Walking across the arts quad alone, I forgot my headphones. A wash of sound floods over me — leaves brushing vigorously against each other in the aggressive wind, shoes scurrying past at various paces, bikes mechanically whirlling. I notice my own contribution to the concert. My pants shuffle against each other with an airy, light sound. I can choose the rhythm of the shuffle with each footstep. My steps are more percussive than the ones from the girl who just passed me. She was walking quickly. I am in sync with the boy walking in front of me, but I delay a beat and suddenly we’re syncopated. When I reached my class, I forgot that I wasn’t wearing headphones.
There’s so much that isn’t listened to. Streaming services are musical black holes, and record shops host endless bins of names from A to Z in every genre imaginable. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. An abundance of music hides in plain sight all around us, undetectable to the distracted ear. It is in your steps, the trees, even your computer keyboard. When you put on headphones for a morning walk to class, the familiar songs that fill your head tune out a worthwhile opportunity for musical interaction. Music, especially in the confines of solo listening, is so often a method of detachment. It removes the listener from their surroundings and tells a story outside of the moment. The most musically rewarding experiences, though, can be those where you find yourself without headphones or a catchy tune, just an ear and an eagerness to listen. So, I challenge you to take the headphones off and try an experimental exercise in close listening similar to the one I described above. Let the world be your playlist and stage. The only thing you have to do is open your ears.
To listen, you first need to know what to listen for. How can you hear music in your steps? Unfortunately, we face a problem fairly quickly when determining the definition of “music.” What is considered “music” as opposed to “sound” has changed much throughout the ages, as boundaries have been broken and definitions have widened. Augustine of Hippo, an ancient Roman philosopher and Catholic saint, for example, saw music in its most mathematical form — as evidence of adequate measurement. More recently, however, British ethnomusicologist John Blacking argued that the core of music is humanly-organized sound. He explained that the human dimension is vital. This is expanded in a definition by Luciano Berio, an Italian composer, who proposed that music is “everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.” Where Augustine may view a bird’s chirp as music due to its mathematical placement in time, Blacking or Berio would point to the human listener as the one who makes the bird’s sound a song. Deciding whether any of these viewpoints is objectively correct is moot; rather, they are all significant in that they represent a scale of varying degrees of rigidity that distinguish mere noise from music. The music we are looking for in this close listening experiment lies on the most abstract end of the scale. Like Berio’s comment, it is music because we say it is. In other words, it’s experimental.
Experimental music has historically pushed the limits of these rigid definitions of what music can or should be. Its core principle lies in the idea that all of the conventional elements of music — be it rhythm, pitch, timbre, harmony, form, etc. — can be intentionally warped to create a completely new and oftentimes unconventional sound. For this exercise, the most important aspect is to embrace this open-mindedness, especially in instrumentation. An instrument, for our purposes, is not just the traditional groups of strings, winds and percussion you may see a local band perform in standardized ways. Really, anything “playable” will do. Get creative! The vacuum in your dorm, your water bottle with ice, a creaky door — all instruments with a promising variety of ways to be played.
Now that the terms of listening have been established, it is time to begin. Here’s how the experiment goes. In a moment of desire for new music, listen — but don’t put on your headphones. Just connect to your surroundings, regardless of where you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re walking across the arts quad like I did or sitting and doing your work at the library. Using an open-minded definition of music and instruments, listen with intent. You begin as an audience member, noticing the louder sounds of the space. Friends are chatting, footsteps are pounding. Slowly, you’ll begin to hear the quiet hum around you. Maybe it’s the air conditioner. And then, you’ll become a performer. Just as you get more comfortable in the musical environment you’ve created, so too you will interact with musical purpose. Perhaps you’ll contribute by typing on the keyboard. Maybe one key is quieter than the other. All this would be noticed as you become the performer and listener of your wonderful piece of interactive experimental music. But it can’t be forgotten that this is an improvisation exercise, so a sneeze from a passerby is a welcome addition to the collage of sound you have now made through close listening.
Of course, this could never be a replacement for a more conventional type of music. Rather, it’s a meditative exercise to try every once in a while. It reminds you to connect to the environment around you, that a musical distraction doesn’t have to be detached. The mindfulness required in close listening allows you to situate yourself and create a peaceful awareness. A musical ear makes the most entertained listener, even when it’s silent.
Hazel Tjaden is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at hlt43@cornell.edu.
