The Buddhist Musicianship Series

D h a r m a s o n g P u b l i c a t i o n s • www . d h a r m a s o n g . c o m

by Phil Nyokai James

Listening

What is Buddhist Musicianship

Twenty-five hundred years ago the Buddha discovered a method for living life more

freely and compassionately. His method was empirical rather than religious: instead of

theological concepts and devotional commitments, he outlined a set of practical

techniques his followers could try out for themselves.

The Buddha rarely mentioned music, and yet much of what he taught can be applied

directly to what I call Buddhist musicianship. Buddhist musicianship is a radical return to

the basics of working with sound, emphasizing concentration, mindfulness, personal

discipline, attentive listening, breathing, community, and compassion.

This Buddhist Musicianship series of articles is about becoming a musician or, for those

who are already musicians, about revisiting the foundations of the craft and discovering

new approaches, using the Buddha’s teaching as a framework. By “musician” I don’t

necessarily mean a professional musician – I mean somebody who is creatively engaged

with the world of sound.

For music to exist in the world, one of the most basic requirements is attentive listening.

What a simple idea, but one that is often ignored because it seems so obvious. That’s why

these first three articles delve deeply into the practice of listening, drawing parallels with

Buddhist methods and offering exercises that bridge the gap between art and meditation.

I hope that through these writings you will develop a sense of the world of music that is

at once broader and more precise than you thought possible. I hope you will begin to see

yourself as an active, creative, and self-assured participant in that world. I hope, too, that

the Buddhist approach to musical expression enriches other areas of your life.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be filled with love and compassion. May all

beings be liberated from suffering.

Buddhist Musicianship 1:

Listening to Sound as Sound

What if we define music not as something that’s made or consumed, but simply as sound that’s listened to as sound?

If I listen to your voice only to extract the literal meaning of the words you’re

uttering, it’s not exactly music to my ears. But if I notice the rise and fall of your

breath, the changing pitches of the syllables, the sharpness or gentleness of your

tone, then I am certainly listening to a song. Similarly, if the pattering of the rain

means no more to me than a signal to go indoors, it would be a stretch to call it

music; but if I am attentive to the complex ever-changing rhythms of the

raindrops, I experience the same type of fascination as when I listen to Indian

tabla drumming or jazz, a clearly musical fascination. In other words, through my attentiveness to sound I have entered a state of music.

Buddhism and listening

Buddhism has a lot to say about perception and about attentiveness to sensation,

including sound. The Abidhamma, an ancient collection of Buddhist treatises on

psychology that is remarkably in synch with modern cognitive neuroscience,

outlines a journey from the first physical sensation of a sound through its complex

processing in the brain. The Abidhamma makes clear that there are decision

points along the way, moments of choice between accepting a sound as just sound

or rejecting it as something we don’t want to hear, between noticing its various

interesting features and cutting off engagement by hurriedly identifying and

labeling it as good or bad. What I have just called a state of music would be

considered, in Buddhism, simply a state of relaxed non-judgmental awareness, the ground from which deeper realizations may grow and ripen.

Concentration and listening

Essentially there are two approaches to meditation in Buddhism: concentration

and mindfulness. In concentration meditation, you focus on an object of the

senses. This could be the feeling of the breath as it enters and leaves the body, or

it could be a repeated sound such as a mantra or a chant. The idea is to keep

bringing the attention back to this object. As many times as the mind wanders to

other thoughts or other sensations, you rein it back in. This is also the essence of

“musicianly” listening: bringing your attention back again and again to the sound

at hand (or at ear). If you’re a working musician in the middle of a performance,

you might find your mind wandering away from the passage you’re playing right

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now to thoughts of the next phrase or song – or even of your next gig! But it is

essential, for the life of the music, to bring your attention back to the “right now”

sound. And of course it is essential to listen to this sound as sound. As you do this

over and over again, it starts to become second nature. This is Buddhist

musicianship in action.

Exercise: Concentration on sound as sound

Sit in a comfortable position with your spine straight. You may sit on the

floor cross-legged or in a chair, but if you use a chair be careful not to

slump or lean against the back. If you are sitting on the floor, a pillow

under your buttocks may help you to keep your spine straight. Optionally,

you can try sitting on your knees with your buttocks between your heels.

This position, sometimes called “seiza style,” is considered a position of

power in the Japanese arts. It allows you to breathe very deeply into your abdomen.

Start this exercise by watching your breath. Don’t try to control it in any

way, but simply notice the sensation of the air entering and leaving your

nostrils. Or, if you prefer, notice the sensation of your belly expanding and

collapsing as you breathe in and out.

Once you feel somewhat relaxed, pick a sound to listen to. It may be a

fairly steady sound, such as the drone of a distant electric motor, or it may

be more changeable, such as the song of a bird or a rushing river. It could

even be the sound of your breath. Whatever sound you choose, stick with

it, noticing every slight change in pitch, volume, tone quality, location,

etc. Even the steadiest sounds will “undress themselves” to reveal a

complex and ever-changing character if you listen with enough attention.

If you’re focusing on an electric drone, for instance, you may notice that

it’s actually composed of tiny fragments of sound strung together closely

enough to give an illusion of continuity – thousands of sonic arisings and

passings-away every minute! And if you listen to your breath, you may

find that the sound is as complex and powerful as the ocean. If your mind

wanders, bring it back again and again to the sound you’ve chosen, trying to hear it with more and more precision.

To exercise aural acuity, focus in now on the smallest sound you can hear.

Listen with ever-increasing attention until you can hear it in the minutest

detail. Again, this may be the breath itself. Notice how the sound changes

through time. Resist the temptation to identify it or to figure out how it’s

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being made. Simply notice everything about it. Notice how the sound

begins, how it progresses, how it ends, perhaps how it starts again. Notice

any change in volume, or pitch, or any other qualities such as roughness

versus smoothness. Don’t try to analyze, just notice all these aspects of the

smallest sounds.

After a while this level of concentration may feel like a strain. In that case

return to noticing the feeling of the breath, the sensations at your nostrils

or in your belly as it enters and leaves your body. When you are more

relaxed restart your detailed investigation of sonic phenomena. Eventually

the focus on sound will become as relaxing as the focus on other body

sensation. You may notice that your mind becomes quieter, that you are

clearing a mental space in which the sonic events can live their brief life.

Concentration on sound naturally develops quietness, not necessarily the

quietness of a library or monastery, but a deep inner quiet.

Mindful listening

The second Buddhist approach to meditation is mindfulness. In mindfulness

meditation, you let go of concentration on a particular sense object and open up

your awareness to include the constantly changing states of your mind and body

and the world around you. In other words, you ride the waves of sensation and

thought as they arise and disappear. If an image of a lemon meringue pie pops

into your head, for instance, you simply notice it, let go of it, and let the next

mind-object rise and pass away. You may discover that you’ve been stuck in

lemon meringue pie bliss for several minutes, but it’s never too late to let go. In

some traditions you softly label the mind-object that arises. “Thinking,” you say

to yourself when a thought comes up. Then you feel an itch on your leg.

“Feeling,” you say to yourself, and then let that go as well. In this way you get

more and more adept at being present and at allowing every experience to arise

and perish without clinging to it.

How does this apply to musicianship?

