New direction
I will be taking a new direction for a while. What I want to talk about, is music perception and world perception. Fasten your seatbelt. Here we go:
When Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr. set foot on the moon, on July 20th, 1969, I was sitting in the dining room of the house in which sixty or so other choir members were taking their lunch, as part of our summer choir camp in the massif central, the ancient volcanic mountain range raising its gently curved mountain summits west of the Rhone Valley. That walk on the moon was the turning point of the space exploration, or, as it also was called, the conquest of space.
Forty-one years later, as I recall this momentous event, I cannot help but being struck by the conjunction of all the elements that occupy us today. Walk, conquest of space, music. Walking, a challenge for most of us, requires a good balance, and a reliable perception of space. It also requires dopamine, under various forms, so that muscles receive and execute orders given by the brain. While I wish I could replace dopamine altogether by music, I am mostly going to talk about how to help its effects through a better, more efficient, handling of space.
Conquest of space is how I would best describe how I feel when I go outside for a walk. Ever since I was diagnosed with P.D., four years ago, I have experienced a drastic reduction of my space, which is the subset of the total space I used to be able to reach prior to the onset of P.D. I also am faced with challenges to my sense of balance, first physically, and, as the mind is never far from the body, mentally, and psychologically. How music helps me regain access to a wide space, and keep my balance, in every sense of the term, is what I want to talk about today. The goal is to help you, in turn, regain the use of space, with all the joy associated with it, and which is an important part of getting your life back.
We perceive space through three main long range means: Smelling, Hearing, Seeing. Let us concentrate on the latter two. We live in three-dimensional space. This means, if we want to know where we are, we need three numbers: latitude, longitude, height. And to get these three independent data, we need three measurement devices: three eyes, or three ears. Most of us only have two of each, not three. How do we get around this problem?
If we focus on the ear, we notice that it’s a very efficient instrument. Of all the frequencies it can hear, from 20 to 16000 Hz, give or take, the ear mostly perceives sounds that are characteristic of the human voice, what is called the mid-range. Sounds in this range are perceived louder than any other sound. And that’s where the brain, with all its analytical power comes in. Loud, the brain says, means near. Bingo, we got one number, let’s call it longitude.
Now suppose we’re listening to a concert, played by musicians spread around a stage. Assuming we’re not sitting exactly at the middle of the concert hall, we hear music through our left and right ear. The left ear, by definition, is closer to the left part of the stage, and thus hears left coming sounds earlier than right coming ones. The two streams of sound coming each through one ear, are delayed with respect to each other. From that delay, our powerful brain extracts the separation between the left and right part of the stage. That gives us our second number, latitude. The third one, height, is not that important on Earth, but is extracted similarly, by comparing sounds at ground level to those at higher altitude.
By increasing awareness of space through sounds coming from music, I “explore” space even without walking. Outside of being by itself an incredibly rewarding experience, it sets the stage (no pun intended) for the real exploration of space, the one with our full body.
Back in 1989, I was a graduate student in Indiana, at Purdue University. My field of research was meteorology. I was, always have been and forever will be, a pianist too. I came across the summary of a research paper, which showed that failures in the execution of a movement resulted exclusively from a failure in what is called movement preparation. Movement preparation is the sending by the brain of test signals to the different parts of the body involved before the actual movement. This firing of neurons is a test, in a sense that no movement is performed then. A few hundred milliseconds later, the movement is performed by the brain sending the exact same test signals.
From this astonishing paper, I deduced that if I visualized my fingers playing a piano piece perfectly, my brain would learn the correct sequence of neuron test signals, and that, therefore, my execution would be flawless. That is, assuming nothing gets in the way during these hundred milliseconds, such as panic or sudden emotion.
I decided to start this exercise on a monument of classical music, which is Chopin’s first piano concerto. The first movement lasts ten minutes. At a tempo of 120bpm, that’s 120 quarter notes times ten, or 1200 notes. Since the piece is actually written in sixteenth notes, you get 6400 sixteenth’s, or, to round up, 10,000 “notes” for both hands. Each note requires sending signals about speed, intensity, pedal (there are two), and length of time during which the note is held. This gives the grand total of about 50,000 instructions, give or take a few thousand. (If you’re in the mood, multiply this by three for the three movements, and again by four, for a classical CD usually contains four concertos!)
