumi’s Tongue, Einstein’s Tongue, & Yours – 35
Chapter 12: Mirroring and Abandonment – 41
Chapter 13: Walk and Talk: The Great Separation – 45
Chapter 14: Listening and Language Learning – 47
Part Three: Back to the Roots of Meaning – 49
Chapter 15: Resonance, Harmony and Entrainment – 49
Chapter 16: Rumi and the Poetry of Reconnection – 55
Chapter 17: Rilke and the Mythology of Reconnection – 57
Chapter 18: The Sociobiology of Reconnection – 61
Part Four: Some Difficulties – 65
Chapter 19: Closing the Doors of Perception – 65
Chapter 20: Rooms for Improvement – 71
Chapter 21: The Assault on the Ears – 75
Chapter 22: Tinnitus – 79
Chapter 23: The Shadow of Language Itself – 87
Chapter 24: Body Armour: Pro and Con – 93
Part Five: Listening to Music and Language – 95
Chapter 25: The Hang of Listening – 95
Chapter 26: Listening to Words – 97
Part Six: Listening out of the Box – 101
Chapter 27: Perception: Left, Right, and 360 Degrees – 101
Chapter 28: Why are Whales Big? – 107
Chapter 29: Muscles and Tubes – 113
Chapter 30: “I feel like my skin is all ears!” – 117
Chapter 31: Echolocation – 121
Part Seven: Deep Listening, and Deeper – 123
Chapter 32: Musicians Together – 123
Chapter 33 Two Silences – 127
Chapter 34: Listening-without-an-Object – 129
Part Eight: Afterword – 133
Appendix I: Short Exercises: Reprise – 139
Appendix II: A Home Listening Practice – 141
Appendix III: Imagining an Integrative Approach – 145
Appendix IV: The Work of Alfred Tomatis – 151
Appendix V: A Piano Tuner’s Way in Listening – 155
Bibliography – 159

Citation preview

David Kaetz LISTENING WITH YOUR WHOLE BODY

Better Hearing through the Somatic Experience of Sound SecondEdi tion

David Kaetz LISTENING WITH YOUR WHOLE BODY

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LISTENING WITH YOUR WHOLE BODY: Better Hearing through the Somatic Experience of Sound by

David Kaetz

© 2018 Second Edition

www.da vidkaetz.com www.listeningwith yourwholebod y.com

River Centre Publishing Hornby Island Canada

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First Editi on© 2017 . Second Edition © 2018. ISBN 978-0-9784014-6-7 . All rights reserved. Print ed in Canada. 2nd Edition, 2nd Printin g: Jun e, 2018.

By the same author:

• Making Connections: Roots and Resonance in the Life and Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais (2007) • The Ezekiel Code:A Vision of Living Bones (20 14)

Listening with Your Who le Body,.,., is a tr ade mark of the author. Cover photo :© G iovann i Dall ' Orto. Roman mosa ic, featurin g Orph eus surround ed by enchant ed anima ls. First page photo: Chladni Plate from William Henry Stone, Elementary Lessons on 5011 11d , (London: Macmillan, 1879) p. 26, fig. 12.

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Listen Listen more carefully to what is around you Right now ... There is an astonishing vastn ess Of movement and life ... 0 listen Listen more carefully To what is inside of you right now. In my world All that remains is the wondrous call to Dance and prayer Rising up like a thousand suns Out of the mouth of a Single bird .1 ~

Hafiz (1320 -1389) (trans . Ladinsky)

Have you heard the music th at no fingers enter into? Far inside the house entangled music What is the sen se of leaving your house? .2 ~

Kabir (1440-1508) (trans. Bly)

~

A white flower grows in the quietness .

Let your tongue become that flower. 3 - Rumi (1207-1273) (trans. Barks)

1

Hafiz (Danie l Ladinsk-y,trans .), The Subject Tonight is Love. (N.Y.: Penguin, 2003), 28-29. (Excerpts)

2

Kabir (Robe rt Bly, tra ns.), The Kabir Book (Bosto n: Beacon, 1992) 70.

3

Rurni (Co lem an Barks, trans.), Th e Big Red Book . (N.Y.: Harper One, 20 10) 194. - vii-

- viii-

TABLEOF CONTENTS FOREWORD

xi

Dedications and Acknowledgements

Part One: The Basics of Hearing and Listening Chapter 1: Sound is a Spatial Event

xv

1 1

Chapter 2: If a Treefalls in the Forest

7

Chapter 3: Sensing and Attending

9

Chapter 4: A Pair of Impairments

13

Chapter 5: The Visible Ear I

15

Chapter 6: The Visible Ear II

19

Chapter 7: Vibrating Bodies I

21

Chapter 8: VibratingBodies II

25

Chapter 9: Particleand Wave

29

Chapter 10: Music and Cognition

33

Part Two: Growing up Listening, or Not

35

Chapter 11: Rumi's Tongue, Einstein's Tongue, & Yours

35

Chapter 12: Mirroringand Abandonment

41

Chapter 13: Walk and Talk: The Great Separation

45

Chapter 14: Listening and Language Learning

47

Part Three: Back to the Roots of Meaning

49

Chapter 15: Resonance,Harmony and Entrainment

49

Chapter 16: Rumi and the Poetry of Reconnection

55

Chapter 17: Rilke and the Mythology of Reconnection

57

Chapter 18: The Sociobiologyof Reconnection

61

Part Four: Some Difficulties

65

Chapter 19: Closing the Doors of Perception

65

Chapter 20: Rooms for Improvement

71

Chapter 2 1: The Assault on the Ears

75

Chapter 22: Tinnitus

79

Chapter 23: The Shadow of Language Itself

87

Chapter 24: Body Armour: Pro and Con

93

Part Five: Listening to Music and Language

95

Chapter 25 : The Hang of Listening

95

Chapter 26: Listening to Words

97

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Part Six: List ening out of the Box

101

Chapter 27: The Sphere whose Centr e we A re

101

Chapter 28 : Why are Wha les Big?

107

Chapter 29: Muscles and Tubes

113

Chapter 30: "I feel li ke my skin is all ears!"

117

Chapter 31: Echolocation

121

Part Seven: Deep Listening, and Deeper Chapter 32: Musicians Together

123 123

Chapter 33 Two Sil ences

127

Chapter 34: Listening-with out-an-Object

129

Part Eight: Afterword

133

Appendix I: Short Exercises:Reprise

139

Appendix II : A Home Listening Practice

141

Appendix III : Imaginin g an Int egrative Approach

145

Appendix I V: The Work of A lfr ed Tomatis

151

Appendix V: A Piano Tuner's Way in Listening

155

Bibliography

159

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FOREWORD The long-h eld conc ept of the perceptu al brain being compo sed of separate sense regions is being overturned. Your brain seems designed around multisensory input, and mu ch of it doesn't care through which sense information comes. Your brain wants to know about the world-not about light or sound, as such. - Lawrence Rosenblum , See what 1'111 Saying (NY: Norton, 2011 ) 280.

We begin to hear-and to remember what we hear-long before we are born into this world. And, as we take our leave, our sense of hearing is our last link to the plane of existence we call life. Our hearing is in place long before we have any idea of a self, and it is there while all that we cherish of that self is dissolving. And, in between these fateful bookends, whether we like it or not, hearing is on all the time, reaching out in all directions . Our auditory sense gives us constant and fundamental bearings on the world. It is by this evidence, the first and last and most continuous, that we construct a life. Because hearing connects our life to others through language, upon it we also construct an intelligence, and a living society. A distinctly central role, one would have to agree! If it should come to pass that this fundamental link is compromised by one or the other form of loss or distortion, then we face a serious challenge to our well-being, both personal and social. How much more surprising is it then, given its centrality, that the domi nant view of the auditory sense has hardly shifted since the nineteenth century. To be sure, in the event of hearing loss we have various ultra-modern tools-stylish, miniaturized, and unobtrusive- which we use to turn up the auditory signal. However, whil e this technical approach addresses the quantity of input to our organ of hearing, it does not actually deal with the way we listen. Back in the day when my father had lower back pain, the best medical practice was: apply hot packs and/or strap the poor guy 's torso into a girdle . How he moved, how he sat , how he stood , how he flexed or extended his spine ... these things went largel y unexamined . And this was not so long ago! Since then we have learned , hopefully, that we need to consider how a person is using his or her whole spine. From the way we move we obtain indications for improvement, and the usual result is less pain and more efficiency in movement . We call this a holistic approach , and it works . It seems obvious enough today, but it wasn 't then . -xi-

When it comes to the senses, how ever, we are not ther e yet. As a rule, visual and audit ory correction is prescribed with out inquirin g into th e way a person attends to visual and auditory stim uli. We forget to ask what he or she is looking at or listening to , and with what amo unt of stress or ease, and when, and in what positions. We ignore the roles of the brain, the interplay of all the senses, personal histor y, unconscious attit ud es, and the quality of movement it self. Instead, we satisfy ourse lves with fiddling with the sensory eq uivalent of hot-packs and gird les. Somatic work with the senses chall enges a number of idees fixes. The most imp lacab le among them is the notion th at seein g involves only the eyes and heari ng involves only the ears. Neverthe less, as it is the whole person who walks and runs-not just the legs-it is surely the who le person who looks and sees, listens and hears. Working with the who le sensing person produces qualitati ve shifts in perception. In other words, by learnin g to look and listen differentl y, people do see and hear differently. Improving your listening can alter the dimen siona lity, depth, colou r, and text ure of your auditory experie nce, along with yo ur satisfaction from it. These changes in the exper ienced qua lity of percept ion do not occur in the ears, but in the brain, and as such the y are not necessarily detectabl e by the quantitative measurements by wh ich visual and auditory diagnoses are made. We are, th ankfu lly, infinitely more comp lex than the devices we invent and the descriptions they provide. The sense of hearing is abou t far mor e than loudness, and th e activity of listening involves far more than th e ears. In the .same way that tai chi impli es a specia l atti tud e toward movement , Listenin g with Your Whol e BodyTM represents a special attitud e toward hearing and the acts of listen ing. The terms somat ic listening and embodied listen ing are used to point in the same direction, with slightl y different emphases 1• The und erlying intention is to brin g to the auditory sense the same systemic mindfulness that , through such pract ices as meditation and tai chi, man y have learned to extend to other areas of their lives.

When there is a problem with hearing, it is genera lly considered to be a medical matter. It goes without saying, however, th at hearing improves with better listening, and listening is, with few excep-xii-

tions, not a medical matter. Where, then, is the sphere of healthy listening? Where do people go for the enjoyment of sound? Music. As for the musicians themselves, listening is their stock in trade. If they are successful in their joys and labours, their audiences leave with music resounding within them . Although one couldn't say this for certain, one might guess that an orchestra composed exclusively of otolaryngologists would not necessarily attract more listeners, or encourage more listening, than an orchestra composed of musicians. As for somatic practitioners, listening is also their stock in trade. Naturally, their clients talk when they arrive, with their voices and their bodies, and all along the practitioner is listening, with his or her whole self, hands included, to what is being said and to what is not being said. If practitioners are successful in their joys and labours, their clients leave more able to listen to themselves. So, as will become ever clearer in what follows, and although there is a fair share of anatomical exposition to come, this booktogether with the listening work itself-is about improving our sensory experience through our own resources: curiosity, movement, awareness, imagination, humour, learning. A functional understanding of the sense organs themselves lies in the domain of the natural and applied sciences. Pathologies of the ear belong to the otolaryngologist, audiometry to the audiometrist, the fitting of hearing aids to the audiologist, and the mystery of what we do in our brains with what we hear will keep neuroscientists busy until the cows come home. Listening, on the other hand-one of the most intimate activities of which we are capable-belongs to the arts as well as to the sciences. It has dedicated practitioners among musicians and poets , shamans and psychotherapists, ecologists, ornithologists, teachers, yogis, lamas, Sufis, monks and dancers. Neuroscientists are more than welcome, for they offer yet another set of metaphors to describe the indescribable. But the ten'itoryof listening, like the territory of poetry, music and everything else, is not the map, however detailed that map may be. To get there, it is not enough to know everything there is to know about hearing. You also hav e to be there. You have to listen. ***

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The listen ing work that I propose responds to an acceleratin g incidence of problems with both h earing and listening-not only among people of a certain age, but amo ng ever younge r age groups, not to mention mu sicians . It consists of practica l and effective tool s for improv ement , includin g individ ual, couple, and group exercises, lots of mo vin g, toning, listenin g, and laughin g. The effectiveness of these tools, and the cur iosity and en thu siasm of worksh op part icipants, have made clear the need for an exposition of the principles and understandi ngs that und erlie th e work itself. That said, read ing is not exactly listenin g. Most of th e exercises introdu ced in th e worksh ops are acoustical in nature, and require a particular settin g, group supp ort and supervision. Committin g them to text and askin g a reader to recreate these conditi ons at hom e wou ld not brin g them to life. There are some sh ort do-it-yourself exercises offered in the pages that follow, by way of illustration of basic concepts; these are reprised in Appendi x I. In Append ix II you will find a "home listening practice," in whi ch , through self-observation, you may expe rience some of the major themes of the work . This book does not proceed in linear fashi on , nor does the work itself. The proj ect is to grow a new awareness of an anc ient phenomenon. Like exp lorers of a new continent, we may round th e same mount ain several times, until we know it as one mountain . We shall not cease from ex plora tion And th e end of all our exp lori n g Will be to arrive where we started And know th e place for the first time . - T. S. Eliot, from Littl e Gidding

That mount ain sits so deep within us-as deep as gravity-that we hardly know its name . I invite you to join me in a journ ey th at turns , like Rumi's dervishes, and spirals, like the snail-shaped inner ear, around one of the least observed but most central aspects of our being.

1 Th e term soma. from w hich the adjective somatic is derived , refers to 1he body as it is experie nced by an ind ividua l, as opposed to the way it is described or understood from the ·•outside. " Thu s,

soma tic list ening gives more wei ght 10 the subjective experience of the listener, wh ile embodied lis tening refers. in an anatomical sense. to the place or placeswhere listening •·occurs."

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Dedications and Acknowledgements

Listening with Your Whole Body owes much to those who, by putting quot ation marks around the word "impossible," have help ed dismantle the Cartesian paradigm whereby body and mind behave like an estranged couple living in the same house for the sake of the children. These are the godparents of body/mind science, sensor y awareness, soma tic education, and body-oriented systemic therapies. An incomplete list: Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jun g, Fritz Perls, Emile Com~, Elsa Gindler, Heinrich Jacoby, Charlotte Seiver, Wilhelm Reich, Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, Karlfried Graf Di.irckheim, Therese Bertherat, Gerda Alexander, F. M. Alexander, Mabel Todd, Andre Bernard, Virginia Satir, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Stanley Keleman, Ron Kurtz, Bert Hellinger, Richard Schwartz, Peter Levine, Besselvan der Kolk, and many others.

Of this noble company, the most direct and persistent influence in thi s project is th at of Moshe Feldenkrais. It was his under standin g of th e optimal circumstances for learning that opened for me th e way to a somatic work with audition. Over the course of a long and colourful career, Feldenkrais showed his students how to negotiate successfully with inherited notions of impossibility. He didn't invent neuroplasticity, but long before we had a word for it, Feldenkrais affirmed its presence, made friends with it, and preached the optimal conditions for its flowerin g-a ll th e while dancing a bold two-step on the cusp of science and spiritu ality. 1 And while he did not teach explicitly about audition, in a provocative art icle, published over 40 years ago, entitled The P,imacy of Hearing,2 Feldenkrais pointed to a work that needed doing and th e benefits it would bring. The work described in this book is my contribution to th e unfoldin g of Feldenkrais' vision, as applied to th e auditory realm. I would also like to acknow ledge the work of a number of musical educators and bridge-build ers: percussionist Dame Evelyn Glenni e, writer, producer and impr esario Joachim -Ernst Berendt, Sufi sage Hazrat Inayat Khan, performers, composers and educator s Murray Schafer, Pauline Oliveros, W.A. Mathieu , and John Cage, as well as historian of mu sical metaphysics Joscelyn Godwin, and Dr. Alfred Tomatis , pioneer of a holistic approach to the auditory sense. Each has sought , in his or her own way, to articulate the manifest and reveal the hidd en natur e of sound . -xv-

Appreciations are also due to friends in whose company, through hours of challenging and inspiring conversation, I was able to give form to many of th e ideas that appear below. Among them: •

The late David Webber, friend, colleague, compatriot, co-adventurer, and developer of SeeingClearly,, an approad1 to vision rooted in the Feldenkraiswork. He was a great inspiration and support in the manifestation of this project, and will be sorely missed.

•

Eric Schand all, Steinway piano technician and tuner for some of the planet 's most accomplished keyboard artists. Eric has kindly contributed an appendix to this book, detailing his insights on the centrality of listening for the profession of tun ing.

•

Lucas Derks, NLP trainer, researcher, film-maker and co-developer of

MentalSpacePsychology.Lucas keeps me on my terminol ogical toes. My thanks , likewise, to a far-flung cohort of somatic educator s, each deepl y committed, in his or her own way, to impro ving the experience of livin g. Writing is solitary work, hence I especially value the contributions of a team of proof readers with diverse perspectives, including otolaryngology, ophthalmology , psycho therap y, semiotics, naturopathy, sound he aling and journalism. A deep bow , as well, to family, friends , clients and students whose auditory challenges have made wholesom e demands on my learn ing, and whose kind tolerance of my exper iments has nourished it.

' cf. David Kaetz, Making Connections. (Hornby Is.: River Ce ntr e, 2007) . 2

Moshe Feldenkrais,

"The Primacy o f Hear in g." Originally

published

in

Somatics magazine, this arti cle has been reprinted in Embod ied W isdom: The Coll ected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, edit ed by Elisabet h Beringer. (Berkele y:

Nor th Atlanti c Books, 2010).

-xv i-

Part One: The Basicsof Hearing and Listening Chapter 1: Sound is a Spatial Event It is not true that a person hears sound only through his ears: he hears sound through every little pore of his body. It permeates through his whole being. - Hazra t Ina yat Khan, The Mysticismof Sound and Music (Boston: Shamba la, 1996), 83 .

Imagine you are at a concert.

On the programme

are

Bach's Suites for Solo Cello. The cellist enters, his instrument in one hand, his bow in the other, and sits down on a chair in the centre of an otherwise empty stage . There is a magical moment

as Yo-Yo Ma gathers himself in silence, and the

listeners do the same. This moment

reaches its fullness, the bow hovering over

the strings. And then ... The bow kisses the strings, the strings shake the bridge with their joy, and the bridge brings the whole body of the cello into song. And, miraculum miraculorum, at virtually the same instant, you hear music! Your ears thrill, while the rest of you-water,

bone, and inner spaces-is

embraced and set

in motion by Bach and his cellist. How delicious! What we are listening

to is movement.

It comes to us

courtesy of the cellist, the composer, their teachers , many years of study, the cello, the cello-maker, the cello -m aker's teachers, sun, rain, and soil and the slow ripening of spruce and maple trees, not to forget hairs from the tail of a horse raised in a cold climate and (historically

speaking if no

longer so) the dried intestines of a sheep or goat. The movement

to which you are listening reaches you

through the air in the form of pressure waves. In contrast to electromagnetic

waves such as light, x-rays, and radio -waves,

sound waves require a liquid, through

solid, or gaseous medium

which to travel. Thus, in order for us to become -] -

aware of them-that

is, to hear them-some

liquid, solid, or

gaseous part of ourselves must be in contact with the medium through which the waves are conducted. It is the job of our auricles to gather up air-borne pressure waves, and to send them onward and inward through the ear canal. How tho se impulses actually arrive at their destination, the inner ear, is the subject of divergent narratives, all of which may be true. What follows is the story that currently wears the crown of consensus:

Semicircular Canals

EustachinnTube

Tympanic Membrane

Round Window

- Image by Chinka L. Brockmann - Percept ion Space- Th e Final Frontier, A PLoS Biology Vol. 3, No. 4. e 137 doi: 10.137 1/joumal.pbio.00 30137 (Fig. INLar ge version). vectorised by lnductiveload , CC BY 25. https://commons.wikimed ia.org/w/index.php?curid=5957984

Although the air around us is filled by an infinite var iety of frequencies, the shape and size of the ear canal tends to favour and amplify a certain frequency band which includes the range of the human voice. Thus, having passed an audition of sorts, pressure waves arrive at the ear drum (tympanic membrane) and set it in motion. The eardrum takes this message and passes it through the middle ear by means of a relay of three tiny bones. The impulses are delivered (in nano-seconds, and amplified over ten times) to the so-called oval window of the cochlea . From there they enter the spiralling fluid-filled tunnel of the coch lea, where they are detected by the hair cells, con-2-

verted into electro-chemical signals, and fast-forwarded by the cochlear nerve to the brain. When we notice their arrivalthrough

the as yet poorly understood

become aware of anything at all-we

process whereby we

call that noticing hearing,

and the movement of those pressure waves we call sound. Assuming the amplitude is great enough, the (undamaged) human

ear can detect sound waves as slow as 16 Hz (i.e.,

sixteen cycles per second, an extremely low sound), or as fast as 20,000 Hz (an extremely high sound). Within this span, the range of greatest sensitivity (that is, the greatest ability to hear at the lowest levels of volume) is between 3,000 and 4,000 Hz. And right in the middle of that range of greatest sensitivity is the cry of a human baby. Clearly, our ears were designed with our survival in mind. The frequency specialization of the human ear is matched to the requirements

of human

communication,

and, in

particular, human language. It is with this toolkit (language + hearing) that we emerged from a sizeable cohort of fellow hominoids and took over the planet. ' This socio-linguistic advantage of ours gets mixed reviews. Yes, the planet lies at our mercy. Meanwhile, for our overwhelmed hominid

cousins, countless other species, and the

planet herself, our progress has been a lesser blessing. As for ourselves, the development curious transformation

of language has brought with it a

and distortion of reality. To wit:

A camera takes three-dimensional

space and turns it into

two; in this way the grand canyon can be projected onto a wall, for example. We are looking at a wall, and seeing a canyon . This situation would become problematic only if we were to lose sight of the artifice involved , and walk, with our backpacks and climbing gear, directly into the wall.

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Likewise, the ear takes a certain band -width of vibratory movements (pressure waves) in three-dimensional

space, and

abstracts them into brain-worthy code. Thus, when a three dimensional movement, channeled through the ears, arises within us as sound, it does so stripped of its original dimen sionality: a spatial phenomenon becomes a non-spatial phenomenon. Add to this the abstraction involved in communi cating through names and symbols, and we find ourselves at several removes from reality. Nevertheless, these transformations would become problematic for us only if we were to lose contact with the original spatial nature of sound, which is still there to remind us where and what we are. Thankfully, one and the same acoustical event reaches us . simultaneously as both sound and sensation. The crucial principle for our work is: these diverse pathways meet in one brain to make one audito,y image. A corollary of this principle is that this image is enriched by the synergy of its pathways, and impoverished if one of them is missing. Although this synergy of pathways serves to ground us in reality, it is generally not understood to be part of audition. Of course, the pathway of the ears is the most obvious and the most sensitive. It makes sense that until and unless our hearing is somehow compromised, most of us pay almost no attention to other channels of information. Nevertheless, they do exist in everyone, and some people depend on them exclusively. Here is what the late Oliver Sacks discovered when he began the exploration of deafness and sign language which resulted in his inspiring book, Seeing Voices: The congenitall y deaf do not experience or complain of "silence " (any more than the blind experience or complain of "darkness") . ... Moreover , those with the profoundest deafness may hear noise of various sorts and may be highly sensitive to vibrations of all kinds. This sensitivity to vibration can become a sort of accessory sense ... -4-

Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations or sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C or a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering: an octave above this (thirty-two vibrations a second), we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of "tone" within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgement or construct of the norm al auditory system ... If this cannot be achieved, as in the profoundly deaf, there may be an apparen t extension of vibratory-sense upward, into realms which, for hearing people, are perceived as tones-even into the middle range of music and speech.' As Sacks explains above, vibrat01y awareness gains enormously in importance importance

if you are deaf. It is also of supreme

if you are a musician

Imagine, then, the importance

(or singer or actor).

of vibratory awareness for a

deaf musician. It is one of the lovel y paradoxes of this work that hearing

people, whether the y are musical or not, can improve their hearing by taking a cue from a population

who, by conven-

tional ways of thinking , can barely hear at all. If it seems counterintuitive

that

the deaf h ave something

hearing people about hearing, redundancy

remember

to teach

the principle

of

and the talent of our brains to seek other re-

sources when a particular resource is blocked. Thus, if you spend a few hours with a blindfold, you will find new skills in your ears. Likewise, when the hearing pathway is block ed (try walking around with a set of very efficient noise-cancelling headphones)

yo u quickly become more attentive to

visual and kinaesthetic cues. Dame Evelyn Glennie, a world-class percussionist and, as she would put it, a teacher of listening3- who just happens to be profoundly hard-of-hearing-offers

the following examp le: you

are standing on a street corner and a large truck rumbles by. How do yo u first become aware of its advent? The rumble sets your body in motion and you feel it coming. As it ap-5-

proaches, you also hear it with your ears; this transition is gradual, from vibration into hearing . It is movement we are listening to, one way or the other. Another way to imagine this: a spider has no ears. It has fine hairs on its man y legs. It lives in the middle of an antenna, and it "hears" every movement in its immediate environ ment, includin g the movement we call sound. The auditory sense is thus composed, no t only of ears, but of a hard-to -measure synergy between wha t we sense through our ears-sound-and what we feel in our bodies, and this ratio will vary from one person to the other. Moreover, the ratio among input streams changes according to the needs of the moment , which suggests that we can learn to modulate it. And what we can modulate, we can improve.

1

Yuval Harari , A Short Histo,y of Humankind. (NY: Harper, 2015 ).

[Recent findings suggest that both Homo Neande1t/1alensis and Homo Erectus also had spoken language-Le., they were far more sapiens that ha s previously been thought to be the case.I 2

3

Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices(NY: Harper Perennial , 1994) fn.14, p.8. · See Evelyn Glennie's video, Touch the Sound.(New Video Group: 2006).

- 6-

Chapter 2: If a Tree Falls in the Forest

A brief re-cap: hearing is how we become aware of vibration in a certain frequency range. Pressure waves in th e air are collected by the outer ear, selective ly amplified or mitigated through their passage through the ear canal to the ear drum, which is set in motion. This motion is transmitted through the middle ear, where it undergoes further processing, to the inner ear, which transforms it into electro-chemical signals, which are forwarded to the brain. There, through some alchemy beyond the reach of words, these signals enter our consciousness as sound . Thus, sound and vibration are differentiated

from each

other according to the way we perceive them; technically at least, vibration becomes sound only in the brain. And thus is

a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it fall, is there a sound?-neatly resolved. Yes, there is movement, there is vibration, there are pressure waves ... but, no, sound does not exist in the absence of hearing.

the ancient philosophical

puzzle-If

At night, the skies are full of bats, but there is no sound, per

se. Not for us, in any event (though there are people who swear they can hear them.) Meanwhile, up there in the ultrasound spectrum, those silent-to-us little creatures are producing decibel levels comparable what we might hear standing on a runway in an international airport. What is more, with the help of their astoundingly complex outer ears, they are navigating and feeding-in the dark! Nor can we hear the love songs of male mice, which apparently must be reduced by four octaves before humans can become aware of them as sound . And if the scratching of rodents' feet in the attic keep s yo u up at night, just imagine the crooning of amorous ultrasound-equipped rodents. (N.B.: - 7-

while you are sleeping undisturbed, your cat is tuning in to mouse romance radio with great interest, at frequencies of up to 65,000 Hz.) Meanwhile, out on the savannah, with the help of their huge, downward-drooping ears, elephants are discussing the limits of human empathy at frequencies below the threshold of human hearing-Le., infrasound. They can hear one another across vast distances; still, as far as humans are concerned, there is no sound. Some people can feel the vibrations that elephants make, but the y can't hear them.

