Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Listen like Indigo

Ok, so it’s 2007 and I’ve finally broken down and started listening to music through my PC. I haven’t started downloading yet, but when I’m working, I pop a cd in. I finally just didn’t feel like maintaining a whole different stereo system in the office. Really, I didn’t feel like lugging it up from downstairs.

I’m the last person I know who doesn’t do Ipod, etc. It’s not that I’m a luddite, I’ve embraced every new technology as it came along and made music more portable. I’m just tired of changing media formats. My concession has been Mini Discs. Of course, this is the beta vs vhs debate again, and it’s already been won. They sound better, and when I got into them in the late nineties, they were a superior live recording format… any how, I digress.

So, I finally get to see these digital images that the media player creates with the music, and I’m floored. This is exactly what I see when I listen to music. I could never explain it to anybody, and only tried a couple of times in my life. But that rolling , pulsing landscape is what I feel and see inside my head when I listen to music. I didn’t know till I was in college that this was unusual, seeing music or hearing color, or whatever.

I’m extremely sensitive to sound. Tone, more than sound really. Tone and Timbre create physical, visceral reactions in me. Not bad, mind you, just present. Sound has not just vibration, but also color for me. Color by itself also has vibration. Words have vibrations. That’s how you know what colors to use together, what words to use together, before there were words, letters had colors, and that’s how you matched what letters to use together. It’s the vibrations that communicate what the music really means, regardless of what the singer is saying. The vibrations, layered on top of each other, create a landscape, a topography, like layers of the earth surface, but corresponds with my body, vibrating in my torso like layers in photoshop. It moves in your gut, tries to take you with it. So that’s what I feel when I really listen.

When I was about three or four years old, my mother feared that I was going deaf. We were home alone together that year, she was expecting my baby sister, and due to her advanced age, the doctors recommended she take the year off from teaching.

I was a quiet child, easily absorbed in solitary tasks. I think this was something my mother encouraged, too because she didn’t know what to do with a toddler- she certainly never spoke to me like I was a toddler.

During the day, she would sit in the kitchen, listening to the public radio station and doing her crosswords. It must have been that I hadn’t really been exposed to ambient music before- certainly not at pre-school, and at night, when dad was home, the tv blared, and I didn’t have a record player yet. So no one had noticed that I went into a sort of trance when listening to music.

I remember very clearly the day my mother shook my shoulder. She had been calling me from the kitchen, repeating my name for several minutes, getting no response she came into the dining room, where I was sitting Indian Style, playing with a giant jar of change- my parent’s poker money, sorting them into piles. I immediately thought she was shaking me because she was mad that I was playing with the coins. She had gotten down on the carpet, beside me, face level, which she rarely did, even when she wasn’t pregnant, looking panicky, she asked:

“Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

Startled, I said ‘No,’ truthfully, and my mother seemed worried. I thought I might be in trouble so I kept quiet, and went and ate my lunch. I wouldn’t have know to explain that I was swept away watching where the music was going in me anyways.

We went to the pediatrician the next day, and my hearing tested fine. He apparently suggested that I was a little dreamy and maybe needed to interact with more children my own age. My mother decided to start watching other teacher’s kids during her maternity leave, so our quiet little routines were disrupted (it turned out I loathed other kids my age… they were very noisy and wanted to play very stupid games.) But the ‘problem’ abated, or at least was no longer noticeable to my mother, so it was never investigated further, not even when I started primary school and it took a miracle for me to learn to read.

There were tears and tantrums and all sorts of problems. I could never communicate effectively to the teachers or my parents that the problem was that in order to ‘read’ the way they wanted me to, or even worse, write, I would have to use letters together that didn’t ‘match.’ They weren’t the right colors to go together, their little vibrations didn’t blend. Their alleged ‘words’ were not smooth and harmonious. The words THEY wanted you to make were jarring and mismatched and it made me furious. (ok, so there was probably a little OCD going on too, if you couldn’t tell from the whole ‘change sorting’ scene.) I also was truly baffled by how they could be so insensitive to that. It never occurred to me that other people didn’t ‘feel’ letters, and that the alphabet was all the same color, black, to the other children, so was never able to articulate. But I did finally learn to pretend that text was only black and white.

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