After Salman Rushdie withdrew from the Jaipur Literary Festival under threats of an assassination attempt (threats he now believes to have been "invented" by Rajasthan police in a scheme devised to dissuade him from attending), four other writers on the program--Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, and Ruchir Joshi--expressed their solidarity on stage by reading out passages from The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, to the horror of some conference organizers.
Police have demanded that the organizers turn over recordings of the controversial readings. Yet as Salil Tripathi points out, it is illegal to import the book into India but it is not clearly illegal to possess it or read from it.
Despairing of ever being able to enjoy live music again, Richard was attending a Hearing Loss Association of America conference in Washington, D.C. when he agreed to attend a performance of Wicked--despite his dislike for musicals--at the Kennedy Center that had been specially arranged as a demonstration of loop technology. He thought he would duck out after the first act if he even lasted that long. Instead, he heard something life-changing. Entering the theater, Richard learned from staff that he didn't have to rent any equipment or strap a contraption to the side of his head. He had only to flip a switch on his own hearing aid, and a sound mix from the concert hall would flow directly into his hearing aid.
I flip the switch and it was clear as a bell. It was as clear as the most beautiful radio signal you're ever heard in your life. It was perfect. It was right in my ear. There was nothing I needed to do. There was zero dropout, zero static, zero interference, zero hum. It sounded like a CD. It was amazing. And I just started to cry. I hadn't heard sound that good live in a year. I could probably hear better than the people who weren't using the loop. I could hear every single word. I didn't need the captions.
There are many reasons for that. The loop was great. The sound mix was great. Another very important thing is this: It was coming directly into my hearing aid, which is a sound environment that I know extremely well. Here was the absolutely perfect solution to a problem that had really put me in despair for a year.
Since that experience at the Kennedy, I've actually gone to the trouble of learning as much as I possibly can about the technology. I've even taken a three-day class in how to install them, crawling around on the floor, taping the loop down--it literally is a loop of wire--setting up the amplifiers, adjusting the sound. It is not as easy to set up as an FM system or an infrared system, which are the common ones that we see, but it is a far, far better system when it is properly set up. I'd like to see it in all the major concert halls in the United States.
We need a word for an environment that does not have a hearing loop. Hearing disabled?
Disgraceful. There are 36 million people with hearing loss in the United States. This is a figure that will double in the next 5-10 years because of the Baby Boomers who are turning 65 this year. I am not the only person who can't go the theater. Since I can't go to a theater, a ticket is not sold. Sales are going to plummet unless hearing assistance improves dramatically. The place where you start improving hearing assistance is with loops.
Who bears the responsibility for looping these environments?
For me, the interesting question is operational. Who's going to pay for it? Who should pay for it? The answer is, anybody who's got the money and who cares. In terms of the public sector, people with hearing losses need to make it as clear as they possibly can that if the government is going to provide help to the disabled--which I think is a moral imperative--then assistive listening devices need to be improved. The government needs to change its standards. The Americans With Disabilities Act should be updated and better hearing assistance should be mandated.
What about applications beyond the theater?
Loops are very flexible. They can be used for hearing assistance for subways, going to a bank, ordering at McDonald's, or at the Apple Store--which is a terrible environment for me. Loops are convenient and dignified. Where can't they be used? The major drawback is that they are mono only.
In what ways will you be involved in these issues in the future?
Bringing the technology that I know and use every day to bear on the question and the problem of improving hearing assistance technology, particularly hearing aids. Hearing aids are optimized for speech, but they don't sound good for music or anything else but speech.
Interestingly enough, there are two parallel industries that work in sound. I had no idea about this until I lost so much hearing. The hearing aid industry works on sound reproduction: it uses microphones, speakers, and all sorts of signal processing. The professional audio industry does exactly the same thing. But while the two of them know about each other, the hearing aid industry doesn't understand how advanced professional audio is and the professional audio industry doesn't understand how large a market there is for high sound quality in hearing assistance.
The major focus that I hope to have is in bringing the people in these industries a little bit closer together so that they can grasp the importance of it. I'm not making any money of it. I'm actually losing a fortune considering the amount of hours I'm working on it without getting paid! The only thing I want to do is to get better sounding hearing aids. And the only way I can think of doing is that is to take the technology I use everyday as a record producer, engineer, and composer and get more of it in my ear.
