My Story

Five years ago, an unexpected thing happened to me. All of a sudden, the way I experienced sound changed, altering the way I heard almost everything.

It was while listening to this piece (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzY3tFTz9k), the harpsichord solo from Bach's 5th Brandenburg concerto played by Gustav Leonhardt, that my transition to Encompassing Voice Perception occurred. It was because of this that I then began to experience higher levels of musical structure. I don't believe that my experience is unique. In fact, I believe I can find examples of people who I believe have been through the same thing, and I suspect that many more may have undergone it without conscious awareness of it happening. The following video provides a few examples, the Matt Giordano and Tony Cicoria sections being particularly relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqrNEmuSCis


To give you a more relatable idea of what this general experience was like, there are examples of other people activating a similar kinds of mental transformations due to a deliberate and concentrated effort to change their own mind, such as that of Susan R. Barry, whose case is given here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_R._Barry

Here, we have an account of someone who went all her life without having 3D vision, and on top of this being told that after a certain age, it will be impossible to learn if you don't already have it. She ended up showing that this whole point of view was wrong and that transformations of perspective, even literal ones such as this, may be possible at any age.


Another good reference point is this article by Blake Ross.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of visual aphantasia (which has only been discussed sporadically until fairly recently), this article should explain what that entails. I have perfectly fine visual imagination myself, but what I really want to talk about is the thought processes of someone who has something like aphantasia, the inability to imagine or perceive things in ways that others can, realizing for the first time that there are people who can actually imagine images in their heads. I can relate to the experience Blake describes here, of assuming that others who have a particular form of imagination are simply using elaborate metaphors, only to later realize they are experiencing something you cannot and that what they are describing is a more or less literal description of their head-space. My own mental transformation allowed me to directly compare what it was like between having not EVP and having it, letting me understand why certain things may feel obvious to some, and nonsense to others.



Now, as you might understand, having your perception of reality suddenly change is not something that you happen to expect at any given random point in time, so actually undergoing the transformation was a strange and disorienting experience. Having said that, one of the nicer things about it was that certain somewhat unpleasant sounds, like the screechy, watery qualities of some styles of violin playing, became much more palatable and pleasant to hear*. Significantly, these harsh and unsatisfying qualities seems to be exactly those that transformed into the "voice-like" qualities that drive the emotional core of tonally centered music, the sense that human like qualities can arise from the violin and that these tones essentially speak and be empathized with. To hear 'voice' arise from tones that just before sounded piercing and muddy was the clearest and most striking consequence of the transformation, but other qualities arose at the same time. The next most immediately apparent aspect was the sense of theme that popped up around the same time. Where previously, much of Bach's music sounded like random patterns of notes scattered around in forms that seemed to have no purpose whatsoever, from this chaos a sense that musical structures could respond to each other, parts standing out as echoing one another in sequence, became an inherent part of how I heard the music. Along with this came the sense that these vocal patterns responding to another formed individual 'lines', and that multiple voice lines could be perceived running through the music at the same time. Before this, it was difficult to concentrate on hearing more than one melody, especially if the melodies were very different or out of phase from one another.

But ultimately, all of this was tied together by the realization, once the music had ended, that the piece was 'inside' of a tension that felt like it should resolved by the playing of a particular key at the appropriate time, when the musical theme and the piece as a whole ended together. So at this point I wondered, when people spoke of music being "in a key", are they actually referring to what I had just come to experience, that the entirety of a piece is literally inside this sense of tension, this feeling that the music should progress to a final point, where it finishes on a specific note? Only later did I realize that my hunch was more or less right, that this new experience was exactly what being "in a key" apparently meant and that major discussions of music theory centered around this. And this surprised me because before I thought that the phrase referred to some far more abstract property of music, as opposed to something I could directly and clearly feel but simply hadn't experienced before.

So this was all very unexpected. While I've heard of tone deafness, there seems to be this assumption among musicians that, as long as someone can hear tones and the relations between them, tonality and "the tonal center" are supposed to be something that naturally arise out of this and can be felt by anyone who's willing to listen and concentrate on the music. But through my own experience I can confirm otherwise. The sense of tonal centeredness, the desire that music should structure itself so that it progresses through a 'theme' and returns to the 'tonic' at the appropriate time was simply a completely new aspect to me, one that I simply had no conception of without the accompanying experience of voice-like qualities arising out of instrumental music, along with everything enabled by that.


