For our first wedding anniversary(!!!), her birthday, and my student-teaching’s successful conclusion, Wifely Kate and I have taken a road trip to Marfa, Texas. It’s an incongruously posh West Texas town of about 2000 people, each better dressed and better groomed than you. Cross Stuff White People Like with Fort Worth’s aggressively vegan Spiral Diner, write it up in the New York Times, and you’d wind up with something like this town. More laid-back than Austin, and on average, more expensive, too. No Shiner on tap at a hotel courtyard, but there’s Brooklyn Lager!
We’re having a wonderful time, enough for me to let loose with this good-intentioned mockery.
Close to the nearby megalopolis of Ruidosa, Texas
The drive down took us eight, maybe nine hours, including two or three stops. To ease the journey, we created an iPod playlist to randomize 1) her songs that I can withstand (“Firework” by Katy Perry) and 2) my songs that she can withstand (“Got a Match?” by the Chick Corea Elektric Band). I named the playlist “Marfa Double Boo.” You see, I call her Boo, she calls me same; hence: Marfa Double Boo.
Dust Devil Approacheth
Dust Devil is Furious!
One thing about Marfa this summer — it’s HOT. Dust devils such as the one pictured above often arise, according to meteorologist JeffJamison, in “extreme temps >100 degrees,” where “the air is rising quickly [and] there’s enough shear above.” It’s a “tube of wind.” He goes on to say “Usually doesn’t do much damage and they do scoot along quickly.”
When we returned to Marfa from driving around Presidio (a town along the US-Mexico border), we had to pass through a US Border Patrol checkpoint. I expected some sort of drama, but really, when I rolled down the window, the authority figure just said: “Citizenship?” The responses which leapt to mind included:
Yes, please.
I’ll take three.
What about it?
The correct answer was “American.”
Marfa Farmers Market
The food here is fantastic, nobody locks up their doors or bikes, the stars overhead are plentiful . . . and the famed Marfalights, allegedly paranormal lights that do float in the sky strangely, are, well, a little lame. Possibly they’re just ordinary lights reflected by atmospheric conditions that are abnormal due to sharp differences in temperatures and elevation. On our anniversary night, at the official Marfa lights viewing station — where we drank champagne saved from our wedding — true believers insisted to one another that the lights are indeed a paranormal phenomenon. Frankly I think the city of Marfa pays some guy to stand out there with a flashlight, but make up your own mind via the great 80′s competitor to 60 Minutes, Unsolved Mysteries:
Too many drastically overestimate their skill at discerning details of audio such as music. Listen to this basic A major guitar chord:
Can your ears “reach into” the chord and pick out all three notes? (Test yourself by singing or humming each one individually.) Or do you just hear the chord as a composite? It’s easier when someone plays the notes together and then separately, as above. If you want a real challenge, go mash down a bunch of random piano keys (a “tone cluster”); then, without releasing the keys, try to sing or hum each note separately.
Do you hear a few huge, blocky piano chords, or do you hear hundreds of individual notes also? Serious music students have a hard time distinguishing all the different notes, too, so much so that they sometimes refer to ear-training courses as “fear-training” or “ear-straining.”
My understanding — and this might be wrong — is that, with chords, the mind (on some level at least) hears both composite sounds and individual tones at once, always. So maybe in your subconscious you’re hearing it all. I’m still leaving out overtones and features such as vibrato.
This is my brain. Not joking; the MRI people copied me a DVD.
I’m also unsure of whether the conscious mind, hearing chordal music, rapidly switches its focus from one individual note to another (and the composite waveform) or if it’s truly capable of hearing multiple tracks at once. (If I had to guess, I don’t think the conscious mind attends to much of anything with perfect simultaneity, when you drill down to individual instants, simply due to latency limitations of the physical nervous system.) For whatever it’s worth, computers can only complete one task at a time — they just switch between them so quickly we imagine they’re “multi-tasking.”
Even when people don’t have good ears for music (by which I don’t mean they’re literally tone-deaf, just that they aren’t highly skilled at perceiving details of audio), we typically say they can identify for themselves whether a piece of music is “good” or not. Of course it’s really their subjective experience of the music that they’re labeling as good or bad.
We don’t extend the same leeway to people evaluating visual art, however. We don’t expect someone with bad vision (and no corrective lenses) to make astute judgments about a painting they can’t see well. (A good way to train the eyes, by the way, is field-guiding.)
Who?
Why the double standard? I think because most of us are more familiar with sight; most of us live our entire lives without wondering about our ability to discern pitches in the audio we take in.
Once, a long time ago, my friend Bryan told me he only heard heavy metal as a kind of static-y noise. He couldn’t identify its pitches; later, after repeated listening, he could hear them. Try it yourself: here’s an instrumental Metallica song, Orion, as originally recorded. Skip ahead to :56 if you want to cut to the chase and get past the quiet intro.
Do you hear the bass guitar and the multiple notes of the multiple guitars? Or is it just one moving block of sound with drums banging away? People do in fact hear it quite differently. Now try the same (well, practically the same) music played on piano (by the fantastic VikaYermolyeva). Generally people hear pianos more clearly than other instruments.
I think current research says babies are pretty much always born with perfect pitch, also known as absolute pitch — the ability to distinguish and name notes. To someone with perfect pitch (who has also learned the Western musical alphabet), a guitar string vibrating at 440 hertz produces an A, not just a sound. (Perfect pitch doesn’t mean singing in tune; it might help someone sing in tune, but perfect pitch is a perceptual skill, not a skill involving the voice box, diaphragm, tongue, etc.) Growing up, children aren’t taught to associate the notes they hear with a musical alphabet, and so their perfect pitch fades away. Some adults can indeed learn it, though.
Basic ear-training makes music more enjoyable even for non-musicians. Now, go smush down some piano keys.
You’re lying in bed. All at once big dog paws paddle your forearms. Heeding the PetSmart trainer, you do nothing, and so your dog scrabbles around the bed to your wife‘s side. He paddles her face and, play-acting at punishment, she says his name again and again in a high, gentle voice. “If you’re going to reprimand him,” you say, “make up your mind to reprimand him and do so without compromise. Anyway, he needs to be in his crate.” “I don’t want to ruin who he is,” she says. “I don’t want to crush his spirit.”
How do you reply to that?
Betty the Cat
All the same, I’m glad we, thanks to Kate, have our animals: 2 cats, 1 dog, 2 humans. Our shared feelings and inside jokes about them have become quite specific. For instance, we’ve decided Betty is less judgmental than Henry. She’s probably also a Democrat, whereas Henry’s Republicanism is evident from his aristocratic nature. Our reasoning about, and fine-point debate over, these insights go on endlessly. It’s very important.
Henry the Cat
Henry, the first pet, displays clear anger toward his fellow pets who suck attention away from him. So sometimes to give him special attention we take him with us when we go get frozen custard from Curly’s. (Henry doesn’t eat the desserts there; he just travels along.) Regardless of his anger, Henry always likes to sleep sweetly in a certain spot on the bed next to Kate, whereas Betty typically seeks her own private locale. Gibson? These days he stays in his crate.
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