I’m very interested in the way sound affects us, especially in music. One way that sounds affect me is that I tend to move in relation to certain ones, especially those sounds that are filtered and in the vocal range. I wonder how many of you might share this reaction, so I want to take you on a little journey, a journey with some explanation and a SoundPost to get your reactions.
First, just in case you haven’t experienced the process of filtering audio, a little experience for you:
- Make an ooh sound, feel how your mouth is shaped, maybe look in the mirror to see it.
- Make an ah sound, feel that, look at it in a mirror.
- Now move slowly back and forth between the two, and notice the relation between your mouth shape and the sound outcome.
- Repeat steps 1-3 using no vocal sound, only air.
What you’ve just done is to filter the source sound produced by your vocal cords (or just air flow) using the lips, and added a little resonance in the mouth and nasal cavity when moving to the ooh sound. (I have an essay about resonance for a future post.) With the mouth wide open, you get the ah sound, which contains a lot of airiness, especially when not making sounds with the vocal cords. When we close our lips, we filter out higher frequencies, and create a little feedback loop that increases the frequencies around the cutoff frequency.
So that’s filtering. What I just had you do is rather like what happens to me when I hear certain sounds, and it’s part of why sounds have such a strong impact on me, I’m sure. I move my mouth as if I were doing the filtering myself. Let’s see what you think, what happens to you when you hear such a sound. I’ve posted a couple that definitely cause this reaction in me.
SoundPost 2: Click here for a sound experience and let me know how it makes you move (or not!)
There’s a phenomenon called Mimetic Musical Imagery, exposed nicely in the article, Embodying Music: Principles of the Mimetic Hypothesis, by Arnie Cox. It takes as a starting point the fact that we learn by imitating, at the very deepest level of our being. We see someone do an act, a task, and we imitate their movements when we try to do the action. The article points out that much of our musical activity, whether we are physically active or just thinking, involves motor imagery, and hypothesizes about how this might work and how it impacts conceptualization and meaning. A key statement in the essay is that part of how we comprehend music is “by way of a kind of physical empathy that involves imagining making the sounds we are listening to.”
This is all very meaningful to me, because when I listen to music, especially electronic music in which sounds are filtered, I find myself making motions with my mouth that will produce similar sounds. I wonder how many others do this, therefore the SoundPost. And let me cast the net a little wider for consideration: when you listen to someone playing your (or an) instrument, do you find yourself making movements that correspond to the ones you’d make if you were playing the instrument? Or do you find yourself drawn to playing air guitar with your favorite songs, or maybe just mouthing the words short of singing along? If it’s a piece you have played, do you find yourself pausing, breathing at the phrase breaks? With a piece you’ve listened to many times and know very well, do you find yourself moving to enact some aspect of the music?
These would all be mimetic responses in some way, in which our bodies provide part of the understanding we have of the music. We gain an empathetic understanding of performers and performances by having performed ourselves. Even those of us who have not played a particular instrument can see a person exerting tremendous effort to succeed at playing a passage, and that draws us in. Those signals may be facial expressions, movements of the arms or hand, anything that we can relate to and which we might have done ourselves. To be in the physical presence of effort exerted is one of the most important things about witnessing live performance. Whether to make a passage especially strong or particularly delicate, the care we witness translates directly into our empathy, and creates meaning.
Empathic energy is one of the aspects of the musical experience that can be chronicled, documented in a holistic analysis. I have developed such a method, and I’ll be writing about it in this blog in the future. If you want to find out more about it now, there is a bit of background and both a published and an unpublished paper on the topic at this website. The range of meaning created through the varied levels of mimetic response is pretty vast: very high register, very fast notes, very slow bow… all these are immediately understandable as requiring effort, and communicate important information about the piece to an audience. If we seek to fully understand the musical experience, accounting for these energies is of great importance.