I have been working on this concerto for the past ten years, four of which with parkinson. Let me share with you a few of the insights I have discovered for myself.
First, why Chopin’s first piano concerto? Because its music has a structuring power. Its chord evolution acts on my brain to straighten it, removes its clutter, helps information flow better, acts like a light bathing my mind and clarifying everything. Mozart’s music has a similar effect, and I play it on my stereo every time I can.
Classical music, from its religious origins to its secular incarnations, has always been a music of the spheres, a music of celestial dimension. This music expresses the order in the material world, such as planets and stars. As a result, it transmits this sense of order to the brain of the person hearing it, and to a far greater extent, to that of the person singing or playing it.
Playing Chopin’s concerto requires learning it first. During that phase, I am put face to face with Chopin’s mind, learning to think the way he thinks. Any obstacle to a good functioning of my brain is being challenged by trying to think like a (musical) genius. By behaving as if my brain was normal, I teach it what it feels to be just that: normal.
Playing, as opposed to learning, this forceful piece is very energizing. When I play, I feel a fire inside me, that usually helps me walk and feel better. When I struggle on a particular passage, I can sense my brain trying to break through barriers, and by my conscious visualization of the proper way to play this passage perfectly, I very clearly feel my brain trying to get “to the other side”, and when it gets there, and new road has been laid out, where there once was just jungle. These are extraordinary moments, whereby I sense my mind expanding, and breaking the straightjacket it lives in. This is a great antidote to the shrinking of space that accompanies Parkinson.
Playing music is also like singing, only with your fingers. The material world, fingers, feet, vocal chords, is a reflection of our internal world: the mind, soul, spirit. When I think about how best to play a piece which is beyond me, I teach my mind the movement preparation phase. And when I execute, or try to execute, this perfect playing, what happens is pretty interesting.
At first, my mind is in shock. There is a kind of “conversation” between myself and (like Austin Powers would say) myself. My brain says: “I’m not supposed to be able to play this fast.” My mind answers: “tough luck, you are now.” Brain answers: “I can’t do it”. Then the mind comes to the rescue. “We are going to do it differently. Try this, instead. See how the fingers move? We’ve never done this before. You have no history of failure associated with this method. Go and run with it.”
Of course, the only way to make progress in music, is by first hearing better. The better I hear, the more clearly I receive the message of order and structure coming from the music itself. It’s like living in a spa. I get a constant “massage” of my mind, a kind of mental therapy. It is constant because I hear, and have been hearing, music in mind since the age of three.
The above conversation could equally have taken place when walking, instead of playing. Conscious movement preparation helps by visualizing the movements needed.
The next aspect I want to talk about is proper balance. We’ve seen how music provides a “copy” of the three dimensional world. Proper music, which, in my opinion, is classical music, provides with a reference frame, with a grid, which is the auditory equivalent of the visual lines on the ground which are being used to help parkinson patients walk. The way I understand this, is that parkinson flattens space by removing depth. Distant objects appear unreachable, hence the inability to walk. By restoring the missing sense of depth, music recreates a three-dimensional world in which the brain has no problems giving the order to walk.
Of course, there are other reasons behind walking difficulties, but I believe that this flattening of space is an important one. How else to explain that a parkinson patient walks better with lines drawn on the ground, or drawn on special glasses?
Satellites launched into space must be able to send information back to Earth at all times. For that they must be able to orient their antennas toward our planet. How do they know in which direction to point? The answer is, a spinning top is put on board the satellite. That top, because it is spinning, always points in the same direction, and provides a reference frame, ie a set of three axes, up-down, left-right, closer-farther, which allow the satellite to always be able to stay balanced. Music, likewise, is a spinning top which restores balance inside the mind.
Last, but not least: rhythm. Through rhythm, music can make people move, a most welcome “side-effect” of rhythmic music. I am fortunate enough to be able to write my own music. When composing rhythmic pieces, I naturally write music that makes me move.
In the morning, listening to one such special piece (summertime, part of my debut CD coming out in the next few weeks) always puts me in motion. Right after taking my pills (requip 16, stalevo), hearing this piece makes me dance. It’s clumsy at first, then as my limbs loosen, my moves become more natural. I know of no better way to start the day. I can indicate you where you can listen to this piece, should you find it of relevance to your life.
Thierry kauffmann