-8-

Chapter 3: Sensing and Attending Surely we need our legs for walking, but a graceful, elegant and efficient gait involves far more than legs. 1 Walking is something you do with your whole self, sound included, and listening is something you do with your whole self, movement included. While there are many ways to speak of the difference between hearing and listening, for our purposes, let us take hearing to be about sensing, while listening is about how you

use your attention. Hearing is something you have. There is some doing involved, but mostly hearing does what it does without asking you. As for listening, it is not something you have: you either do it or you don't. Hearing takes an adjective, like good hearing or impaired hearing. Listening takes an adverb, like listening deeply, or listening intently, or hardly listening at all. Imagine you are in a conversation with a friend; both of you are hearing people-that

is, your respective senses of

hearing are working well. This, however, is not enough to sustain a conversation, for we generally want a friend to be present and attentive while we are speaking with him or her. In other words, in addition to having a functioning sensory apparatus, we are expecting from our friend a particular activity called listening. As every member of a couple, every parent, every child, and every member of every committee everywhere knows, it is possible to hear without listening . And it is also possible to listen - to attend, to be present-and to hear nothing. A practical example is fishing: you can fish without catching fish. Yet even if there are no fish biting at the moment, the quality of your fishing has a bearing on the ultimate catch. If -9 -

you fish well, and if there are fish, you will eat more. Common sense confirms (as do brain-scan studies) that when you

listen better, you hear more. A colleague of mine teaches drawing; actually, he confides, what he is really teaching is looking. Naturally, he says, when his students have learned to look, they see more . . . and without any changes in their eyes or their glasses. While this may seem obvious-or obvious-the

perhaps because it seems

question remains to be begged: if we want

better seeing and hearing, why are we not educating for better looking and better listening? Somatic listening improves hearing in a way that, for all its obvio usn ess, is also novel. It does not do it by manipulating your sense organs, nor by adjusting the input they receive. Rather, it does so by reorganizing your perception. To extend the fishing metaphor : rather than buying a new rod and reel, breeding bigger fish or restocking th e pond, what we do is put the hook in the water. Again, we are not talking about altering the diagnosis you receive from your audiologist or audiometric technician. He or she has been trained to quantify the responses of your ears to particular frequencies left and right. Rather, we are talking about becoming aware of and improving your self-use while listening. This difference is neatly illustrated by the following thought experiment: imagine that the legendary Italian violinist Niccolo Paganini (1782 -1840) and the late Canadian hockey star Gordie Howe (1928-2016) were born with identi cal ears and identical ankles. This does not mean that Howe could listen like Paganini, nor that Paganini could skate like Howe. 2

-10-

1 In the wonderful film made by Norwegian musicologist Jon Rohr Bj0rkvold, When the Moment Sings, one can see clearly the difference between walking with the legs only and walking with the whole musica l body. See Bj0rkvold's book, The Muse Within (NY: HarperCollin, 1992), regarding sound, song and movement in childhood.

Paganini had a violin made by Antonio Stradivari (1727), of which he is reputed to have said: "This violin has a tone as big as a double bass; never will I part with it as long as I live."* Now if you were to play a C# on this Stradivarius, and then play the same C# on a plastic copy, a digital tuner would record these two notes as having the same pitch. The. differences between these two notes, as you hear them , reside in tone colours which arise from the vastly dissimilar resonance capacities of the two instruments. * http://tarisio.com/cozio-archive/property/?ID=40048 2

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Chapter 4: A Pair of Impairments

In order to address both hearing and listening creatively, we need to deploy these terms with some precision. As mentioned above, hearing happens. Listening, on the other hand , is something you do more or less consciously. And because we are culturally rather shy about, if not downright insensiti ve to the protean nature of consciousness, we generally pay little attention to the act of paying attention. How do you listen? You could listen with all of yourself. You could also listen with only part of yourself, while the rest of you is otherwise occupied. For example, you cou ld listen while in a trance , and later not recall a thing. There are many variations on this theme of auditory atten tion. You could listen in on a conversation,

or listen into

yourself. You could listen in a very open way, to whatever is happening,

or in a more focussed way. We call this more

focussed variant listening to; it stands in relation to hearing the way looking at stands in relation to seeing. Listening to implies that you are active ly selecting a sensory object: you are in a restaurant full of conversations, but you are listening to your friend .

Selectivity can also be involved in the other direction, that is, in not listening to. Imagine: there is a loud clock in the room. You cannot turn off your hearing. You can redirect your listening, however, so that you are not listening to the clock, and it does not preoccupy you . Auditory selectivity is a learnable skill.1 Being clear on hearing as a sense and listening as attending allows us to differentiate a hearing impainnent from a listening impairment. The most common kind of hearing impainnent is

loss of responsiveness to certain frequencies in the inner ear, -13-

whether through aging, certain illnesses, drug reaction or acoustic trauma (chronic or acute). This damage reduces the amount of vibration that is translated into signals conveyed to the brain to be perceived as sound. A hearing impairment is located in the hardware, and the tools we have evolved to deal with it are mostly technical and prosthetic. A listening impairm ent, on the other hand-which

is some-

thing that most adult humans

living in the "developed

wor ld" have experienced-suggests

a loss of efficiency in an

activity. While a listening impairm ent can have a neurological basis, it can also be a culturally and/or psychologically condi tioned phenomenon-Le.,

something

we have learned . It

follows that if the way we listen is learned, it is susceptible to change . If a hearing impairment is damage to the hardware, most listening impairments reside in the software. The good news is: software, you can update. The tools we have evolved to deal with impaired perception are neither technical nor prosthetic, but educational. One such tool is mindfulness practice, the cultivation of presence in body/mind,

usually grounded in the observation of the

breath. This will tell you how you are using your attention. Another tool is Awareness Through Movement, an aspect of the Feldenkrais Method , which, as its name implies, takes the investigation of mindfulness into the moving body .

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Chapter 5: The Visible Ear I

The parts of you that hold up your glasses, your auriclesor pinnae, have something in common with a radar dish . They are funnels for collecting input and sending it onward for processing. The narrow end of the funnel is the ear canal, whose size and shape favours certain frequencies. So, of course, it matters how big that funnel is, how long and how wide, how obstructed or free. The intri cacies of your outer ear also matter because the deflection of waves off those ridges and folds helps your brain pinpoint sound sources in space. How far your ear sticks out and the direction in which it is turned also matter, and not only because you catch more waves when you are looking toward their source. Pressure waves generally reach one pinna before they reach the other, and the brain compares the experience of the two ears to calculate location. Thus, although the size and shape of the outer ears are rarely discussed, and although they do not form part of standard therapy for hearing impairments, the y naturall y affect the quality of hearing. Everybody knows that enlarging the funnel by cupping a hand behind your ear will improve your hearing. All the rriore so if, like a dog or a horse, you can direct this newly enlarged ear toward the sound source. On the down side, ha ving noticeably large ears will make you the butt of countless social cruelties , even if you are the heir-apparent to the British throne or the former president of the U.S. If your pinnae are especially prominent you may have be en taunted as a child on the playground for h aving "bats ' ears." A useful come-back would have been: "Thanks!" For no one has better ears than bats. Bats are auditory super heroes, detecting frequencies as high as 200,000 Hz, while leading all of creation in outer ear -15-

design. Differing radically from one species to the other, and beautifully adapted to their respective diets and hunting patterns , bats ' ears are often bigger than their heads. At least one species of bat is able to change the shape of its ears- in flight, in a fraction of a second-to

suit th e needs of the

hunt.

The ridiculing of protruding ears is an int eresting special case of the unconscious tension between th e visual and the auditory . Big eyes are seen to be beautiful, big ears are seen to be ugly. Why do we think bats are blind? (They're not. ) Is it because the y ha ve big ears? In any event, all other things bein g equal, big ears do allow you to collect more acoustic information . In spiritual icon ograp hy, big ears are used to suggest something else again. George Lukas was onto something when he introduc ed, to a generation of children, big-eared Yoda as the icon of wisdom, and nobody called him names! ("Luminous bein gs are we, not this crude matter.") As for the Buddha, literally "the awake ned one," he is almost always pictured with oversized ears. In Buddhist art, big ears connote, among oth er things, an expansi ve qualit y of listening and compassion-even awakening itself. When one considers the sums that are spent on cosmetic surgery for th e sake of altering various angles, surfaces and volum es, all in the interest of visual effect, one has to ask why more isn 't spen t on impro veme nts in the size and shape -16-

this is not entirely in jest-

of the ears! For example-and

those that lie flat against the head could be tilted forward, and disproportionately

small auricles could be enlarged. If

these ideas sound ridiculous, it may be because most cosmetic surgery for the ears goes in the other direction: e.g., protruding ears are pinned closer to the skull. While this latter procedure may save you some embarrassment on the playground of life, it almost certainly affects your hearing for the worse. Although

attaching

custom-designed,

colour-matched,

pinnae equipped with swivel mountings to the side of your head might offer obvious advantages, such a proposal is admittedly a. hard sell. Silicon breast-implants and injections of botulism toxin, on the other hand, are easier to bring to market. Go figure. pre-pierced, multi-ridged

prosthetic

In a fascinating experiment that Yoda would ha ve loved, scientists in Nijmegen,

Holland , designed

prosthetic

ear

moulds to fit over the auricles of experimental subjects.' The subjects immediately

experienced a loss in their ability to

locate objects in space through hearing. But then, marvel lously, they regained it, their brains having adapted to the new ear shapes. Learning to hear with a second set of pinnae showed a strong commonality

with learning a second lan-

guage . Once spatial location had been mastered with the prosthetic auricles, the subjects were able to switch back and forth between their original and their ersatz ones with no further disorientation. That is, a new spatial language was acquired (i.e., made part of the wiring), one that shared a brain with the previous spatial lan guage. The exper imental subjects had become auricularlybilingual. ' Paul M. Hofman, Jos G.A. Van Riswick & A. John Van Opstal, "Relearn ing Sound Localization with New Ears," Nat ure Neuroscience 1:1998, 417-421 . (University of Ni jmeg en, Department of Medica l Physics and Biophysics.) See also: Veronique Greenwood, "How the Shape of Your Ears Affects What You Hear." New York Times, March 6, 2018. - h ttps: //www .n ytimes.com/2018/03 /06/ science/ ears -sha pe-hea rin g.ht ml -17-

-1 8-

Chapter 6: The Visible Ear II

There is a curious assumption which goes, in my experi ence, completely unquestioned:

namel y, that the best hear-

ing aid is th e least visible hearing aid. What is this about? This situation testifies to the paradoxical nature of hearing: while central to our place in the world, it is largely hidden, and it seems to want to remain so. Are we concerned we wou ld be regarded as less worthy or desirable if we were to

appear to have poor hearing? Do we sense that our very survival is at risk, as it certainly would have been , way back when,

were this weakness

apparent

to our predators?

Perhaps, being older and more hidd en than seeing, hearing doesn't, shouldn't, or can't make or even have an appearance? By contrast , vision could not be more "right in your face" than it is, nor our eyes more "front and centre." Thus, while unobtrusiveness is a primary design feature and selling point for hearing aids, those who make and sell eyegla ss frames employ a different logic. They use attractive models and high-qualit y photography

to transform

spectacles from a

revelation of impairment into a fashion statement with more than a soupr;onof intelligence. Meanwhile, riding on this different logic, there are hearing aid designers who cleverly smuggle their creations into eyeglass frames, so that hearing impairment is camouflaged as vision impairment . There may be other shadows behind our reluctance to be seen as hard-of-hearing, some firmly anchored in history. In

Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks recounts how the profoundl y deaf were once considered to be, at least in Europe, and up until the nineteenth accordingly.

century; virtually sub-human,

and treated

1

Now hard of hearing is not deaf, but it is close enoug h to feel the stigma, and no one wants that. Of course, stigmas -19-

will differ for every culture, but, as Sacks tells the story, there have been only a few cultures or sub -cultures on Earth where deaf people have been treated with equal or positive regard. Lurking still in living memory, there is something darker yet, which very few hearing people have heard about. And this stands to reason, for there are very few living witnesses, and most of them communicate

in German sign language.

The Nazi regime , obsessed with eugenics and racial purity, began by sterilizing the congenita lly deaf and then took to rounding them up and murdering them .2 While deaf peop le were not subject to elimination in the U.S., in the early twentieth century there were laws on the books in many thought

states enforcing

sterilization

for those

to be genetically deficient, which included

the

blind , the deaf, and the epileptic. Altogether, 60,000 people were sterilized . Meanwhile, deafness was considered sufficient grounds to be rejected for immigration.

Under these

conditions, surely one learns to conceal anything that might attract the wrong kind of attention. Naturally enough, perva sive social stigma, forced institutionalization,

sterilization,

and gas chambers have left gaping wounds ii:1the collective psyche which do not disappear in one generation. The pervasiveness of such wounds, whatever their origin and intensity, suggests that any holistic approach to the improvement of hearing and listening must provide a safe climate for the release of shame and traum a around auditory issues.

Oliver Sacks. Seeing Voices. (Berkeley/ Los Ange les: University of California Press, 1989). 1

2 Ryan, Donna F. and John S. Schuchman, _ed . Deaf People in Hitler's Europe. Washington D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002.

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Chapter 7: Vibrating Bodies I "E pur si muove" - Galileo. ("And yet it moves.") To perceive sound through the body, and using your body as some sort of resonating chamber, that has to take practice, and, you know, listening skills [are] about concentration, it's about focus, it's really digesting what is actually going through that body ... I'm sure if you covered up part of the body of a viola, or violin or cello or someth ing, it would be a completely different type of sound , possibly more 'choked .' So we have to open that instrument up. And likewise our bodies, th ey are the instrument, at the end of the day, and we have to open the body up, in order to perceive sound. - Evelyn Glenn ie - tra nscript of a radio int erv iew, April 6, 2014, Wisconsin Pub lic Radio, availab le here: http: //www. ttb ook .org/book/touc hin gsou nd- eve lyn-gl enni e

Try this. Lie on your back on the floor. Rest one hand gently on your chest, and the other on your belly. Now sing 'o,' starting at your lowest possible note and sliding, like a siren, glissando, up to your highest possible note, and back down again . Do this slowly, a number of times, so that you can feel what is going on in your head, throat, chest, and belly. Now, in the same position, listen to a piece of solo cello music, to Gregorian Cha nts, or to a jazz trio. Which voices, which phrases, which instruments do yo u feel where?

Resonance is accessible to all. Is it not puzzling then, that the experience of being literally moved by internal and external sound hardly shows up in scientific writing on hearing? Audiology textbooks will devote a great deal of space to electronic diagnostic devices and their use, and little or nothing to the somatic experience of those who dedicate their lives to sound (musicians and poets included). One might as well write a pasta cookbook without m en tioning cheese, garlic, olive oil, rosemary, oregano, basil or-horror of horrors-tomatoe

s.1

-2 1-

Any mismatch that exists between the science of hearing and the devotees of Orpheus is surely not driven by ill-will. Rather, when there is a choice between anecdotal evidence on the one hand, and quantifi.able evidence on the other, scientists will compose their understanding on the basis of that with which they are most comfortable, name ly, the measurement of quantities.2 Artists and their audiences, on the other hand , are drawn to the qualities that move them. For example, an ensemble performance is improved by the qualities of empathy and resonance among the players, and between the players and the audience. You can employ as much audiometric equipment as you like, and you will not capture these qualities, nor will you be able to invent a device to evoke them. These properties arise in a field of resonance. Thus, not only are they detectable by listening, but they are also in some way produced by listening. This is an especially savoury paradox, and it sits at the heart of a somatic approach to perception. While it is under -represented in the literature , the experience of resonance in the body is every bit as real as the experience of gravity in the body . (Recent research suggests, in fact, that th e two experiences may be related at a fundamental level.3) Now, if the bodily experience of sound is part of listening . for most musicians, for hearing -impaired musicians such as Evelyn Glennie, it is a larger part of listening. My own experience in teachin g this work suggests that learning to listen in a more embodied way offers a richer auditory life to people both with and without hearing impairments.

' There are exceptions, of which the books of Oliver Sacks (also a musician) are the most promin ent.

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" If scientific method is o nly one form of a gen eral meth od emp loyed in all human inquir y, how is it that th e resu lts of science are mor e reliable than what is pro vided by the se ot her forms? I think th e answer is that science deals with hi ghly quantifi ed variables an d that it is th e precision of its result s th at supplies this reliability. But make no mi stake: quantified precision is not to be confused with a superi o r method of thinkin g." - James Blachowic z, "There Is No Scientific Method," The New York Times, OpinionPages, Jul y 4, 2016. http://nyti.ms/29snUQo. 2

3

The gap betwee n scientifi c work on sound and th e experience of musicians may be closing, thank s to recen t wo rk by a mu sical neurosci entist in England and his colleagues. Dr. Neil Todd suggests tha t at least some of our experie n ce of resona nc e comes to us court esy of our "gravity sensors," th e otolithic orga ns of th e vestibular syste m . This fresh hypoth esis is described at length in th e Afterwo rd.

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Chapter 8: Vibrating Bodies II Imagine for a moment a loudspeaker that is also a microphone. This is you. In their most basic conception,

both loudspeaker

and

microphone function with the help of vibrating membranes. The microphone picks up vibrations and transmits them to an amplifier; the speaker takes amplified signals and sends them, as vibrations, back into the environment. If you have a fairly big speaker, whose cone is accessible for you to play with, you will discover that you can actually set the speaker in motion with your voice. And why not? If the speaker cone is optimized to distributevibrations, it is also optimized to receivethem. Like the skin of a frame drum-or

your eardrum-a

taut membrane

receives and transmits simultaneously. Imagine for another moment the earliest telephones: there was a mouthpiece,

containing

a vibrating membrane,

and

there was an earpiece, also containing a vibrating membrane. Likewise, you are also equipped with vibrating tissues for both in and out: eardrums in the ears, vocal chords in the larynx. Paired with these tissues are a set of more or less complex funnels and tubes, whose function it is to refine and direct pressure waves. In the days before electrical amplification, people with hearing difficulties would use an "ear trumpet"--essentially a prosthetic auricle. This device looked like a blossom, or, variously, a cow's horn (in fact, sometimes it was a cow's horn). The narrow end was held to the ear, the wide end was held toward the conversation. Try it, it works.

-25 -

Meanwhile, for public speakers, cheerlead ers, police and protesters-or

anyone

who wants to be heard outdoors-th

ere is

the megaphone, which is, from a design standpoint, essentially the same thing as an ear trumpet. It also works. The ear trumpet and the megaphone call to mind the iconic painting of the little white dog whose black ears are leaning intently toward the horn of a Gramophone.

The caption reads "His

Master's Voice." This image was used

extensively throughout the 20th centu ry, worldwide, by the Victor Talking Machine Company and its successors. The story goes that this pooch, one Nipper, belonged to the artist's late brother, whose voice was coming from th e horn ... and the sentiment the picture evokes was exploited for over a century to sell millions of phonographs, records, films, etc. Poor Nipper's full and perplexed attention is devoted to the wide end of a funnel, while the narrow end is connected to a needle, which rests in the groove of a disc. The technology used to get his master's voice into that disc was very similar to th e one used for getting it ou t: a funnel-shaped device connec ted to a needle. In photos from early recording studios, huge cones, as much as two meters long, can be seen reaching from the instrument to be recorded to the turntable or cylinder on which the recording was being cut. This entire tale of membranes, species bereavement

funnels, tissues and inter-

has been told to introduce to yo u the

following principle of somatic work with the auditory sense: what works in one direction also works in the other.

-26-

l.

The Shakespearean actor learns to broadcast his/her voice through the entire resonant body. So doing, he or she reaches across distance to touch the resonant body of the listener, setting it in motion. Resonance in the body is part of vocal training for singers: how do I best resonate this frequ ency, this vowel sound, this pitch-through all of my solids, liquids, spaces, membranes, tubes, and funnels-so as to put the sound out there, where it will make a connection with the solid, aqueous and spacious body of the listener. Interestingly, while actors and singers are trained to optimize the natural resonators in their bodies, listeners are not. In our workshops, we take the same road in both directions, using the voice to awaken the acoustic responsiveness of the body. Voice work and listening work thus share a concern with the resonant capacities of the head, the sinuses , the face, the mouth cavity, the throat, the upper and lower chest, the belly, the skin, the fluid body and the skeleton itself. Once this capacity is experienced directly in sound production, it becomes available for another purpose: to allow us to be moved by voices other than our own.

-2 7-

-28-

Chapter 9: Particle and Wave Wave-particle duality is the fact that every elementary particle or quantic entity exhibits the properties of not only particles, but also waves. It addresses the inability of the classical concepts "particle" or "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum -scale objects. As Einstein wrote: "It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do."

... current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa). This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also for com pound particles like atoms and even molecules . For macroscopic particles, because of their extremely short wavelengths, wave properties usually cannot be detected. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality

Quantum physics reveals the charming ability of entities to appear solid, while simultaneously

being nothing of the

sort. There should have been a Nobel Prize for the Buddha, who, some 2500 years ago, said: Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness. - The Heart Sutra (excerpt), Trans., Thich Nhat Hanh.'

Qu antum physics and the Heart Sutra notwithstanding, when we look for the causes of imbalance in an organism, we generally hold to the habit of looking for the visible thingthe gene, the virus, the bacterium, the poison-which has caused changes in the thing that we both are and aren't. What vibrates us, and how it does so, is also important. -29-

Study after study has demonstrated the power of sound and music to affect the growth of plants, milk production

in

cows, the memories of Alzheimer patients, test performances among school children , and the speed of post-operative healing. Someday, when you visit your doctor with a nervous ailment of indeterminate cause, he or she may ask you what kind of music you have been listening to, or whether you live near an airport. It is said we are both energy and matter, but this formula-

tion combines two incomplete notions, and so can only be an approximation

of the reality to which it points . A fuller

definition would also include the process of change itself, of which energy and matter are phases, and the periodicity of that process. Fortunately, given our cultural bias in favour of "seeing is believing," we now have plentiful visual evidence for the way unseen acoustic energy at various frequencies interacts with matter. Moreover , we have YouTube to hand it to our eyes on a gleaming monitor.

Chladni Plat e from William Henr y Stone , Elem entary L essons on Sound, (London: Macmillan, 1879 ) p. 26, fig. 12.

The man known as "the father of acoustics" was Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756-1827) , a contemporary and compatriot of Goethe, a physicist, musician and inventor. -30-

Building on the work of the English polymath Robert Hooke (1635-1703), Chladni developed a mechanical

method for

making vibratory properties visible. He scattered sand on a free-standing metal plate (Chladni plate), and vibrated it with a violin bow. This caused the sand to arrange itself in geometric forms according to the vibrational nodes of the plate. Simple forms were called into being by lower tones, more complex forms by higher tones. Chladni's work was taken up in the 20 111century by Swiss doctor, artist, and naturalist Hans Jenny (1904-1972). Jenny used an array of photographic equipment to record the resonance and flow behaviour of a variety of substances when they were exposed to electronically generated tones, as well as to the human voice. The science of wave phenomena which emerged before his eyes he called Cymatics. Jenny's work has been embraced, in turn, by the German photographer

Alexander Lauterwasser, who is particularly

interested in th e way water responds to sound. His striking Wasser-Klang-Bilder

(water-sound-images)

ha ve been pub -

lished in a number of collections, and can also be viewe d on his website. Thanks to the curiosity, creativity and persever ance of Messrs. Hooke, Chladni, Jenny, and Lauterwasser, there is no lack of proof for the eyes that the stuff of which we are made is shaped, moved , and even brought into being by wave phenomena, whether they are audible or not. The author recommends that you take the opportunity to wander down the digital path to YouTube, where you can feast upon the work ofJenny, et al. Likely the first thing you will notice in th ese videos is that particles and liquids are not merely affected by exposure to tones: they are differently organized, i.e., set in motion in particular ways by particular tones. The forms they assume, as well as the direction of flow within these forms, vary with -31-

the frequency, the amplitude, and the combinations of sounds that are used. Different substances behave radically differently, but all of them reveal design patterns which are familiar to us in nature at various levels of magnitude, from caterpillars to hurricanes, from fingerprints to galaxies. Given that different sounds evoke different responses in resonant substances and bodies, it follows that the quality of your voice is a major part of your communication with others, human and non-human. As your dog will gladly confirm, what yo u say may or may not be understood, but how you say it will connect.

1

http :// plumvillage .org/ news /th ich-nhat -hanh -new-heart-su tra-translation /

-32-

Chapter 10: Music and Cognition

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological term for the experience of dealing with simultaneous and contrary inputs. A standard

example is the so-called "Stroop Interference

Task," in which the word RED is printed in GREEN ink. In order to read the word correctly, you have to ignore one of two mutually exclusive pieces of evidence. This test appears relatively easy, but when we start to pose ourselves more complex philosophical puzzles on the basis of contradictory evidence-e.g. , free will and predestination-the

mind reach-

es its limits fairly quickly. Interestingly, this dissonance is language -based; without ourselves-whether

a language with which to baffle

it is composed of words or of images-

there is neither cognition nor cognitive dissonance. (There may be dissonance, but it is not cognitive.) A rather impressive study, 1 published in 2013, demonstrates that listening to harmonious music while confronted with cognitively dissonant

tasks helps peop le to achieve

better scores on those tasks. Conversely, listening to dissonant music while confronted with dissonant tasks leads to worse scores. The authors of the study suggest that these results are possibly a key to the evolutionary

function of

harmonious music (and possibly a key to why we find it beautiful). Harmonious sound appears to mo ve us through those situations which are cognitively unmanag eab le-Le. , where our very thinking jams. And life-the more we think about it-is composed almost entirely of things which can not be encompassed by thought. It is certain ly demonstrable

that music plays a role in regulating our brain waves. Thus, it is quite possible that a certain musical work can move us from predominantly beta to predominantl y alpha waves. In this way the quality of our -33-

perception moves from a narrow to a wider focus, and from dualistic either/orthinking, into paradoxical thinking, where what were once experienced as mutually exclusive realities can co-exist within us. One could imagine it this way: when we allow ourselves to be moved by music, its tones (sound in specific frequencies), its melodies (tones in sequence , connected within us by memory), its harmonies (tones in simultaneous relationship with one another), and its rhythms (periodicities and patterns among pulses) resonate and entrain many divergent elements of our selves, if not all of them . They can do this because we are made of the same stuff/not -stuff as music. If harmonious

music can have an integrative effect-Le.,

bring you 'into concert' with yourself-it sounds can be 'disconcerting.'

follows that chaotic

Consider the disintegrative

effect of having a drill applied your teeth. You can wear ear plugs to protect against noises coming through the air, but they are less effective against vibrations conducted directly into your skeleton. Therefore, harmonious music while you are in the dental chair-or

in surgery-is

not a bad idea.

This applies whether you are conscious or not, and on two counts: first, awake or sedated , you are influenced by sound; second, your dentist or surgeon (hopefully awake) is also influenced by sound . After your dental appointment,

when

you have recovered sensation in your face, consider inviting your dentist to a concert: beautiful music can help re-tune you both. 1 Nobuo Mas ataka & Leonid Perlovsky, Cognitive inte,fe rence can be mitiga ted by consonant music and fac ilitated by dissona nt mus ic. First publi shed on-line on 19 June, 2013. http s :l/ w,v,11 .nc bi.n/m.nih .govlpm c/arti cles/PM CJ 685829/pdjls rep0 2028.pdf The author s of the study cited use the tenn consonant with reference to intervals in a Mozart minuet. I have taken the liberty of using the term harm onious, used more commonly by musicians, to indicate the oppo site of dissonant . Nei ther term is particularly preci se.

" ... th e participant s we re exposed to a Moza rt minu et with prim arily co nsonant int erva ls, and th e int erference was in crease d when th e partic ipa nt s were ex posed to a modifi ed minu et with prim arily di sso nant in te rva ls." -34-

Part Two: Growing up Listening, or Not Chapter 11: Rumi's Tongue, Einstein's Tongue, & Yours A tongue has one customer, the ear. - Rumi (Colem an Barks trans.) , The Essential Rwni (NY: Harpe rCo llin s, 1995) 118.

We make sense of the world, even when it is rather abstract, by getting ready to act on it or interact with it. The sensorimotor part of the brain provided the original platform for the developm ent of more abstract cognition and comprehension, and continues to do so throughout life. - Guy Claxton, Intelligencein the Flesh(New Haven: Yale U.P., 2015) 155.

One of the core principles of the work of audio-psychophonologist and inventor Dr. Alfred Tomatis (1920 - 2001) was the notion that if you can't hear a sound, you can't make it. He developed an entire system of programmed listening through headphones , electronically filtered in order to accustom the ear to particular frequenc y ranges. With this method Tomatis was able to resolve vocal problems in his clients . From the perspective of a somatic practitioner and musician, I have long suspected that the opposite of the so-called Tomatis Effect is also true ; namely, if you can make a sound,

you can hear it better. We know that even thinking about movement invo lves some motor mobilization, however small. This is why rehearsing a movement in your imagination can improve the movement just as much as rehearsing it more expansivel y. Likewise, even imagining a tone or a sound involves some degree of muscle activation. What has not been experimen tally demonstrat ed until now, at least to my knowledge, is that, at an early stage of development (at what a Freudian would call the oral stage), the ability to differentiate a sound is associated with the muscles required to produce it. A -35-

recent study at the University of British Columbia, in which a team of researchers demonstrated

that babies listen better

when their tongues are free, has supplied the missing link: Theori es of languag e acquisition have typically assumed infants ' early perceptual capabilities influ ence the development of speech production . Here we show that the sensorimotor (production) system can also influence speech perception: Before infants are able to speak, their articulatory configuration s affect the way they perceive speech, suggesting that the speech production system shape s speech perception from early in life. These findings implicate oralmotor movements as mor e significant to speech perception development and language acquisition than current theories would assume ... 1

The researchers gave one group of six-month-old pacifiers that restricted the movements

babies

of their tongues.

