Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (14 page)

In his letter referring her to me, Rachael’s physician described her “agonizing experience of hearing all music as discrete, contrapuntal lines, being unable to hold on to the harmonic sense of chordal passages. Thus, where listening was linear, vertical and horizontal at the same time, now it was horizontal only.” Her major complaint, when she first came to see me, was of this dysharmonia, her inability to integrate different voices and instruments.

But she had other problems, too. The injury had rendered her deaf in the right ear; she did not realize this at first, but wondered later whether it played a part in her altered perceptions of music. And though she noted the disappearance of absolute pitch right away, she was even more disabled by the undermining of her sense of
relative
pitch, her representation of tonal space. Now she had to rely on literal enaction: “I can remember a pitch only because I remember how it feels to sing it. Just start the process of singing, and there it is.”
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Rachael found that if she had a score in front of her, it could at least provide a visual and conceptual representation of harmony, though this could not by itself supply the missing perception, “any more than a menu can provide a meal,” she said. But it served to “frame” a piece, to prevent the music from “spreading all over the place.” Playing the piano, and not just listening, she discovered, would also help to “integrate musical information…demands both a tactile and an intellectual understanding…contributes to the ability of quickly switching attention between the different musical elements, and thereby helped integrate them into a musical piece.” But this “formal integration,” as she called it, was still very limited.

There are many levels in the brain at which perceptions of music are integrated and many levels, therefore, at which integration may fail or be compromised. In addition to her difficulties with musical integration, Rachael experienced a similar problem with other sounds, to some extent. Her auditory environment was split sometimes into discrete and unconnected elements: street sounds, domestic sounds, or the sounds of animals, for example, might suddenly stand out and preempt her attention because they were isolated, not integrated into the normal auditory background or landscape. Neurologists refer to this as simultagnosia, and it is more often visual than auditory.
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For Rachael, this simultagnosia meant that she had to build up a picture of her auditory environment in a much more conscious and deliberate, item-by-item way than the rest of us do. And yet, paradoxically, this had some advantages, as it forced her to experience previously overlooked sounds with a supernormal attention and intensity.

Playing the piano had been impossible in the months following her injury, when her right hand was still almost paralyzed. But she taught herself, in these months, to use her left hand for writing and all else. Remarkably, she also took up painting at this time, using her left hand. “I never painted before the accident,” she told me.

With time and physical therapy, her right hand became stronger, and Rachael found herself slowly able to play the piano again with both hands. When I visited her a few months after our initial meeting, I found her working on a Beethoven bagatelle, a Mozart sonata, Schumann’s
Forest Scenes,
a Bach three-part invention, and DvoÅ™ák’s
Slavonic Dances for Four Hands
(this last she would play with her piano teacher, whom she visited weekly). Rachael told me that she had experienced a distinct improvement in her powers to integrate the “horizontals” of music. She had recently been to a performance of three short Monteverdi operas. At first, she said, she delighted in the music, experiencing it for the first time since her accident as harmony, as integration. After a few minutes, however, it became difficult: “It was a great cognitive effort to hold the strands together.” And then the music burst apart, becoming a chaos of different voices:

I was reminded here of my patient Virgil, who had been virtually blind all his life and then, at the age of fifty, had gained sight following eye surgery.
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But his new sight was very limited and fragile (in large part because, with very limited early vision, his brain had never developed robust visual cognitive systems). So vision was taxing for him, and when he shaved, for example, he could see and recognize his face in the mirror at first, but after a few minutes, he would have to struggle to hold on to a recognizable visual world. Finally, he would give up and shave by touch, because the visual image of his face had decomposed into unrecognizable fragments.

Rachael had, in fact, also developed some visual problems following the accident, peculiar problems of visual synthesis— though, with typical resourcefulness, she had managed to turn these to creative use. She had, to some degree, a difficulty in synthesizing the elements of an entire scene at a glance, a visual simultagnosia analogous to her auditory one. Thus she would notice one thing, then another, then a third; her attention would be commandeered successively by different elements, and she could piece the scene together as a whole only slowly and with difficulty, in an intellectual rather than a perceptual way. Her paintings and collages made use of this weakness and, indeed, turned it into a strength, disassembling the visual world and reassembling it in new ways.

Though her apartment is now hung with her many paintings and collages, Rachael has not been able to write music since her accident in 1993. The chief reason for this is another sort of amusia, a lack of musical imagery. Before the accident, she used to compose in her head, without a piano, straight onto manuscript paper. But now, she says, she cannot “hear” what she is writing. She once had the most vivid musical imagery, and as soon as she looked at a score— her own or another composer’s— she could hear the music in her mind with full orchestral or choral complexity. This musical imagery has been virtually extinguished by her injury, and that makes it difficult for her to transcribe what she has just improvised, for as soon as she reaches for her manuscript paper, in the seconds it takes her to put pen in hand, the music she has just played evaporates from her mind. With the difficulty in imagery comes a difficulty in working memory, and this makes it impossible for her to retain what she has just composed. “This is the major loss,” she told me. “I need a mediator between me and the printed page.” A crucial breakthrough thus came for her in 2006, when she found a young collaborator and learned with him to use a music-processing computer. The computer can hold in its memory what she cannot hold in her own, and Rachael can now explore the themes that she has created on the piano and transform them into notation or into the voices of different instruments. She can achieve a continuity with her own compositions, and orchestrate or develop them, with the help of her collaborator and her computer.