You can get close enough to a painting that nothing else is included in your visual

arena – all you see are the colors and shapes and textures on the canvas. But with

sound it’s different. Sound never exists in isolation. A Sousa march blaring from a

band shell is embroidered with the sonic events of the entire soundscape. A dog

barks, a jet flies by, somebody sings along. And as you listen you may also be

aware of the sounds of your own body: the wind rushing past your ears, your heart

beating, even the sound of swallowing. It is impossible to completely block out all

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these inputs, and so the musicianly thing to do is consider them a part of the

music, to hear the entire sonic environment as a symphony (symphony means

“sounding together,” by the way).

This sort of inclusionary listening is a fundamental skill for performing in

instrumental ensembles. If you’re playing with other musicians, you have to open

up your hearing to include everything they’re doing as well as everything you’re

doing. It doesn’t work to just concentrate on your own part, playing it as

accurately as you can – you must be receptive to the miniscule moment-to-

moment changes in the overall sound. The more mindful each member of the

group becomes, the more unified and enthralling the music. And if the group can

extend that mindfulness to include the sound qualities of the space – incorporating

into their music the reverberation of the walls, the random sounds of traffic, even

the occasional fidgeting of the audience – then we have a truly remarkable

musical event rather than a simple “recital” of a composition.

Exercise: Inclusionary listening

Start with an abbreviated version of the first exercise above: watch your

breathing for a while, then move your concentration to a particular sound,

once again trying to notice even the minutest changes over time. Again,

this could be the sound of the breath itself if you want. Stick with Exercise

1 until you feel that external and mental distractions have less power over you.

Now try to open up your hearing so that it encompasses the entire world

around you. This is the mindfulness part of listening – being mindful of

everything that’s happening. It may help at first to scan your surroundings.

Are there any sounds to your left? How about your right? Or behind you.

Or above you, or even beneath you. Notice the different types of sounds:

drones, percussive bursts, fragments of melody, white noise, etc. Soften

your hearing so that it all fits together and bathes you in a gigantic many-

textured ocean of sound.

Now try to combine the two aspects of attentive listening: at the same time

your ears are open to the broad range of sonic information, you become

more and more tuned into the details of the sound. Try and get to the place

where you don’t have to switch off one aspect of listening (concentration

on the fine ever-changing details of sound) in order to engage the other

(inclusionary awareness of the soundscape as a whole). This may be very

difficult at first. Sometimes I think of it as fractal listening: the variety of

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the entire sonic environment is reflected in the varying qualities of the

smallest bits of sonic data. To hear it all as a continuum, from minutest

sound to the entire soundscape, is the goal of this exercise.

It’s an exercise you could work on your entire life. After practicing it a

few times I think you’ll find that it’s like plunging ever more deeply into

the ocean of sound – a world that’s as mysterious and surprising as it is familiar.

Concentration and mindfulness in musical cultures

The two exercises I’ve suggested so far may seem unusual in the context of music

education, but many cultures have them built right into their musical forms. Much

Indian music, for instance, includes an introductory “Alap” section in which a

performer slowly and teasingly works toward full-out expression, listening

carefully to the sounds he or she is making and to all the sounds of the

environment, intuiting a pathway into a state of music.

I play the traditional Japanese shakuhachi flute. Simply crafted out of bamboo, the

shakuhachi is capable of a surprising range of sounds, many of them reminiscent

of the sounds of nature such as the blowing wind or the calls of birds. For

centuries the shakuhachi was used by wandering Zen monks as a meditative tool

rather than a musical instrument. They wandered the Japanese countryside

looking for ichi on jobutsu, the one sound that would lead to enlightenment. In the

shakuhachi tradition, many pieces start with a sort of prelude called “shirabe” or

“choshi.” This section of the music provides the performer an opportunity to get

in tune, to feel out the mood of the instrument itself (shakuhachis are notoriously

sensitive to temperature and humidity), and to methodically enter a state of

concentration and mindfulness. In addition we have a practice called ro-buki

(“blowing the note called ro”), engaged in daily by virtually all shakuhachi

players. In ro-buki, we repeatedly play one note for the full length of a breath.

That’s all there is to it. This very slow meditative practice pulls us into

concentration on the fine details of the ever-changing sound, makes us aware of

the rise and fall of sonic phenomena, and with each long in-breath opens our ears

to the myriad sounds that surround us. It is a sort of automated concentration and

mindfulness exercise – practicing ro-buki, you can’t help becoming more

attentive.

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Ma

In traditional Japanese music we also have a concept called ma. Ma means the

space between intentional sounds. Like many Japanese terms, though, it is a

highly condensed nexus of concepts. The idea of ma includes listening, relaxation,

patience, and attention. Its outward manifestation in performance is an intuitive

artistic sense of the spacing between musical events (breath-length phrases or

individual notes), but “good ma” demonstrates many underlying qualities of

musicianship and even of a more general meditative attitude toward life.

Needless to say, traditional Buddhist shakuhachi music emphasizes ma. Silence,

in fact, or not playing, is the ground from which the music is reborn with each

breath. Shakuhachi is notorious for the difficulty of producing pitched sound, but

I believe it is not making sound that is the hardest aspect. The real challenge is

returning again and again to a quiet receptive state – a ma state -- between

phrases, letting go of worrying about what comes next. This habit, I believe, is the

essence of Buddhist musicianship. Fortunately you don’t need a shakuhachi to

practice – all you need is your body, your breath, your ears, and the exquisite

mysterious world of sounds.

Exercise: Developing good ma

Make a single sound with your voice, your hands, whatever. Pay close

attention to the sound while it is alive. Now simply listen to the sounds

around, remaining silent yourself. Try to be patient, observing your sonic

environment carefully and lovingly. Now make another sound. Pause

again, listening once more to the soundscape.

As you play with making sounds and being silent, try to think of the entire

activity as a piece of music. The silences – the periods when you are not

making sound yourself – are as much a part of the piece as your audible sonic gestures. Hear them as equally valuable.

You may even want to experiment with mentally switching perspective

from our usual way of thinking about sound: hear ma as the primary

ongoing component of the music and your own sounds as momentary

punctuation points or as a sort of framing for the silence.

Start to experiment with a natural-feeling rhythm of making sound,

listening to silence, making sound, listening to silence. The rhythm can be

irregular, with silences and sounds of widely varying lengths. Just relax, listen, and hear how it all fits together.

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Whole body listening

We tend to think of the ears as the only organs of hearing. But we actually

perceive sound with much more of our bodies than we are normally aware of.

Think, for instance of the low rumbling of a distant jet: we feel the sound viscerally, in our bones and our guts, before our ears enter into the action.

Much of our body is actually more sensitive to very low frequency sounds than

our ears are. Our ears are only sensitive down to about 20 Hertz (twenty

vibrations of a sound per second), but some of the most interesting and sensual

sounds fall below this range. The 32-foot pipes of a giant church organ give

worshippers an almost silent (to the ears) bodily thrill that is akin to the pleasures

of sex and may keep them coming back to church for more. Dancing barefoot you

feel the booming of bass and drums enter your body through your soles, not your

ears. Giant subwoofer speakers speak to our vibrating skeletons.

Why the increased emphasis on bass sounds in popular music over the past twenty

years? I believe it is an attempt to “re-corporealize” music, to bring it back to our

bodies. When music was a participatory feature of daily culture, it lived in the

bodies of individual music makers and in the body of the community as a whole.

As we specialized the activity of music making, separating performer from

listener, we also robbed the majority of the culture of active engagement with

sound. The dramatic “whole body” experience of heavily amplified bass sounds returns us, in a way, to a physical participation in the world of music.