Another group received pacifiers that left their tongues free, while a third group of babies had no pacifiers at all. The babies, all from English-speaking families, were then played recordings of two similar but dist inct consonantal sounds in the Hindi language. The study revealed that the group of babies whose tongues were restricted from moving could not distinguish

one consonant

from the other, while those

whose tongues were free to move could indeed do so. When one considers the enormous proportion called cortical homunculu s (the representation

of the so-

of the anatomi-

cal divisions of the body in the nervous system) that is occupied with the tongue, the mouth and the lips, these findings should come as no surprise. As Freud noticed with great inter est, it is with these densely enervated parts that we first meet the world. Why wouldn't the oral nature of this first meeting also have significance for the development of listening? Such experiments suggest that the more differentiated our awareness of the precise work of tongue and lips, the more differentiated is our ability to attend to vocal sounds, and, by -36-

implication, to attend to language itself and all that it imports. How rich and suggestive are these words: mother

tongue, language, monolingual, bilingual, multilingual! Consider this notion: with no tongue (and lips and palate) to differentiate them, there are no phonemes (the smallest units of speech) at all, and no alphabet or characters or hiero glyphs to represent them. If there is no alphabet, there is no alphabetical order, and no letter-symbols with which to chart our path through such abstract operations as the theor y of relativity and quantum physics. In other words, all that we do with language (i.e., with our tongue in the abstract sense of the word)whether literally, figuratively, symbolically or metaphorically, and exactly as the word linguistics itself would suggest-depends on our tongue (in the concrete sense of the word .)2 I enjoy imagining that Albert Einstein was demonstrating this fact in the famous photograph

3

by UPI photographer Arthur Sasse

(1951), where the physicist sticks out his tongue at the photographer ... as if he were telling us: "See!? This is how I do it!" How is this discovery about the tongue of practical use to us? In a very stra ightforward way, tongue-listening is a prior condition of reading and writing. The diagnosis of dyslexia is usually offered when children differentiating

begin to have difficulties

similar shapes visually. However , it may be

that an underl ying confusion begins much earlier-we might call it dyslinguia-before words become letters an d shapes on paper, and even before sounds become words. Thus, by returning to an earlier stage of language acquisition, where particular phonemes are acquired simultaneously by the tongue, ear and brain, and by clarifying the missing differences, changes are likely to appear in the superordinate levels of language. This was demonstrated to me by a dyslexic colleague, who told me there had always been words whose spellings had confused her. After she spent a short time playing -3 7-

carefully with the sounds of those unclear letters with the tip of her tongue, a cluster of spelling errors vanished. The UBC study further demonstrates, if more evidence were necessary, that listening to language involves more than the ears. It gives us a clue to the kind of movements we once made in order to learn to listen . As well, it supports the notion that there is a path to the improvement of listening that proceeds through movement. An impressive example of the function of the tongue in learning to differentiate non-linguistic information comes to us from Indian classical music. In India, a student of the tabla is expected to master rhythms of a complexity beyond anything the western classical tradition has to offer. While one might think that the first step in playing the tabla would be to train the fingers, in practice, the tongue comes first. Every student must master the technique of bol, whereby every possible sound and sequence of sounds on the instrument can be represented on the tongue. The recitation of these sounds in performance-e.g .: dhaa, ga, ge, gi, ka, ke, dhi, dhin, tin, tun, tit, ti, te, Ta, tr, naa, ne, re, khat, taa, dhaage, tiTa, tirikiTa-is every bit as aurally exciting as the music which it represents. And the key to acquiring this extraordinarily complex rhythmic language-for later use by the fingers-is the tongue. If the tongue is part and parcel of learning to listen to language, as well as to music, how do we, as children, learn to listen to the utterances of domestic and wild anima ls?

Well, as it turns out, not so differently: we use approximations of their vocalizations (e.g., cock-a-doodle-doo, miaow, baaa, maaa, woof, bow-wow, etc.) that we can "wrap our tongue around." Of course, roosters do not have lips or teeth, nor do they say cock-a-doodle-doo. So it may be that when we hear a rooster we are accessing our own approximation of his morning -38-

shout as much as we are actually listening to what he is saying. To attend more deeply to the voices of natur e would mean letting go of our approximations and listenin g, not on our terms, but on the rooster's . Other faculties and _senses can be conscript ed into learning to listen. How does a professional ornithologist learn to discern the mornin g song of the female yellow warbler from the fighting song of the male yellow warbler? Donald Kroodsma, author of The Backyard Birdsong Guides, suggests mobilizing the visual imagination: It helps me to grasp th e song if I envision a menta l image of it that I can read from left to right-a crude musi cal score that depicts the up s and down , the slow and fast parts, the tonal versus nois y parts, anyth ing that varies of th e length of the song. For a pure tone, I see a line left to right , th e line being horizontal if the pitch is consta nt , rising or falling if th e tone is slurred up or down ... "Seeing is believin g," as th e old adage goes, and "seeing" birdsongs like thi s imp roves our hearin g and memory enormously. 4

These examples of th e interplay of tongu e, eyes, memor y and sound may help to explain why, in our workshops , we engage in some curious exercises that , at first glanc e, do not appear to have much to do with listenin g ... and wh y, as we tune in through the synergy of man y such experi ments, there is a corresponding shift in hearing . 'Se nsorirnotor influ ences on speech perception in infancy; Alison G. Brudere r, D. Kyle Danielson, Padmapriya Kandh ada i, and Jan et F. Werker. http:// www.pnas.org/content/ 112/44/13 531.full .pdf

http ://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/uobc-bnfl 00915.ph p http ://www. th eatlan tic.com/ health / archive/2015/ 10/babies-use-their-tongues to-understand-sp eech/ 410461/ #article-comme nt s This inform ation is one key to th e catastroph e that befalls a people who have lost their mother tongue, for with it they ha ve lost a whole way of thinkin g. Mother tongue thus goes two ways: wh ile the phrase evokes th e language of the moth er, it also reveals th at th e tong ue is the mot her of cogni tion. This is illustrated by an art icle in th e New York Tim es, Jun e 11, 2

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2017, regarding language loss among the Haida peop le of Haida Gwaii (The Queen Charlotte Islands ): "Th e loss of one language ," said Wade Davis, a Univers ity of British Co lumbia ant hrop ology prof esso r, is ak in to clear- cuttin g an "o ld-growt h forest of th e mind. " Th e wo rld 's co mpl ex web o f myth s, beliefs and ideas - wh ich Mr. Davis calls th e "e thn osph ere" - is to rn , just as the loss of a speci es weake ns th e biosph ere, he said. "Engl ish cann ot begin to describe the land scape of Haida Gwa ii," th e Ha ida hom eland, Mr. Davis said. "Th ere are 10,000 shad es of nuan ce and in terpr etation. That rea lly is what language is." .. . "Th e secrets of who we are are wrap ped up in our language," said Gwaa i Edenshaw , a co-dir ecto r of th e film , who like mo st of th e cast and crew grew up learnin g some Haida in schoo l but spoke English at hom e" ... "It's how we think ," he co ntinu ed. "How we labe l our wo rld aro und us. It's also a resistanc e to wha t was im posed o n us." Ca th erin e Porter, "Rev iving a Lost La nguage of Ca nada throu gh Film, " New York Times, Jun e 11, 2017: http s:// www.nytimes.com /2017 /06/1 1/wo rld/americas/ reviving-a-lost-lanh'llage-ofcanada-through-6.Jm.html?hp &action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSourc e=storyh eadin g& modul e=seco nd- co lumn-r eg io n ® ion=top-n ews&W T.na v=to pnews&_r=O 3

Einste in and hi s tongue can be viewed h ere: https:/ / up Ioad. wi kim ed ia. org/wiki pedia / en/8/86/E inst ein_to ngue. j pg

• Donald Krood sma, Th e Backyard Birdsong Guide {W estern North America] (San Francisco: Chronic le Books, 2008) 15.

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Chapter 12: Mirroring and Abandonment Without your word th e soul has no ear, Without your ear the soul has no tongue ... - Rumi, cited in Annemarie Schimmel, Rumi 's World (Boston: Shambhala , 2001) 44.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt, post-war Germany's premier jazz journalist, impresario and musical philosopher, suggests that our relationship

with sound, sound-making

and listening

underlies our deepest attitude to life. Unsurprisingly , given his passion for American music, Berendt's road runs from shortly after birth directly to the blues. When you were born, your first successful act in the world was to make a sound .... If you had good result s, and someone came, th en this was the first action in your life which resulted in an outer response: If I am unhappy with th e situation, then sound will change this situation for the better ... Let's take this into your adu lt life. Let's assume, for example, that you are sad. Or heartbroken .... Now make a sound which goes into this sadness and pain .... Maybe you will have th e experience that you can even now change your experience through sound. - Trans. & adapted by the author from Joachim-Ernst Berendt, !ch hare, also bin ich, (Freiburg: Hermann Bauer , 1989) 139-140.

When we look at walking from a developmental perspective , unclarity in the gait of the adult may derive from problems with crawling. Is it also the case with vocalizing and listening, that if there is an interruption or incompleteness or lack of responsiveness in the earlier stages there may be some hindrance in their flowering? We now know this to be the case where the child's tongue is unable to shape sounds. What are the long-term effects in the event that a child's own sounds are not heard by others? Clearly, if a baby 's cries are ncit answered, the fruit is a preverbal feeling of abandonment, which can remain as back- 41 -

ground noise for the remainder of his or her life. Moreover, in addition to an undertone of abandonment,

this baby may

also have a disturb ed relationship with his or her own, apparently ineffective, voice. The authentic voice, as a projection of the person's power in the world, may remain unborn. There may be a sound from the larynx, but not one that expresses one's truth. Most importantly , if listening has not been modelled at the crucia l time as the appropriate

response

making, the light may not go on-even child-regarding

the connection

to sound-

in the hearing

between sound and inter-

personal relationship . In other words, the child may grow up with a listening disorder, or worse. As Oliver Sacks and others have described, if the early communication

of a child is not

mirrored intimately before the age of three-whether oral or signed communication

it is

does not seem to matter-

certain links will not be established, and the acquisition of language , and with it the possibility of cognition through the manipulation of symbols, will be seriously compromised. Clearly , there are degrees of abandonment,

between the

catastrophic-one thinks of Romanian orphanages under the dictator Ceausescu, where the children were not even touched-and

insufficient

love and responsiveness,

where

the parents are under stress, or distracted, or depressed, or narcissistic, or addicted, or for whatever reason unable to attend fully-Le., to listen. Whatever the case, that first relationship sets the tone for a person's own relationship with both sound -making and listening. Since these early exchanges provide the tools and templates for our own internal dialogue, if your original care-givers did not mirror you lovingly as a child ("seen but not heard"), as an adult you may have within you an internalized non-listener-Le. , you may not be able to attend lovingly to yourself. -42-

If we are successful socially and educationally, we might

never pay attention to these things ... until, that is, we are in a long -term relationship. There, as any couples' th erap ist will tell you, the first, most enduring, and most common complaint goes something like this: "He (or she) does not listen to me!" As the road to better walking will tell us a lot about how we moved in our first year of life, th e road to better listening is equally revelatory. Through it, we stand to learn a great deal-more than we may want to know-about the qualities of our earliest relationships. One way to re-establish good communication from the ground up, as it were, is to play with sounds as a child does when he ·or she is learning to move. In this way you can rediscover the power of your own voice as it is felt in your entire body, while listenin g to yourself with curiosit y, acceptance, and love . A baby must cry before the mother nur ses. Make a noise, poet. Want the deep friendship, out loud. 1

1

Rumi/Barks. The Big Red Book (New York: Harper One, 2010) 228.

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- 44-

Chapter 13: Walk and Talk: The Great Separation

Most parents are tuned to the sounds their infants and toddlers make while playing. When things get too quiet , that 's when they go to check what's happening. During the years of most rapid brain growth, while we are learnin g to walk and talk, we are seldom silent. When we are, this may well be an indication of hearing impairment. Not only is sound, by its very nature, movement; making sound is also an intrinsic part of our kinaesthetic life, as it is elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It is only later, when we sense that our voices make grown-ups uncomfortable (especially if they have had to repress their own), or when we are taught at school to "sit quietly and learn," or, as Berendt suggests, when our vocalizing finds no respons e, that we begin to split our voices off from our bodies. There is also a peculiar tradition of music education where, in a curious inversion of the natural order of learning , children are introduced to music as something to be read from a page. One message of this tradition is that music is not to be mistaken for the joy of playing with sound. This curious pedagogy furthers the divorce of the voice from the bod y. It is not surprising that many adults, in their thirties or forties, discover that the y hav e lost their authentic, embodied voices, physiologically and metaphorically, and they set about to find them. If such an adult comes to a movement class, a Feldenkrais

or yoga class, chances are he or she will be asked to experiment with moving like a child. This can certainly produce good results, but if you have ever observed a large movement class in action , you may sense a quality of earnestness which is wholly inappropriate for childhood movement. What is missing, of course, is sound, and its attendant glee. From the moment that students are encouraged to experiment with -45-

moving while vocaliz ing lik e children, this glee is never far away, and with it comes auth enticity . Enjoyable change is lasting ch ange; th e brain takes note.

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Chapter 14: Listening and Language Learning

A large part of our early conditioning and education concerns language, and, subliminally, the perceptual consensus underlying it. When you hear your mother tongue spoken, there is immediate activation of a thousand links of meaning: naming, identifying, recognizing , interpreting , comprehending, and engaging with content and all of its associations. Of no less importance, there is another world of meaning riding along in the feeling tone of the language. It is thus no simple task to experience your mother tongue as you did before all those links were established. In the beginning, it was just resonance, listening, relationship, and playing with sounds. Consider the implications for learning a second language. Imagine listening for the first time to the language of a forest tribe. Here you are just hearing sounds, with no links to meaning other than the unique music of the language itself and the relationships and context in which you hear it. If you remain with a simple intention to connect, without engaging in the analysis and effort which ordinarily pa ss for language training, you might be able to hear the new language as you first heard your mother tongue. If you were to allow your tongue the freedom to play with the sounds you are hearing, while actively exploring the forest (where the language itself is most at home) with your new companions, remaining in a state of receptivity , unknowing and play, you would be learning the new language as you did your first-

regardlessof your age. 1 As for phonology, vocabulary, syntax and grammar, your brain looks after this by itself, even as it did during your first apprenticeship to language .

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1

Regarding learning like a chi ld, consider thi s teach in g of Dr. Feldenkrais' remote ancestor, Rabbi Pfnchas of Koretz: In the "Ethics of the Fathers" it is said: " If one learn s as a chi ld, what is it like: Like ink written on clean paper. If one learns as a n o ld man , what is it like: Like ink written o n blottin g paper." It may be asked: "W hy di sco urage th e o lder man?" But the sentence may be understood thus: "One who learns as a ch ild, n ame ly as one who concentrates his thoughts on that which he is learning, and has no foreign thoughts at the time [author's emphasis], is like ink written on clean pap er; his learning will be engraved upon his mind, and in his heart." Thus , even an o ld man may learn as a child , if h e disp lays the necessa ry conc entr a tion. · Loui s I. New m an, ed., Til e H,1sidic Ant/Jo/ogy(New Yo rk: Schocken Books, 1963) 4-1:10.

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Part Three: Back to the Roots of Meaning Chapter 15: Resonance, Harmony, and Entrainment Rhythm, resonance, and harmon y order the heavens ... The deep structure of music is the same as the deep structure of everything else. - George Leonard , The Silent Pulse. (New York: Bantam, 1981) 9, 10.

Words are just pretexts. It is the element of sympathy that attracts one man to another, not words. If a man should see a thousand proph etic or saintly miracles, it will profit him nothing if he does not have sympathy with the prophet or saint. It is that sympathetic element that unsettles and disquiets. Were there no element of sympathy to amber in straw, then straw could never be attracted by amber. The sympathy betwe en them is hidden, however; it cannot be seen. - Rumi, (W.M .Thackston, Jr., trans.). Signs of the Unseen: The Discoursesof falaluddin Rumi (Boston: Shambhala, 1999), 7.

The vital spirits of humankind , tuned to the tone of hea ven and earth, express all the tremors of heaven and earth, just as several cithars, all tuned on gong [tonic], all vibrate when the note gong sounds. The fact of harmony between heaven and earth and humankind does not come from a physical union, from a direct action; it comes from a tuning on the same note producing vibrat ions in unison. - Dong Zhongzu (2"d century B.C.E.), cited in Alain Danielou, Music and the Powerof Sound (Rochester, VT: Inn er Tradition s, 1995), 2.

Long before we are capable of breathing or thinking or forming sounds with our tongues , and long before we have a sense of a self, we can hear. But without language or thought or self, what kind of hearing can this be? The most ancient and fundamental relationship with sound is resonance.In a narrow sense, this phenomenon is also known as sympathetic resonanceor sympathetic vibration, and refers to the tendency of systems - animate and inanimate-to vibrate or 'sing' in sympathy with one another. For example, if I play a clear note on my clarinet, while standing next to an open grand piano, there will be a 'sympathetic' response from the corresponding string in the piano. In a larger sense, the one -49-

used in this book, resonance also encompasses the phenomena of hannonic vibration and rhythmic entrainment.' Long before we have ears, brains, and names, and like all creatures with watery bodies and subject to gravity, we are touched, moved, and in some way affected and imprinted vibrations.

by

Later on, with ears, brains, and names, we learn

to do quite a bit with sound. We learn to locate ourse lves in space; we become aware of and make contact with what is going on around

us. We exchange

fellow creatures through

informat ion with our

audible language, and we learn to

think with internalized

language. These subsequent develop -

ments are so important

to us that sometimes we forget that

they would all be impossible without resonance itself. Deep ecologist David Abram writes: This ancestral capacity of speech necessarily underlies and supports all the other roles that language has come to have. Whether we wield our words to describe a landscape, to analyze a problem, or to explain how some gadget works, none of these roles would be possible without the primordia l power of utterance to make our bodies resonate with one another and with the other rhythms that surround us.2 Let us therefore take as our working hypothesis that reso nance is the substrate,

the foundation,

subordinate

other aspects and orders of sensing and attending

to all

to sound .

You have surely heard of plants growing toward Mozart and away from heavy metal? Consider the following ingenious experiment: Researchers at the University of Missouri have determined that plants respond to the sounds that caterpillars make when eating [one of the plant 's own leaves, previously removed] and that th e plants then respond with [appropriate] defences. "Previous research has investigated how plants respond to acoustic energy, including music," said Heidi Appel, senior research scientist in the Division of Plant Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and the

Bond Life Sciences Center at MU. "Howeve r, our work is the first example of how plants respond to an ecologically relevant vibration. We found that 'feeding vibrations' sign al changes in the plant cells' metabolism , creating more defensive chemicals that can repel attacks from caterpillars." 3

Here, in the absence of ears and a nervous system, are both the recognition of a signal and the response to it. The plant involved in this experiment

is not only being moved by

vibration, in the same way that water and sand are moved by vibration; it is also somehow alert to particular characteristics of the way in which it is being moved, and responds in a manner that protects its integrity. If this responsiveness to "ecologically relevant vibration" exists in many if not most living things, surely it exists in us. As the evolutionary

stages of walking, if not evident in

every human step, are nevertheless present, so are all aspects of hearing and listening present simultaneously. A corollary of the notion of successive and simultaneous levels of sensing and attending

would be that without the subordinate

levels, the superordinate abilities-such

as location , recogni-

tion, language, thinking and abstraction-become

progres-

sively split-off from their roots in bodily experience. In other words, to the extent that I am out of touch with touch, my intellect will also be, metaphorically speaking, out of touch. 4 Studies in the field of embodied cognition (Varela, Lakoff, Johnson , Glenberg, et al.) suggest that even our most abstract thoughts are constructed from metaphors with roots in bodily experience. Thus, tongues (languages) are constructed from the experience of tongues (organs). It follows that continually refreshing these metaphors at their somatic roots might well refresh the abstract processes that flow from them . This is why Einstein's sticking out his tongue some how suggests a fresh approach to science.

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When communication breaks down in a couple, whereexactly

is out-of-touchness? Where will we look for in-touchness? To improve communication, one can focus on the content of the discussion: e.g., needs, complaints, missing and/or objectionable behaviours . One can focus on the way the content is expressed: the choice of language, the volum e, speed, and inflection of the voice. However, if the actual resonance (including rhythmic entrainment) within and between the bodies of the partners is the most fundamental field of listening, then it should also be the most productive ground for improvement. Without it, the superordinateaspects of communication-such as content and delivery-are

compromised. In other words, if

your partner is, for whatever reason, out of touch and unable to enter into resonance with you- and you with him/herthen the most appropriate words, and the most elegant way of using them, will go only so far. An understanding of the fundamental nature of resonance (including harmonic vibration and rhythmic entrainment) has profound ecological implications, which we will look at in sub sequent chapters .

Imagine this. With every syllable you speak, you are setting your watery body and the watery body of your listener in motion . Each tone, each vowel and consonant-each with its unique qualities of rhythm, pitch, amplitude, overtones, and microtonal variation-evokes a particular symmetry, a particular colour, a particu lar emotional nuance. Try having a slow-motion discussion with someone you know well, in which you put at least half of your intention into this aspect of communication, that is, into how your resonating body resonates your partner, and vice versa.

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Resonating the body/mind can be done with deep intention: singing a mantra, a niggun, a zikr, a chant, a raga, an aria, a ballad or th e blues many times, organizes you in a particular way. This effect can be supported by suspending our belief in ourselves as fixed bodies in space, and allowing the self image to shift into the realm of flow and process. For couples: before you have a discussion, sing slowly and attentively together. It doesn't have to be a whole song, or have words .. . or even be a song, for that matter. Just take a short melodic phras e and sing it together in unison over and over. The effect can be strengthened by contact, especially bone contact; for example, try singing this short phrase together while holding hands , touching heads togeth er, or, less intimately, shoulder-to-shoulder. Let it continue until you feel that there is one song coming through you both. Then, when you actually start to speak with each other, speak with the awareness that the resonance of your voice is the larger part of what you are saying, and the verbal content, the smaller part. (P.S.: Dancing also works.)

1 Harmony, or harmonious vibration, describes a relationship among vibrating systems. Here the vibrations are not identical, but are in a mathematical/musical relation with one another, such that one tone matches an ove1tone(or harmonic) of the other. Thus, if you sing an A, and I sing an E which is not quite an E, it will sound 'off'-inharmonious . When my E arrives at a frequency that is at the appropriate ton al distance from the initial A-which musicians describe as a fifth-it will sound 'on' or ha,monious. Entrainment, or rhythm ic entrainment, describes th e tendency of systems to synchronize, or move into a common rhythm with one another-in other words, it describes the temporal, periodic or pulsed aspect of the ph enome non of resonance. For example, in a roomful of grandfather clocks, their pendulums will eventually tend to swing together. In musical terms, this is called beat induction. Thus, for our purposes, the term resonance subsumes th e following properties: sympathetic vibration, harmonious vibration, and rhythmic entrainment. 2

David Abram, Becoming An im al (New York: Vintage, 2010) 12. http://www.dailymail.co .uk /sc iencet ec h/ art icle-26 7 7 858/ Bad-newsvegetarians-Plant s-hear-eaten .html 3

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• Allow me to propose the following socio-botanica l thought experiment: let the hypothetical Mozart- loving plant represent this most basic stage of hearing and listening, that is, the ability to respond to acoustic energy . To represent language-based abstract thinking, let us imagine a lawyer arguing a complicated case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Now hypothesize a constitutiona l lawyer who is simultaneously able to feel Mozart in his/her cells. Charmin g idea, no?

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Chapter 16: Rumi and the Poetry of Reconnection While we hav e criticized the concept of functi on, even attempting a rather radical redefinition , we have adhered to it neverth eless, drawin g in th e broad est term s con trasts based on 'deficit' or 'excess'. But it is clear that wholly other terms also have to be used. As soon as we attend to ph enomena as such, to the actua l qualit y of expe rience or thou ght or action, we hav e to use terms more remini scent of a poem or painting . How, say, is a dream intelligible in terms of fun ction ? We ha ve always two univ erses of discourse-ca ll th em 'ph ysical' and 'phenom enal ', or what you will-one dealing with qu estion s of quantitativ e and formal structur e, the other with tho se qualities that constitute a 'world.' - 0 . Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. (N.Y. : Touchstone, 1998), 129

All men need an exerc ise of the spirit to be able to hear correctly. Those who do not have thi s exercise hav e to acquire it by learning. Neither in th e old days nor in our time s has it ever happen ed th at someone cou ld hear correctly without learning it. - Li Pu We (Lu Buwei), cited in Berendt, The World is So1111 rl: Nada Brahma. (Rocheste r: Destiny Books, 198 1), 149.

Let music loosen our deafne ss to spirit. - Rumi 1

From th e understanding

of devel opmental orders of hear-

ing we arrive at this premise: restoring our connection to our vibra tory nature-without attac hed-can

interpretation,

with no narrative

also help restore our connection to the world.

I say restore, because the ability to be pres ent in the senses is forfeited by most of us fairly early on. It is sacrificed in the headlong rush to acquire the pri ze of language, the badge of our humanity,

and then (voluntarily

or involuntarily)

to

acquire literac y ... in sum, in the acqui siti on of a socially acceptab le self and the abandonment of all perceptual abilities which fall outside its requirements. This is not hearing loss, but listening loss-what Rumi calls "deafness to spirit" and it is the source of much madness in our relationship with ourselves and nature. Over 800 years ago, the Sufi poet sang in a thousand ways of the lon ging to reunite with what has been lost. His bestknown poem on this theme is The Song of the Reed (referring -55-

to th e ney, an end-blown cane flute). (You will not be sur prised to hear that th e Dervish ceremony in which the ney is played is called sam'a, or listening.) Listen to the story told by the reed of being separate . "Sin ce I was cut from th e reed bed , I have made thi s crying sound" ... 2

In The Song of the Reed, Rumi offers practical advice for overcoming that separateness: The one who heals us Lets whatever hu rts the soul Dissolve to a listenin g int elligence ... 2

What shall we do?: Days full of wanting, let th em go by with out worrying th at they do. Stay where you are, inside such a pure hollow note. 2

How shall we do it?: I empty out whatever blocks a clear note. 4

1

Rumi (Co lem an Barks, trans.) The Big Red Book. (N.Y.: Harpe r One , 2010) 292.

2

Rumi (Barks) The Big Red Book. (N.Y.: Harper O ne, 2010) 293.

3

Rumi (Barks) The Essential Rumi (Edison, N.J.: Castle, 1997) 17-18.

' Ibid ., 293.

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Chapter 17: Rilke and the Mythology of Reconnection

The senses are occupied with bringing the outside in; through their work, we sample the world to make sense of it. Listening, on the other hand, works from the inside out. If you want to know more about how the senses work, there

is quite a lot of hard science-how ever incomplete and however contested-to

refer to. If you want to know how you work,

we have Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, Mirabai, Lalla, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Blake, Whitman,

Rilke, Cohen, Dylan, Bly, Oliver,

Sarton, Whyte et al. For when it comes to exploring the qualities of subjective experience,

poetry itself-what

Leonard

Cohen called The Tower of Song-is at least as likely to be helpful as the towers of anatomy and physiology , not to mention the tower of pathology. And behind everyone in that tower stands the figure of Orpheus . Orpheus was, so we are told, the son of Apollo, who gave us music and poetry, and Calliope, who, of the nine muses, had the job of inspiring poets. With parents like these it is not surprising that Orpheus was said to be able to enchant anyone and everything with his music, including the gods of the underworld . Around this magical figure, at once hum an and divine, there grew up in ancient Greece a mystical initiatory tradition, involving the passage from one life into another. Although little is known of the actua l rites involved, one is bound to assume that the powers of music and poetr y-and of listening-were central to the so-called 01phic Mysteries. In the artistic tradition of the western world, the figure of Orpheus can be said to personify the power of sound to touch us in our depths. This notion is reinforced, in a most poignant way, by the story of Orpheus and his great love, Eurydice. When she died - 57-

of a snake bite, the heart-broken Orpheus managed to en-

trance his way into the underworld , and negotiate his beloved's release, with one condition: he was not to look back at h er as he led her out of the underworld, lest she be lost to him forever. Nata Bene: it was through the enchantment of sound that Orpheus was able to rescue Eurydice from the bonds of death; it was through the distraction of appear ances that he lost her. In the German language, ear is Ohr, pronounced like th e English word or. Certain ly it was not lost on Rainer Maria Rilke, a master of sounds and their associations, that the Greek archetype of poet and musician, Or-pheus, has an ear in his name . In the first of his Sonnets to O,pheus (Part I, 1922), Rilke explores what it means to be touched by the archetype, as he himself certainly was. It almost seems from the poem that, while he was working

on the first of these sonnets, Rilke had before him the Roman mosaic you see on the cover of this book , or a similar classical representation of Orpheus . For my own free, non -canonical English adaptation of Rilke's poem, I have taken th e liberty of imagining that this was indeed the case. First the origina l, then the free adaptation: Da stieg ein Baum. 0 reine Obersteigung! 0 Orpheus singt! 0 hoher Baum im Ohr! Und a Iles schwie g. Doch selbst in der Verschwe igun g ging neuer An fang, Wink und Wandlung vor. Tiere aus Stille drangen aus dem klaren geloste n Wald von Lager und Genist; und da ergab sich, da~ sie nicht aus List tind ni cht aus Angst in sich so leise waren, sondern aus Horen. Brullen, Schrei , Gerohr schien klein in ihren Herzen. Und wo eben kaum eine I--luttewar, dies zu empfangen, ein Unterschlupf aus dunkelstem Verlangen mit einem Zugang, dessen Pfosten beben, da schufst du ihnen Tempel im Gehor. -58-

See the tree at Orpheus'right hand', the one with the bird in it? It grows in us when O1pheus sings. When listening takes us beyond what we thought we were, this is Orpheus' doing. You could imagine it this way: Everything is silent, A full silence, ripe with transformation. And from that pregnant quietness come animals2, from their lairs and nests in the suddenly well-lit forest3; And they are so quiet inside-n ot (as you might think) because they are stalking something, nor becausethey are afraid. Nor are they interested in the usual animal business of bellowing, crying and roaring. No, these creaturesare quiet because they are listening. For you have built inside of them, where there were once only the flimsiest structures thrown together out of need and greed, whose ent1yways tremble in the wind,0 Temples of pure listening.5

Says Rilke: th e power of the archetype is not in th e playing or in the instrument, but in the listening . If music and musical instruments

come from Apollo, his son's gift is a bloom-

ing within us, whereby we transcend our inner noise, and all preoccupation with ourselves . Orpheus is thus the evoca tion of a sacred interiority , free of craving and aversion for outer thin gs (List und Angst, cunnin g and fear), uninterested

in the "bellow, roar and

shriek" (Mitchell) of our instincts. There we wake up into something closer to who we actually are . This suggests a form of initiation, even a passage from one life into th e other. Music therapi sts who work in palliati ve care are familiar with this aspect of Orpheus, as are shamans. And, of course, evoking a sacred interiority is what the shaman Rilke, in vo king the ur-shaman Orph eus, is doing with us . -59-

' No te, in the mo saic, Orpheus has on one side a lyre, on th e other a tre e; they resemb le eac h oth er, as the tree resembl es the brachiated ner vous system throu gh which Or ph eus' so ng reaches th e brain. 2

Anima ls often represent , in dreams, our embodied inst incts.