Is there room for a Richard Einhorn composition for orchestra and sound loop?
The sound loop is essentially just a sound delivery system, but I am working on a piece with my friend Bill Morrison--who did the films for the live version of The Origin--for the opening of a space in New York in the fall of 2012. Bill and I were talking about what had happened to me and he got this idea for an installation. Without giving too much away, there will be a lot of interactivity and a lot of very, very cool sounds rather than upsetting sounds. So, I guess I am still working with space.
Richard Einhorn's The Origin (CD cover image above) is based on Darwin's life and work.
Why is it that gorillas can out-shout us but not out-talk us? Because, like all primates besides us, they possess a balloon-like organ called an air sac. The shrinking of the air sac into a vestigial organ in our evolutionary lineage can be traced by looking at the skeletal location, absent in modern humans, to which the tissue once attached.
While the air sac makes possible booming vocalizations, it may have prevented the production of the rich variety of distinctive sounds that is exploited in spoken language. A paper published last month in the Journal of Human Evolution, "Loss of air sacs improved hominin speech abilities," explores this relationship. From the abstract:
Air sacs are a feature of the vocal tract of all great apes, except humans. Because the presence or absence of air sacs is correlated with the anatomy of the hyoid bone, a probable minimum and maximum date of the loss of air sacs can be estimated from fossil hyoid bones. Australopithecus afarensis still had air sacs about 3.3 Ma, while Homo heidelbergensis, some 600 000 years ago and Homo neandethalensis some 60 000 years ago, did no longer. The reduced distinctiveness of articulations produced with an air sac is in line with the hypothesis that air sacs were selected against because of the evolution of complex vocal communication. This relation between complex vocal communication and fossil evidence may help to get a firmer estimate of when speech first evolved.
The researcher, Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam, attempted to recreate the sounds of our inarticulate ancestors by forcing air through artificial vocal tracts of plastic tubing, some of which contained an extra chamber to model the air sac. The results can be heard here courtesy of New Scientist.
Conductor Marin Alsop and composer Richard Einhorn at rehearsal with the London Symphony for the London Premiere of Voices of Light on 5 November 2011. Photo: Robert Garbolinski.
I first came to know the composer Richard Einhorn when he was beginning research on The Origin, an oratorio crafted from the life and work of Charles Darwin. We met professionally but bonded over an unlikely set of shared enthusiasms: early polyphony, early analog synthesizers, Indian cooking, and church-state politics. We fell out of touch in 2010 and it was not until last week that I opened up a New York Times story and learned, to my great shock, of his severe hearing loss.
When we reconnected in late October I asked Richard if I could we do an interview for The Ethical Ear about his extraordinary experience of hearing loss, its impact on his work as a composer, and his advocacy for better assistive listening devices, which was the subject of the Times piece. What he had to say was so interesting that I decided to share it here in two parts with minimal editing.
Richard explained that his hearing loss happened suddenly and without warning. He had just arrived at an artist retreat, eager to explore some new directions for his music. But when he rose in his hotel room the next day to begin his work, he first noticed a loud, piercing ringing in his ears: tinnitus. Then, he discovered that his right ear had gone totally deaf. With the room swimming, he collapsed from vertigo.
Since that time, hearing has not returned to Richard's right ear, but sound has. It is extremely distorted, a warped audio track of robots from a "bad science fiction movie" as he put it. The left ear has lost 70% of its hearing and experiences tinnitus and slight distortion as well. These three forms of damage combined, he said, are "extremely exhausting and extremely disorienting in ways that are very difficult to describe."
Everything comes to me from my left, so that if a sound comes from somebody standing to my right and I don't see them, I immediately turn to my left. I can turn completely in a circle before I finally realize that they've been standing on my right side. I have no sense of up or down either, in terms of sounds. Once I heard geese and couldn't see them. I looked everywhere. They were up in the sky and I had no concept that they were up there.
I also have a condition in my right ear called hyperacusis. Not only is everything distorted but normal sounds are unbelievably loud--louder than a rock concert at full tilt, louder than a jet plane taking off. As a result, I have to wear an earplug in my ear at all times otherwise the normal sounds of a quiet room become so loud and so exhausting that I want to run. My fight-or-flight reflex kicks in. It's extremely strange.