But it is not only bass sounds that can be sensed through organs other than the

ears. I remember as a child touching my father’s larynx, or “Adam’s apple,” as he

read me a bedtime story. As I drifted off to sleep I could feel the words entering

my body through my fingertips.

Some teachers of Buddhist mindfulness meditation – most notably Ruth Denison

– suggest experimenting with mindfulness of the body, breath and sensations “off

the cushion,” in positions other than just sitting. She says that “what evolves is

meditation while standing, walking, running, jumping, lying down, rolling on the

grass -- meditation in the entire scope of the body's mobility and expression, in

yoga àsanas, in dance and laughing, in sound, touch, taste, sight or imitation

motions such as crawling like a worm, etc.”1 Exercises in noticing the sensations

of sound in the body are at the heart of this approach to Buddhist meditation.

1 from a 1997 interview in Insight Journal, a publication of the Barre Center for

Buddhist Studies

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Exercise: Whole body listening

As you wander through the soundscape, experiment with touching

resonating surfaces. Touch the walls of the subway station and see if you

can feel the sound of the arriving train before you hear it with your ears.

Touch the back of an upright piano as somebody plays, or touch the

various surfaces of a guitar as you pluck the strings. Rest your head on the

ground and try to feel the rumbling of the earth. Put your face close to a

bass speaker and notice the slight blast of air with each low beat. Feel the

vibrating of the sand under your feet as an ocean wave approaches or

recedes. Touch your lover’s body as he or she sighs. Become a “whole body ear.”

Listening to space

As a child I spent lots of time at the beach, playing in the hissing, sputtering and

roaring Atlantic waves. It was a sound I loved and found exhilarating. One day I

suddenly noticed an aspect of the sound I had never heard before. Waves do not

hit the beach completely head on, they break in a long slow spiral against the

shore. In other words, if you’re facing the ocean the sound of a wave crashing

might start far down the beach to your left, and then it hits closer and closer until

it breaks directly in front of you. At that point it may keep crashing against the

sand to your right, making contact further and further down the beach until the

sound is a distant whir. By then a new wave will certainly have announced itself

to your left, and the whole cycle repeats with sounds that are always slightly different.

Why hadn’t I noticed this before? There are a couple of reasons. One is simply

that it hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything to be gained from

consciously listening to the ocean the same way I was used to listening to

instrumental music. More importantly, the concept of sound as moving broadly

through space was new to me – or more accurately, had become alien to me. As

school emphasized the importance of paying attention to the one focal point at the

front of the classroom, I had lost some of my peripheral hearing and the joy of

noticing the spatial play of sound.

Living with or close to nature, sonic location is an essential human skill. You

have to know where that hissing or snarling is coming from, and whether it’s

headed your way or not. You have to know how far away the thunder is and

which way the wind is blowing – both of these pieces of information can be

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derived from sound alone. Without the aid of artificial lighting, we are partially

blind for fifty percent of our time on earth – but all through the night our ears are

working overtime, busy locating sound sources and analyzing their movement in order to compensate for our night blindness.

Exercise: Sonic mapping

This is one to try at home. It may be more interesting at night, when the

louder sounds of traffic and daily activity are at a minimum and the subtler sounds of night come to life.

Close your eyes. Once again, start by watching your breath: the sensation

of the air entering and leaving your nostrils, the sensation of your belly

expanding and collapsing as you breathe in and out. Once you feel

relaxed, open your hearing to all the sounds around you. Notice the

soundscape in as much detail as you can. Notice the tiniest hums and

clicks that live in your house like microbes. Notice random sounds from

far away and the sounds of your own bodily systems. Notice especially

any directionality to the sounds: sounds approaching or getting more distant, moving to the right or left, moving up or down.

Now start to walk around, still with your eyes closed. Try to feel your way

through a space you know by sight and touch, but this time relying only on

sound. Mentally create a sonic map of your house or apartment, complete

with landmarks (soundmarks?) and pathways through the auditory jungle.

The refrigerator is easy, clocks are easy, but what about windows? What

about plumbing? What about the hum of electricity in the walls? Is it

louder in some places than others? Are there sounds that move, are there

sounds that remain still?

With a little practice, you may be able to construct a precise sonic map of

your home that will enable you to navigate in total darkness, without the

aid even of your hands.

Playing space

Whenever we make a sound – whether it’s a so-called musical sound or not – we

are sending vibrations into a particular space, a space that contains the vibrating

substance (air, water) and that is contained by substance (walls, trees, mountains).

The vibrations interact with the space, including its container, to create the quality

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of the sound. We all know that in a large empty room sound is very resonant,

while in a small carpeted closet sound is flat and “present.” As every performing

musician knows, when we make a sound we are “playing the space” as well as our

instrument. And our own voice is affected not just by the room we’re in, but by

the various bodily containers it passes through: our throats, mouth, and lips.

Recently I stayed for a few days in the old center of Perugia, a medieval Italian

city whose streets and buildings have hardly changed in five hundred years. Since

the central area is almost exclusively pedestrian, subtler sounds are not obscured

by traffic noise. And because of this, you can hear very clearly how the extreme

variety of architectural spaces – from wide open piazzas to narrow circuitous

alleys, from intimate shops to huge cathedrals – affect sound. As you walk

around, your voice may at one moment be a flat whisper, the next moment a booming oracle.

Old cities like this are a sonic playground, and I’m sure acoustic playfulness went

into the original design. I can imagine children running through these spaces

shouting and laughing, listening to how the sound of their voices changes as they

run. This is a form of play we have lost for the most part in modern environments,

where it’s harder to hear these differences due to ambient noise, to muzak that

imposes its sameness everywhere, and to architecture that represses rather than

invites sonic experimentation. (In the buildings that stand out as acoustically

interesting, such as churches and old libraries, we are told to be quiet.) The

situation is a little better for kids who grow up on farms: there are the barns and

other outbuildings, each with its own sonic identity; there are the varied rooms of

an old farmhouse; and there are highly specialized spaces such as silos and old-

fashioned wells that offer children an opportunity to play wildly with sound.

Though for many of us the possibility of this sort of play has been greatly

diminished, through careful listening we can still explore the acoustical

differences in our environment and develop a greater appreciation for the relationship between sound and space.

Sound, space, and Buddhism

So what does this spatial aspect of sound have to do with Buddhism?

I think it points to the very essence of Buddhist practice: living each moment in

the here and now. Meditation (including listening meditation) trains us to notice

the particularity of each experience, its grounding in this moment, this place.

Rather than really experiencing each moment fully, we usually cling to it or reject

it by means of abstract thinking: “That’s a nice sound I hear” or “That song

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sucks.” Buddhism teaches us to plunge into a recognition of the actual event that

is occurring, as it occurs. Part of this heightened awareness is noticing that the

event is happening in a real space. Becoming sensitive to the spatial aspect of

sound, the relation of sound to space, grounds us in physical reality. From this

grounding we can begin to experience the world as it is and to become free of our prejudices and quick judgments.

Exercise: Playing space

This is another one to try at home and at night.

As usual, start by watching your breath. Now take a breath and try to make

a steady sound, a drone that maintains pretty much the same pitch from

beginning to end. Take another deep breath and repeat the drone tone.

Keep alternating between relaxed deep inhalations and this steady pitched sound.