3

Emergin g from the depth s of th e uncon scious, new ly lit. Literally, "from th e clear, un fastened forest," or, as translator Stephen Mitchell ha s it: "from th e bright unb ound forest."

' Like ea rdrum s and oss icles. Litera lly, "whose doorpo sts tremble." "with an ent ryway th at shudd ered in the wind ."

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Mitchell:

Chapter 18: The Sociobiology of Reconnection If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

We are born with a relatively undifferentiated

sensorium;

sound and light, touch, smell and taste, a great jumble of input, out of which we gradually master, through relationship and lots of mirroring, a certain shared perceptual logic. (One plausible understanding

of autism is that this jumble

never loses its overwhelming character, and so never turns into differentiated and sharable experience.) ' Normal development presumes the gradual acquisition of this shared logic regarding how it all fits together; without this, there is no culture. That said, cultures vary widely in the kinds of logic that they share, and each kind of logic presupposes the acceptance of a certain mix or ratio of sensory input, and the inhibition or repression of other possible mixes. 2 To reorganize our perception,

to alter the socially-sanc-

tioned filters through which we perceive things, involves a fundamental shift in our relationship with the world, and it is easier said than done. As we notice when we endeavour to render our movement more fluid and efficient, habits formed in the first years of life run deep. This explains the common experience

of somatic practitioners,

wherein clients who

experience pain-free and graceful movement at the end of one session will return a week later with their old and painful movement pattern intact. This kind of change requires persistent application. How much more so when we are dealing with perceptual patterns that date from infancy or before. Moreover, as media researchers and social psychologists have been telling us, our perceptual organization is going -61-

through wave upon wave of change, due to pervasive and exponentially accelerating developments in technology. The rate of change is so fast that ten years may now be enough to produce a degree of perceptual and cognitive change that might have once taken a generation, and before that, several generations. What we do today with our eyes and ears, bodies and minds, goes far beyond anything for which evolution may have prepared us. In particular, the long-term effects of smart-p hon es and social media are literally unfathomable. say literally unfathomable, we examine

perceptual

I

because the very too l with which changes,

namely

our perceptual

organization itself, is part of the flux we wish to examine. To listen with your whole body is to attempt to recover something of what evolution did prepare us for, namely, to participate in nature with all of our senses alive and coordi nated with one another. In his formative book, The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: Only by temporarily shedd ing the accepted perceptua l logic of his cultur e can th e sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; on ly by altering the common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape. 3

One of the reasons I choose to formulate a listening work independent of technical means is precisely the desire to listen to the unmediated body, the soma, the body as it is actually experienced from within. This is not the persona, not the mask worn for the world, not the body on the (revealingly named) Facebook page. Nor is the soma the body between my headphones, which are telling me something quite different from what is coming through my skin, my belly, and my feet.

- 62-

Listening somatically is organized rather differently from the kind of listening for which we were trained. If such legendar y figures as King Solomon and Saint Francis could understand th e speech of animals, they were listening from a place outside the shared logic of their respective cultures.

1 Some research finds a plausible contributing factor to autism in the overwhelming of a developing nervous system by repeated exposure to ultrasound in the first trimester. http://www. wsj .com/ articles/study-raises-new-questions-about-fetalult rasounds-14 74312017

Chinese babies and French babies are all capab le of all the phonemes necessary to speak both Chinese and French . At some point in language acquisition, those phonemes that are not mirrored back to the baby by his or her primary caregivers are inhibited (or "culled"). To acquire them again is possible, all the more so if we are willing to babble again like babies. Norma lly, however, the sounds of a new language are rarely mastered, accent-free, after the age of eight. (The word babbling, of course, comes from the anc ient and storied city of Babel, whose tower could not be comp leted on account of linguistic confus ion.)

2

3

Abram, David, The Spell of theSensuous.(New York:Vintage, 1996),9.

- 63-

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Part Four: Some Difficulties Chapter 19: Closing the Doors of Perception

According to Joachim -Ernst Berendt, th e art and habit of listening has been driven into the shadows by an ever-increasing dominance of the visual mode in our lives. 1 He makes a very strong case, an d we will consider the dynam ics and implications of this historical shift in a sub sequent chapter. With a view to th e insepara bility and interdependence of the senses, we can also speak of a simultaneous shift in perception itself . Not only have we becom e over-dependent on th e visual, but we have transformed the way we use all of our senses, to wit: open-field attention to the space around us ha s been driven into th e shadows by near-field and narrow-focu s attenti on . Between hunter-gatherin g and smart-phoning there is an enormous change in th e way we use not on ly our eyes, but our attention in gener al. Dr. Feldenkrais him self spoke ·of the metamorphosi s that takes place in each individual upon being taught to read and write; we must shrink the vast field of our animal attention to a word on a page. The influence of early education for literacy on the narrowing of perception was an issue which concerned Feldenkrais deeply . In The Primacy of Hearing, a short article originally published in Somaticsmagazine in 1976, he offered a rare glimpse of his thou ghts on the interaction of th e senses: ... here is a simpl e [exa mpl e] that will show how very much a liabilit y and restrict ion is our ach ieved level of learnin g and how we do not benefit from what our awa reness allows us: ... blindfold your self and live by yo ur ears on ly. To begin with, do it for only half an h our. You will quickly realize how your aware ness is mos tly limit ed to what you can see. Any creat ure who had to guarantee hi s indi vidu al safety and security could not survive if two-th irds of th e space aro und him was ignored and did not reach awareness. W hen we pay attent ion to what we see we cannot help withdrawing our attention from the better pa,t of the space around us. [Editor's - 65-

emplrasis/ A wild animal that does not have a samurai -like awareness of what is happening around it and above it cannot endure for lo ng. You and I can do what a tr ained samur a i can do : we can retrain and ext end o ur awaren ess to th e Realit y all around us. The ears did just thi s before th eir information began to be partiall y ign o red and n eglected !with th e acquisition o f literacy • ed.], and befor e vision beca me do min eerin g in stead of dominant. 2

Another way to explore this dynamic is to think in terms of central and peripheral perception. With regard to the eyes, the term central vision refers to the process of looking at, focussing on. It is a selective process, implying zeroing in on a particular portion of the visual field to the exclusion of others, and it occupies on ly a small proportion of our retina. The rest of the retina is concerned with peripheral vision, whereby we become aware, often subconscio usly, of what is transpiring on the edges of our visual field. The periphe,y has the fascinating quality that you can't look

at it. If you do look at it, it ceases to be the periphery, and becomes the centre . The only way to see what is going on at the periphery-which is where most of the world is to be found-is not to focus on it . (As a friend says: "That's where the fairies are, and that 's why you can't see them!") As Feldenkrais implies , from the viewpoint of evo luti on, noticing movement on the edges of the visual field would have been more important to our survival than, for example, concentrating

on the stone tablet edition of the Neolithic

Daily News. Now here we are in the Anthropocene, and while our priorities have changed, our eyes have not. The correc tive lenses that we wear so we can read a tablet more easily actua lly work to the detriment of our peripheral vision (and, Feldenkrais might add, our surviva l). The frames of our eyeglasses define the area we are not going to see, as much as the one we are looking at . (Contact lenses do not divide the visual field so radically.) To regain something like natural

-66-

eyesight would mean to recover a balance between peripheral and central vision. This is a big part of integrative vision work. If listening to speech with the aim of comprehension

can be described as a.narrow-focus task, the internal and external sensing of the body could be described as peripheral listening. It gives us information, usually unconscious, that is nonetheless helpful to our surviva l: thunder miles away, the scream of a mountain lion, the screech of brakes behind you, some thing unusual in the voice of a friend, your own heartbeat . Why is it that people wearing headphones-with eyes wide open-are more likely to walk into a street sign, or fall off a bridge? • It may be they are missing cues that are now dissociated from their hearing: obvious visual cues, or more subtle ones coming through the soles of their feet, or the reflection of sound off a building onto the skin of their neck. Through their headphones they are present in one place on Earth, and in their body, in another. For example: I am a creature of sound. I grew up in the music indu str y, and during my day job as a freelance writer, I'm rarely without my headphones and constant access to my Rdio account. Walking down the street, I frequently walk into tel ephone polls and bruise myself because I'm too busy paying attention to the noises emanating from my headphones, visually oblivious to the world around me. It has therefore been spectacularly enlightening to discover that I could learn more about the nature of sound from tho se who cannot hear than from anyone else. - Zoe Co rmier , National Post (Toronto), December 12, 2014

4

The wearing of closed headphones is a special case of narrow focus listening. Like eyeglasses, such headphones separate two streams of input, that would normally inform each other, into disconnected and competing streams. We could even call them cognitively dissonant streams, for you must ignore one to make sense of the other. ' Meanwhile, closed headphones also deny you the "depth-of-field" or -67-

location awareness that you get from your auricles. Headphones are an unprecedented development in human histor y. They are useful in a sound studio, but they could hardly be said to bring us closer to nature, where we attend to our environment with all of our senses together-not to mention the danger they pose to our cochlear hair cells and the neurons that serve them. In the matter of central and peripheral perception, the example of deaf sign language is particularly instructive . While the signers' eyes are usually focussed on the other signer's face, the movements of the hands in space are taking place in the periphera l visual field of both interlocutors. • Thus, to use sign language most effectively requires an efficient synergy between central and peripheral vision . Would it be possible to listen in this way? In both the visual and auditory senses, selective focus implies some degree of effort. The trick to seeing and hearing what is in the periphery-the deer among the trees, the birdcall in the rain-is softening the focus, which means dropping the effort involved in selecting a sense object. Trying too hard gets in the way of all the senses. Somatic listening do es not mean not using your ears, or abandoning langua ge comprehension. It means supporting your ears (which never stop doing what they do), and your brain (likewise) with a field of open attention in the body. Pioneer body/mind educator Heinrich Jacoby, a formative influence on Feldenkrais, called this kind of attention antenniges Lauschen," which translates approximately as harkening like an antenna . The following excerpt from a transcript of one of Jacoby's music courses is very much to the point: II

11

11

Leaving your eyes closed, and letting go of the int ention to look, even behind the eyelids, try to listen receptively, like an antenna, and not to "stare" with the ears . But not listening - 68-

for the sake of listenin g, rather initially to be ready to experience all that reaches us from th e environm ent in this space by way of acou stical stimulu s! In this receptiv e seren ity, be careful not to trip back into 'pricking up th e ears.'! We have to stay in this antenna -like state of listenin g in , even if some sound starts to grab our interest, for this is a pre-condition for the experience of what is essential in music, the energetic processes and the leaning towards rest! To dwell in thi s condition opens th e gates to music! ... 7

A jazz musician came to see me regarding hyperacusis. This is a situation where sound-usually in a particular frequency range-becomes intolerable . Naturally, this is an extremely threatening occurrence for a professional , with far-reaching ramifications . In this particular case, she had had to relocate to a quieter neighbourhood; she even had to stop playing her instrument . Her mood was affected, along with h er relationships; she was ultimatel y hospitalized for depression. The resolution did not come from any treatment of her ears, nor from mood-altering chemicals. It came rather from a whole sale reorganization, a fundamental shift of perception, whereby the entire body becomes the perceptual interface. In this way, sound is encountered as movement in space, as something that touches the bod y and moves through it. One learns to allow this sound massage, rather than straining either to grasp it or to defend oneself against it.

1

Joachim-Ern st Berendt (Tim Nevill, Trans.), The Third Ear (N.Y.: Holt, 1988).

2

This art icle is also available in Moshe Feldenkr ais (E. Beringer, ed.), Embodied

W isdom (Berkeley: No1th Atlantic Books, 2010) 45-51. 3

Oliver Sacks on h eadph ones on Oliver Sacks: A re yo u a vinyl man , or do yo u prefer CDs or MP3s?

I used to have a lot of records and a wonderful old record player which I rath er reluctantly gave up. I didn't have room for the hu ge spea kers and things. I ha ve CDs . I've neve r gone over to an iPod but perhaps I should. But I was alm ost killed a few months ago when someone walked in front of me with headphon es. I was on my bike and I flipped ove r and got hurt. 1 ha ve some thin g aga inst functional deafness. - 69-

But you're wearing ea,phones on the cover of Musicophilia. Do you like that photo, by the way? No. A o ne-syllab le a nswe r. Everyo n e else seem s to but I hat ed th e picture. I feel I was tricked into it . I never look like that normally. I never wear earphones . I feel like tearing th e cover off. I like the ca lligraphy in the title though . - h ttp://www.nationalreviewofmedicine.com/issue/inte1view /2008/ S_interview_04 .html. 4

ht tp: // news. nationa Ipo st. co m/art s/weekend -pos t/ keepi ng-m y-ea r-to-th e-grou nd- ongett ing-m usic-lessons-a t-a-dea f-rave

A friend who was for years a sound enginee r in a recording studio tells me that some guitarists he worked with were unabl e to sing in tune while wearing headp hon es. They were gettin g their cues for pitch from the mo vements of their instrum ents against their bodi es, and the competing stream of informati on throu gh th e headphon es left them stranded. 5

6

Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (NY: Harper Perennial, 1994) 101.

Heinrich Jaco by, Musik Gesprache-Vers uche. (Hamburg: Hans Christi an Verlag, 2002), 193. (Aut h or's translation into English.)

7

Here is th e original passage: Versuch en Sie, die Augen zuge h en zu !asse n , auc h hinter den Lidern ni cht die Schau-Absich t zu behalten, lau schb ere it zu we rd en , "a nt enni g" zu werden , ni cht mehr mit den Ohren zu glot zen . Aber ni cht Lauschen um des Lauschens willen, sond ern zu nac hst bereit we rden zu erleben, was alles un s a n a kustisch en Reizen aus der Umwe lt hi er im Raum e errei cht! Sto lperber eit werden ub er di e Bedrohung anten ni ge r Ge lassenheit , wen n wir doc h wieder di e ,,Ohr en sp itzen "!Man muss antennig bleiben ko nn en, auc h wen n etwas zu klingen beg innt , was ei nen besonders interessiert, denn so zu sein ist Vorausset zung fur das Erlebe n des Wesentlicilen der Musik, der energetischen Vorgnnge und der Tendenz wr Ru/Je! So zu sein eroff n et un s die Pforte zu Musik!

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Chapter 20: Rooms for Improvement

Like auditory vibrations exists in three-dimensional

themselves,

the physical body

space. Likewise, any building we

can enter is also comprised of three-dimensional

space . There

was a time when architects knew how to shape buildings and rooms to optimize the relationship

among space, auditory

vibration, and the human body. Before the era of electric amplification,

the room - its dimensions,

surfaces, temperature, humidity-was

angles, materials,

all that there was, and

acoustical considerations were essential factors of design, part of the business of builders. This is why an auditorium is called an auditorium; in Latin, a place for hearing. On a hillside in the Greek municipality stands

a magnificent

amphitheatre.

of Epidaurus

Built approximately

2,400 years ago under the direction of the architect Polykleitos the Younger, it seats up to 14,000 people. Remarkably, each member of the audience can-wherever without benefit of amplification-hear

seated and

what is said on stage.

Sometimes this effect occurs by accident of design. My friend Charles bought himself a lovely old house , and renovated it with great care . He invited his parents over to have a look. His mother, in her early eighties, is quite hard of hearing . She wears powerful hearing aids which help to some extent, but they amplify sounds behind her head as strongly as sounds in front of her, and this she finds confusing. Thus, conversations between Charles and his mother are neither smooth nor easy. There is a lot of guesswork, misunderstand ing, frustration

and endless repetition.

Sound familiar?

SOUND FAMILIAR?! In any event, Charles' parents sit down

on a sofa which is placed in the middle of an alcove off of the dining room, and his mother hears every word, as if there were no problem at all. What is going on?

- 71-

The alcove could be described as 5/8 of an octagon, with a sofa in its centre. Thus, Charles' voice was being reflected to his mother not only from behind , but also from several other angles-not

quite a parabolic reflector, but close. No one

knows whether this nook was designed for the purpose of listening , but it might as well have been. More recentl y, I was invited by some musical colleagues to dine with them in their marvellous, beehive-shaped, owner built home. With me was a hard-of-hearing friend. We were seated on sofas arranged around the circumference of the beehive, and were served a delicious tea with home-made goodies of all sorts . We entered quickly into a lively discussion about architecture and music. To his great surprise, my hard-of-hearing

friend-who

often feels himself excluded

from such discussions-discovered

that he was no longer

hard-of-hearing. This raises a very interesting issue in the philosophy of audition: if there is a handicap, who owns it, the person, or the space? If there are rooms and structures with "good ears" and rooms and structures with "bad ears," why do we describe people as "hard-of-hearing," and not spaces? Although gathering for the purpose of listening is a major part of the raison d'etre of churches, hotel conference rooms and social halls of all sorts, more often than not insufficient attention is given to their acoustic properties. 1 With an aging population and an ever-younger onset of hearing loss, would it not make sense to take this issue seriously at the design stage? What about the even more obvious case of hospitals, seniors' centres, and long-term care facilities? And why stop there? Since every home is sure to host or house a hard-ofhearing person at some point, why not build into every dwelling at least one space designed to optimize listening?

- 72-

As any musician can tell you, you can't tum a bad room into a good one merely by boosting the volume, any more than you can turn impaired hearing into unimpaired hearing with the same techniques. A case in point: the sound quality of hotel ballrooms and conference rooms is most often addressed after construction by technical means. Since neither the hotel staff nor the general public is particularly adept with microphones, amplification, and speake r placement, these technical means are only as good as the sound technician who installed them (and then left for his next gig). In other words, rather than address the sound qualities of public spaces for the well-being of the communities that use themand despite the fact that the knowledge of what makes for good acoustics is thousands of years old-we play, usually in an uninformed and haphazard manner, with the knobs of unfamiliar black boxes, and make do with acoustic chaos . Imagine your average committee chairperson, standing at the podium in a modern hotel ballroom and addressing the annual conference through a microphone: "Is this thing on? Can you hear me?" Now imagine an operatic soprano, relying on her body to send her voice into a space designed to carry it from the stage into the uppermost balconies. The committee chairperson relies on technology to project her voice, the soprano relies on resonant spaces, inner and outer. Auditory vibration occurs in space and is shaped and propagated according to the laws of physics and the shapes of spaces. Since the advent of electronic amplification, we seem to have lost our connection to this fact. One result of our reliance on electronic sound remediation is a proliferation of public spaces which do not serve fundamental human needs. Another result is the progressi ve deafening, by these same devices , of the population, starting with the children.

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See Michael Kimmelman, "Dear Archite cts: Sound Matters," New York Tim es, December 29, 2015. 1

- /1ttp:// ww,v.11 y ti111 es.co111 / i11t emctive/2015/ 12/29/arts/design/sound-arc/1it ect11r e.ht1nl?

. 74.

Chapter 21: The Assault on the Ears "Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquer ed Germany." - Ado lf Hit ler, Manual of German Radio. 1938, cited in Jacq ues Att a li, Noise: The Political Econo,ny of Music (Minn ea polis: UMP, 1985), 87.

Possibly because it lies so deep and so early within us, so primary and so automatic, and because the visual mode is so dominant in our societies, we tend to take our hearing prett y much for granted . But ignorance does not confer invulnerability. In the case of our hearing, what we don't know can (and does) hurt us. How else to explain the current epidemic of early hearing loss, every bit of it preventable? The natural decline in the acuity of hearing that comes with age is known as age related hearing loss (presbycusis), and it has been with us forever. But over the last couple of decades, the age at which hearing loss first manif ests is getting lower and lower. This is not because we are aging faster ; if anything , the opposite is true. But we are doing something to our ears for which there is no precedent in recorded history. Namely, we-especia lly as adolescents-are

putting loud

things over our ears or, worse , in th em, or standing in front of much larger and louder things until our hearing suffers irreparable damage. This damage is known in the literatur e as noise-inducedhearing loss, or NIHL. Of the trio of loudspeakers, headphones , and ear buds, the last are the worst. Unlike over-the-ear headphon es, ear buds don't block out ambient sound, so people tend to turn up the volume to overwhelm what's going on around them. This results, naturally, in faster damage. More bad news about ear buds: there are tiny mini-muscles in the middle ear which affect the tension of your tympanic membrane (eardrum) and the ossicles (the three tiny bon es which trans- 75-

mit vibrations from the ear drum to the inner ear). These muscles are capable, to a limited degree, of protecting the inner ear from loud noises, if they have sufficient warning. By moving the sound source directly into the ear canal, you short-circuit any warning signals which might come through your skin and auricles, and your self-protective capacity has that much less time to respond. And, of course, even if your ears have ample warning, and regard less of how you get your music, if the source is loud enough your ears are out of luck. For example, if you are a Rolling Stone, and have performed Honky-Tonk Woman some five thousand times, surrounded by the biggest and baddest stage monitors in existence, there is no need to wait impa tiently for age-related hearing loss. There are other ways to knock out your most vulnerable frequencies, the higher ones. 1 Just mow your lawn with a gas engine, or spend quality time with your vacuum cleaner, blender, juicer or coffee grinder. Or sit in an airplane, prefer ably near the engines. Better yet, sit in an airplane near the engines and attempt to cover up the noise with the on-board entertainment system (and ear buds). Or join a symphony orchestra and sit directly in front of the horns. Or play the horn and sit directly in front of the percussion . Or simply play the violin and own a left ear. Or go through basic training in the military, not to mention combat. The EPA (American Environmental Protection Agency) estimated recently that 13.8 million Americans are regularly exposed to "excess ive" noise levels, defined as anything over 70 decib els, and that 30 million suffer from "toxic " noise where they work. Bad noise is the number one occupational disease in the Unit ed States , according to the EPA.2

If you are an average young person, chances are good that

you will sustain NIHL far earlier than your pre-industrial and - 76-

pre-electronic ancestors . Chances are also good that you will live much longer than those ancestors. Putting these two probabilities together, you will also likely have a lot of time to consider life without high frequencies. Thus, a word to the wise, young and old: it makes sense to protect your own ears; no one else is going to do this for you. People will unint entionally and ignorantly do things to your ears which would send them to jail for decades if they did it to some other part of you. Even if you paid a lot of money for those seats at the concert, if the sound level hurts , it is causing enduring damage. If you take action to protect your hearing at the moment that protection is required-regardless of what everyone else is doing and how silly you feelyour ears will reward you deliciousl y throu ghout your life. I recently saw the following note in my dentist's office: "You don't have to brush all of your teeth-onl y the ones you want to keep." The logic here is fairly inescapable: if you have one or two ears you would like to keep, bringing ear protection with you to the concert is not a bad idea. (The drummer him- or herself may be wearing a set of high-efficienc y custom ear plugs.) When playing the violin or th e bagpipe, one plug will suffice, as lon g as it is in the ear that sits closer to where the sound comes out. Put your fingers in your ears when an ambulance goes screaming by; the siren is supposedto alarm you, that's why they use it. Using industrial ear protectors when working with power tools is a no-brainer. As for your plane ride, there are noise-cancelling devices on the market that offer better ear protection than has been available at any time in history. (Of course, they don't protect th e rest of you from the rumble and the roar, but we have to start somewhere!)

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' Hea ring loss fro m susta ined or repeated expos ure to loud noises usually occu rs in th e inn er ea r. Unt il recentl y, it was th ought th at thi s loss was du e mos tly to traum a to th e stereocilia (whi ch are orga nelles, or protub era nces of so-called "hair cells") in th e coch lea. The ir job is to detect specific frequ encies and amplitud es and send thi s news up stream to the brain by way of th e cochl ea r nerve . Rece nt resea rch (Kujawa, Liberm an, et al) revea ls th at th ere is also damage to the afferent n erve termi na ls, i.e., th e synapses where th e neurons of th e coc hlea r nerve co nn ect to the hair cells. Once th ose synapses are damaged, th e in put -deprived neuro n s th emselves begin to dege nerate. Mo reove r, damage to and degeneration of th e coc hlea r nerve, as opp osed to damage to th e hair cells, does not tend to sh ow up on th e usual type of hearin g test. Hence it has been labelled "hidd en hearin g loss ." 2

Geo rge Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels (NY: Scribn er, 2010 ) 5.

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Chapter 22: Tinnitus The experience of a somatic practitioner

is that people

generally do not seek help with movement until they experience some pain or restriction. Likewise with hearing: people generally don't ask the questions that will lead to greater awareness of perception - and thus to improvement-until there is a perceptual disturbance-until

something grabs our

attention. Tinnitus is one very effective attention -grabber. Tinnitus is not so much a disease as a symptom, and, like fatigue or tension, it can be a symptom of virtually anything. Where the cause can be established (e.g., in order of severity, from too much ear wax, to a middle ear infection, to a lesion, stroke, or epilepsy 1 in the temporal lobe (auditory cortex), it is called secondary tinnitus. When there is no known condition of which it is a secondary effect, that is, when the tinnitus itself is the primary problem - which is most cases-it

is

called primary tinnitus. There are many factors that may contribute to this apparent ly source-less sound, and first among them is exposure to loud noises. Then there are adrenaline, fatigue, tension in the upper spine and jaw, certain analgesics and antibiotics, withdrawal from addictive drugs, surgery, shock, changes in air pressure, middle ear infections, etc. Whatever the unknown cause, tinnitus is usually described as an uncontrollable noise coming from within; it is something we don't want to hear, an uninvited guest, that competes for an inappropriate share of our auditory bandwidth with the external sounds, or signals, that we do want to hear. Quite often tinnitus is felt to be an existential threat, especially for musicians . Clearly, with such a wide spectrum of symptoms and causes, there must be a differentiated response. In every instance of -79-

tinnitus, one must enquire into the role the symptom plays in the whole. As in somatic work in general, the enquiry leads where it leads, and relief may come from the most unexpected sector at the least-expected time . A sound with no apparent source in vibration or memory

If a bird is singing outside of your window, and you can't

hear the bird, because the window is closed and your phone (or your ear) is ringing, there is still a bird out there pushing the air around . Likewise, if you are in traffic and the driver behind you is honking his horn, whilst you are listening to music at full volume and hear nothing outside the car, there is still a horn behind you, and it is still sending pressure waves in your direction. Most tinnitus is different: it is sound without an apparent source in vibration or mem01y. If you do not hear it, there is no

tinnitus. And therein lies a clue, if not a smoking gun. In other words, for a large proportion of tinnitus cases, the phenomenon of tinnitus is not distinct from the perception of

tinnitus . The good news is: perception itself is something we can learn to modulate. There are sounds inside of us, of cours e, that once had a source in vibration, but no longer do . For example: you hear the voice of your mother. She is not in the room, but you have shared rooms with her. She speaks in your memory or your imagination or both. Then there is the phenomenon of musica l seizures, which Oliver Sacks describes so movingly in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. 1 Here we are dealing

with entire songs or repertoires emerging unbidden from the remote past and dominating the acoustic landscape. There are also sounds inside of us which do have sources in vibration, but which we ordinarily exclude from our awareness; here I speak of the sounds produced by a living body. Under certain circumstances such sounds-the heartbeat, for -BO-

example-will

emerge from backstage to claim our undivided

attention. While we may develop a problematic relationship with them, they are anything

but pathological.

