Is it 'noise' or is it 'music'?
Adjusting psyche and nervous system to the sound of reality
photographer unknown
Tonight I’m listening to Ravel’s piano music next to my bedroom window.
The window opens to a 6-lane road below. It’s mostly empty since it’s past midnight, but tonight there is a visitation: a massive motor, possibly a street cleaner, one of the monstrous noise ghosts that regularly haunts my neighborhood.
I experienced a wondrously mysterious and piercing sense of peace in the first weeks of the pandemic when the major traffic corridor below my window went eerily quiet. The world pressed ‘pause’ and suddenly I was living in a ghost town. Amidst all the panic and stress, there was this paradoxical gift, a vast space of silence.
That’s the feeling we go looking for in nature, but here it was in the midst of the concrete, as if the stillness of midnight now spread through the entirety of each day.
But tonight the sound of midnight is different.
I adore the opening movement of Le Tombeau de Couperin. But tonight a metallic monster is simply louder than Ravel and there is nothing I can do about it.
Actually, there is one thing I can do - I can practice.
For years, I’ve been deeply tuning into the soundscapes I find myself in. I don’t try to push sounds away, no matter how unpleasant. I try to hear all there is to hear.
There’s no question that I would choose Ravel over the street cleaner, but I don’t have that luxury tonight. To curse the underpaid city employee preserving my quality of life or try to prevent this motor from touching my ear would only be to argue with reality.
Arguing with reality restricts your breathing and creates unnecessary muscular contractions. It diminishes your body’s capacity to resonate, to receive vibrations. It pulls your attention inwards as you try to avoid contact with the world.
These days many of us live in landscapes that are not nourishing to the senses - just the opposite. So there is a certain level of vigilance that is difficult to expunge from our nervous systems, no matter how skilled we are.
We sometimes make the mistake of describing this situation as “normal” - which is why it’s a good idea to get out of the city as often as we can. Immersion in nature reminds us what ‘quiet’ actually sounds like.
Yet if I complain that the city is noisy - if I think that it shouldn’t be like this while someone is cleaning the street below my window - I am arguing with reality.
It took me many years to understand the lasting benefits I received from several years of immersion in a radical experimental music community. There were many sounds that my ears found difficult to swallow. Yet, I learned through practice that sometimes beauty simply needed more time to be understood.
Other times, there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I was disappointed, but I didn’t conclude from these experiences that there was no value in the experiments. I returned to listen again at the next opportunity.
What I learned was that the sounds I sometimes called “noise” went down easier when I stopped resisting them, when I stopped trying to squeeze my ears shut.
Tonight, I split my attention between Ravel and the massive engine, listening to both.
The piano falls into my ears like a waterfall of rose petals. The machine groans obscenely without any ring of organic life.
I remind my mind that this is the music of my world right now. I am very aware of my ears. I intentionally hold them open. I actively encourage my breath to flow.
These two expressions live together in the same soundscape despite the fact that neither one listens to the other. Their movements are not coordinated.
Yet, I do have the capacity to listen, to choose how I respond.
I allow one part of myself to flow with the piano while another part carefully attends to Motor Mouth, not willing to let him take me by surprise.
I don’t feel divided. It’s more like attentional multi-tasking. But I am whole.
Like feeling fleece against one cheek and rough concrete against the other, these two divergent textures of experience simultaneously call to my senses.
Both are equally real. I don’t choose between them.
Now the engine roars again, nearly twice as loud as before. I realize the vehicle had only been idling. Now it moves up the road, briefly obliterating Ravel.
It takes a very long time for Motor Mouth to finally disappear into the distance, leaving only the soft hum of the street lamps and the warm breeze.
Finally, it’s only us again, Ravel and I.
I lead monthly outdoor Musicality of Being workshops in Rock Creek Park in Washington DC. We practice tuning ourselves to the music of the world. We listen to our bodies, our companions, and the body of the park.
For most people, learning to listen this way is much easier in a natural setting.
Yet this practice is so much more than a “walk in the park.” I often tell workshop participants that we could just as easily practice downtown - but it’s not as easy.
We tend to assign value to what we perceive almost instantly, and rarely see that our judgments are coloring are perception - and its consequences.
Still, I believe it’s vital that we become more skilled in tuning our nervous systems to the sound of reality with a minimum of unnecessary contraction in our bodies.
Because those contractions are not only the source of aches and pains. They also interfere with our capacity to think. And to communicate with each other.
A crucial thing to realize, when you listen, is:
My thoughts make a sound.