The only thing that you can do is to use whatever technology is around, and the other thing you can do is take breaks. It is so tiring on such a deep level that you have to go away, shut down, be quiet, and collect yourself just in order to get through a day. Often sound is very, very painful for me.
I've been working in music and sound my entire life. Nobody told me that any of these things were possible: that you could suddenly lose your hearing, that you could develop this condition. The only place I'd ever heard of this condition was in a Poe short story, the Fall of the House of Usher, in which Roderick Usher can't tolerate loud sounds. In my case, I can't even tolerate soft sounds.
How has this affected your work?
I can easily compose, especially for acoustical instruments, but there are a few things I can no longer hear. I have to imagine them.
When I was fifteen years old, I used to write electronic pieces for four channels. The sounds would be flying around the room, flying around the auditorium. it was really a blast. This was very, very primitive equipment, but I just loved figuring it out and I loved figuring out how sounds moved through space.
Just before my hearing loss, I was planning to go back to this idea. I was going to set my up my studio not in four channels but in five or possibly even eight channels and create electronic music that literally swam around the space and moved in all sorts of very cool ways. I wanted to study algorithms for panning music around and moving recorded sounds in space and making it seem realistic. That would be very difficult to do now.
Fortunately there are other things that I also wanted to work on. I had been studying Sol LeWitt's paintings and techniques. He takes extremely simple mathematical permutations, augmentations and diminishments and carefully and systematically applies them to constructing a painting. If you are as careful as Sol LeWitt in doing this, what occurs are these overwhelmingly emotionally compelling as well as formally beautiful works.
I was very excited about the possibility of bringing these kinds of simple, clear, and clean permutations into music. What I've done since the hearing loss is I've focused a lot on the formal ideas but not the spatial ideas that I can no longer hear. I've written about 30 études using various techniques that are adopted from LeWitt's vocabulary, trying to find a musical analogue to them.
In some sense, the hearing loss hasn't affected my direction at all. In another sense, it has limited certain things. But that's okay. Space is something that I can still imagine, and its not a primary aspect of a musical experience for me. What's primary for me are form, melody, counterpoint and rhythm of course. Rhythm is basic, and these other things--melody, counterpoint, and structure are secondary to rhythm and I have no problem hearing and imaging all of them.
Space for music is very interesting, its very exciting. Its a fundamental part of sound, but sound isn't music. With all due respect to John Cage, they're very different things. Sound is very hard for me right now. Music on the other hand remains very easy, and very easy to perceive.
In fact, the only part of my life that's not been affected by my hearing loss is my ability to compose. Every other aspect of my life that involves hearing has been severely damaged but not my ability to compose. That's very interesting to me.
What about your ability to enjoy live music?
Right after my hearing loss I wanted to hear concerts anyway. I wasn't going to let something stupid like the loss of an ear stop me from enjoying live music. Or so I thought.
We've all gone to theaters and passed by a bunch of what are called assistive listening devices, which are these really strange looking head pieces that old guys wear in order to hear at a Broadway show or concert. And since I don't have any embarrassment about sticking things in my ear in public places, I went to the counter of an opera house, a very fine opera house, handed my credit card over as collateral, got one of these stupid earpieces, put it on, and the sound was so awful, I can't even begin to describe it. Every aspect of the sound was awful. The mix was awful. The quality of the wireless reception was terrible and in fact dangerous, it was crackling and breaking up and slamming my left ear. The headphone didn't fit and was very uncomfortable and in addition to that it was of very bad quality.
I must have gone to 30 different places--concert halls, theaters for drama, movie houses--and always the same thing. It sounded terrible. Absolutely terrible in all sorts of ways. I just can't describe to you how depressing it was to be sitting in the third row watching a great performance of, say, Richard III, and not be able to hear the actors. No matter what you do, you cannot hear it and cannot understand the words.
I started to take along with me a rig that I figured out by using some recording apps on an iPhone. I put together a portable microphone, basically a hearing assistance device. I would go to concerts with this iPhone, a very high quality ear phone. sit as close as I can and point the iPhone's microphone at the stage and I can almost hear. And that is far better quality than all of these assistive listening systems that are being used all over the country. For the most part, They just don't work that well.