Think of

what a fetus gets to listen to: not only heartbeat, but digestion, respiration , and all sorts of vascular squishing, rumbling and roaring. Now imagine you are entering a soundproof room, in which you are the only moving element . Will you not now hear more, rather than less, of these internal sound sources than you usually do? 2 Thus, when you start to listen somatically, you may indeed hear more of yourself than you are used to . As it becomes clearer that it is you you are hearing, you can go in and out of this mystery by shifting your attention . Of course, you would want to have a place to shift your attention toan anchor, as it were-and

this is a good part of the work of

mindfulness. An oyster's life

"What kind of noise annoys an oyster? A noisy noise annoys an oyster." - traditional tongue twister.

The arrival in your life of tinnitus, or something else with the same name, can be compared to the arrival of a grain of sand in an oyster. There is often a lot of sand around an oyster, but inside an oyster there is only an oyster. One grain of sand in the wrong place is a challenge for which oysters have developed a unique response (which no doubt worked better for them before humans discovered the necklace). Similarly, a person experiences tinnitus as the intrusion of a foreign element into his or her inner world. If this person is you, this may be the first time you have been confronted with the task of observing yourself in the act of perception. This can be a fruitful moment, as perception normally operates below the radar, and the radar is perception. And, if it -81-

can be said that there is a gift in an annoying noise in your head , this is it. In order to lose that noise , you have to pay attention to how a part of you is making it. This is th e pearl. When you slow the process down and have a look, it turns out that you do have some choice in how you perceive. Virtually everything plays a part: emotion, thinking, memory, context , motivation, intention, posture, breathing, muscle tone, stress-you

name it. In fact, that last piece,

"you name it," plays a rather large part, because by labelling or diagnosing something, we contribute to how it is held, or framed, in consciousness. Thus, when a health -care professional consecrates your distress with a Latin name, and then tells you there is no thing that will cure the thing that you

most definitely have, this doesn't necessarily help. On the other hand, if what ails you is connected dynamically to how you are using yourself (including how you are framing your experience),then you have a path to improvement. Reframing I: Curiosity

A colleague of mine came up with a novel and very direct solution. She took tinnitus to be a benevolent signal rather than a problem , and, without

attempting

to decipher it,

made the following assumption: "My body wants to hear this sound." And then she proceeded to study the specific frequency of her tinnitus, until she was able to sing that sound to herself, deliberately , in her imagination. Then, since she had consciously taken over the work she presumed her tinnitus had come to do, her symptoms disappeared . (!) A hypothesis current in the halls of neuroscience fits my colleague's intuitive solution rather neatly, to wit: the sourceless sounds you hear correspond to damaged hair cells in your cochlea, each hair cell corresponding to a particular frequency range. Your brain has been accustomed to receiving input at -82-

those frequencies, and the part of your auditory cortex that would normally turn that specific cochlear input into sound is deprived of specific instructions. It begins to produce tho se sounds autonomously, and, since the control mechanism on which it had previously depended has atrophied, who is going to tell the cells involved to stop? A group of music therapists in Germany has developed a

rather sophisticated protocol ("The Heidelberg Model of Music Therapy") which is built upon this hypothesis. One aspect of this method (alongside relaxation exercises and several other treatment

modalities)

involves identif ying the dominant

frequency of the tinnitus (if there is one), transposing it a few octaves downward into the normal singing range, and singing it. Published studies report an impressive rate of success.3 Reframing II: A psychodynamic role for tinnitus?

From a psychod yna mic viewpoint, there are situations in which tinnitus may said to speak for something that is otherwise unvoiced ; for example: a conflict, gent-if

inconvenient-truth

a trauma,

or an emer-

-4 In this case we might ask:

what is it in a person that would like to be heard but that is not getting the attention

it wants? According to this ap-

proach , the noise we are hearing is a measure of our resistance to "getting the message." If that unheard something-a worry, a challenge, a conflict, a sorrow, a threat, or an unaccepted blessing-is brought to centre stage to be dealt with, tinnitus may be out of a job. Reframing Ill: Re-setting your SNR

The notion of competition for available bandwidth between a noise and a signal invites a descriptive model known as the signal-to-noise ratio or SNR. Imagine: you are turning the dial on an analog AM radio, and there are moments where your programme comes in crystal clear-i.e., all signal, -8 3-

no noise. And there are moments where there is only static, and no voice or music-i.e. , all noise, no signal. And there are moments and places where there is more or less of one or the other: for example, 70% signal, 30% noise (70:30)-a situation

in which it would be possible to understand

a

newscast, but not without difficulty. Our intuitive response to noise is usually to try to reduce it. For example , when confronted by an unexpected noise in the sound studio, a logical response would be to try to identify the source of the noise (could it be the ventilator in the kitchen downstairs?) and to turn it off. Tinnitus, however, does not behave like a kitchen ventilator. If we attempt to shush it up with any degree of effort-i.e.,

if we resist it-we create a nega-

tive feedback loop. We could even call it a problem of mental hygiene, not unlike that faced by the mythical hero Hercules when confronted with the many-headed Hydra. For the more we struggle with this whatever-it-is, the more there is of it. If we add fear and/or anxiety to the loop, it only gets worse. How do we get out of this loop and arrive at a place where the signal (i.e., what we want to hear) is not disturbed by the noise (i.e., what we don't want to hear)? One clue: this is a zero-sum game: the greater the signal, the greater the ratio of signal to noise . When this ratio reaches a certain point, the signal exceeds the noise to the extent that the noise disappears from the horizon of your perception . Now, as previously discussed, signals come to us by diverse routes or channels: pressure waves in the ear, vibrations and resonance in the body, light to the eyes, scent to the nose , etc. If you have tinnitus your "normal" hearing is likely already

stressed, so turning up the signal in your ears may well also turn up the noise, which is not what we want. We could, on the other hand, increase the somatic signal by giving vibration in the body a larger share of attention, -84-

thereby inducing relaxation, which itself increases the body's ability to resonate. In this way, the brain receives a wider menu of acoustical information. The signal -to-noise ratio is altered, and noise claims a lesser share of our attention, until it doesn't bother us anymore. Reframing IV: Where's the tiger?

Stress usually implies hyper-alertness, a particularly taut pre-set of the nervous system, usually as a consequence of trauma . In this pre-set, the senses are straining to detect any and all possible threats. Unsurprisingly, they will find one, and if there is no tiger roaring outside, they will find one inside. Hyper-alertness is an obvious villain with regard to noise in the system. It follows that stress reduction belongs to virtually every approach to tinnitus reduction. If there is physical or social trauma behind that inner tiger ,

a natural first step would be to find a safe (i.e., tiger-free) outer environment. Relief may then come from re-tuning your attention to the movement of your breath, to the receptivity of your skin, to the undulations of your internal sea, and to the support of your skeleton . Then you may find yourself in a quieter forest.

Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (London: Duckworth, 1985), part III. 1

For an extreme case, see th e note in Chapter 28, re: an art icle entitl ed, "Wom an who can hear sound of her own eye balls, " The Telegraph, Jun e 27, 2013. 2

3 Argstatter et al., "Long-te rm effects of th e 'Hei delberg Mode l of Music Therapy' in patients with chronic tinnitus," Int ernationa l Journal of Clinical Experimental Medicine. 2012;5(4):273-288. http://www.ijcem ·.com / (iles /

IJCEM1207002.pdf

Crick, et al., "Cortical reorganization in recent-onset tinnitus patients by the Heidelberg Model of Music Therapy," Frontiers in Neuroscience, 19 February 20 15. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10 .3389/fnins.2015.00049/full The notion of a psychodynam ic genesis for .tinnitu s is exp lored in Michael Tillman, !ch das Geri.iusch(GieEen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2012) . (German only.) 4

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Chapter 23: The Shadow of Language Itself Whether we gain or not by this habit of profuse commun ication it is not for us to say ... - Virginia Woolf , Jacob's Room (1922)

For as a philologist, I am in a position to tell you that language is a lie. Yes, language itself! A stone , is a stone! The word 'stone ' is not a stone . It is a token , a linguistic bank -not e th at we exchange to indicate the idea of a stone . It saves us the trouble of having to haul one out of the ground to show our interlocutor what we mean. - Prof. Donald Trefusis (a creati on of British ac to r, writer, a nd co median , Steph en Fry) fro m Fry's co llection of hum orou s essays entitl ed Papenveight (Lond on: Arrow, 200 4), 56.

We are social beings; it is our nature to live and link with other humans. Virtually every aspect of our cultures and civilizations manifests a fundamental desire to connect. We have made Eros a god because the erot ic is what draws us into relationship . One could go so far as to say that hearing is an erotic sense. If this seems far-fetched, consider the function of vocalizing among birds, frogs, moose, crocodiles and even certain fish. One might also consider the unendin gly monomaniacal lyrics of human pop songs, and the place of pop stars themselves in the collective unconscious. As mentioned earlier, our hearing is specialized to detect vibrations in the human voca l range. This selective sensitivity, together with the unique vocal apparatus to which it is matched, along with the processing capacity of our prodigious forebrain, enables us to communicate through spoken language - a neat trick, and one that distin guishes us from our hominid cousins . Our preoccupation with language has two faces: on the one side it ties us to our fellow humans and forms the basis of culture-no small gift. According to historian Yuval -8 7-

Harari, humans dominate the planet Earth because, uniquely among all the species, we are able to cooperate in large groups in a flexible and adaptive way. And what enables this networking is language. Without language, Harari suggests, our near cousins the chimpanzees have far better survival skills than we do.' The shadow side of this talent of ours is that it can separate us from the rest of nature. This is especially true of literate people, among whom the meanings of words outweigh their resonance. The smart phone is only the latest chapter in a long saga, whereby our need for connection with one another-combined

with our love affair with the

toys we've invented to maximize it-crowds

out other re-

sources and abilities, including interspecies communication and alertness to the environment. ' On a larger scale, some speak glowingly of the emergence of a technically mediated world mind, where everyone can communicate

with everyone else instantly and anywhere.

Meanwhile, the shadow of this phenomenon nant

hypertrophy

of the communication

is the maliginfrastructure,

whereby millions of microwave towers and thousands

of

satellites cannibalize the natural world, the atmosphere, and the space around it. These devices connect us to energygluttonous multi-acre server farms . (These heavy, opaque and exceedingly dry installations are known as the cloud, a selfserving neologism that would make Orwell blush.) And if we cannot bring our lust for ever-greater social networking into balance with the need for intra-psychic networking (i.e., more awareness) and inter-speciesnetworking (i.e., more compassion) , we are literally cooked ... and by our own words. There is an interesting corollary to that old philosophical puzzle about the tree falling in the forest. If sound is the frequency band of vibration that, evolutionarily -88-

speaking,

has been most important for our survival, you could say that we hear best what we are interested in. Thus, while many thou-

sands of trees fall in the forests of the world every day of the year, there is only going to be a sound if we are interested. And because the fate of the earth and all of its creatures depends on it, we need to become interested in more than our own voices. Is there an app for that?

What happens with your listening when you spend a long time in nature, when your only companions belong to other species? Will they tell you their names? Once, on a musical tour to a small town in northern Saskatchewan, where most of the people belong to the Cree nation, I heard a raven talking in a tree outside the motel. "Ka-kow-gha, ka-kow-gha," said he. I asked the receptionist in

my motel if she could tell me the Cree name for raven. "Kakow-gha,3" said she . David Abram writes: While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world, acknow ledging certa in anima ls, plants, and even landforms as expressive objects with whom they might find themselves in conversation. -1

To reconnect with ourselves and all of life, we would need to regain certain forsaken qualities. To do that , we would need to pay more attention to that substantial part of language which is not about the meanings of words. This is the part we share with all creatures .' To reconnect is to feel things directly, and there is no way to do this other than through the body, as somatic experience. While we are -89-

tirele ssly talking and te xting with other members

of our

garrulous in-group, homo sapiens, an d while the natural world figuratively and, alas, entir ely litera lly, retreats b efore our very eyes- (if only we were loo kin g!)-e very one of our homo

sapiens cells is notwithstanding

resona ting , unconsciousl y,

and in a very fund ament al way, with all of life . Somatic listenin g is a gestur e of return , coming hom e from a perilous and self-dest ru ctive exile in our h eads. David Abram describes cross-country skiing in the Rockies an d surp rising a mother moose n ur sin g her calf. There is a tens e stand-off, as hum an and ungulate assess each other: My senses were on high alert, yet somehow I wasn't frightened or even worried: I took a deep breath and then found myself offering a single, sustained mellifluous note, a musical call in th e middle part of my range, holding its pitch and its volume for as long as I could muster. As my voice died away I already sensed the other's muscles relaxing . .. For th e timbre of a human voice singing a single sustained note carries an abund ance of information for th ose whose ears are tun ed to such clues- information about the internal state of various organs in the singer's body, and th e relative tension or ease in that person, th e level of aggression or peaceful intent. 6

Since reading thi s passage of Abram 's, I ha ve been singing to th e deer who wa nd er ni ghtl y across my lawn . The y stand still and turn their big furry ears in my direction . Not wanting to confuse them, I h ave be en sin gin g the same song every night: "Oh , deer, what can the matter be?" One night, I missed th eir visit , and a guest who was there at th e tim e said th at th ey stopped in front of her, turn ed their ears, and waited. 1

http s://www .ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_haraii_what_explalns_the_rise_of_humans ?

2

We all know in stin ctively, fo r exa mple , that our (presumably) no n-v er bal and illit erat e dog is far better at int er-species co mmuni cati on than we are. Mor eove r, if yo u have ever lived out o n th e land, yo u are familiar with h ow we ll do gs make up for t h e hum an lack of di sta nce sens in g. - 90-

Kahkakiw , in th e on -lin e Cree dictionary. As discus sed in Chapter 11, concerning th e ton gue, naming animal s afte r their vocalizations is also common in English . Int eresting ly, English usage tends to grow away from such usages, tr ansitin g from vocali zation int o categor ization. For exa mpl e: for a small child, the animal that bark s is a bow-wow; for an older child , a dog, and late r on, a sh epherd, a pood le, a terr ier, a mutt.

3

'Davi d Abram. Becomin g Animal (New York: Vint age, 2010), 10. "[The] ton al layer of meaning-th e stratum of spontan eo us, bodily expression that ora l culture s steadily dep loy, and that literate cu ltur e all too easily forgets-is the very dim en sion of languag e that we two-l eggeds share in common with other anima ls." - Ibid. , 12. 5

6

Ibid., 161-162.

Then th ere is the gestura l layer of meaning : An Italian immigrant arrives in New York, aro und 1900. His son, who has been in th e Big Apple for some time already, is tr ying to explain to hi s fath er the use of the telephone: "You hold this part to your mouth with one hand , and you h old this part to yo ur ear with th e oth er hand." "But," protests the perplexed papa with bro ad gestur es of th e face, arms and upp er bod y, "How will I talk?!" "[Gregory Bateson] once wrote th at when a guy says to a woman "I love you ," sh e wou ld do well to pay mor e atte ntion to his body language, th e dilation of his pupil s, the ton e and timbre of his voice, wheth er hi s palm s are wet or dry, an d so on, th an to th e denotat ive co nt ent of his words. That 's because comm uni cation is a multilay ered phenomen o n that requires attention to both it s "human " and "n on hum an," or evo lu tionaril y inh erited, invo lunt ary elements. Bateson said that 's why we don't tru st actors, and I tell my students that's wh at mak es email such an incendi ary form of co mmuni cat ion: all th ose dampenin g and text urin g dimen sion s of th e communication go away, and so th e comm uni cation beco mes all the more thin and brittl e, and to try and get some of it back we start inserting emoticons, and so on. In all this, the properly "h um an" is on ly pa rt of the story; it 's nested in a larger, an d in man y ways nonhuman , set of contexts an d forces." - Natasha Lennard and Cary Wolfe, Is Humani sm Really Human e? New York Times, "The Stone," Januar y 9, 2017. http://www .nytimes.co m/2 0 I 7/0 1/09/o pinion / is-hum anism-really-hum ane. html ?&mod uleDetail=section-news -4&actio n=click&con ten tCollection=Opinion & region=Foot er& module=Mo rel nSection&ver -

sion=W hatsNex t&contentlD=What sNext& pgtype=a rticle

-9 1-

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Chapter 24: Body Armour: Pro and Con

A client sings in a church choir. His fellow choristers are complaining about his pitch. I invite him to sing for me. He knows when he starts to go off. This distresses him, and his distress drives him further off. I ask myself, where exactly is he trying to find those notes, and with what kind of effort? His eyes provide a clue: he appears to be looking for the missing note s up in the air somewhere nearby. Our work together consists of slowing the song down, and re-locating each note in the body, in the specific place or places where it resonates. When he can feel the notes as movement in his body, they are spot on. To feel resonance in the body means gaining access to feeling in the belly, chest, throat, face and head . And this may take some time, for one must also respect the story told by the unavailability of feeling . What makes a good violin a good violin? What prevents my body from resonating with sound? The material must be free to resonate, i.e ., not entirely rigid . If your chest is armoured like a steel safe, it is not going to vibrate much . If your ribs are free to move, if the muscles of your belly and back are in balance, naturally there is more availability for tiny movements , as well as big ones. As Evelyn Glennie says, the process of hearing in the body is one of opening. And sometimes, out of self-preservation, we close. There are noises and situations by which we do not want to be shaped (for example, the sound of a jackhammer breaking up the pavement) . There are traumas which dampen our capacity to resonate. If you are directing traffic on Main Street, and you don't want your body to be open to every honk and screech, there is a tendency to armour yourself unconsciously. You become less responsive, less open. Whether you ha ve had - 93-

a rough path through life for any of a thousand reasons, or have merely been keeping up with politics in the Englishspeaking world, you may be clanking around like a medieval knight in armour. The good news about armour is: the proverbial "slings and arrows" can 't reach you there. The bad news is: neither can feeling and sensation. A first step to removing this very hard couture can be to acknowledge that the body has its own wisdom, that sometimes freezing up appears to it to be the only way available to lessen vulnerability. This re-framing ma y soften the self-critique which holds the armour together, and empower you to dismantle it more gently. People who experience difficulties in hearing are often under stress, lest the y miss what is said, not to mention the shame , rejection, and isolation we discussed earlier. Naturally, when the sympathetic nervous system comes into play-i.e ., fight, flight, hyper-alertness, striving towards a goal-our ability to come into resonance with acoustical vibrations decreases, and listening is compromised . Thus, a vicious circle: compromised hearing > stress > compromised listening > compromised hearing. Removing the armour implies broadening and deepening the focus of listening , and giving up "trying to hear" along with "trying not to hear. Instead of effort-which produces tension, which makes us less resonant-there is opening, and allowing oneself to be moved. 11

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Part Five: Listening to Music and Language Chapter 25: The Hang of Listening The city of Bern, the capital of Switzerland, is a hotbed of innovative thinking. This seems to have resulted from many generations

of peace, beauty, and political neutrality. It was

in Bern that Albert Einstein, working as a customs clerk, came up with the general theory of relativity. It was in Bern that Hans Kayser developed the science of Harmonik, detailing the laws of resonance, and carrying forward the tradition of Pythagoras and Kepler. It was there that the great philosopher and poet Jean Gebser wrote his masterwork,

The Ever-

Present Origin. And it was in Bern, in the year 2000, that two instrument

builders obsessed with resonance,

Felix Rohner

and Sabina Scharer, created the hang.1 Introduced to the world at the 2000 Frankfurt Music Fair, shaped like your standard issue flying saucer, about 53 cm (21 inches) in diameter, made of very thin steel, and played with the fingers as it sits in your lap, the hang was an overnight sensation, and the first new acoustic instrument

of

the 21 st century. I met its inventors in their atelier in 2002, and over the next few years, serving as their represent ative in Canada, I was party to many exciting discussions about the nature of sound and music. I watched them tune their creation with small hammers . (In order to find the vibrational nodes in the metal , they would spread fine coloured sand on the part they were tuning, watching the ever-changing terns , just as Chladni had done two hundred

pat-

years earlier.)

Meanwhile, I learned to play this curious thing. The hang is not a loud instrument,

and its overtone -rich

sounds tend to induce relaxation, if not outright trance . As a public instrument,

it fits much better in a park than on a -95-

major thoroughfare . A shaded fountain in a leafy park is better yet, and on benches by fountains I have made many friends through its music, especially among children, babies and dogs. As for adults, curiously, many of them could not hear an instrument whose name they did not yet know. It was quite common to be interrupted by adults wanting to know the name of the thing I was playing.

Photo from a concert with friend and colJeague Nie l Go lden. 2

After this had happened a number of times, it dawned on me that many adult people were endeavouring to listen with their knowledge, but not with their bodies. No amount of information from me could help them open themselves up to unfamiliar sounds. Meanwhile, children, babies, dogs, and couples in love drifted from the very first notes into the arms of Orpheus. And he paid for lunch , too.

1 2

Felix Rohner and Sabine Scharer , hang: Sound Sculpture.(Bern : PANArt, 2013). You can h ea r sampl es of our music here: www.davidkaetz.com.

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Chapter 26: Listening to Words You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at th e same time ... If you are not willing to put aside everything , includin g your own worries and preoccupations, then you are not willing to trul y listen . - M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled(Londo n : Arrow, 2006), 113.

With instrumental

music, the difference between listening

with one's knowledge an d listening with one's whole self is comparatively easy to describe. The plot thickens when words enter the listening space. Unlike sound itself, which is entirely in the present, words are always linked to prior knowledge, and when our knowledge lights up we ma y be inclined to think that we already know what is being said. The hitch here is that this is only partly possible, for all knowledge is of the past, and resonance exists only in the present. Putting resonance aside for the moment, and considering only the content of what is being said, our prior knowledge may serve more as a filter than a light: Very few of us listen directly to what is being said, we always tran slate or interpret it according to a particular point of view, whether Hindu, Muslim, or communist. We have formulations , opinions, judgments, beliefs through which we listen , so we are actually never listen ing at all; we are only listening in terms of our own particular prejudices, conclusions, or experiences. We are always interpreting what we hear, and obviously that does not bring about underst anding. - Krishnamurti1

To listen through knowledge, as well as through the filters of cultural conditioning, is to narrow the band-width of our auditory awareness. This is what I have earlier called a listening impairment, rather than a hearing impairment . Its cau se is not to be found in the ears, but between them, and-further back - in culture and society.

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This is worth examining a bit more deeply, because it is a central notion, and helps to explain the historical shift to the visual alluded to earlier. By the time you enter kindergarten your native language is already fully uploaded and installed , as it were. And what school then does-and this we consider it to have failed-is (tongue/ear/brain)

aptitudes

if it doesn't do

to shift your linguistic

into the visual realm, from

word-as-sound to word-as-image. Given that words originally came into being as sound, out of our intimate relationship with sounding

nature, there is inevitably a flattening

of

meaning when the word loses its sound.2 The Greek word translated as word in Gospel of John (1:1) in the famous phrase Jn the beginning was the Word," is logos. 11

Apart from word, logos can be rendered in various ways, including thought, speech, meaning, reason, and logic. Whatev er nuance it carries, however, it is definitely not pointing at the written or printed word. Likewise, in the religious context of ancient Judaism, the "word of God" is not visual, but an explicitly acoustical revelation. 3 Now what we know of sound (or more properly , vibration) tells us that acoustical waves set matter into motion in par ticular ways; that is, they generate form. It is vibration, the word as motion, that stands behind such manifestation,

and

not the image of a word. Likewise, it is from the sound of a word that its creative "spell" (as opposed to its spelling) arises. Consider the embodied experience of "falling under the spell" of a master storyteller, singer, or bard . Sound casts spells (while spelling dispels them). Throughout most of our evolution we were educated by storytelling. Today, with some notable exceptions, most primary education busies itself with dispelling. (Waldorf schools, in order to enrich imaginations, rely on storytelling until the children reach the age of eight and begin to read.) - 98-

In most public schools, you might still be "reading out loud" in grade two, but soon thereafter you are expected to read in total silence. You will still be hearing the words in your head, but if you continue to pronounce ·them aloud as you read, you risk appearing to be less than fully literate-Le., you have failed to separate the meaning or content of words from their sounds. Doing so helps us to read faster (and makes for quieter libraries), but there are losses among the gains. As psychotherapists,

psychiatrists, counsellors and clergy

will gladly confirm, flattening or reducing communication to mere content-again, a listening impairment-deprives us of whole dimensions of meaning. Content is only the half of it, if that. Indeed, sometimes content is actually a device to distract the listener from what is really happening (e.g., what in politics is known as "spin.") By opening up the band-breadth

of your listening, you

"show up" for someone, you "tune in." If you are only tuned to content, you may indeed hear what your partner is saying, but only that. If you become present in an embodied way, you may well hear what your partner is not saying. Moreover, when the one who is talking begins to sense a deeper resonance in the one who is listening-that, when a field of resonance is called into existence (i.e., when a spell is

established)-he or she may begin to speak differently. In other words, the quality of our listening in the field helps determine what happens in that field. If this begins to sound a lot like quantum physics, why not? How falsely a listener may construe what we say if he takes only our words. Our words are often halting and many times plainly not what we mean. Back of what we mean on the conscious level, there is almost always a deeper unconscious meaning that is at work ... But these unconscious meanings are only dimly felt by the speaker and they do not formulate well in words. Com-99-

plaints and threats are so much easier to express . Only before an open listen er do th ey disclose wh at the y really mean , do the comp laints and sigh s give way to further und erstanding . [Someone ] once suggested to me that in every conver sation between two peopl e there are always at least six persons present . What each person said are two; what each person meant to say are two more; an d what each person und erstood the ot her to say are two more . There is certainly no reason to stop at six, but the fathomless depth of th e listen er who can go beyond words, who can even go beyond the consc ious meanings behind words and who can listen with th e third ear for what is unconsc iously bein g meant by the spea ker, this fashion of attentive listenin g furnishe s a climate where the most un expected disclosures occur th at are in th e way of being miracles in on e sense, and th e most natural and obvious thin gs in the world, on the oth er. 4

1

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Tota l Freedom, 1955.

h ttp: // www .jkrishn am urti. org/ krish nam u rti-teach ings/ prin t. ph p ?tid=492&c hid= 48 l 1 2

There is a rich and revea lin g body o f wo rk on thi s th eme, kn ow n as orali tyli teracy studi es. The change s in the n ervo us system and th e cultur al shift s

t hat acco mpan y th e tran sition horn ora lity to literacy are easily as great as the ch anges we are n ow expe rien cin g through th e adop tion of soc ial med ia. "Tnit h, as first conceived by Judai sm, was the word of God, somet hin g th at was audibl e and graspable acoustically and linguistically. In th e teac h ings of the syn agog u e, revelat ion is an aco ustic process or act, not a visua l one; or revelatio n at least happ ens in a sph ere which is m etaphysica lly associated with th e aco ustica l and th e sensua l. ... Th e point of departur e of aU m ystical th eories of langu age ... is th e convicti on that th e langu age-t h e medium-in wh ich spirih1al life tra nspires includ es an inn er dim ension, an aspect whic h is not limit ed to t he relationsh ips of commun ication betw een bein gs. A person shar es hims elf, tri es to mak e him self comp reh ens ible to othe rs, but in all such attempts th ere is something else vibrati ng, which is not just comm uni cation , meanin g and expression. Th e sound up on wh ich a!J language is built , th e voice which gives it form, forging it horn th e materi al of which sound is mad e, thi s is already prim a facie beyond our und erstandin g . ... a certain in ex pressib le som ethin g, which shows it self on ly in symb o ls, reso n at es in every mann er of exp ression ... " [The noti o n of vibration expre ssin g itself in symbol s recalls th e a rchetypa l fo rm s obse rved by Hans Jenn y in his experiment s with cymat ics. - ed.] - Excerpted, tran slated and adap ted from Gersh om Scho lem, "De r Name Gottes und die Sprac hth eo rie der Kabba la," in Eranos f ahrbuc h, Vol. 39, 1970, pp . 243-244. 3

Douglas Steere. On List enin g to A noth er (New York: Harp er & Row, 1964), 188-190. (Steere was a prom inent Quaker ed ucator. )

4

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Part Six: Listening out of the Box Chapter 27: The Sphere whose Centre we Are We divide space into left and right because we are forwardfacing, bilaterally symmetrical creatures. 1 However, space itself is not organized that way; it is essentially indifferent to our preferences. Fortunately for our survival, our auditory sense (unlike our vision) is tuned by evolution to the entire sphere whose centre we inhabit. In that perceptual space, each one of us has a unique relationship to every point of the compass, in all planes. Imagine for a moment you are in a coastal rain forest. You hear a cougar's cry, and it occurs to you that you might want to know how far away that cat is, which way it's travelling, whether it's up a tree or in the undergrowth, and how hungry it is. Right and left are helpful here, but more information is required. Unless we have trained oursel ves to what Feldenkrais calls a "samurai-like awareness of what is happening there will be undeveloped

around [us],"

areas of our field, where we tend

to be fuzzy about what is going on, at one or the other de gree of the compass and/or degree of elevation. We might call these 'locational

prejudices ,' and they don't n ecessa rily

originate in the ears and eyes. They also arise from unique patterns

of self-use, including

countless

asymmetries

in

resonance, support and mobility, inherited or acquired, from the feet to the h ead . These patterns, embedded spatially in the body/mind , reveal themselves not only in the carriage of the head with its tel eceptors, but also in our ability to attend to the various points of perceptual sphere. How does this play out, in practical terms? There is asymmetry in action: for example, most people are right-handed,

some

are left -handed. There is asymmetry in support: for example, most people have one leg on which they are more stable than -101-

the other. And there is perceptual asymmetry: for examp le, most people have a so-called dominant eye, usually the right. Since the two eyes have essentially different views of the world, the position your right eye assigns to a remote object and the one which your left eye assigns to the same object are not the same. The phenomenon of eye dominanceresolves tho se two positions into one position, how ever unstable.*

You can explore eye dominance by forming a triangular frame using both index fingers and thumbs. Hold this triangle at arm's length and gaze through it, with both eyes open, at an object on the opposite wall, such as a clock, a light switch, or a picture. Centre your frame around the object. Now close your right eye. Did th e object jump to the left (or the frame to the right), or did it remain in the centre? Open both eyes, again centring the object in the frame. Now close your left eye. Did the object jump to th e right (or the frame to the left)? If th e object (or the frame) moved (more) when you closed your right eye, you are likely right-eye dominant. If it (or the frame) jumped (more) when you closed your left eye, you are likely left-eye dominant. If it moved equally both times, you have, at the moment at least, no clear dominance. What is going on? There is a viewpoint from the left of your no se, and another viewpoi nt from the right of your nose. Yet, most of the time, with two eyes open, we don't see two images at once (altho ugh this option is always there, and easy to evoke). Rather, the two separate views are more or less resolved into one. They are not resolved, however, by averaging,as one might guess, but hierarchically . That is, the viewpoint of one eye prevails over the viewpoint of the other. Eye dominance and feeling tone. With your non-dominant eye well-covered, call up in yourself an event of great emotional import for you personally, and observe the depth and breadth of your feelings associated with the event. Give it a few long breath s. Then cover the dominant eye and uncover the non-dominant eye. Take time to explore th e quality of and access to feelings on this side.