Rachael has now embarked on her first large-scale composition since her accident thirteen years ago. She has decided to take a string quartet, one of the last works she wrote before her accident, to disassemble it and reassemble it in a new way— as she says, to “cut it into the wind, collect the parts, and put it together in a new form.” She wants to incorporate the ambient sounds which she is now so conscious of, “to weave sounds together that are not meant to be musical,” to compose a new sort of music. Against the background of this, she herself will improvise by breathing, singing, and playing a variety of instruments (her worktable, when I visited her, contained an alto recorder, a Chinese jade flute, a Syrian flute, plumber’s brass tubing, bells and drums, and an assortment of wooden rhythm instruments). The sound, the music, will be interwoven with projections of visual forms and patterns provided by photographs she has taken.

She played for me, on her computer, a small sample of the finished piece, which starts with “Breathing…a darkness.” Though she agrees with Stravinsky that music does not represent anything but itself, when she composed this opening, her mind was full of the idea of coma and near death, a time when, for days, the sound of her own breathing, amplified by a respirator, was almost the only sound she heard. This opening passage is followed by “incoherent fragments, a shattered world,” as she puts it, representing her own broken awareness at a time when “nothing made sense.” There are agitated, strongly rhythmic pizzicatos at this point, and unexpected sounds of all sorts. Then comes a strongly melodic passage, her recomposing a world, and finally darkness and breathing again— but “a free breathing,” she says, representing “reconciliation, acceptance.”

Rachael thinks of this new piece, to some extent, as autobiographic, a “rediscovery of identity.” And when it is performed next month, it will be her coming out, her first return to the world of musical composition and performance, the public world, in thirteen years.

P
eople with absolute pitch can immediately, unthinkingly tell the pitch of any note, without either reflection or comparison with an external standard. They can do this not only with any note they hear, but with any note they imagine or hear in their heads. Indeed, Gordon B., a professional violinist who wrote to me about tinnitus, or ringing in his ears, remarked matter-of-factly that his tinnitus was “a high F-natural.” He did not realize, I think, that saying this was in any way unusual; but of the millions of people with tinnitus, probably not one in ten thousand could say what pitch their tinnitus has.

The precision of absolute pitch varies, but it is estimated that most people with it can identity upwards of seventy tones in the middle region of the auditory range, and each of these seventy tones has, for them, a unique and characteristic quality that distinguishes it absolutely from any other note.

The Oxford Companion to Music
was a sort of
Arabian Nights
for me as a boy, an inexhaustible source of musical stories, and it gives many charming examples of absolute pitch. Sir Frederick Ouseley, a former professor of music at Oxford, for example, “was all his life remarkable for his sense of absolute pitch. At five he was able to remark, ‘Only think, Papa blows his nose in G.’ He would say that it thundered in G or that the wind was whistling in D, or that the clock (with a two-note chime) struck in B minor, and when the assertion was tested it would invariably be found correct.” For most of us, such an ability to recognize an exact pitch seems uncanny, almost like another sense, a sense we can never hope to possess, such as infrared or X-ray vision; but for those who are born with absolute pitch, it seems perfectly normal.

The Finnish entomologist Olavi Sotavalta, an expert on the sounds of insects in flight, was greatly assisted in his studies by having absolute pitch— for the sound pitch of an insect in flight is produced by the frequency of its wingbeats. Not content with musical notation, Sotavalta was able to estimate very exact frequencies by ear. The sound pitch made by the moth
Plusia gamma
approximates a low F-sharp, but Sotavalta could estimate it more precisely as having a frequency of 46 cycles per second. Such an ability, of course, requires not only a remarkable ear, but a knowledge of the scales and frequencies with which pitch can be correlated.

Yet such a correlation, though immensely impressive, deflects attention from the real wonder of absolute pitch: to those with absolute pitch, every tone, every key seems qualitatively different, each possessing its own “flavor” or “feel,” its own character. Those who have absolute pitch often compare it to color— they “hear” G-sharpness as instantly and automatically as we “see” blue. (Indeed, the word “chroma” is sometimes used in musical theory.)

While absolute pitch may sound like a delicious extra sense, allowing one to instantly sing or notate any music at its correct pitch, it may cause problems too. One such problem occurs with the inconstant tuning of musical instruments. Thus the seven-year-old Mozart, comparing his own little violin to that of his friend Schactner, said, “If you have not altered the tuning of your violin since I last played on it, it is half a quarter of a tone flatter than mine here.” (So it is related in
The Oxford Companion to Music;
there are many tales about Mozart’s ear, some no doubt apocryphal.) When the composer Michael Torke encountered my own ancient piano, which— still having its original nineteenth-century strings— is not tuned up to the 440 cycles per second standard of modern pianos, he instantly remarked that it was a third of a tone flat. Such an overall sharpness or flatness would not be noticed by someone without absolute pitch, but it can be distressing and even disabling to those who do have it.
The Oxford Companion to Music
again gives many examples, including one of an eminent pianist who, playing the
Moonlight
Sonata (a piece which “every schoolgirl plays”), got through it only “with the greatest difficulty” because the piano was tuned to a pitch he was not accustomed to, and he “experienced the distress of playing the piece in one key and hearing it in another.”