Now project the sound onto a wall or some other surface. Imagine it is a

beam of light that you are directing at a particular spot. Listen very

carefully to the sound. Walk around your house slowly, projecting this

beam of sound onto different surfaces, into different spaces, listening

carefully to each new sound. At first you might not hear much difference,

but once your mind gets still enough and your listening subtle enough, you’ll be able to detect the effect of different spaces on your tone.

Buddhist Musicianship 2:

Our Listening Problem

We all have ears – why can’t we just listen without needing to practice

concentration and mindfulness?

Listening, or rather not listening, is apparently a serious problem in our society.

Relationships fall apart all the time because a partner “doesn’t listen to me.” We

all want to be listened to, and yet often we refuse to listen well enough to satisfy another person.

Not listening to another person is essentially the same as not listening to any other

sonic information. Sounds enter our consciousness through a haze of distracted

thinking and preformed assumptions, and it’s sometimes moments before we

notice, for instance, the sound of a bird chirping, cars whizzing by, a kettle

whistling on the stove, or a partner claiming she’s unhappy. With atrophied

listening skills we are alienated not just from other individuals, but from our entire environment.

The Buddhist psychological perspective

In Buddhist thought, consciousness is granular rather than solid. It is entirely

made up of a series of tiny “mind-moments” – what I sometimes call quanta of

attention -- that arise and pass away. Each quanta lasts perhaps a thousandth, or

even a millionth, of a second. The Abidhamma, an ancient collection of Buddhist

psychological teachings, traces the path of a sensual input, such as a sound, from

its physical occurrence all the way through our advanced conceptual and even

moral processing via a patterned succession of these mind-moments. Leaving out

the details, here’s roughly how it works (each step may be composed of many mind-moments):

1. A sound strikes the ear drum, causing a disturbance.

2. If we are at least somewhat attentive to sonic input at that point, “receiving-

consciousness” begins. The sound is still only a fuzzy background event, but our ongoing stream of consciousness has been interrupted.

3. Now it is possible for “investigating-consciousness” mind-moments to arise,

the very beginning of listening. We start to decipher the sound.

4. Next, “determining-consciousness” may arise – we figure out on a subconscious level what the sound really is.

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5. From here, it is possible to either “taste” or reject the sound, and it is only after this that it really registers in our minds.

6. Any sort of post-processing can occur now, such as judgments about the sound,

decisions to stop paying attention, etc.

At any point during this process, other objects of consciousness will sneak in

between the mind-moments that add up to hearing this one sound. A sudden

awareness of hunger, for instance, can turn into millions of little donut-vision

mind-moments cutting in line. Obviously this weakens the impression of the

auditory input as it stretches out the listening process, and if the donut-visions are

strong enough the listening process might short-circuit before the sound even

registers in the brain as a sound.

The Abidhamma suggests that it is possible to take control of this process to some

extent, to develop such a sensitive awareness that we can monitor the succession

of mind-moments directly and choose what inputs to privilege. A firm ethical

grounding, according to the Abidhamma, will create habits of choice such that we

may automatically pay attention to our friend in need rather than letting our minds drift too far into donut-land.

Filtering

We all share the ability to block out or filter sonic information. In Abidhamma

terms, we have developed a habitual short-circuiting of the listening process when it comes to certain kinds of sound.

This is a very interesting skill, sort of the inverse of mindful listening, and an

extension of a survival technique common to many animals. A tiger roaming

through the forest cannot treat all sounds equally: respond with full attention and

concern to every creaking of a branch and you may miss the more important

signals, not to mention that you’ll be a nervous wreck. Those proto-tigers who

survived long enough to pass on their genes were ones who could let the sounds

of nature meld into Muzak that was occasionally pierced by the cry of some

particularly delicious or nutritious prey species. And those smaller prey who

survived were ones endowed by evolution with a built-in “everything-but-tiger

filter” -- they could put the sounds of a thousand scurrying creatures on an aural

back burner but quickly went into high alert at the sound of a single feline

footstep.

Perhaps the most obvious example of a hard-wired filter like this in humans is a

mother’s ability to hear the soft cry of her awakening infant two rooms away even

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through the blare of a stereo. It’s a filter that insures the survival of her offspring.

If she were listening with full attention to every sound, she might miss her baby’s

cry, or at least it wouldn’t stand out in importance from the rest of the

soundscape. In addition, the attentiveness to every sonic input would leave her too

exhausted to deal effectively with her biologically-dictated tasks.

School daze

It’s early spring, the sun is pouring through the classroom window. It’s hot and

sticky in the room, your desk is uncomfortable and constraining. You’re

daydreaming about romping barefoot in mountain meadows, picking wildflowers,

standing under waterfalls with your face to the sky and your arms spread wide,

maybe even riding unicorns. Every once in a while you notice the clock at the

front of the room: the second hand seems to be barely moving. The teacher’s

voice is a distant, dismal blur. You think he is droning on about the quadratic

formula, but it may be the War of 1812, you’re not really sure. In any case it’s not

something that matters very much right now, you’re sure of that at least. The

mind-moments of listening to the teacher are almost constantly interrupted by

your daydream, and the listening process is short-circuited somewhere between steps 4 and 5 of the Abidhamma outline above.

Suddenly you hear a sound that makes you sit bolt upright. Your daydream

screeches to a halt as soft reverie is immediately replaced by harsh reality. What

was this alarming sound? Simply your name. The teacher said it just once very

softly, almost inaudibly, but it somehow penetrated the haze of your inattention

and hit you like a clap of thunder. In fact, the sound probably was inaudible to

most of your classmates, who were still busy with their own unicorns and rocket ships. It wasn’t their turn to wake up.

This story reveals what I call the “everything-but-your-name filter” at work: all

other sound is blurred and muted, and only your name is allowed to pass through

loud and clear, like a tiger’s footstep. What’s interesting about this filter is that

it’s not hard-wired. There’s nothing in your genes that makes you predisposed to

straighten up and fly right when you hear “Johnny” or “Janey.” And yet it is

common to all humans and to many dogs I have known. Thus there must be

survival value attached to the ability to program new “everything-but” filters.

Creating these new filters enables us to adapt to our environment in the course of

a single lifetime, to watch out for new predators that have evolved quickly or have

been introduced recently into the environment – such as boring teachers.

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How does this relate to our general problem with listening? I believe humans have

an overdeveloped tendency to create these “everything-but” filters. The ability to

self-program in this ad hoc way served us well in the wild, in environments that

required a great deal of contrast-enhancement between the thousands of sounds

that were not survival-significant and the few that were. However, I think we

spawn filters that are inappropriate to our current manufactured environment and

cooperative social arrangement. And once a filter is used a few times, it quickly

becomes a habit. If you’d gotten used to blocking out your last partner’s abusive

rants, you might have a hard time even hearing your next partner’s effusive words of love.

Humans and filtering

I think there are at least four reasons why humans are even more prone than other

animals to self-program “everything-but” filters:

• Source location. Due to the placement of our ears, and our inability to

move them independently as a dog or cat can, it is not easy for us to locate

the source of sounds. Backgrounding what is unnecessary to us for survival

enables us to more accurately discern the location of foreground sounds that

we allow to pass through to full consciousness.

• Damage control. As our manmade environment has become noisier, with

decibel-levels that evolution has not physically prepared us for, we seek to

protect our sensitive and easily damaged hearing apparatus. Earplugs help,

but we don’t always have them with us, and so we try a tactic that seems

like it might work, mentally filtering the noise. Of course this does nothing

to protect our ears on a physiological level, but “blocking out the noise”

quickly becomes a habit, especially in cities.