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Given the indivisible nature of perception, the way you use your eyes cannot be separated from the way you hear and listen. For example, if you were merely to entertain the thought of listening to the left or right, an observer would notice a corresponding movement in your eyes. Conversely, research suggests that every lateral eye movement is accompanied by changes in the tension of both ear drums 2 • It follows that a change in the use of one perceptual channel implies a change in the other. The implications for a somatic listening work are clear: the auditory sense lies very deep within us, and offers few obvious handles for adjustment. The eyes, on the other hand, are easy to find. Therefore, we work with what is available in order to evoke changes in what is hard to grasp. If our eyes have established a division of labour ·between

them, do our ears also have, as it were, different personalities and tasks? Studies have indeed confirmed that the left ear, whose harvest is fed into the right hemisphere, shows an advantage in recognizing emotional tone, while the right ear, which feeds into the left hemisphere, shows more aptitude in recognizing verbal content.3 To some degree then, when we ask someone to lend an ear we should be more specific about which one we would like to borrow. (There are domestic implications: e.g., if picking up emotional tone is the priority, you might consider lending your left ear; if tracking facts is the priority, then the right ear.)

Try changing your listening position at a concert. For example, during the first half of a concert you sit on the far right side of the room; during the second half you sit on the far left. Is there a difference in the way you are with the music?

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How would we go about lending one ear or the other? If we were horses, this would be a simple matter: we would merely tum the appropriate ear in the appropriate direction . For hominids, lending an ear is a fuller-bodied undertaking: it is our whole self that turns the ears-which

is to say, our whole spine. Having a

human spine introduces yet another aspect of lateral differentiation , because, for most of us, the spine turns more easily one way than the other. Now, if we add to this lateral preference the inevitable differences in resonance, left and right, in the sinuses, face, mouth, teeth, throat, chest and abdomen, it becomes clear that there is no simple answer to th e question of auditory lateralization, and it does not begin or end with the ears. One crucial implication of this profound inte r-relatedness is that auditory asymmetry may be successfully addressed in an integrative manner: not only with the eyes, but with eve1y aspect of the self, from prenatal history to the orientation of the pelvis in listening. There are also huge implications

for the listening work in

the dynamic process of lateralization in the brain itself. One of the first discoveries of modem neuroscience was that language is located primarily in the left hemisphere. It turns out , however, that there is language and there is language learning,and we initially

encounter

language

(whether

spatial) in the right hemisphere.

auditory

or visual/

As we succeed in embeddingour

experience into a notation or code,' this representation migrates to the left brain. That is, linguistic knowns are organized in the left brain, while unknownsare encountered in the right. s In Seeing Voices,Oliver Sacks' primary interest is the sign language of the Deaf. He explains that, according to the formerly accepted model of brain lateralization, one might imagine that a spatial/kinaesthetic

language like ASL (American Sign Language)

would reside in the right hemisphere. However, like other encoded representational systems, once it is learned, ASL turns up on the left. This process, says Sacks, also applies to musical listening: -104-

There is good evidence ... that while musical perception is chiefly a right hemi sphere function in predominantly "nai:Ve" listeners , it becomes a left hemisphere function in professional musicians and "expert" listeners (who grasp its "grammar" and rules, and for whom it has become an intricate formal structure). 6

Since one of the objectives of an embodied listening work is to "refresh" our listening, this shift between hemispheres gives us a very useful set of tools. For, while the right ear would seem to be the better path for de-coding language and music-t hat is, for listening through what we know-if

we are looking to open up

established patterns to change, the opposite would appear to be true. If we are looking to listen with "naive" ears, and to retrace the path of learning-to

hear a language as new, to hear

music as new, or even to hear a partner anew-that

pathway

could well go through the left ear and into the right brain.** Among the most enjoyable aspects of my work is assisting classical musicians in learning to improvise. Often a musician is bound to a particular perceptua l mode. One path to freedom lies in temporarily inhibiting that mode. Listening differently leads to playing differently. Just as one could try to release writer's block by writing with the non-dominant hand, shifting the perceptual mode will often help free an artist from neural servitude to what he or she already knows. By bringing our awareness to differences in attention-at all points of the sphere we inhabit-attention itself becomes subject to change and improvement. In my own work this is often done by inhibiting habitual modes of self-organization in space, including habitual use of the eyes and hands. This naturally evokes a new pattern. The next step is to combine the new pattern with the dis-inhibited mode. This process almost invariably leads to a new constellation of the perceptual field, hearing and listening included.

-105-

* The notion of eye dominanc e, with its hi erarc hic al overtones, can

be rath er mislead ing. For one thing, the domin ant eye is not necessarily the one with the better score on yo ur eye exa m. And for another, the term dominance refers onl y to th e determination of location in the space in front of you . Meanwhil e, yo ur non -domi nant eye may very well be playing another role entir ely, even a dominant one , in survey ing th e land scape within you. 1 For mor e on this th eme, see David Kaetz, The Ezekiel Code (Hornb y Island, B.C.: River Centr e, 2014).

"Wh en th e Eyes Move, the Eardrums Move Too." NeuroscienceNews, 23 January 2018. - http: // neurosciencenews.com/eye-ear-movement -8360/. 2

Marcel Kinsbourne and Brend a Bemporad, "Late ralization of Emotion ," in Fox and Davidson (eds.). The Psychobiologyof Affective Development (London : Psychology Press, 2015), 278. See also Michael Seidman et al, "Hemispheric Dominance and Cell Phone Use," in Journal of the American Medical Association, Otola,yngology, Head and Neck Surge,y. (VOL. 139:5) May, 2013, 466 -470 3

- h ttp: // jamanetwork.com/journals

/ ja m ao tolaryn go logy/fu l lart icle/1688 129

Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (Berkeley/LA: U. Cal. Press, 1989), 105. 5 Ibid., 104-105. 4

Sacks speaks here of developmenta l phase s of lateralization , dep end ent on th e experience of th e individual : "Classically the two cerebral hemisph eres are seen as having fixed (or 'co mmitt ed') and mutuall y exclusive functions: linguistic/ nonlingui stic, sequential/simu ltaneous , and analytic/gestalt are am ong the dichot omies suggested ... [However, citing the work of Goldberg et al ... I The tight hemisphere's role ... is a·itical for dealing with novel situations, for wh ich there does not yet exist any established desaiptive system or code-and it is also seen as playing a part in assemblin g such codes. Once such a code has been assembled, or emerged, there is a transfer of function from right to left hemisphere, for the latter controls au processes that are organized in tenns of such grammar s or codes. ( rhu s a novel linguistic task, even th ough it is linguistic, will initiaJJy be processed predo minantl y by th e right hemisphere, and only subsequentl y become routin ized as a left hemisphere function .)" 6

Ibid., 106

** Interestingly, Dr. Tomat is, who regarded th e right ear as th e "leadin g

ear," and saw left-ear (and left-hand) dominance as "dyslaterality," derived th ese notions from working with professional musicians. He noted th at they were rendered virtually incompetent by closing their right ears. However, it may well be th at this is not how they became professional musicians. In order to induce th e experience of hearing music as if for the first time, it may be helpful to backtrack and reboot by listenin g in an un accustom ed-if possibly disorienting-way.

-10 6-

Chapter 28: Why are Whales Big?1

Soon after one starts delving into the literature on hearing, one discovers that, while there is something like a consensus view, backstage there is a lot of discussion and not a little disagreement

on some

pretty

important

example, most agree that air conduction

matters.

For

and bone conduc-

tion are parallel channels whereby vibrations reach the inner ear. The canon holds that the three ossicles of the middle ear transmit airborne vibrations from the ear drum to the oval window of the inner ear. Others (Tomatis among them) have suggested that the ossicles have more to do with the regulation of sound, even with protecting the inner ear from vascu-

lar noises, while vibrations are primarily transmitted

from

the eardrum to the cochlea through the bones of the skull, in which the cochlea is embedded. Another agrees about the ossicles, but prefers an air conduction channel between the two membranes. And, there may be channels of conduction that are missing altogether from the consensus. Fascinating work has been done in France (2013)2 suggesting an electricalpathway from the eardrum - whose collagen fibres apparently have piezoelectric properties-directly

to the cochlea. Thus the eardrum serves

not only as a means of mechanical transmission of impulses to the ossicles, but also as an electronic microphone , most effective in the higher frequencies. This hypothesis nicely addresses the fact that transmission through the ossicles and the bones of the skull is less efficient and precise in the higher frequencies . The notion of electrical transmission is further supported by the observation that age- or toxin - or auto -immune-related deterioration in the collagen of the eardrum, which is associated with a loss of the piezoelectric response, leads to hearing loss, particularly in the higher frequencies . -10 7-

Another narrative suggests that fluid conduction is a partner in the transmission process, in particular conduction through the cerebrospinal fluid , which is anatomically contiguous with the inner ear. This hypothesis, proposed by Dr. Alan Lupin of Victoria, B.C., has some fascinating, if neither conclusive nor exclusive, arguments in its favour. 3 One of these is that the inner ear is encased in the densest bone in the body. According to Dr. Lupin, this density serves to insulate the cochlea from a chorus of chewing, digestion, respiration, and other internal sounds, and thus to preserve the cochlea's sensitivity for what comes from outside of the body: "If it [the cochlea] weren 't so hard , you 'd spend all your time listening to blood rushing ," says Victoria , B.C., otolaryngologist Dr. Alan Lupin. "Every time you burped, it would sound like thunder. If our ears were any more sensitive, we'd be listening to what is called Brownian Movement-the movement of molecules within a gas." 4

Another argument for fluid conduction whales-mammals

like us, after all-are

is that the great among the best

listeners, communicators, and sonar operators (echolocators) on the planet, and their inner ear resides in a bony container of extraordinary density and durability. Specimens of these

petrotympanic bones over five thousand years old have been found on arctic islands, just sitting on the ground. Most importantly,

this extraordinarily

dense container

has no

direct contact with the rest of the whale's skeleton. Rather, it is suspended from the whale's skull by a ligament, and sits in an entire ly fluid surround. Thus, for large wha les, bone conduction can be ruled out. Unlike land mammals, sea mammals have no flap - or funnel-shaped outer ear. This makes sense , since the function of the funnel is to gather pressure waves and directional information from air, not water. Moreover, says Dr. Lupin, the ear canal of a whale is a very narrow, long and winding -108 -

tunnel, full of debris. So, transmission through the outer ear is also unlikely to be the way whales receive communication across thousands

of miles of ocean. The most likely and

obvious medium is fluid: pressure waves are received through the water and transmitted

to the whale 's cochlea directly

through the soft tissues and the fluid in which the cochlea is suspended. Fluid conduction in cetacean hearing gave Dr. Lupin the idea that humans might also hear this way, and in particular through the cerebrospinal fluid and the soft tissue itself. Nine teenth -century reports from patients who had had portions of their skull removed, in an operation known as trepanation, seem to support this theory . Such patients were able to hear through the scars covering the missing bits of bone , even when their ears were hermetically sealed. With sealed ears, and when the surgical openings themselves also were covered, the patients could not hear at all. These insights led Dr. Lupin to develop implanted hearing aids which use fluid conduction to reach the inner ear. Perhaps you have tried the experiment where a tuning fork is first struck and then its single round foot is touched to your skull? The sound of the fork increases dramatically when it contacts your head. Your skull has become a resonator, in the same way that the bridge of a guitar becomes a resonator when you touch it with the base of a tuning fork. The specific channel

whereby this heightened

resonance

reaches your inner ear is generally explained as bone conduction. This does not rule out the possibility of a simultaneous path through the cerebrospinal fluid .

***

-10 9-

As mentioned earlier, in somatic listening , as in somatic education in genera l, our purpose is to provide the brain with as broad a sensory palette as possible. In this we can trust our brain-our

ultimate authority on practical anatomy-to

use

what's there and to ignore what isn't. Our embodied experience includes all channels: those that form part of th e consensus view of audition, and others that may be hiding in plain sight ... like, for examp le, the whale's ear, which is the whale .

1 Bernard Aurio l et al, "Overt and covert paths for sound in the auditory system of mammals," available from Research Gate:

- h ttps://www .researc hgat e.net/ publication/258105 701_ Overt _and_ cove rt_paths _fo r_sou nd_in _the _a udi tory _sys tern _of_ma mmals

If Dr. Lupin's hypothesis of fluid conduction through the body of the whale is born out, th en it has a charm ing corollary: the immense reach of a whale's hearing is enab led by the size of the whale itself. That is, if the whale's tiny and clogged ear canal is not the main conductor of pressure waves to the cochlea, then the effective outer ear of the wha le is the whale, and the bigger the wha le, the better it hear s, and the longer th e waves it can detect . 2

A particular case is the sperm whale . These beings got their English name from the fluid found in their heads , which was labeled spermaceti, and once, falsely, thought to be sem inal fluid. It is very waxy, and the proportion of wax increases with the age of the whale. Spermaceti makes great candles and lamp oil, and for our light and lubri cation, sperm whales were once hunted close to extinction. Spermace ti also has very high sound conductivity, an d it is now thou ght that its primary biological function has to do with echolocation, a talent the gigantic sperm whale shar es with the little brown bat. As sma ll as they are, however, bats ha ve magnificent foliated ears to help them locate ob jects in space, while the sperm wha le apparent ly does this in a wholly different if not-yet-fullyunderstood way. See: http://marinebioacoustics.com/files/200l/Mohl_2001. pdf. Sound transmission in the nose of the sperm whale Physeter catodon . A post mortem study . Bertel Muhl (Denmark). 3

http://www.lupinimplantcomponent.com/Genesis.html

Dr. Lu pin's article does not specify the spec ies of whale involved.

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'Allison Griffiths and David Cruise, Hear No Evil. (A special report of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. Toronto: 1999.) - http://atkinsonfoundation .ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07 /hear -no evil.pd£ Note: precisely this effect-hearing too much of on e' s own insides, including the movement of one's own eyeballs-results from a malady known as superior canal dehiscence syndrome, of SCDS, in which there is a thinning ('honeycombing ') or absence of the temporal bone . See "Woman who can hear sound of her own eyeballs," in The Telegraph,June 27, 2013. - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/10145124/Woman-whocan -hear-sound -of-her-own -eyeballs.html

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Chapter 29: Muscles and Tubes Our inner ear is hidden away where only pressure waves can reach it, whether th ey arrive by air, bone, electrical, or fluid conduction. However, there are other parts of our auditory system with whose movements we can actually play a bit, to better understand how the y work. There are two tiny muscles in the middle ear, known as

tensor 'tympani and stapedius. Their work-at

the risk of over-

simplifying, and taking into consideration that the science on these matters is not unanimous-is

to shield the inn er ear from

high levels of low-frequency vibrations, including those coming from one's own voice and respiration , meanwhile allowing the higher frequencies to be heard more clearly. This is done by adjusting the tension of the eardrum and the ossicles, thereby altering their impedance (responsiveness to vibration). This reflex happens exceptionally fast. Not fast enough, however, to protect your inn er ear from loud sounds up close (and thus, as mentioned earlier, not from your phone and earbuds). A small percentage of people are able to activate these muscles voluntarily, and thereby to tun e certain sounds out and in. When , for whatever reason, th e protective reflex which controls these muscles is disabled, there may be hypersensitivity to environm en tal sound, as well as noise induced hearing loss . A lesser dysfunction may lead to too much low end and/or not enough high end sound . There is also said to be a diminution of the reflex with age, which would account for decreased tolerance for noise among the elderly. There are a number of movements that trigg er the protective reflex . Experimenting with them may allow you to experience what these muscles are up to. Tensing the muscles intentionally not only changes what you hear from the outside; you may also hea r a transient roar or ringing in your -113-

ears, produced by the vibration of the muscle itself. (Apparently all muscles produce sound at very low levels. Of course, if that muscle is in your ear, you are more likely to hear it. While these two may be the smallest striated muscles in the body, they are also the closest to your cochlea.) There are several movements (apart from speaking and breathing) that can induce a reflex activation of these muscles. Among them are: extending your jaw, yawning, swallowing, squeezing your eyes forcefully shut, and clenching the teeth. If you do these things while listening to a steady sound source, you may notice changes in the tonal profile of the sound, as well as new sounds. The reflex is said to habituate quickly, so you can't continue these experiments very long before their effect dissipates. The study of human musculature dates from an era of mechanistic thinking, with each set of muscles and bones seen to be functioning in isolation. In our day it is increasingly the fashion to see the entire body as an interactive system in which the tension of any one muscle has an effect on all the others. If that is the case, one might speculate as follows: if the muscle tone of any part of my body affects the tone of the muscles of the middle ear, might it not also affect my hearing? 1 If so, does a state of low muscle tone (hypotonia) contribute to underfunctioning middle ear muscles? Does heightened muscle tension overall-for example, following a traumatic event-do likewise? Could it be that better coordination of flexors and extensors overall would result in improved self-regulation of the ear drum and ossicles? Unlike the inner ear, the middle ear is an airy chamber. That said, it has no access to the outer atmosphere, other than through the eustachian tube, which opens into your nasopharynx. If it is playing its part to the full, the eustachian tube functions as a bi-directional gas and fluid valve. That's quite a ·114-

job description, and it includes: 1) equalizing air pressure inside and out, 2) . allowing secretions in the middle ear to drain outward into your throat, while 3) preventing fluid in the pharynx from flowing into your ear. If you have done any diving, or flying, or driving through

high mountains, you are aware of the effects of changing air pressure in the middle ear, which can distort the eardrum and affect your hearing. And you are also aware that by swallowing, yawning, or chewing, you can open up the tubes, and, partially at least, equalize the air pressure between the middle ear and the outer ear. This is naturally harder to do if the tubes are blocked , scarred, swollen or infected. Conversely, if the tubes remain too open (patulous tubes), the middle ear is liable to be visited by whatever's hanging out in the back of your throat, and infections and various other problems may result. Getting to know your eustachian tubes better can change the way you hear during and after a flight. Likewise, learning to regulate or tone the musculature of your face, jaws, neck, mouth, tongue and throat (hint: singing helps) may help resolve difficulties related to both hearing and voice production. 2 1 Acco rdin g to th e Toma tis schoo l, thi s hold s true in the other direc ti on; i.e., changes in hearing affect th e enti re mu sculatur e.

2

For alternat ive therapeutic work around the eustachian tube , see: http:// www.tubenfi111ktio11.d e/

wissenscha~lich earbeit.html(in German).

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Chapter 30: "I feel like my skin is all ears!" - workshop participant , Victoria, B.C.

The realms of the audible vary subjectively. For older people-an d often from the 50 th year onwards-the upper limit moves appreciably downwards . Others are capable-through trainin g or natural ability-of considerably extending th e limit upwards .... It is also difficult to determine the lower limit to h earing. Here too it becomes clear that the sensation of hearin g does not simply vanish-as does the perception of light in specific, relatively det erminable ranges-but is instead tran sformed into a vibratory sensation such as one can also bring about in any otherpart of the body through contact with a vibrating object ... One thus moves without noticing from a predominantly but not exclusively acoustic sensation to a predominantly and even exclusively vibrato1y sensation. Distinguishing between these two modalities in this transitional area is scarcelypossible and highly subjective ... 11

11

- Joachim- Ern st Berendt (Tim Nev ill, trans.), The Third Ear. (N.Y.: Holt, 1988), 40. (citing French acoustician Rene Choc holle).

We should not be surprised that the skin is sensitive to vibrations, given that both skin and ner vo us system develop from the same level of embryonic tissue , the ectoderm. This fact caught the attention of both Feldenkrais and Tomatis.

1

While every cell in our body is susceptible to being moved by vibrations, some of them have structures that are special ized to inform the brain about vibrations. These are the socalled mechanoreceptors , nerve endings which respond to minute movements

and pressure. There are four types of

mechanoreceptors, of which three ha ve been shown to respond specifically to vibrations: the lamellar corpuscles (otherwise known at Pacinian corpuscles), which can detect frequencies centred around 250 or 300 Hz, and at very low amplitude;

tactile corpuscles (otherwise known as Meissner's

corpuscles), respon ding to frequencies between 10 and 50 Hz; and Merkel cells, which react to frequencies between 5 -1 17-

and 15 Hz. Taken together, the frequencies for which they serve as antennae include the lower range of what our ears can perceive, and lower still. Tomatis believed that these cells are, through their embryonic development,

related to the

hair cells of the inner ear. By this model, not only do we hear with our skin, but the cells that do so in their respective organs are cousins. Tomatis was particularly inte rested in finding a cure for stuttering, which he initially thought was due to insufficient dominance

of the right ear, and thus insufficient "audio-

vocal control"-i.e.,

insufficient

feedback between speech

and listening. While he had success in training stutterers to use their right ears more, there were recalcitrant cases, which led him to conclude that their skin was less responsive to sound than the skin of his more successful clients: So if the skin lacks sensitivity the whole process of audiovocal control is endangered. If you isolate the body, by putting the head in a baffle for example, you immediately disturb the whole regulation. The most persistent stutterers were particularly deprived of the dermal control mechanism. The treatment of these kind of stutterers required helping them to learn to sense the flow of sound over their skin . As Tomatis more eloquently put it, "the person must learn to use his body like a musical instrument ... a cutaneous keyboard. "2

Here we are again in that interesting territory of parallel inputs, where, at the bottom end of what we recognize as sound, the skin and the ears are registering the same phenomena-where the skin is, to quote one of my clients, all ears. (Although there is conduction to the inner ear through bone and, plausibly, fluid, these channels may be compromised when the inner ear is damaged. Sensation in the tissues, on the other hand, does not proceed to the brain through the inner ear.) As the experience of Deaf musicians shows, an impairment of the inner ear invites a compensato-118-

ry apprenticeship

to sensation . Cultivating the "accessory

senses" will certainly not replace lost hair cells or damaged neurons, but there is no doubt that it gives the brain- where audition takes place-more to work with.

1 Alfred A. Tomatis (Hain er Kober, tran s.), Der Klang des Lebe1J s. (Rein bek bei Hamb urg: Rowohlt , 1990), 119.

ht tp://va leriedejean.o rg/to mm y6.html © Valerie Dejean 2006. (Valerie Dejean studi ed with Dr. Tomatis.) Tomatis would later join the idea of cutaneous sens itivity to the notion of bon e condu ction , so th e above formulation seem s to ha ve been tran sitiona l.

2

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Chapter 31: Echolocation

Echolocation is a sensory function that we associate more with bats and whales, but most humans also use it unbeknownst. It can also be consciously cultivated to an amazing degree, and rather quickly, because it is already there. For me it stands for all of our underdeveloped faculties, of which there are, by definition, more than we can imagine. We could think of echolocation as a refinement of hearing, and we could think of it as a manner of seeing. It is both. Echo location is one of many tools in the service of navigation in space. The brain uses any and all sensory inputs to construct and constant ly refine its map of the world. Here again we note that our classical sensory categories, along with notions of what Oliver Sacks calls "anatomically fixed, pre-dedicated parts of the cerebral cortex,"• do not actua lly describe the way we work. This book begins with a citation from research psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum , and, as it draws to a close, Rosenblum's words are worth reiterating: The long -held concept of the perceptual brain bein g composed of separate sense regions is being overturned. Your brain seems design ed around multisensory input , and much of it doesn't care through which sense information comes. Your brain wants to know about the world-not about light or sound, as such. 2

Evelyn Glennie , the world-class percussionist who says her life work is to teach people how to listen- and who just happens to have profound hearing loss-understands this. And next to Dame Evelyn there is the remarkable Daniel Kish, sightless since infancy, whose life work is teaching blind children and adults how to explore space through echo location. It is nothing short of astounding to watch this man in -12 1-

action 3 , as he navigates through cityscape and countryside, on foot or on his mountain bike, clicking with his tongue against his palate, and reading from the reverberations he receives the locations, distances, shapes, sizes and make-up of objects and surfaces, near and far. He and his colleagues have helped teach these skills to hundreds of blind ch ildr en. Daniel Kish and Evelyn Glennie are walking advertisements for the wisdom of using what works to supplement what doesn't, of building upon known strengths and developing unknown ones, and of optimizing this whole process through curiosity and creativity.

' Oliver Sacks, On the Move. (London: Picador, 2015) 362: " .. . much of th e cortex is plastic, pluri potent 'rea l estate' that can serve [within limit s] whatever function is needed; thus what would be auditory cortex in hearing people may be reallocat ed for visual purposes in congenitally deaf people , just as what is normally visual cortex may be used for other sensory functions in the congenitally blind. " ...

Describing th e research work of Dr. Ralph Siegel, Sacks writes: "One of his findings ... was that neuronal conste llations or maps cou ld chan ge in a matter of seconds as the anim al learned or adapted to differen t sensory in puts." 2

Lawrence Rosenblum , See what I'm Saying (NY: Norton , 2011) 280 .

3

Video here (hopefu lly still): http://www .bbc.com /news/d isability-35550768

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Part Seven: Deep Listening, and Deeper Chapter 32: Musicians Together Watch the members of a chamber group-how they move as one, become as one, a single field. We have become accustomed to such miracles: the extraordinary faculty of jazz mu sicians to "predict" precise pitch and pattern during improvisation, the simultaneous sweep of sixty bows in a symphony orchestra . The miracle springs not so much from individual virtuosity and sectional pyrotechnics as from the ability of a large group of human beings ... to sense, feel, and move as one. - George Leo nard , The Silent Pulse (New York: Bantam , 198 1) 22-23.

The greater part of making music in an ensemble is learning to listen as one, and when this happens, the audience can hear it in the playing. This is accomplished by listening to oneself while listening to others. While each musician has his/her

own special

doorway to enter the "zone" of this sort of listening, most would agree that it is done by feel, rather than thought, and by openness, rather than by effort. And where is the feeling, and where the openness, if not in the body? Listen my friend, the human body is his sitar. He draws the strings tight, and out of it comes the music of the inner universe. '

For singers, the body is the instrument, and tones are sensed in the singer's body as palpable vibrations. With the cello, harp, and classical guitar, where the instrument lies against the body, sensations may be felt in the same way as with the voice. For others, they might be linked with finger position and other kinaesthetic cues. You may have seen guitarists and pianists moving their fingers along an imagi nary fingerboard in the air, or an imaginary keyboard on a tabletop, while the tones are sounding in the musician's

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brain in precise coordination with the muscles involved in producing them . When improvising musicians ope n their attention simultaneousl y, each one appearing in the awareness of the others, a field of resonance appears. Anoth er way to describe this is: I hear you in me, and you hear me in you. Meanwhile, if you would ask musicians what the y would want of their audiences, for many it would be the same thing. They would like people to feel what they feel, to move them and touch them as they themselves are moved and touched. This is, after all, the unique power of music among the arts: to create, even at a distance, a field of sympathetic resonance. If you are an improvising musician and you step into this

field, attending to cues in your own body, the next note to play-or

not to play-makes

itself clear.