This is perhaps the main reason why we have so much trouble listening to each other.
The inner children never seem to want to be quiet. This is a problem.
One person who has sought to address this issue directly - and had some popular success in doing so - is Byron Katie.
Thousands of people have learned from her to ask themselves four questions that rapidly reduce the momentum of mental cascades of noise. She calls her process The Work. I’m currently enjoying her book, Loving What Is.
This incredible yet “ordinary” woman had a kind of struck-by-lightning transformation in her mental life after years of profound suffering. She realized that her thoughts distorted her perception and created a process for seeing clearly again.
Following my curiosity about her onto YouTube, I discovered another simple practice she created called the Morning Walk. It’s another powerful tool for cutting through the noise of thinking to allow in more of the music of the world.
Much of what our ears hear in this epoch does not strike our hearts as music.
Yet, music is not only made by producing sounds. It’s also made in the ear that hears.
To listen to the sounds of the world without prejudice is to listen to sound as music, whether or not its the kind you would pay to listen to in a concert hall.
There is no question that this is harder than listening to Ravel or any other musical saint that you might adore. But it’s a necessary part of turning towards the world in such a way that the possibility of harmony can be preserved.
After all, each person you meet has their own rhythm and melody. Sometimes the music is so sweet that you’ll invite them for dinner. Yet other times this is the ‘music’ of buying your groceries, giving directions or paying the rent.
It’s possible to hear these moments as music too - instead of calling them ‘noise.’
Noise tests our patience with the present moment. We want to “get this over with.” We try our damndest not to feel it. We imagine - in vain - a noiseless world.
We all do it, but it doesn’t help.
To prove this to yourself, imagine a ‘noise’, say, someone yelling in your ear.
Feel how you wince and pull your head away. Notice what you do with your eyes, what happens in your neck and your throat. Feel how the wince gets stuck in your ribs.
Notice how your body is caught in a straight jacket and it’s hard to breathe.
A couple years ago, a construction crew set up under my window, also after midnight.
When they didn’t relent, I went to the kitchen and started cooking. Each time they fired up the jackhammer, I danced to the rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…
I coordinated the movements of my hips with a wooden spoon pushing sizzling vegetables around a frying pan and the merciless pounding of concrete.
In his book Bearing Witness to Epiphany, philosopher John Russon writes:
Music is not exclusively of the ear, or of the mind. It is of the body as a whole. Though it may require the involvement of ear and mind, music is not fully appreciated when it is severed from an engagement with the moving body. To receive music as music is to dance.
It’s harder to dance to ‘music’ that was not created for that very purpose, but it’s certainly possible. The first step is to notice when you have unnecessarily categorized sound as ‘noise’ and taken the posture of defending yourself against it.
Sometimes that makes sense. But other times it’s not necessary.
Again, John Russon:
Music calls the body: it stirs the body to move, and it is only in the body’s acceptance of this its transfigured status that the music is allowed to be . . . In order to know what the nature of the music is, one must attend to the music itself: in advance of hearing, one does not know what the music is, but one must learn from the music what its specific character is. The music shows itself - it is an epiphany. Further, it shows itself as something compelling, something that dictates to the body how to behave. When the body dances, its limbs are moved by a power not its own. The music itself is the guide. The music is a reality: it is a causal force at play in the world. It informs the body. But this epiphany rests upon the properly supportive anticipative openness of the body. The music is real, but it cannot exist without the body’s acts of preparation and relaxation. The music depends on the body to allow it (the music) to be the causal force. Only within the anticipative openness of the body can the music realize its causal primacy, its authority.
The “authority” that Russon speaks of is the same aspect of reality that Byron Katie describes as “God’s business.”
She writes:
I can only find three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours, and God’s. (Anything that’s out of my control, your control, and everyone else’s control, I call God’s business.)
Further:
Where reality is concerned, there is no “what should be.” There is only what is, just the way it is, right now. The truth is prior to every story. And every story, prior to investigation, prevents us from seeing what’s true . . .
I came to see that the world is always as it should be, whether I oppose it or not. And I came to embrace reality with all my heart. I love the world, without any conditions.
Byron Katie’s love for the world is the very same thing as John Russon’s “properly supportive anticipative openness of the body.”
It’s a posture, an attitude, a disposition.
Sometimes sounds are simply too loud and the muscles in our ears contract reflexively to protect us from harm.
But other times, we may have more capacity to listen than we realize, if we can refrain from describing the world as noise.
It’s a practice.
Thank you. Sometimes I still need to be reminded that it's only "noise" because I have labeled it as such. ;)