In the next installment, Richard talks about alternative assistive listening systems.
The new album by the experimental electronic composer Matthew Herbert, "One Pig," which was released today, follows the 25-week life of a single pig from its birth on a farm in the English countryside to its slaughter. The New York Timesdescribes the project:
After capturing the pig’s growth to maturity, oink by oink, he transformed those recordings into a dark kind of dance music punctuated by telling sounds: the moo of a nearby cow, frantic squealing, an idling truck. Each track on the album is named after a month in the pig’s journey, culminating in a banquet full of chomping and lip smacking. (Because of British law, he was not able actually to witness or record the pig’s slaughter.)
Following Herbert's announcement of his plans to pursue this work back in May 2009, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued this statement:
No one with any true talent or creativity hurts animals to attract attention. . . . Pigs are inquisitive, highly intelligent, sentient animals who become frightened when they are sent to slaughterhouses, where they kick and scream and try to escape the knife. They are far more worthy of respect than Matthew Herbert or anyone else who thinks cruelty is entertainment.
Hebert responded on his blog:
PETA have not heard a single note of music made from sounds that I have gathered since I have yet to write it. they appear to have drawn their own conclusions as to what this might all sound like. they have concluded it will be ‘entertainment.’
PETA is absolutely right though about me hoping to attract attention, although I am trying to do that by drawing in an inquisitive ear rather than by ‘hurting animals.’
The Ethical Ear will have a listen and return with some thoughts.
Socrates, by his own admission, did not know much about music. Condemned to death, he told his companions of a dream that had recurred throughout his life in which he was told: "Make and cultivate music." He had always thought that the dream meant he should continue his life's pursuit of philosophy, as philosophy is the "noblest and best of music."
But now, near the end, he realized that by music, the dream may actually have meant music. In an autobiography entitled Killing Time completed shortly before his death, the iconoclastic Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend came to an even more rueful conclusion. By doing philosophy he had neglected his true life passion: opera singing.
In the course of Plato's epic utopia, The Republic, Socrates and his interlocutor, Glaucon, set out to develop an ideal curriculum of musical education for the warrior guardian class of the just city. Socrates asks for Glaucon's help in determining which of the musical modes are fit for soldiers.
Socrates: And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow? You are musical, and can tell me.
Glaucon: The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian, and the full-toned or bass Lydian, and such like.
S: These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a character to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men. Certainly.
In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly unbecoming the character of our guardians.
Utterly unbecoming.
And which are the soft or drinking harmonies?
The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed 'relaxed.'
Well, and are these of any military use?
Quite the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian are the only ones which you have left.
I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, to sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets the blows of fortune with firm step and a determination to endure; and another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity, and he is seeking to persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and admonition, or on the other hand, when he is expressing his willingness to yield to persuasion or entreaty or admonition, and which represents him when by prudent conduct he has attained his end, not carried away by his success, but acting moderately and wisely under the circumstances, and acquiescing in the event.
These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.
To discourage the dissolute sounds, the distribution of musical instruments would have to be controlled, for certain designs make them all too easy to produce.
Then, I said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and melodies, we shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic scale?
I suppose not.
Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with three corners and complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed curiously-harmonised instruments?
Certainly not.
But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players? Would you admit them into our State when you reflect that in this composite use of harmony the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put together; even the panharmonic music is only an imitation of the flute?
Clearly not.
There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the city, and the shepherds may have a pipe in the country.
That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.
The "harp" is not a harp but a kithara--the largest of the lyre family, a virtuoso instrument from which derives the name of the chordophone that eventually conquered the world--the guitar. And the "flute" that Plato singles out is in fact not a flute at all, but an ancient reed instrument called the aulos.
Auloi were constructed of mouthpieces set in resonating pipes of reed, wood, ivory, horn, or the bone of deer, eagle, or vulture (according to sources collected in Thomas Mathiesen's Apollo's lyre: Greek music and music theory in antiquity and the Middle Ages). What apparently worried Plato was their ability to produce multiple modes in the space of the same performance.
He was not alone in his lack of enthusiasm for the aulos. Aristotle, in his Politics, also prohibits it on pedagogical grounds. What explains this animus, and the preference for simple stringed instruments?