Improvising musicall y in a group is, in this sense, not very different from contact improvisation in dance, where every move involves feeling for contact, weight, and suppo rt . I feel your weight in me, you feel my weight in you. And the same applies to systemic constellations in the therapeutic realm, where a field is established and everything that happens after that depends on somatic cues. In all of these situations, thinking about th e issues involved will not help you to navigate. It is attention to breath and sensation in the body that brings us into play, as it were, while thought separates us from ourselves and others . Here, connection is experienced as resonance or its lack, rather than as agreement or disagreement. This kind of relationship was described by Rumi, in Coleman Barks' rendition, with these lines: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field; I'll meet you there. 112 ***

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On a visit to Vienna, home of many great composers and musicians, I met over coffee with the remarkable pianist Paul Gulda.' I had attended a concert of his, and left impressed by his way with the repertoire, the instrument, the audience, and simply being on the stage. It soon became apparent in our discussion that teaching is his great joy. Gulda said that a student feels acutely the quality of the teacher's listening , and appreciates most when a teacher listens not only with his or her ears, but viscerally . On the sine qua non of ensemble playing-listening to oneself and others simultaneously-he proposed, as an ideal, a wide and effortless field of attention: Having first developed tru e unity with the instrument /vo ice/ material at hand-a technically and intellectually demanding task-what if we could then tune our listening away from the individual perception of 'What's this note doing? What's this line doing? What is the sound of the piano versus the sound of the cello? ... if we could do something I like to call 'the one big ear,' just taking it all in. That's a state of bliss, maybe that's something we can aspire to . We can imagine it. That could be the moment of enlightenment that Zen students talk about. Yow! Here it is, listen to the universe! 4

1

Kabir (Robt. Bly, trans.), The Kabir Book (Boston: Beacon, 1992) 32 ..

2

Rumi/Barks, The Essential Rumi (Edison, NJ: Castle, 1997) 36.

The poet's original Persian lines, especially when read in th e light of today's climate , were a bit bolder and riskier. They refer to a field that is beyond religion and unbel ief See Rosina Ali, "The Erasure of Islam from th e Poetry of Rumi," The New Yorker. January 5, 2017. http: //www. n ewyo rker.com/books/page- turn er/theerasure -of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi 3

http: //www. paulguld a.info

4

About conducting, Guida added: "This is also the kind of listen ing a truly great conductor will exercise, beyond the analytical registering of tuning, balance, rhythm , etc. in the orchestra, as he stands there in front of the man y."

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Chapter 33: Two Silences Music begins. Your silence, deepen that . - Rumi (Co lema n Barks, tran s.) The Big Red Book . (N.Y.: Harp er One, 2010 ) 345.

Effort at any level is obviously a form of destruction, and it is only when the mind is very qui et, not making an effort, that understanding takes place. But with most of us, effort is the primary thin g; we think effort is essential, and that ve ry effort to listen, to unde rstand, prevents comprehension, the immediate perception of what is true and what is false. - Krishnamurti, Total Freedom, 1955. http: //www. jkrishn am urti .org/krishn am urti-teaching s/prin t. ph p?tid=492&chid=4 8 l l

There is one silence which relates to hearing, and another which applies to the way we use our attention. We can deal with the first one rather straightforwardly,

since, in an abso -

lute sense, it doesn't exist. When you enter a sound-proof room, you bring your own sound (and vibrations) with you: respiration , circulation, nervous system, digestion, and musculature. Silence of hearing can only exist where there is neither movement nor mo ver, and consequently, no hearer. The other silence is the one alluded to the foregoing passage from Krishnamurti, where the mind is not generating its own noise. In the unquiet mind, the capacity to attend is undermined by fixed patterns of thought and emotion, by identifications, fears and desires, and by any number of other competitors for our attention. To listen in silence, to be fully available, one would have to free one's attention from these patterns and habits, and from self-concern. Here listening can tune into what is sensed as sound, or ignore it altogether. Consider the following account by the renowned Burmese meditation master Ajahn Chah:

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I stayed once in a forest monastery that was h alf a mi le from a village. One night the villagers were celebrating wit h a loud party as I was practicing walkin g meditation ... My mind was quiet. There were hardly any thoughts. I felt very relaxed and at ease . I did walking meditation until I was tired and then went to sit in my grass-roofed hut ... As soo n as I sat down, th e mind be.came truly peaceful ... It wasn't as if I cou ldn 't hear the noise of the villagers singing and dancing-I still could -b ut I could also shut the sound out entirely. Strange. When I didn't pay attention to the sound , it was perfectly quiet-didn 't h ear a thing. But if I wanted to hear, I could, without it being a disturbance. It was like there were two objects in my mind that were placed side by side but not touching. I cou ld see that the mind and its ob ject of aware n ess were separate and distinct , just like this spittoon and water kettle her e. Then I understood: When the mind unifi es in samad hi , if yo u direct your attention outw ard yo u can h ear, but if you let it dwell in its emptiness then it's perfectly silent. When sound was perceived, I could see that the knowing and the sound were distinctly different. 1

'A jahn Chah, Foodfor tile Heart. (Boston: Wisdom Pub ., 2002). 191-192 .

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Chapter 34: Listening -without-an -object If we place crystal wine glasses on a table, they are together, at the same time, but they remain strangers to one another ; if we fill one, the others remain empty; if we put them all together in a box to carry them somewhere, the y will knock against one another and shatter. Meanwhile, one musical tone can bring all these glasses into resonance at the same time. This tone fills them all, it sets them in motion, and they don't break. - Trans. and adapted from Jean Bmn, "Le monde des resonances," Eranos Jahrbiich, Volume 59, 1988. P. 50.

So far we have been looking at listening as a partner for hearing. Now we shift to a realm where listening goes its own way, where no ear can go. When people begin to meditate, they are often given a specific item, process, or mantra with which to focus their attention.

Once this capacity is established,

the vista is

opened up. Now there is attention, but no longer attached to anything . It is free simply to notice whatever offers itself to be noticed. What comes up is not different from what came up before meditation was undertaken; what is different is that the student now has a place to dwell, awake, in the midst of it all. Something similar happens with listening. While we are listening attentively to music, our capacity to listen is growing . Once it has attained a certain intensity, this capacity remains even after the music has come to an end. This listening-Without-an-object could be described as a deepened receptivity. In a group, it has the quality of dissolving separations . You may have had such an experience at a concert: when the audience has been connecting with the music and musi cians on a deep level, the performance will end while the listening will continue, blooming into a profound silence. The audience has entered, together with the musicians, into that field of resonance of which we have previously spoken . - 129-

The members of the audience together hold back from breaking the mood with applause. This is what it feels like when Orpheus enters the room. In this state, talking may seem too crude, yet more is excl).anged in silence than anyone could dream of saying with words. This was better said by Rumi in these oft-quoted lines: When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. 1

The possibility

that

liste_ning can continue , or even

deepen, in the absence of hearing , returns us to the crucial distinction

between sensing and attending.

With hearing/

sensing we are dealing with the capacity to detect a particular frequency band of vibrations. With age, this capacity is often compromised. With listening/ attending, we are dealing with a capacity which can , with the right nourishment,

grow ever

wider and deeper. The one has more to do with structural givens, environment

and heredity; the other is an active

principle of self-organization. Naturally, together, the two of them are mutually reinforcing. That said, as sensing happens vyhether we are attending or not, attending is also possible in the absence of sensing. There are deep implications. Listening somatically-which is the experience of sound as movement

in space-is

like

experiencing your own breathing as movement in space. Both of these activities, listening somatically and experiencing the dimensionality of the breath, can take place only in the present. You can imagine a future sound or breath, and remember a past sound or breath-both

of these, imagining

and remembering , are cognitive activities-but

you cannot

listen in an embodied way, or feel the dimensionality of your breath, in the past or the future. You can listen to a sonata twenty times-the same artist, the same performance every time-but

listening somatically is always new, as is every -130-

breath, and, for that matter, love . Listening in an embodied way can absorb you into a quality of attention that is, to the extent that it is free from thought, also free of (the experience of the passage of) time. And once the capacity to listen in this manner is established (as described in Buddhistic terms 2 by Ajahn Chah in the previous chapter) it can persist with or without an object. Otherwise said: in a field of resonance, the object has become more or less beside the point; the object was there to lead us into presence. The five colors can blind, The five tones deafen, The five tastes cloy. The race, the hunt, can drive men mad And their booty leave them no peace. Therefore a sensible man Prefers the inner to the outer eye: He has his yes, he has his no. 3 - Lao Tsu (trans. Witter Bynn er]

Thus, while the sense of hearing may begin to fade with advancing age, the practice of listening may continue to ripen . The following story concerns a Persian Sufi poet, a predecessor of Rumi, one Sheikh Ruzbehan (1128-1209): ... At the end of his life, Ruzbehan began to abstain from the practice of listening to music [sam'a]. He had no mor e need of the intermediary of audible sounds, for the inaudible was heard by him as a pure inner music. . . . When one of his intimates que stioned him as to the reason for this abstention from music, Sheikh Ruzbehan answered : 'Henceforth it is God in person who performs in concert for me [or, God in per son who is the concert I listen to] . This is why I refrain from listening to what anyone else would have me hear (or: any other concert than himself) .' In this culmination of an entire life's experience, where the ear of the h eart, of the inner person, becomes indifferent to the sounds of the external world-there are indeed sonorities which can n ever be perceived by the man dispers ed in the external, torn from himself by the ambitions of this world. - 131-

What the ear of the heart hears is a sound and a music from beyond the tomb , which a few privileged one s have heard in this world , to the point th at the opaque barrier between the wor lds has become transparent to them. '

The author of this account was Professor Henri Corbin, a world -renowned scholar of religions, a Sufi himself and very influential in Jungian circles. Of Corbin himself , in his later years, it was said that . . . he would occ asion ally remove his hearing aid in company, remarking , not without humour , that now he preferred to listen to the an gel. 5

' Rumi/B a rks, Tile Essential Rumi (Edison, NJ: Ca stle, 199 7) 36. 2

Whil e th e lan guag e used by Aja hn Chah (or his tran slator s) to describe hearing, list enin g, and sound is so mewhat diff erent from the way it is used in thi s book, a bit of int erpretation reveals a kin ship with th e Sufi (and Taoist ) teachin gs we are exa minin g, to wit: "Wh en th e ears pick up a sound , observe what happ ens in th e hea rt a nd mind. Do th ey get bound up , entan gled, and ca rried away by it? Do th ey get irrit ated? At least kn ow thi s mu ch. Wh en a sound th en registers, it wo n't di sturb th e mind .. . Even if we' d like to flee fro m sound , th ere's no esca pe. The only escape possible is throu gh tra in ing th e mind to be unwa verin g in th e face o f sound . Set sound dow n . Th e sound s we let go o f, we can still hea r ... It's not that we hav e to forcefully separate th e hea ring and th e sound. It separ ates aut o matically du e to aband o nin g and lettin g go . Even if we th en want ed to clin g to a sound, th e mind wo uldn ' t clin g. Beca use once we under sta nd th e tru e natur e of sight s, sound s, smells, tastes, a nd all th e rest, and th e heart sees with clea r insigh t, eve rythin g sen sed with out exce pti o n falls within th e domain o f th e uni versal characteristics of im perma nen ce, un satisfactorin ess, and no n-self. "Anytim e we hear a sound it's und erstoo d in term s of th ese uni versal characteristics. Wh enever th ere's sense cont act with th e ear, we hear, but it's as if we didn 't hear." - Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart. (Boston: Wisdo m Pub., 2002). 2 11-212. 3

Lao Tzu, (Witter Bynner, translator ). The Way of Life According to Lao Tz11 . (New York: Capricorn , 1962), 3 1.

4

Henri Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger (Berkeley: No. Atlantic , 1998) 234,5.

Janos Darvas: Briickenbm,er zwisclrenOst and West, Henry Corbin:£in biographischphilosophisches Portriit.http s://www.amiscorbin.com /wp-cont ent/upload s/2012/06/ 5

Darvas-2015-Bruckenbauer-zwischen-Ost-und-West-Hemy- Corbin.pdf

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Part Eight: Afterword A camera takes th ree-dimensional space and turn s it into two; in thi s way the grand canyon can be proj ected onto a wall, for example. We are looking at a wall, and seeing a canyon . This situation would become prob lematic only if we were to lose sight of the artifice involved , and walk, with our backpacks and climbing gear, directly into the wall. Likewise, th e ear takes a certain band-width of vibratory movements (pressure waves) in thre e-dim ensional space, and abstracts them into brain-worthy code. Thus, when a thr ee-dimensional movement, channeled throu gh th e ears, arises within us as sound, it does so stripped of its original dim ensionality : a spatial phenomenon becomes a nonspatial phenomenon. Add to thi s th e abstraction involved in communicating through nam es and symbol s, and we find ourselves at several removes from reality. Nevertheless,these transformations would become problematic for us only if we were to lose contact with the original spatial nature of sound, which is still there to remind us where and what we are. - from Chapter 1

Our embodied experience includes all channel s: tho se that form part of the consensus view of audition , and others that may be hiding in plain sight ... - from Chapt er 28

While this book was going into final edits, I found myself on a flight from Vancouver to Frankfurt. The connection was a tight one, and the flight ·arrived a few minutes late. I raced through tunn els, up and down stairways, elevators and escalators, and along moving walkways to the gate, only to watc h my connecting flight lifting gracefully off the tarmac. The next conn ection was half a day away. Apart from grumbling, calling ahead, and fora ging for lunch, there was nothing for an expectant writer to do but visit the bookstore . There I spied a science maga zine announcing the following theme: Our Senses:Researchers discover

properties hidden until now. One of the articles bore this in-133-

triguing title: Our Second Sense of Hearing. ' With a smile of gratitude for having missed my flight, I bought the magazine and headed for a long and rewarding wait at the gate. There I read about recent research into th e human vestibular system, whose job is to orient us in space. From an evolutionary standpoint,

the oldest part of this system is the

saccule ("little bag"), which deals with orientation and acceleration in the vertical plane. The vestibular system also includes the utricle (orientation

and acceleration

in the

hori zontal plane), and the semi-circular cana ls, which sense head rota tion along all possible axes. All of them are to be found right next to the cochlea in the aptl y-named laby1inth of the inner ear. The saccule and utricle are known

as otolithic

(°ear -

stone") organs , for they contain tiny 'stones' or grains (actu ally, calcium carbonate) which, with mo veme nt, weigh or drag upon a set of mechanoreceptors,

thereby informing us

of orientation and movement with regard t o gravity. For this reason the otolithic organs are also known as gravity sensors. In one form or another, gravity sensors hav e have been with us ever since we, as very simple creatures, first needed to know up from down. Technicall y, the term otoliths applies to the mineralized bits in the saccules of vertebrates. In invertebrates those bits are known as statoliths (which are contained in statocysts). In the plant world statoliths are to be found in statocyt es, where the y tell a root tip which way to grow. However, writes the author of the article, neuroscientist and musician Neil Todd, giving us our bearings is not all thes e little stones do: Any soun d source th at causes local fluid vibration s (the aco ustic near field) will result in th e vibrati on being tr ansmitted to the animal's bod y, henc e causing relative motion of the -1 34-

statolith [the animal in question is an octopus - ed.] contained within its body. Thus we see that an organ originall y evolved to detect gravity becomes an organ to perceive sound .

With the excitement

of a child who has found his first

Easter egg, I read that the same evolutionary detects spatial displacement-vertical

adaptation

and linear-can

detect acoustic vibration as a spatial phenomenon.

that also

Actually,

posits Neil Todd, we have two senses of hearing, one based in the ancient saccule, the other in the coch lea, a more recent development. The two have rather different functions.

Todd describes

cochlear hearing as "auditory scene analysis": ... the cochlea carries out a spectral analysis of sound. This capability, in turn, enables us to develop highly nuanced acoustical communication in the form of speech, to appreciate music, and to form complex mental representations of the environ ment-a capacity referred to as audito,y scene analysis.

The first and oldest job of the gravity-sensing the other hand,

is to situate us within

Without a gravity-sensing own

movement,

pointless, pointed

and

organs, on

our environment.

organ, no creature could direct its auditory

if not impossible.

scene analysis

would

be

It follows (as Alfred Tomatis

out), that oral language itself would be impossible

without the vestibular apparatus. Now if a gravity-sensing organ-that

organ is also a vibration -sensing

is, also an organ of audition-then

the experience

of vibration as a spatial event both precedes and underlies the experience of sound through the cochlea. I suggested earlier that the invention of the term neuroplasticity (in the mid-sixties) did not alter the effectiveness of the

Feldenkrais Method, which by then had been around for some fifteen years. That said, the term itself and the concept it represents go a long way toward explaining in anatomical terms how the Method works. Likewise, positing the existence of some-135-

thing we might call "vestibular hearing" helps to explain how Listening with Your Whole Body works.

I wrote earlier of diverse streams of input coming together to build an auditory image. This synergy includes cochlear hearing (auditory scene analysis) and a number of "accessory senses." Of all of these, the one upon which deaf and hard-of-hearing musicians most rely is vibratory sensitivity. Now, in the light of recent research, we can plausibly credit our gravity sensors (along with mechanoreceptors in the skin) as a source of vibratory sensitivity. 2 While the notion that the human vestibular system retains some aspects of otolithic hearing is quite young, research is going on in some tantalizing directions. For example, there are suggestions that the saccule's acoustical sensitivity may extend not only into the infrasonic, but also into the ultrasonic range, to say nothing of what lies in between: In humans vestibular evoked myogenic potentials [a way of measuring the activity of the otolithic organs - ed.] occur in response to loud, low frequency acoustic stimulation in patients with sensorineural hearing loss. Vestibular sensitivity to ultrasonic sounds has also been hypothesised to be involved in the perception of speech presented at artificially high frequencies, above the range of the human cochlea (-18 kHz). In mice sensation of acoustic information via the vestibular system has been demonstrated to have a behaviourally relevant effect; response to an elicited acoustic startle reflex is larger in the presence of loud, low frequency sounds that are below the threshold for the mouse cochlea (- 4 Hz) , raising the possibility that the acoustic sensitivity of the vestibular system may extend the hearing range of small mammals. - h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otolith

The implications of this re-visioning of the vestibular system are broad indeed, and we can be sure that Orpheus is paying close attention. Todd writes:

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Examples of sexual behavior ... in fish and in frogs [which have on ly otolithic hearing - ed .] show clearly that courtship vocalizations have a profound biological impact on the receiving animal, enough to cause the release of eggs and sperm. This must mean that stimulating sounds cause direct changes in the receiving animal's autonomic and endocrine systems ... Recent evidence discussed by me and others in Frontiersin Human Neuroscience strongly suggests a considerable overlap between the areas in the brain activated by rhythm and parts of the vestibular brain network - in fact, one might even think of rhythm perception as a form of vestibular perception. It seems quite reasonable to speculate, therefore, that an accessory auditory system-one concerned with balance and rhythm rather than with complex acoustical analysis-may play a role in courtship and sexual behavior as a fundamentally important aspect of human life. Such an accessory auditory system may well have been central in the evolution of human music and dance ...

***

The first principle of Listening with Your Whole Body is the experience of_sound as a spatial phenomenon. Because space and motion are inseparable concepts, an obvious path to a heightened awareness of space- including sound as a spatial phenomenon-is

movement.

In the Feldenkrais Method, as in somatic work in general, quality of movement is more important than extent or frequency of movement. To refresh our sense of space, we would want to move in a way that is guided neither by memory nor by conditioning , but in the moment by all of our senses, recognized and unrecognized, otoliths included . Non -habitual movement, done slowly and with great attention, is especially

useful, whereby we are constantly "re-calibrating," continuously relocating and rediscovering ourselves in the field of gravity . If we add to non-habitual movement the use of non -habit -

ual perceptual modes, as described earlier, there is an even greater call for spatial re-orientation. Thus is our "second -13 7-

sense of hearing" brought ever more fully into the mix that comprises the "auditory image ." The recipe for a richer audi tory experience thus includes cochlear hearing, vibratory sensitivity (or "vestibular hearing"), as well as cues from all the other senses (those we know of and those yet to be discovered), mechanoreceptors in the skin, bone and fluid conduction, sympathetic resonance, rhythmic entrainment, the resonant spaces in the body, and-last but not least-the reeducation of attention . Put it all together through practical experience-powered by sufficient motivation and enlivened by curiosity and laughter-and you've got better hearing through. the somatic experience of sound.

1 Neil Todd, "Unser zweiter Horsinn ," Spektrum der Wissenschn~: Spezial: Biologie, Medizin, Hirnforschung. 3/20 16. The original English vers ion was published in American Scientist, under the title of "Do Humans Possess a Second Sense of Hearing? " September-October, 2015. Volume 103, Number 5, p. 348 + ff.

Thi s profusely illustrated article can also be found on-line: https: //www.a mer icanscientist.org /a rticle / d o- hum ans -po ssess -a-second -sense-of- h ear in g. The quotes in this chapter a re from the on- lin e English vers ion . Oliver Sacks, writing before the research of Todd et al., spoke of "vibrato,y -sense," but did not attribute it to a specific anatomical feature (see quotation on page 5).

2

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Appendix I: Short Exercises: Reprise 1.

Try this. Lie on your back on the floor. Rest one hand gently on your chest, and the other on your belly. Now sing 'o,' starting at your lowest possib le note and sliding, like a siren, glissando, up to your highest possible note, and back down again. Do this slowly, a number of times, so that you can feel what is going on in your head, throat, chest, and belly. Now, in the same position, listen to a piece of solo cello music, to Gregorian Chants, or to a jazz trio. Which voices, which lines, which instruments do you feel where?

2. Imagine this. With every syllable you speak, you are setting your watery body and the watery body of your listener in motion. Each tone, each vowel and consonant-each with its unique qualities of rhythm, pitch, amp litud e, overtones, and microtonal variation-evokes a particular symmetry, a particular colour, a particular emotional nuance. Try having a slow-motion discussion with someone you know well, in which you put at least half of your intention into this aspect of communication, that is, into how your resonating body resonates your partner , and vice versa. Resonating the body/mind can be done with deep intention: singing a mantra, a niggun, a zikr, a chant, a raga, an aria, a ballad or the blues many times, organizes you in a particular way. This effect can be supported by suspendi ng our belief in ourselves as fixed bodies in space, and allowing the self image to shift into the realm of flow and process. For couples: beforeyou have a discussion, sing slowly and attentively together. It doesn't have to be a who le song, or have words .. . or even be a song, for the matter. Just take a short melodic phrase and sing it together in unison over and over. The effect can be strengthened by contact, especially bone contact; for examp le, try singing this sho rt phrase together while holding hands, touching heads together, or, less intim ately, shou lder-toshou lder. Let it contin ue until you feel that there is one song coming through you both . Then, when you actua lly start to speak with each other, speak with the awareness that the resonance of your voice is the larger part of what you are saying, and the verbal content, the sma ller part. (P.S.: Dancing also works.) -139-

3. You can explore eye dominance by forming a triangular frame using both index fingers and thumbs. Hold this triangle at arm's length and gaze through it, with both eyes open, at an object on the opposite wall, such as a clock, a light switch, or a picture. Center your frame around the object. Now close your right eye. Did the object jump to the left (or the frame to the right), or did it remain in the centre? Open both eyes, and again centre the object in the frame. Now close your left eye. Did the object jump to the right (or the frame to the left)? If the object (or the frame) moved (more) when you closed your right eye, you are likely right-eye dominant . If it (or the frame) jumped (more) when you closed your left eye, you are likely left-eye dominant. If it moved equally both times, you have , at the moment at least, no clear dominance. What is going on? There is a viewpoint from the left of your nose, and another viewpoint from the right of your nose. Yet, most of the time , with two eyes open, we don 't see two images at once (although this option is always there, and easy to evoke). Rather, the two separate views are more or less resolved into one. They are not resolved, however, by averaging, as one might guess, but hierarchically. That is, the viewpoint of one eye prevails over the viewpointof the other. 4.

Eye dominance and feeling tone. With your non-dominant eye well-covered, call up in yourself an event of great emotional import for you personal1y, and observe the depth and breadth of your feelings associated with the event. Give it a few long breaths . Then cover the dominant eye and uncover the non-dominant eye. Take time to explore the quality of and access to feelings on this side. 5.

Try altering your accustomed listening position at a concert. For example , during the first half of a concert you sit on the far right side of the room, and during the second half you sit on the far left. Do you notice any difference in the way you are with the music ?

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Appendix II: A Home Listening Practice Introduction: To pay attention to your own auditory sense is like looking into your own eyes (without a mirror). We are setting about to examine the tool by which we examine. Nevertheless, in this, as in all other aspects of somatic work, the method for shining light on the unknown is clear. We can't look at our own eyes, but we can observe what happens while we are looking with our eyes at anything. What happens while we are listening to music reveals how we listen. This is the key to awareness, which is, in turn, th e key to improvement.

1) Choose two pieces of recorded music, between ten and thirt y minutes each, with which you do not have strong historical or emotional associations. Ideally these would be pieces with depth and texture, well-recorded, and played by artists whose own listening is apparent in their playing. The pieces need not be musical compositions or performances in the narrow sense. They might include, for example, Tibetan singing bowls, liturgical chanting, or environmental sounds. 2) Find a quiet space with good acoustical properties, where you can listen undisturb ed . The quality of sound reproduction is important. If you are using digital sources, use uncompressed sound files where possible (e.g., AIFF or WAV, rather than MP3's, from which much that you will be listening for has already been removed). You will want to use decent quality speakers which offer you a differentiat ed sound, and not headphones, because, well ... this is Listening with Your Whole Body.

3) Every day for a week, listen to the first selection, just once. (It is important to use the same selection throughout this period; in this way, since the music remains the same, you have the opportunity to observe the mutability of listening itself.) You can listen while lying on the floor, sitting or standing. The important consideration here is that you are relaxed and awake. Allow yourself some time afterwards to recall your experience, and to feel the after-effects. If you like to write, you might write something down after each session, for purposes of comparison.

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The following questions are offered only to open up a field of enquiry, not to constrain yo ur experience. Imagine somebody whispering such questions to you while you listen, or read through them before you begin, or after you're done. Feel free, as well, to substitute yo ur own questions. The pedagogical point here is to pay

kind attention to your experience:

How am I breath in g as I listen? What is the connection between breathing and listening? What am I doing while l am listening? ... with my eyes, hands, and tongue? ... in my skeleta l alignment? Does it make a difference how I am support ed: standing, sitting, lying? Where is the music? ls it outside of me or in side of me? [f outside of me, wh ere is it coming from -sp eakers, walls, floor? [f inside, whereinside: what parts of me feel touched? Am I moved by this music, and how? How does my feeling to_ne ch ange in th e cour se of th e listenin g? Is there a direction or flow of feelings? Are there images or memories that appear unbidd en? Do fragments of dreams return? What is the quality of my attention? ls it like the sun , like the moon, a floodlight, a laser-beam, or someth ing more diffuse? Like one after the other, like all at once? Is it easy or difficult to stay with the exerc ise? Does my attention wander? When? Where to? Am I thinking whi le I am listening? Am I judging or ana lyzing the performance, or th e exercise? Am I judging myself? (e.g., Am I doing this right ?") 11

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Am I running off into the future (e.g., planning my day)? Am I running off into the past (e.g., going over what has been)? How is my experience altered if I change my position relative to the sound source? ... when I listen primarily on the left side? .. . on the right? Does the qualit y of my listening change with th e time of day, the quality of light, or the temperature in the room? What other sounds enter into my field of listening , for example: street noises, ventilation, electronic hum s, the baby in the next room, my own breathing, my digestion, my heartbeat or circulation, the humming of my nervous system? When do the se other sounds appear and disapp ear? How do I fit th em into my experience? Do I hold them separate? Do they tend to blend with the music? 4) At the end of the week, review the whole experience. What, for you, are the qualities of an optimal listening experience? 5) On the eighth day, set yourself up in your own optimal way. Play the second selection. Are you the same listener you were a week ago?

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Appendix Ill: Imagining an Integrative Approach "Is there something that might have helped?" "That's difficult to say. So much of what we hear, we don't hear with our ears." Seeing Brunetti's confusion, he (the specia list) explained: "We do a goo d deal of lipreading, we fill in missing words from the context of the others we do hear. When people wear thes e hearing aids, the y've finally accepted the idea that something is wrong with their h earing. So all of the other senses begin to work overtime , tryin g to fill in the missing signa ls and messages, and because the on ly thing that's been added is the hearing aid, they believe it's the hearing aid that's helping th em, when the on ly thing that's happened , really, is that their ot her sen ses are working to their maximum to make up for the ears that can no longer hear as well." - Donna Leon's fictiona l detective Com missario Guido Brunetti interviews a hearing specialist in Death nt Ln Fenice,(Harp erTorch, New York. 1992. P. 238 .)