• Neocortical bias. Animals with a less-developed neocortex (the

“conceptual kitchen” of the brain, the area that turns raw inputs into fully

cooked thoughts) have a remarkable ability to notice and recall piecemeal

bits of perceived data. Anyone who’s had a pet dog, for instance, knows

that if Bowser had car keys he would never forget where he’d put them.

Similarly, squirrels and nut-hatches can quickly find thousands of nuts they

buried two seasons ago, returning to very precise locations for their

precious sustenance. Humans are pretty bumbling and inept when it comes

to skills like this. Our neocortical ability to see patterns and create

conceptual connections between discrete bits of information is balanced by

some pretty fuzzy attention and recall. Because there is no way for us to

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really “take in” and process vast numbers of discrete sounds the way some

other animals can, it works better for us to use the

foregrounding/backgrounding techniques of “everything-but” filtering.

• Visual intoxication. I suspect we were gatherers long before we were

hunters. A hawk’s eye is ideally suited to the chase, with incredibly high-

resolution long distance vision. Our own eyesight lacks that kind of acuity,

but we make up for it with the ability to distinguish a broad palette of

colors. We can quickly tell an edible berry from a similarly shaped

poisonous species that is subtly different in color, which obviously gives us

a great survival advantage. Of course in the past ten thousand years we have

become agriculturists and no longer gather food from the wild, but the

instincts and abilities are still there. Our gathering instinct has made a

complex art of shopping, or clever gleaning in the case of the poor, and our

penchant for distinguishing colors has inspired advertisers to provide an

amazing and intoxicating variety of eye candy. Alas, advertisers have not

followed suit in the auditory realm and provide nothing like the rich and

varied sonic environment of the woods, or even of a village, and so we are

left with an overemphasis on the visual in our culture. This, I believe, has

dulled our attention to sound. As we wander through consumer culture we

are so overwhelmed by visual stimulus that we can’t really pay much

attention to auditory inputs anyway, and we tend to filter out everything but

what is essential for our safety or consumer benefit. We deploy, in effect, an

“attention shoppers!” pass filter. Background music of the sort played in

malls helps with this filtering by blocking out any jagged interesting real world sounds.

Filtering and taste

The first article in this series redefines music as sound that’s listened to as sound.

But ironically, even if we revert to a much more constrained definition of music

as, for instance, “songs like the ones played on the radio,” we often don’t listen to

it with full attention but instead apply various sorts of filtering. That’s odd,

because unlike a tiger’s footsteps this kind of music’s only reason for existing is

to be listened to!

This brings up the whole ugly issue of musical taste.

I have met a few people who are able to listen to music completely non-

judgmentally, with no regard for what they think they should like. Most of us,

though, grew up developing preferences and aversions based on peer pressure,

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radio airplay, and many other extra-musical factors. Perhaps you went to a

symphony concert once as a kid and were completely bored. The human penchant

for generalizing can turn this experience into a lifelong aversion to classical

music. Or perhaps you associate a style of music with a particular social group

that you don’t feel you’re a member of, such as the heavy metal crowd. Even John

Cage, famous for introducing all sorts of new sounds into western art music, had a

notable “deaf spot” when it came to jazz.

“Deaf spot” is a good term for it, because when you have an aversion to a

particular kind of music you don’t really hear it. When we mentally classify music

in a particular genre, we unconsciously affect our ability to listen. I may say to

myself, for instance, “That’s brass band music” and move the listening experience

to a back burner of my mind. I may resume “real” listening only if some sonic

fragment catches my attention and demonstrates that it’s within a genre I already

believe I like. If we return to our definition of music as sound that’s listened to as

sound, then certainly this can’t be a musical experience: we are listening to sound

as style, not sound.

Why does musical taste exist at all? Why can’t we appreciate the sensuality of all

sound rather than insisting on classifying it and privileging it or rejecting it based

on extra-sonic criteria? My guess is that humans are a tribal species, and we use

sound – as we use fashion – to flag ourselves as members of a particular tribe: the

hip-hop tribe, the downtown art-scene tribe, the refined classical tribe, etc.

Intrinsically, these are no different from any other tribal affiliations. The more we

can get beyond this tribalism, I believe, the more chance we have of cooperating

with each other and surviving as a species. In less global times there was great

survival value to tribalism. To the extent that music is a bridge into other cultures

and other modes of relating with the world, there is now great survival value to

letting go of taste and its attendant fundamentalism.

Buddhism and taste

Musical taste is an example of what Buddhism calls attachment and aversion.

Attachment and aversion are two sides of the same psychological coin.

Attachment is a clinging to that which has made us feel good in some way in the

past, and aversion is a rejection of that which has made us feel bad in some way in

the past. The phrase in the past is key here: if we listen to a new sound with

attentive new ears, or what I sometimes call “Buddha ears,” we will hear

immediately that it has nothing to do with the past. We can hear it with

equanimity, neither rejecting it nor clinging to it hungrily at the expense of other

experiences.

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In essence, Buddhist meditation is about letting go of attachment and aversion. In

a relaxed attentive state, we can come closer to accepting each moment as it

arises, to letting go of each moment as it passes away.

Exercise: Expanding your comfort zone

Go to a CD store or browse an online venue such as iTunes. Find some

music you’re pretty sure is outside your comfort zone: music in a style

you’ve “always hated,” or by a musician you find insipid, grating, or just

plain idiotic. Set aside enough time to listen to the entire CD or set of

tracks you’ve selected. Sit quietly watching your breath for a few minutes,

then play your new treasure. Listen to it with open ears, trying to hear the

sound as sound. Listen to every nuance of every sonic event, noting the

changes as the music progresses. Of course you can also include the other

sounds around you in your listening experience. See if you can get past the whole notion of style and taste, hearing only sonic events.

In addition to paying close attention to the actual sound, monitor your

mental activity as well. Every time you find your mind wandering to a

judgmental thought about the music, gently bring it back to the sound at

hand. Try to fine-tune your attention so you can notice some of the actual

process of listening as outlined in the Abidhamma, from the physical

sensation of the sound at your eardrum to determining its origin to creating mental impressions.

The most important part of this exercise is finishing it: no matter how

difficult, just sit there and listen. It may not be a pleasurable experience,

but after a while you might find that it’s emotionally neutral rather than

unpleasant. And watching your own programmed reactions can be a fascinating experience.

After the music is over, spend some time thinking about your reactions to

it. How much of your problem with the music had to do with the sound

itself, and how much was based on extra-musical information? How much

of your problem with listening was due to your past “tribal” affiliations?

Muzak

There is also the opposite kind of filtering when it comes to what we normally

consider music: the habit of turning off our listening when the style is too

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familiar. Well, perhaps we don’t completely turn off our listening in this case –

we relegate the sonic information to the status of “background music” and listen

to it in a different way, as the soundtrack to our foreground activities. I wonder if

this experience of music as a soundtrack existed before the movies – and I wonder

if it exists in cultures that have never experienced movies or TV.

When I was a kid what we now call “lounge music,” and what is now considered

a retro delicacy, was everywhere, serving as a narcotizing sonic background to the

pressures of city and suburban life in the late fifties. It was an over-the-counter

sedative that took the jagged edges off our experience of an environment that was

quickly becoming harsher than the wilderness of our prehistory. It also served as a

sort of social lubricant, providing a musical lowest common denominator at

cocktail parties, in offices and elevators, and of course in dentists’ waiting rooms.