The aulos already had the aura of the foreign, having been introduced to the Greeks from the peoples of Asia Minor. In the Illiad, Agamemnon hears the "high calls of the auloi" carrying from the camps of the Trojans. In myth, Athena takes up the aulos but renounces it after glimpsing, in her reflection in a river, how its playing distorts her face, saying "Away, shameful things, an affront to my body. I do not give myself to ugliness!" The instrument is picked up by the satyr Marsyas, an ethnic Phrygian and devotee of Dionysus who challenges Apollo and his lyre--a gift from Hermes--to a musical show-down. The Muses judge Apollo to be winner, and Marsyas is flayed alive.
Many scholars of music history have therefore assimilated the clash between kithara and aulos to the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus, reason and order versus ecstasy and excess. Concluding his exchange with Glaucon, Socrates notes, "We are not innovating, my friend, in preferring Apollo and the instruments of Apollo to Marsyas and his instruments." The German historian Hermann Abert argued in 1899 that the kithara-aulos opposition was essential to classical education in ethics.
A more materialist interpretation is offered by James McKinnon, who maintains that the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle had more to do with the disdain of Athenian "free men" for professionalism and technical skill of all kinds. The well-bred would be gentleman amateurs, not performers. This could explain why Aristotle prefers the simple lyre even to the kithara: "the aulos must not be admitted into education nor any other professional (technikos) instrument like the kithara."
Interestingly, Aristotle also noted that playing the aulos "prevents the employment of speech." While it was regularly used to accompany choral singing, unlike the lyre one could not play it and sing at the same time. The point of the story about Athena, Apollo, and Marsyas, Aristotle concluded, is that training on the aulos "has no effect on the intelligence, whereas we attribute science and art to Athena."
Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades gives this account of why the charismatic statesman shunned the pipes from his youth:
At school, he usually paid due heed to his teachers, but he refused to play the aulos, holding it to be an ignoble and illiberal thing. The use of the plectrum and the lyre, he argued, wrought no havoc with the bearing and appearance which were becoming to a gentleman; but let a man go to blowing on an aulos, and even his own kinsmen could scarcely recognize his features. Moreover, the lyre blended its tones with the voice or song of its master, whereas the aulos dosed and barricaded the mouth, robbing its master both of voice and speech.
While the lyre supports songs and texts with meanings intended by an author, the aulos literally takes the place of a person's voice, transmuting mouth to mouthpiece, and breath to wordless sound. Were the Muses right to give the victory to Apollo? According to at least one account of the contest, Apollo did not best Marsyas in musical merit but with cheap stagecraft. Apollo turned his lyre upside and kept plucking, a stunt that could not be replicated on the pipes, connected as they must be to the body.
In New York City earlier this week, I witnessed the beginnings of the "Occupy Wall Street" action of anti-plutocracy protest that began as a call by Adbusters magazine. On Saturday, 17 September, activists started sleeping in the small, privately-owned Zucotti Park, just around the corner from Ground Zero. In between meetings with lawyers, publishers, and colleagues that brought me to Lower Manhattan, I would stop by to talk with the participants, whose numbers grew each day.
The several hundred people gathered there had already shown themselves to be savvy and resilient. But most striking for me was that the center of activity in the plaza was not a love-in or jamboree but an open and seemingly endless conversation, the General Assembly, an egalitarian, participatory forum by which the leaderless group is attempting to determine its aims and tactics.
To avoid running afoul of a ban on the use of amplifiers in the noisy urban space, the group has employed an ingeniously simple technique of chanting in unison the words of the speaker just after they are uttered. Often, people just taking the floor to speak over what some have referred to as the "people's microphone" begin with "Mic check" to get the crowd's response, "MIC CHECK."
Here's an example of the human bullhorn in action.
I can readily imagine how, in addition to serving as a public address system, this rhythmic chanting generates the kind of communal feeling that anthropologists and ethnomusicologists the world over have noted. At the same time, without the prompting of a moderator, the immediate feedback of the crowd constrains speakers to make their contributions deliberate and succinct.
Here's a good video piece by Nathan Schneider exploring the General Assembly practice and connecting it with a similar practice by the Spanish May 15th demonstrators.