Imagine that you are having some trouble making out what people are saying to you. There are other things going on in your life. Perhaps trouble at work or at home, or the loss of a friend , or a recent election. Maybe you are not eating well, maybe a littl e depressed, maybe there are medications involved. You have seen your doctor and he or she has ruled out medical side effects, as well as infections, irritations and blockages in the outer ear, middle ear, and eustachian tubes. You see a notice for a free hearing clinic. You sign up for a test, and th e results show some degree of hearing loss. It is recommended that you invest in a device sold, coincidentally, by the very company that sponsored the clinic. And because you don't like missing out on things, and because this is the only remedy which has been proposed, you take the plunge. This will likely set you back at least several thousand dollars. Up to the point of swiping your card, however, has anyone asked you what is going _on in your life, or shown any curiosity about how you organize your body /mind to listen? The remedy offered by the hearing aid representative was based on the following reasonable assumptions: 1) hearing is about th e volume of sound that reaches your ears at specific frequencies; and 2) hearing loss should therefore be understood and treated as a problem of volume. Because the question of attention has been left out of the equation, this apparently reasonable solution may fall short of the mark. . -145-

For unless great care is taken, two processes which ought to be mutuall y supportive are set against each other. And the result is that many people leave their new hear ing aids in the dresser drawer. 1 This cross-motivation will endure as long as considerations of human self-use occupy a separate universe from technical enhancement of the senses, however well-intended. As a leaving ing aid options

person who takes responsibility for your own health, and open the possib ility that, at the end of thi s proce ss, a hearmay be exact ly what you need, here is a short list of some to exp lore:

1) Consider the way you are using your attention: The best hearing aid is listening; if you listen better, you hear better. Listening is attending; attending is an activity. Improvement in this activity, as in golf and singing, comes from awareness of how yo u are using yourself in this activity. Strong emotions compete for a share of our attention, as do thought loops and other sorts of inner noise. Have a look inside to see if your attent ion could be used more efficiently. 2) Consider all of yourself Building a rich aco ustic image in the brain embraces th e contributions of your ears (outer, middle, and inner) , and also the contributions of your way of breathing, your skin, skeleton, fluid body, spatia l orientation, stress level, muscle tone, blood sugar, and circulation-not to mention your sleep habits , moods, and belief system. 3) Consider your histo,y: Everything is relevant: accidents, surgical interventions , diseases, family history, social trauma. Have you served in the militar y? Played in a death metal band? Have you ever sustained noise-induced damage? 4) Consider waking 11pyour body's natural resonance: While noise tra um a may have laid low some of your hair cells and coch lear ne u rons, the unsung aspects of hearing-the so-called accessory senses-usually remain untouched. Of particular important is the experience of vibration in the body. The resonant qualities of various SP?Ces in the human body have been known to singers, actors and monks for thousands of years. There are postures and orientations in space whereby air, bone, and fluid conduction are optimized. Improving your capacity for resonance will help your brain compose a more complete auditory image. -146-

5) Consideryour motivation:In order to hear, you must be interested in hearing. Maybe you don't want to hear what is said at work, maybe you have "had enough of that." Maybe some part of you wants to turn away from some part of your world. 6) Consideryour significantothers: Listening is about relationship. Do you feel heard? Have you given up paying attention to someone important in your life, or vice versa? 7) Consider your soul: Every turning away from something is a turningtowardsomething else. Can it be your attention is drawn more to what's going on inside than to what's going on outside? In all honesty, what would you most like to hear? 8) Considerthe spaces you inhabit: the best external and non-technical assistance to the ear is an acoustically well-organized space . Is your workplace acoustically helpful? There are small and larger things that can be done to make your home and/or workplace more listener-friendly, includin g hanging fabrics, putting up or removing room dividers, altering the surfaces of walls and ceilings, damping machine sounds, adding sound insulation, etc. 9) Consider the company you keep in those spaces: the presence of attentive, interested and empathic human beings in a particular acoustic space is a powerful aid to hearing. Such people wou ld place themselves where they could best be heard and seen . This way the listener is in the optimal position to pick up non-verbal cuesacoustic, visual, tactile, olfactory, etc.-that support comprehension . 11) Consider your outer ears and the rest of you that carries them: lightness and flexibility in the carriage of your head mean greater ease in directing those radar dishes on your temples toward the source of sound. Of course, everything above, below and, in particular, between your ears is part of that movement. In other words , how you move is part of how you hear.

12) Consideryour vision: is one eye far more active than the other? Do you have issues with focussing? How is your peripheral vision? Are there places you cannot look? Changes in the organi zation of vision have an impact on our relationship to the entire sphere we inhabit. 13) Consider your sound system: Good quality external reinforcement of music, voices and ambient sounds , leaving the listener's entire mind /body free to locate itself acoustically in space, can be a -14 7-

big help to the ears. Sound reinforcement works well if it is not overdone, but it does cover all the listeners in the space , whether they need it or not. For a mixed audience, pub lic address systems exist with FM receiver/headphones for the hard-of-hearing, similar to what is used for simu ltaneous translation. One drawback ther e is that the rest of the body gets ignored . A variant of this solution is a personal amplifier [sometimes known as Personal Sound Amplification Product = PSAP]. Such units come in various forms, some consisting of microphone , miniature amplifier, and headphones, some resembling a no-frills hearing aid. There are also smartphone apps which propose to accomplis h the same task. For a mild hearing impairment, and with a limited budget, a personal amplifier could do the trick. The drawback: eve,yth ing gets louder, and this may not address the specificity of a person's impairment . (With the smartphone app, there may also be a digital delay.) As mentioned earlier, hearing loss is rarely an across-the-board thing , but generally happens in specific frequency ranges. For those frequencies which are affected, more volum e may be part of the answer, and, depending on the natur e of the damage, maybe not. 2 14) When considering hearingaids, infonn yourselfabout designfeatures that might suppo,t a mutually reinforcingrelationshipbetween technically enhancedhearingand embodied listening.

Perhaps there wou ld be directional microphones, whereby eyes, ears and spine could work together: what you look at, you hear more , what you don't look at, you hear less. There are now 'cons um er programmable' devices on the market. This means that you can set the microphone style and/or equalization curve to suit your needs in vario us env ironments: one way for the hockey game, another way for the dharma talk, and another for the violin recital. Maybe you would want a device that leaves the entire ear cana l free, so that the outer ear retains its role in echolocation, the ear canal is allowed its role in filtering frequencies, and the middle ear retains its role in sound mitigation. Some people hear better through their skeletons than they do through the air. (For example, this would be the case where there is an organic impairment, not in the inner ear, but in the middle or -148-

outer ear.) In this case we are talking about a bone conductiondevice, communicating to the inner ear through transducers in contact with (or implanted within) the bones of the skull.3 15) Considerthe economicsof the hea,ing aid indust,y, which is essentially devoidof competitionin the field of the improvementof hearing.In its favour, it is an industry that is currently on a roll of technological convergence, including digitization, miniaturization, bluetooth and user-controlled apps. A prospective customer has an ever-broader palette of options . That's the good n ews.

The other news: however unobtrusive and user-friendly your expens ive new aids may be, their material and labour costs come to about $100, while the cost to the customer is many times that amount . Other than the lack of competition, what sense can we make of the fact that there is more user-friendliness, processing power and memory (not to mention a microphone and sound source) in your smartphone than there is in your new hearing aids, while the phone (in a very competitive market) costs a fraction as much? Most of what you are charged for a hearing aid is accounted for by research and development, advertising (including 'free' hearing clinics), service to the client, retail overhead (rent, utilities, permits, insurance, etc.), diagnostic equipment , wages, training, and, at several stages, a respectable profit. If a prospective hearing-aid customer is self-motivated, costconscious, and resourceful, he or she can take advantage of the same trend that has caused such fundamental restructuring in the hotel, taxi, book and music industries, namely, on -line sales and service. There are new kids on the block (e.g., audicus.com) who propose to cut costs enormously. Of course, the first rule of shopping still applies: caveat emptor.

16) Consider a societywhich places human needs aboveprofit: Dare to dream. 17) Just as you would with other aspects of your health, take responsibility for your own sensing and attention. Amen.

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' "Mo re th an 20 per cent of people with hearing aids use th eir devices for less th an on e hour a day because of pro blems th ey encount er with tunin g th e settin gs. But now users can participate in fine-tunin g their devices th emselves. As many as 700,000 peo ple in No rway have some kin d of hearing impairm ent , and many wa nt hearing aids to help th em fun ction bett er both at wo rk and at ho me. But th e fine-tunin g and use of th ese devices constitut e a m ajor challenge. 'Sadl y, ma n y devices end up neglected in dr awe rs,' says Ge ir K. Ha nssen at SINTEF. ' It's also beco min g too difficult for so me users to exp lain th eir h ea rin g probl em s to oth ers in words alo ne. Mo reove r, th e clinic s lack audi o metry facilities prop erly eq u ipp ed to assist th eir patient s, wh o are left w ith no influ ence o n th e fin e-tunin g of t heir h earin g a id s,' he says ." Science Daily, Jun e 22, 20 15. - h ttps://www.scie ncedaily.com/re leases/2015/06/ 15062207 12 10.h tm

' Thi s situ at io n was desc ribed by Evelyn Glenni e in an int erview o n Wiscon sin Public Rad io . Hav ing lost most o f h er h earin g fro m a n in fectio n around th e age o f twelve, sh e was fitt ed with hearin g aids. Co n tinuin g with h er mu sic edu catio n, Glenni e di scove red th at turnin g up th e vo lum e of h er hea rin g aids made th e qu ality o f her hear ing not bett er but worse. " [At first] I th o ught tha t th e o nl y way for m e to hea r bette r was to h ea r louder, a nd , of co urse, th at was n ot th e case at a ll. W hen thin gs beca me louder they beca me d istorted, and mu ch mo re pain ful, and more disorga ni zed, and my ba lan ce was affec ted, my dyn ami c ran ge was co mp letely affected, and I h ad n o co ntrol ove r wh at I was d oin g, o r o f th at aro und m e. So actuall y, I d iscove red th a t, by takin g th e h ea rin g a ids o ff, th at, 1actu ally h eard less throu gh th e ears, but mu ch mo re thr o ugh th e body, and th e bod y acted like a reso n atin g cha mber rea lly . So thi s was a hugely imp ort ant step. " - "Evelyn Glenn ie on Touchin g Sou nd ," broadcast on To t!,e Best of 0 11r K11 owledge. Wisconsin Public Radio: January 11, 2009 - h tt p://www.t tb oo k.org/cve lyn-glenn ie

Whether there is in ner ear damage or not, th e quality of hearing does n ot increase in a direct propo 1t ion with volume. According to acoustician Ren e Chocho Lle: "... soun ds only take on a specifically tonal d 1aracter when th eir intensity is neither too high ... nor too low." - in Joac him- Ernst Berendt (r im Neville, trans.). The Third Enr (N.Y.:Holt, 1988), 78.

As menti oned ear lier, th e ear ha s its pr eferen ces; for each frequen cy th ere is a ran ge of volu me in which it is most accurate ly and most p leasant ly heard . As vo lum e incr eases, th ere is mor e distortion at the low and high end s th an in the mid range. Mor eover, the optim al vo lume for a particular ton e ch ang es wit h age. - see Fritz Winckel, (Th o mas Binkl ey, tran s). M usic, Sound and Sensation. (N.Y.: Dove r, 1967), 93 .

To get a sense of listening throu gh th e skeleton , one can try a set of bone conducti on headph ones, of whi ch several brand s are now readily ava ilable. Their litt le tr ansdu cers sit on th e templ es, and the ears are left compl etely free. Impr essively, th e sound gets louder when earplu gs are wo rn . 3

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Appendix IV: The Work of Alfred Tomatis The innovative researcher and clinician Dr. Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001) delved with great passion into questions of listening and hearing, and opened up a wider, holistic view of their development an d function .1 While his legacy is controversial in the otolaryngo logical community, there are many who swear by the efficacy of the method he developed : Audio-ps)'cho-phonology (APP), defined by its founder, A. Tomat is, is th e stud y of the int eraction between a human being' s listening and hearing potential (audio), his psycho logy attitudes (psycho), and his contro l of speech and language (phono logy). As a therapeutic approach it is an intervention in the development of a person that is intended to correct problems arising from a deficiency in 'listening' ability. This is ach ieved by means of (a) contro lled sound stimul ation with the Electroni c Ear to increase the client's ability to listen, which is (b) complemented by counselling. It is proposed that the APP improves Ustening ability, motivation, and desire for communication, and also mood and interpersonal relations . This in turn is expected to lead to improved academic and behavioural functioning and to increase the potenti al to further benefit from remedial and class instruction. 2

Tomatis' writing-fourteen books in French, of which only three have been translated into English -was based on his clinical experience. It manifests the sort of enthusiasm for one's own discoveries that is, to say the least, frowned upon in the academy, whether that enthusiasm is justifi ed or not. Another matter that has muddied the waters for Tomatis' method is that some of his ideas have been coopted for the marketing of simplistic soluti ons for complex and idiosyncratic cha llenges. As a number of people have asked me in what way my own work, which is fresh on the scene, differs from the Tomati s approach, please allow me to outline some rough distinctions. (I do not presume to speak on behalf of those trained in Dr. Tomatis' work.) Whence Listening with Your Whole Body?

In its core understandings and pedagogical approach, my work grows out of the Feldenkrais Method and a lifelong love affair with music: in performance, in the studio, in the schoo ls, and as therapy in children's hospitals. The Feldenkrais Method is a path of selfenqu iry whose primary tool is sensory awareness in movement. Since acoustic vibrat ions consist unequivocally of movement in space, they, -1 51-

too, are subject to sensory awareness. While people usua lly show up in a Feldenkrais class because somet hin g hurts, or doesn't wo rk as well as they wou ld like, th e therapeutic aspect of the work is also an entree to a life-long engagement with learnin g. This involves a continuous refineme nt of th e connections among awareness, movement, supp ort, breath, perception , and environm ent (human and non-human). It is th e Feldenkra is teacher's job to set up circumstances favo urable to open -ended, self-directed, lifelong learn ing . In my own work, thi s enq uiry is directed towar d learn in g how to listen with more of ourse lves to m ore of ourselves. By this I mean listening to what the who le body itself is saying, which implies: in the absence of technical mediation or int ervention. In somatic work, th e client 's focus on th e presenting symp tom is met wit h an enquir y int o th e glob al quality of self-organi zation. Thus, in Listening with Your Whole Body our focus is n ot on th e ears, any more than the study of running is abo ut the feet. No d_iagnostic or remedial devices are used; the tool of enq uir y par excellence is self-awareness. We work through the soma as exper ience d, rat her than th e body (or its properties) as measured externa lly. If anyt hi ng is added to a person's experie nce, it is the invo lveme nt of a second listener. Whence The Tomatis Method?

Alfred Tomat is was an oto laryngo logist (Ear, Nose an d Throat specialist, or ENT). Thus it is not surpri sing that he was focussed on specific therapeutic int erventi on s. Nor is it surprisi ng th at his modus operandi involved electro nic devices an d headphones, given th at these are fundamental elements in an otol aryngo logical practice. He was th e son of a well-known opera sin ger. His fat h er would sen d him colleagues with vo ice tro ubl es, and Tomatis would propose solutions to reso lve them . The cornerstone of hi s therapeutic approach was th e "electron ic ear," a device used to re-train listening (h ence the term "a udit ory training" or "listen in g training") with custom-programme d, custom-fil tered, gated, and otherwise processed sound , heard throu gh headphones , and often including the music of Mozart an d Gregorian ch ant s. For exampl e, if a singer's voice was foun d to be weak in particular freq uenci es, Tomatis' approac h wou ld be to prescribe a listening programme -1 52-

with the Electronic Ear whereby the missing frequencies would be re-habituated, according to Tomatis ' principle that "you can only sing what you can hear." Tomatis' work continued to evolve, and the range of its applications broadened over time. For specific developmental issues, the voice of the mother, filtered to resemble the way it sounded to the unborn child, would be added to the processed music. For other issues, one's own voice would be used. Thus, what began as an ENT practice concerned with the voice grew into APP, Audio-PsychoPhonology, as described above. APP now addresses everything from work-place deafness to motor coordination to problems with maternal bonding to autism. In sum, Listening with Your Who le Body and APP stem from different lineages and histories, as reflected in their distinct philosophical premises, pedagogical principles, specific applications, and practical means.

1 Dr. Norman Doidge's The Brain's Way of Healinghas an expansive chapter on the Toma tis work. [See Bibliography.]

Pieter E. van Jaarsveld & Wynand F. du Plessis, "Audio-psycho-phonology at Potchefstroom, " SouthAfricanMedicalJoumal, 1988, p. 136. http: // www. to ma tis-i ta lia .ovh / images / PDF/Potchefstroo mArev iew

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Appendix V: A Piano Tuner's Path in Listening

By EricSchandall,formerAdministrator(T eache,~ TheodoreSteinwayTechnical Academy,Steinway& Sons,New York We live in a culture that "appears" to be infatuated with what the eye is able to behold . "I see what you are saying," "I see what you mean," "See you soon," "Here's looking at you," "Looks good to me." The eye and the importance we place on seeing is incorporated into our everyday language even if we are sometimes blinded to it by familiarity. But what of the ears, whose range of sensitivity is about seven time s that of the eye? The ear takes in about seven octaves of sound, while the eye's capacity is in the area of one octave of the wavelength of light. This sensitivity extends further if we consider the range of amplitude or volume we are able to hear. It is reckoned that air pressure disturbing the ear only to the degree that it moves the eardrum one tenth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom, can be registered . "Yes, I hear something, just ." The ears are always on, always hearing, starting from about midway in our fetal development. In the middle of the night , we are awakened by sounds, the ears standing guard while we are in dreamland , dreaming perhaps of sounds and sights and feelings. But ther e can be a distinction made between hearing and listening. The ears' mechanisms are always registering sound, always hearing . But as I say to people who ask about ear training with regard to music in general, and to piano tuning in particular, it is not the ears that are being trained, but the space between the ears. The ears are hearing the same things before "ear training" as afterwards. But we have changed our attention in a new way; we have learned how to listen to what the ears are hearing. By way of illustrating the exquisite sensitivity of our hearing, consider what happens when a piano hammer (made of compressed felt) strikes the strings in a piano.* There is a transient deformation of the string, an impression made by the hammer when it strikes the string. This deformation is independent of the waves of motion in th e speaking length of the string. The harder the hammer strikes, the steeper will be the sides of this impression. More of the energy transferred from the hammer to the string will go into the upp er partial harmonics of the string if the impression is steep-sided , and -155-

more will go int o the lower harmonic partials if the h ammer strikes with less force . The aura l component of this is that we hear the h arder blow as brighter as well as louder, and the lighter blow as less bright as well as less loud. Remarkably, the ear recognizes an imp ression in the strin g that was on ly discovered by the eye in the 1980's with help of h igh speed photography and a magnified view. Yet, that difference in timbre and color has been known by the ear since the early days of piano design, and was in fact part of the reason th at the piano was developed. Control of dynamics and timbre was simp ly not avail able to the harpsichordist working with plucked strings . The piano, on the other hand, offered a great range of dynamics, from pianissimo to fortissimo (that's why it was called the fortepiano, after all), along with a wide spectrum of tone co lor. It was well beyond the capacity of the unaided eye to elaborate on what was happening with the latter, yet the ear heard these differences loud and clear. When someone decides that they would like to learn how to tune a piano, there is a process that is started . We do not need spectacular hearing to learn how to do this. But we move in the direction of an u nus ual apprec iation of the subtl eties of what we hear. We start by opening up our listen ing. We are overwhe lm ed by the amo unt of inform ation there is to sort out, on ce we take the filters off that we have unc on sciously developed. People work ing in noisy env ironm ents can often talk with one another and be ab le to hear wh at is being said. The new person on the job, however , at first can't discern what is being said. Give them some time though and they will have learned what to listen to and what to disregard. Wh en learning how to tune, it is similar. Th e "noise" is predominant, a distraction; our task is to develop a filter to allow us to pay attentio n to wha t we n eed and to disregard th e rest, or at least to not be overw h elm ed by it. When our attention and filters are more refined, we can th en extend our listening to include the sense of timb re, the color from the complex interrelationships of the series of partial harmonics within each note and among them . This is what gives each piano and design its characteristic "voice." Whereas tuning can be modeled quite well, and electronic tuning devices can produce h igh level professional tunings, changing the "voice" of the piano (known as voicing in the profession) requires a highly developed -1 56-

appreciation of extremely subtle variations of timbre and amplitude, something that to date has resisted all attempts at modeling . Voicing relies on the technician's skills and ta ste, and the capacity of the piano. The object is to provide a palette of color, dynamic range, and predictability that is as full as possible for the artist. The listening of the technician who is voicing th e piano must be at a level comparable to that of the artist who will be playing it. This may not always be possible, but it is a goal neverth eless. I hav e a friend, a piano technician who h as been blind from a very young age, who relates a story. He has developed a kind of echolocation technique that enables him to know the dimen sions of a room pretty well and where he is in it, by making little click sounds with his mouth and listening for the echo. One evening he was at a meeting with ten or fifteen people in the room . Suddenly the lights went out. Total darkness paralyzed his friends. He said, "Wha t's your problem, guys, are you light-d ependent ?" He was never blind ed by being blind. It seems that the brain is quite plastic and adaptable. We use some small part of its capabilities, relying on habit and early training to carry us through our lives. Piano tuning is a profession that demands extremely close attention to sound and is an invitation to develop innate gifts that are waiting to be exercised. As with any passionate study, the skills, techniques, and event ual mastery of the subject evolve into an art, one that inherently develops our character. All separation between us and our work even tuall y disappears. It is at this point that we can begin to develop our work and ourselves at the same time .

* More inform ation on this phenomenon

can be found in Anders Askenfelt and Erik Johnsson, "From Touch to String Vibrations," in Anders Askenfelt (ed.), Five Lectures on the Acoustics of the Piano . (Stockholm: Royal Academy of Music, 1990).

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Bibliography (Printed Materials) Abram, David . Becoming Anima l. New York: Vintage, 2010. Abram, David. Th e Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage, 1996 . Ackerman, Diane . A Natura l Hist01y of the Senses. N.Y.: Random House, 1990. Ajahn Chah. Food for the Heart. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002. Auriol, Bernard . La Clef des Sons . Toulouse: eres, 1991. Beckedorf, Dirk and Franz Muller. Von der Resonanz zur Bindung. Berlin: Leutner, 2010. Benade, Arthur H. Horns, Strings, and Harmony. N .Y.: Dover, 1992 . Berendt, Joachim-Ernst.(Helmut Bredigkeit, translator). The Wor ld is Sound: Nada Brahma . Rochester: Destiny books, 1981. Berendt, Joachim-Ernst. (Tim Nevill, Trans.). The Third Ear. N. Y.: Holt, 1988. Berendt, Joachim-Ernst. Ich hare, also bin ich. Freiburg: Hermann Bauer, 1989. Botte, Marie-Claire and Rene Chocholle. Le Bruit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960. Bj0rkvold, Jon-Roar. (William H. Halverson, Translator) . The Muse Within. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Corbin, Henry . CTosephRowe, translator). The Voyage and the Messenger. San Francisco : North Atlantic Books, 1998. Carter, Rita. Mapping the Mind . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999. Claxton, Guy. Int elligence in the Flesh. New Haven: Yale U.P., 2015. Denworth, Lydia. I Can Hear You Whisper. New York: Dutton, 2014 . Doidge, Norman. The Brain that Heals Itself New York: Penguin, 2008. Doidge, Norman. The Brain's Way of Healing. New York: Viking, 2015. Fehmi, Les and Jim Robbins. The Open Focus Brain. Boston: Trumpeter, 2007. Feldenkrais, Moshe. (Elisabeth Beringer, ed.) Embodied Wisdom : The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais. Berkeley : North Atlantic Books, 2010. Foy, George Michelsen . Zero Decibels. New York: Scribner, 2010 . Fry, Stephen, Pape,weight. London: Arrow, 2004. Grant, Brian, ed. The Quiet Ear: Deafness in Literature. Boston : Faber, 1987. Griffiths, Allison and David Cruise. Hear No Evil. (A special report of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.) Toronto : 1999. Gregory, R. L. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. Hafiz (Khwaja Shams-ud-DTn Mu ~amm ad). (Daniel Ladinsky, translator). The Subject Tonight is Love. New York: Penguin, 2003. Horowitz, Seth S. Th e Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Jacoby, Heinrich. Musik: Gespriiche - Versuche. Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 2002. Jenny, Hans. Cymatics. Eliot, Me.: MACROmedia, 2001. Kabir. (Robert Bly, translator). The Kabir Book. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Kaetz, David. Making Connections. Hornby Island, B.C.: River Centre, 2007. - 159-

Kaetz, David. The Ezekiel Code. Hornby Island, B.C.: River Centre, 2014. Kayser, Hans. Der Horende Mensch. Stuttgart: Engel, 1993. Khan, Hazrat Inayat. The Mysticism of Sound and Music. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Kroodsma, Donald . Th e Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2008. Lao Tzu. (Witter Bynner, trans lator). The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu . New York: Capricorn, 1962. Lauterwasser, Alexander. Schwingung. Resonanz. Leben. Aarau/Munchen: AT Verlag, 2015. Leon, Donna. Death at La Fenice. New York: HarperTorch, 1992 . Leonard, George. The Silent Pulse. New York: Bantam, 1981. Levitin, Daniel J. This is your Brain on Music. New York: Dutton, 2007. Mathieu, W.A. The List ening Book. Boston: Shambha la, 1991. Mathieu, W. A. The Musica l Lif e. Boston: Shambhala, 1994. Mitchell, Stephen, ed. The Enlightened Hemt. New York: Harper, 1989. Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled. London: Arrow, 2006. Pierce,John R. The Scienceof Musical Sound. N.Y./S.F.: Scientific American, 1983. Powers, Richard. O,feo. New York: HarperCollins , 2014. Rohner, Felix and Sabine Scharer. hang: Sound Sculpture. Bern: PANArt, 2013. Rosenblum, Lawrence D. See What I'm Saying. New York: Norton, 2010. Rumi, Jal a l ad-DTn Muhammad. (W.M. Thackston, Jr., trans.). Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of falaluddin Rumi. Boston: Shambhala, 1999. Rumi, Jalal ad -DTnMu hammad. (Coleman Barks, trans lator). The Big Red Book. New York: Harper One, 2010. Rumi, Jalal ad-DTn Muhammad. (Coleman Barks, translator). The Essentia l Rumi. Edison, N.].: Cast le, 1997 . Sacks, Oliver. Mus icophilia. New York: Vintage, 2008. Sacks, Oliver. On the Move. London: Picador, 2015. Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices. Berkeley/Los Angeles: U. of Cal. Press, 1989. Sacks, Oliver. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. N.Y.:Touchstone, 1998. Sacks, Oliver. The Mind's Eye. Toronto: Vintage, 2011. Schimmel, Annemarie. Rumi 's Wor ld. Boston: Shambha la, 2001. Scholem, Gershom. "Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala," Eranos fahrbuch. Leiden: Brill, 1973. Vol. 39, 1970, pp. 243-299. Steere, Douglas. On Listening to Anothe r. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Tillmann, Michae l. Ich, das Gerausch. Gie~en: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2009. Todd, Neil. "Do Humans Possess a Second Sense of Hearing?" American Scientist. September -October, 2015. Volume 103, Number 5, p. 348 + ff. Tomatis, Alfred A. (Hainer Kober, trans.). Der Klang des Lebens. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990. Winckel, Fritz. (Thomas Binkley, translator). Music, Sound and Sensation . New York: Dover, 1967.

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David Kaetz is a teacher of the Feldenkrais ~ Method & a profess iona l musician. He is also the au th or of Mak ing Conn ections: Roots & Resonanc e in the Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, and Th e Ezekiel Code: A Vision of Living Bones.

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rOn the Listening

with Your Whole Body '" works hops :

"After twenty years of profess iona l experience as a classical vio lin ist, the cha nges I'm experiencing are as welcome as they are unexpected . Th e new ways of listen ing have also transfer red to my playing and I've never known such visceral pleasure in the physicality of the sound. Also, to my joy, I'm better able to en joy the voices of my childre n and husband , as well as my own." - Andrea Hallam, Musician

On Making Connections

:

"I am deeply mov ed by your book, rea lly, as I approach the end I wish it wo ul d co ntinue . In addition to an enjoyable writing sty le, I find the learning about Judaism, Kabba lah, and Hasidism wonderfu l ... also, the connections to Moshe's spirit ual roots he lp me to rethink the work. What mo re could I ask for?" - Russell Delman, Feldenhais Trainer and founderof "TI1e Embodied Life''" School"

On The Ezekiel Code : "I can't quite begin to express the revelatory density of the exper ience of reading it ... th e overlayin g and stripping away of so man y expe rience s/ideas/express ions revea led to h ave th e same skeletal form . It really is a sort of Talmu dic text for somatic studen ts and practitioners, one yo u could study over and over, and that would inform and uni fy so man y aspects of life." - Anni e Gottlieb, W riter and Feldenkrais Practitioner

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