Because of its ubiquity, I never really heard it, and years later when encountering

the newly-chic novelties of fifties-era musicians like Esquivel or Raymond Scott I

had to force myself to turn off my backgrounding filter in order to really

experience the brilliance and humor of their arrangements. Today’s Muzak is

comprised of defanged orchestral versions of great old rock songs, sonic pablum

for the baby boomers. Sometimes music that’s “stood the test of time” is music that’s played but not heard.

“Familiarity filtering” is a hazard for performers, too. I’m sure we’ve all

experienced some legendary musician simply going through the motions of

playing the composition he or she is most identified with. On some tours Bob

Dylan will play his oldest hits in a perfunctory disinterested manner, but on others

he seems to reinvest them with new life. And how does a performer invest a song

with new life? By listening! It is only through coming back again and again to the

auditory moment at hand, really paying attention to the sound of the sound, that

we get past the drudgery aspect of public performing. After practicing a piece of

music a few thousand times it may be hard to keep it fresh, but our contract with

the audience requires, I believe, that each performance feel like a totally new

listening experience. When it is a new experience for the performer, it becomes a

new experience for the audience.

Peak experience

There is one more filter that affects our listening to what is ordinarily called music – the “too much of a good thing” filter.

Perhaps not everyone experiences this, but for many of us listening to music – or

performing it – approaches ecstasy. Leonard Bernstein claimed he regularly

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experienced actual orgasms while conducting the music of Gustav Mahler, for

instance. And certainly the theatrics of many performers have more in common

with religious ritual than with songwriting. But as we come close to ecstatic

experience, whether by means of sex, drugs, or rock and roll, we may become

fearful. We may back away from the edge, refusing to take the plunge into a full-

blown altered state. Perhaps we don’t want others to see us as contorted and

writhing (or even blissfully smiling) ecstatic animals rather than self-controlling

adults, or perhaps we are afraid that if we let go we might never get back to our

prosaic bubble of a workaday world. In any case, we shut down a little, our

listening seems to go away, and we are no longer truly “in the moment” with the

sound. We make a decision to be responsible citizens -- a decision which, if

made too many times, can ruin your life.

While in general Buddhism favors an attitude of subdued equanimity toward

sensual pleasure, various schools of Vajrayana and Tantric Buddhism celebrate an

ecstatic embrace of the sensual world, including sound, seeing it as a gateway to

acceptance of all experience. And throughout the world, various religious and

secular cultures have adopted musical trance rituals as the safest form of

intoxication humankind has found.

The demise of social listening

When we talk about trance rituals, we are talking about social listening, or

listening together – exercising our listening abilities as a group rather than as

individuals. One of our modern “listening problems” is that we engage in fewer

and fewer activities like this, preferring instead to put on headphones for an

enwombed solitary experience of the sonic world.

I remember as a very young child sitting in front of the radio with my father,

trying to follow the opera broadcast with a huge orchestral score spread out in

front of us like a map of the world. I would get lost and he would patiently point

over and over again to the place in the score that corresponded with the current

sonic event. This experience was perhaps unique to my musically nerdy

childhood, but even in the most Leave-It-To-Beaver households the radio

provided a social anchor. And as TV became prominent, sucking curled-up

couch-embryos into its isolating bedtime-story magic, listening to the radio or to

records still remained an essentially social activity. You’d go over to a friend’s

house with a new LP and share the ear-opening sounds of the latest rock, folk, or

even classical music. I clearly remember getting turned on to Dylan this way, and

the Fugs and Zappa and even the Dead! And I remember introducing others to

rare experimental free-jazz recordings, dragging shy schoolmates against their

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will into the sonic wilderness. There were free form FM radio stations, too, that

unleashed new and revolutionary sounds on the excited public. Throughout the

fifties and well into the sixties you’d listen to the radio and records together with

other interested, curious people. There weren’t headphone jacks in the old radios

or phonographs, which meant that listening was by default a social activity.

As time passed, listening to recorded music – which is the whole territory of

music to many people -- became more and more of a “bubble” activity (or a

passivity rather than an activity), something that isolates the individual and bathes

him or her in a constructed sonic environment. Instead of listening parties it’s

shared iPod playlists; instead of the musician on the street it’s the perfectly produced song in your earbuds.

Recorded music itself has changed in a fundamental way. For the first fifty years

of recording technology, “records” were just that: records of an event. They were

sonic snapshots showing us some unfamiliar territory or reminding us of an old

sonic friend. Then with the advent of stereo and other ear-candy tricks, producers

began to create ever more elaborate artificial environments intended to immerse

the listener in a world apart. I have noticed in myself that immersion in recorded

sonic environments makes me turn off my critical thinking and my sensitivity to

physical surroundings in a way that an audio document does not. Maybe this is a

healthy form of temporary escape, but I think we should at least be cautious of

anything that takes the edge off our moment-to-moment awareness.

I even know people who listen raptly to nature recordings but would never take

the time to get out to the woods! This is the extreme example of a trend I call “the

wombing of the world.” In the sixties we started spending more and more time in

our cars – air-conditioned bubble worlds with sound systems that can completely

block out the outside world. Our homes, too, became more and more womb-like,

artificially safe environments full of our favorite toys. It is no coincidence that we

started using the word “crib” for home. TV, of course, helped the process along.

Later, personal computers almost finished the job of re-wombing the individual:

you can hole up in your room or your cubicle for hours on end without being

considered an antisocial nutcase or bad worker. Even food can be delivered, or

you can get it in a drive-through lane without leaving your car. The only reason to

exit your artificial womb is to defecate or buy more toys, taking your rightful

place the consume/waste cycle that is the economic underpinning of modern society.

And of course it is no surprise that the history of listening tracks pretty closely

with this more general social trend.

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In Buddhism we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (his teaching), and the

Sangha (our community of fellow practitioners). Community is considered

essential to the practice. The whole cannon of Buddhist ethical teachings, too,

emphasizes an ongoing relationship with society, an attentive engagement that is

clearly the opposite of self-wombing. But just as the wombing of the world has

affected our consumption of music, it has also distorted our view of Buddhism.

There are some, at least in our culture, who think all you need to do to “be a

Buddhist” is meditate in blissful isolation. The Buddha himself was crystal clear

on this point: without engagement there is no Buddhism! And of course engagement with the world can be practiced in the activity of listening.

Exercise: Social listening

Throw a listening party: invite some friends over and practice a

variety of listening exercises together, perhaps some of the

exercises presented earlier. Or, if you think that might be too

strange for your friends, just listen to some CDs together –

preferably in silence -- and discuss them afterwards. Make clear

that the whole idea of the get-together is listening, not random gabbing.

Try inviting people who don’t usually hang out together, people

from different social spheres or walks of life. Use a listening party as a way to build social bridges.

Buddhist Musicianship 3:

Noise

There’s a lot of noise these days about noise. Most would agree, I think, that noise is now

a part of our environment. But do we really know what we mean when we talk about

noise?

For some, noise is anything that’s not music to their ears, and they may even consider it

inherently evil. Think of a parent shouting “turn down that infernal noise!” But for others,

those who have wholeheartedly accepted the definition of music as sound that’s listened

to as sound, noise is an interesting set of sonic phenomena that can be used in all kinds of

artistic ways.

So which is it?

Defining noise

A technical definition is “data that interferes with the transmission or reception of the

intended information.” This definition counterpoises the concept of noise against the

concept of signal. But in certain forms of very intentional music, random information that

interferes with the basic communicative elements is an important part of the overall

signal. Think of guitar feedback, an effect that’s not completely controllable but is used

purposefully to distort – and enhance -- the melody of a rock song. Or think of the ever-

changing sound of a flute player’s breath that both obscures and enriches the tones,

adding a complexity that would be absent from synthesized flute. These simple examples

demonstrate that instead of considering signal and noise as enemies, you could consider

them allies in the production of music. And as soon as we quite correctly consider noise

an essential element of the music, it becomes signal!

This means that at least in the context of sound and music we’ll have a lot of trouble

coming up with an absolute definition of noise. Perhaps we should leave it at this: noise

is complex signal, signal that we can’t analyze on the fly for simple parameters such as

pitch, adherence to a particular scale, place in a predefined rhythmic structure, etc. Of

course this can be no more than a provisional working definition, since it depends on a judgment call that will vary from culture to culture and from individual to individual.

Now let’s go back to our definition of music as sound that’s listened to as sound. Within

this framework, the only thing that keeps noise from achieving the exalted status of music is our refusal to listen to it attentively – to listen “with Buddha’s ears.”

Filtering noise

Noise has received bad press in part because we are not careful with our definitions. For

instance, many people use the word noise to mean a loud sound. Of course, very loud

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sounds at certain frequencies can damage our hearing quickly. But “too loud” and “noise”

are not the same thing. As far as our ears are concerned, it doesn’t matter whether too-

loud sounds are from a jack hammer, a punk rock band, or a recording of Mozart sonatas

turned up to eleven. And much of the very rich sound-soup we often consider noise --

sounds of traffic and overhead jets and distant construction – is physically harmless at the volume levels we usually encounter it.

Even though the sounds of the city – urban environmental noises – are physically

harmless at a distance, we know that they are physically damaging close to their source.

This makes us fear them, even from far away. And when we fear them, we filter them

out, closing down our listening facility. Ironically, these sounds that are physically

innocuous become dangerous because they make us shut down our attentiveness to the

sonic world around us. And inattentiveness, as we learned in the previous chapter,

quickly becomes a habit. If you are used to filtering out the subtleties of traffic noise, you

may not notice the subtleties in the sound of the ocean.

We have developed a variety of strategies for filtering out what we consider noise. Most

commonly, we treat it like Muzak, a gauzy soundtrack to our lives that effects our

emotions in a generalized and often negative way. We don’t hear the details, only the

overall effect. Even sirens become part of the barely noticed background music. This is

why emergency services and security companies have to change the sound of sirens every

few years, just as advertisers use ever more blatant imagery to stand out from the blur of

our culture’s visual “background music.”

At the extreme, we make ourselves literally deaf to the environment by putting on

earphones and listening to a constant stream of “real” music from our iPods. As an

occasional street performer, it’s humorous to watch the droves hurry by with their tiny

sound systems, not even noticing that there’s a live musician in their midst. This is yet

another one of those grand absurdities of the human world: certainly no other animal

creates environments from which it feels it must protect itself! It started with streets that

required shoes – now we have soundscapes that require MP3 players!

But just as you can still go barefoot, so you can still throw off your earphones and your

psychological filters and listen -- really listen! -- to the world around you. It starts with

accepting noise as just another kind of sound, as musical as any other.

Accepting noise

Buddhist meditators are often forced into a more open way of perceiving noise. I

remember a meditation retreat many years ago in an old building where the radiators

clanked and sputtered ceaselessly. Looking around the meditation hall, it was clear that

many people were annoyed with this environmental distraction and were determined to

use all their meditative power to ignore the sound. They had steely angry looks on their

faces. Probably some of them were regretting the money they’d spent on what they

thought would be a week of serenity. The leader of the retreat urged everyone not to

block out the noise but to embrace it, to listen with full attention to every fine detail and

then let it go, listen again, let it go again. After a few days the room felt incredibly

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peaceful. Clearly the radiator noises had become a music as spiritual as any chant! And I

have seen Zen monks in the middle of the noisiest areas of Tokyo with amused but serene

expressions on their faces, looking as if they were attending a wonderful concert – which they were!

Of course it would be nice if we could all live where the soundscape was a symphony of

breezes and bobolinks. But these days most of us wander through an aural clutter of cars,

cell phones, overly-communicative friends, and electric drones. Many of the sounds we

hear are carriers of human-scale information, the news of the day, advertising for yet

another SUV or diet pill, songs meant to sell lifestyle accoutrements, and dire warnings

of all sorts from sirens to political rants. We try to extract the messages from the sounds,

or we try to reject the messages by closing our ears to the sounds. Instead of reinforcing

our armor, it would serve us better to remember the serene amused faces of the Zen monks.

There is a story about the great shakuhachi master and Zen roshi Watazumi Doso. Some

engineers came to his apartment to record him. It was a hot day, so Watazumi threw open

the windows. Immediately the sounds of traffic all but drowned out the sounds of the

flute. But Watazumi insisted on keeping the windows open, and the engineers had no

choice but to record what they knew would end up a commercially unviable tape. As it

turned out, you could hardly hear the flute at all on the recording. When they played it back for Watazumi, he purportedly only uttered one word. “Perfect!” he said.

Exercise: Embracing noise

Go to a noisy place, somewhere that you’ve always thought of as sonically

unpleasant. Perhaps it is right by a construction site, or in a mall, or the

middle of Times Square. Do everything you did in Exercises 1 and 2

above: start by watching your breath, then extend your awareness to the

minutest details of particular sounds, then to the soundscape as a whole.

There is one difference this time: notice your reactions to the sounds. If

you find yourself trying to push a particular sound out of your

consciousness, listen to it more acutely. Even the most bombastic noise

may be full of subtleties and nuances that you’ve never explored before.

Listen to it all as music rather than as an affront to your sensibilities. I am convinced that you can hear everything as music.

Try listening to the gentle qualities that live within loud noises, and the

fierce energy that’s the backbone of some very quiet noises. Listen as

you’ve never listened before, neither rejecting nor clinging to any sound

you become aware of. Imagine that the you are just another performer in a giant unending symphony of noise!

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Noise and instruments

When people with a limited notion of musical signal talk about music they often refer to

the sounds of the environment as extraneous or distracting. Similarly, when discussing

the sounds of a particular instrument these same individuals are likely to refer to its

annoying artifacts, those accidental and incidental noises that a “good” player tries to

suppress.

Every instrument – including voice – includes a component of noise that is an essential

characteristic of its overall sound. Early attempts to synthesize the sounds of instruments

often failed because they did not include, for instance, the clicking of the piano or

saxophone keys, the sound of a guitar player’s fingers sliding along the strings on the

way to a new chord, etc. And hearing a wind instrument without any inhalation on the part of the player is definitely an eerie experience.

Despite the undeniable importance of noise elements in the “personality” of every

instrument, the historic development of many Western instruments increasingly

emphasized the theoretical over the physical. Wind instruments became less breathy, with

a more focused pitch. Organs became less clicky and wheezy. Everybody was retuned to

a tempered scale that privileged a tidy tonal system over the naturally occurring

overtones. The development of the orchestra paralleled that of the automobile, following

a trajectory from rattletrap to luxury SUV. In the smoothness, power, and consistency of

modern instruments, however, we may miss sometimes the random voice of nature and the physicality of the performer.

In the living traditional music of Japan, on the other hand, an instrument’s mechanical

and human artifacts are considered absolutely essential to the music, sometimes even

more important than the pitched component of the sound. Traditional Japanese

instruments have changed very little over the years, still emphasizing the natural sound of

the materials and the physical presence of the performer. Rather than considering these

elements imperfections, the Japanese aesthetic often considers them the heart or spirit of the music.

Classical Japanese koto (zither) includes non-pitched sonic events that were unheard of in

Western art music until the twentieth century. The technique called suri-zume, for

instance, calls upon the player to scrape a string with the edges or back of the finger

picks.

Shakuhachi is even more extreme in its inclusion of nature and the performer. It is a

simple bamboo tube, improved only by shaping the bore and carving some finger holes

and a notch. A performance by even the most accomplished shakuhachi master is still

very close to the sound of the wind blowing across a raw piece of bamboo. The

techniques emphasize this rawness. For instance, muraiki is a technique in which the

player blasts the instrument with breath like a sudden gust of wind, causing a very noisy

and overtone-rich sound of somewhat indeterminate pitch. Soraiki is a more extreme

version, a sound that has no pitch at all: it is just air. These are not modern avant-garde

techniques -- they have been around for centuries and are an integral part of the traditional music.

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More significant even than specific techniques, the very rhythmic structure of shakuhachi

honkyoku (Buddhist meditative music) is based around the length of the performer’s

breath. There is no abstract or predetermined beat – a player takes a deep (usually quite

audible) inhalation and then blows out for the entire length of his or her breath, fitting a

musical phrase into this physiological event. The breath, rather than being hidden behind

a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, is prominently featured, its white noise collaborating

with the bamboo in creating a rich sonic texture. The rhythm emerges biologically, in a

sense, and the melody is corporealized – it becomes fused with the body of the player.

You cannot say that a particular piece of honkyoku “goes like this.” It goes however the player goes!

There are popular traditions around the world that use noise to great effect in instrumental

music. For instance, mbira (“thumb piano”) players in Zimbabwe add bottle caps to their

instruments, creating a jangling buzzing drone that enlivens the quiet beauty of the

primary pitched sound. And American jazz has incorporated more and more noise over

the years, from the growling clarinets of New Orleans to more recent free jazz

experimentalism.

Many composers, myself included, invent and perform music that not only includes noise

but is actually based on noise. In this sort of composition, the concepts of western

musical theory are completely abandoned in favor of working in a more immediate and

sculptural way that wakes up the listener to the complex beauty in all sound. And an

important outgrowth of noise music, glitch music focuses on those noises that are usually

considered a problem – the skipping of a CD, digital errors in sound files, etc. We

encounter these glitches constantly. They are a part of our sonic environment. It makes perfect sense to hear them – attentively -- as music.

The highlighting of what is normally unintended reminds me of an interesting childhood

experience. I come from a musical family, and we often attended orchestral concerts. I

always loved these concerts best before the conductor came on stage, during that

suspenseful interval when the musicians entered one by one or in small groups, talking

casually, tuning their instruments, having one last go at some difficult passage of the

score. The randomly juxtaposed sounds had all the bristling excitement of dawn in the

mountains. In a sense, this was an orchestral alap. Then the oboe would cut through the

noise with its biting focused A pitch and the mood suddenly became formal and

hierarchical. From there the concert only went downhill for me. All the best music had

already happened – another demonstration that music can simply be considered sound that’s listened to as sound.

Exercise: Noise as musical substance

Even if we accept that certain kinds of noises are an essential ingredient in

instrumental music, we may still mistakenly consider them as spice rather

than rice. This is an exercise in reprioritizing our listening on the way to

“de-prioritizing” it.

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Go listen to a live performer, perhaps a singer-songwriter in a coffee shop

or in somebody’s living room. Using the techniques outlined earlier, start

to focus on the sound itself – not on the style of the song, not on how good or bad the performance is, not on anything except the “sound as sound.”

Now start to notice especially the un-pitched artifacts of the instrument –

the clicking sound of the player’s fingers on the strings, or the airiness of

the flute player’s breath, or whatever small noises arise in the singer’s

voice. Concentrate more and more on these small incidental noises.

Concentrate so fully on these sounds that you can think of them as the

essence of the music: the pitched sounds in between are merely filler, a

background for the noises or a way of getting from one noise to the next. Think of the noises as the skeletal structure of the music.

Now go back to a more everyday way of listening to the music, allowing

the melody and rhythm and lyrics to come to the fore again. See if you can

go back and forth between these two ways of perceiving the music. If you

get good at that, see if you can engage in both ways of listening to the

music at once, deeply attentive to the pitched and “noisy” aspects of the

music simultaneously.

As you practice this kind of listening, music that you thought of as very

ordinary may suddenly reveal an astonishing textural and human

complexity.

Noise and Buddhism

Before he became known as the Buddha, the young Siddhartha lived the sheltered life of

a prince. But when he started wandering outside his family’s palace, he discovered that

nature and society were both full of tumult and suffering. Rather than rejecting this newly

discovered reality and returning to the cloistered comfort he was used to, he decided to

embrace the roughness of the world. Thus his teachings emphasize that everything, from

the most sublime spiritual vision to the annoying buzz of a mosquito to the horrors of a

violent death, can be the subject of our meditation. Not only that, none of these

experiences is intrinsically any “better” than any other. It is through paying close

attention to the rough and beautiful details of the world, not by rejecting or clinging to

them, that we can eventually achieve a state of peace. What an absolutely simple but

absolutely radical idea!

Accepting noise as music is clearly in synch with the Buddha’s project. Buddhist

musicianship requires us to let go of our sentimental attachment to pretty melodies and

embrace the noise of our lives. It requires that we open our ears fully and non-judgmentally to the entire world of sound.

Does that mean that if your alcoholic neighbor is violently shouting at his girlfriend at

two in the morning you should just accept it as a new kind of music and go back to sleep?

Of course not. The Buddha never counseled us to avoid interaction with the world, to

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allow avoidable violence, to ignore pain that we can alleviate, or to sit back and tolerate

injustice. Embracing the noise in our lives often means doing something about it.

Listening to the world – really listening to it after years of avoiding it – often wakes up a new energy for engaging with society.

Noise and more noise

If we don’t restrict ourselves to the realm of aural sensation, we can think of noise as any

phenomena that don’t fit neatly into a preconceived notion of what the world “should” be

like. In other words, we can think of noise as imperfection, at least from an individual

human point of view. You wake up late and have to hurry to work, it’s pouring rain, the

car doesn’t start, you notice that the tree in your front yard has fallen down – let’s call

this an especially noisy morning.

What would the Buddha do in the face of these circumstances? Probably work to solve

the problems in exactly the same practical ways you do, but with an inward equanimity, a

recognition that this is not a bad day but a pretty typical day in our imperfect world. Just

as sonic noise is an essential part of music, a more general and sometimes extremely

harsh randomness pervades our world and makes it what it is. Buddhism recognizes that

we can’t escape this reality by sitting on a mountaintop. Instead, in striving toward

happiness we must face imperfection with courage and a non-judgmental attitude. Buddhism is, in essence, a meditation on the noisiness of living in this world.

About the Author

Phil Nyokai James has been composing and

performing music for over thirty years and is a

licensed shihan (master) of the traditional Japanese

shakuhachi flute. You can read more about him at

http://nyokai.com.