---


A good part of the reason I believe this event occurred is that I was actually trying to deliberately train my ears through attempts at active listening, with the expectation this this would lead to a deeper understanding of music over time. Before it happened, I had no idea the effect would be so sudden or pronounced, but I was well aware that other people probably perceived things (in terms of hearing and music appreciation) differently to me, and that it was apparently possible through ear training, to develop your internal processing of sound in order to hear deeper levels of subtlety in music. What was surprising was that, instead of progressively learning and enhance my abilities gradually over time as I expected, most of the progress occurred in sudden, highly distinct changes that radically altered my perception of sound and the ways in which I could imagine it. The bulk of my efforts resulted in most of my progress coming in two discreet bursts of change of inner mental activity instead of the relatively long term process of insight into individual pieces that I expected (though this assimilation and progressing understanding of specific works and styles is still important, just no where near as impactful in comparison).


It would be five years until I went thought another change of this kind. During this time, while I had explained to some people what I had experienced, some had responded with curiosity, and others with confusion, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it myself. The existence of EVP seemed to explain many things, and I've heard a number of reports from others who seem to have transformational experiences similar to it, so I'm confident I'm not some unique basket-case, but I was still plagued by the possibility that there was still something I wasn't getting. I still didn't quite feel that I fully understood what I was 'supposed' to in all the music I listened to, despite the transformation giving me what I thought was full access to this new language of musical possibility. But still, I could not be sure that was everything I had searched for.

It was in going through the second change, the activation of super grammatical perception, that I felt I had clearly found what I was looking for, and what had been missing the whole time. This time, the activation was more subtle than EVP at first, it had no clear instant where it arose and took a day or two to allow me to properly adjust, but ultimately, the effects it had on me were at least as profound and even more far reaching in their consequences. Musical notes markedly felt like they had more impact on attack, and this effect was pronounced on bass tones especially; I could really feel basslines more heavily compared with before was particularly pronounced with the transition to SGP. But otherwise there was not the same radical change of timbre that accompanied EVP. What really cemented the importance of this though, and that it was a significant change like the kind I had experienced previously, what that I could finally, and clearly, feel something that I strongly suspected I was meant to, and which I had actively tried to before, but which no amount of concentration could actually enable. That, specifically, was the feeling that musical themes should 'develop' structurally, and develop in ways that progressively build up multiple layers of tensions in order to lead back to their resolution.

Not, I want to carefully explain what having EVP, but lacking SGP, meant for my appreciation of music. Don't worry if you find the following section confusing, but I simply cannot come up with a simpler way to explain it. While I could follow along with a musical theme, follow the *transformation* of that theme (with some limitations, which I will explain later) and also follow multiple voices with EVP, either with different themes or the same theme in different phases, the way in which I apprehended themes was essentially linear and did not allow (semi-arbitrary) hierarchical transformation. What I mean by this is that, each time I heard a theme I felt it needed to have 'completeness', for each variation of it to go from start to finish without repeating smaller parts of itself (or another theme) before continuing on. Musical themes must follow a strict, relentless continuity in this way in order for a person with EVP, but lacking SGP (which I will term EVA-SGN, for Encompassing Voice Active, Super Grammar Not Active) to feel that they are actually satisfying or make structural sense. A theme must, start, run through its course fully and without  sub repetition of its structure, finish in what feels like the tonic of the key in order to resolve and then potentially pick up again from the start of the theme to do this again. Any music that does not do this either does not demand tonal centeredness to be appreciated (i.e. it has a structure that doesn't require EVP, like pop music) or is not both structurally meaningful and tonally centered with respect to EVA-SGN (i.e. the music relies on hierarchical forms being build up and being nested within one another via a kind of interpreted grouping structure). Because of this, EVP and SGP are both absolutely necessary to allow the full scale understanding of most symphonies and the forms they take.

So, by breaking through my prior lack of SGP, I manage to overcome this limitation. Yet this was only the beginning of understanding what SGP actually seemingly allowed me to do. I quickly discovered that I could comprehend all kinds of poetry with ease that was previously impossible for me to understand. Because of this, I developed a sense of absolute metaphorical imagination, a whole new way of thinking, that I previously did not have access to (the nature of which I will describe in a later article). As such, realized that this development implied far more then I initially thought. I also found that trying to speed read took vastly less effort than it did before. On top of this, feel that the rate at which I can recover from mental exertion also increased greatly, the implications of which could be spectacular, if true. These aspects of SGP are things I wish to expound upon in greater detail.


* I recall reading an article at some point about a music teacher who I believe did independently realize the existence of EVP. He did not call it that or recognize its other properties, but did understand that many of his students found the timbre and texture of an orchestra to be screechy and unpleasant. His solution was to "train their ears" by playing Mozart symphonies, but with the bass notes softened and toned down significantly, so as to encourage them to follow along the major melodies without distraction, the goal being to get them to reach a point where this sense of harshness dissipated, which I hold would have been the activation of Encompassing Voice. Despite my searching though, I have been unable to find any reference for this, so any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Looking at Poetry 2: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

                                           -William Shakespeare

Now, what have before us is one of the most iconic and well know poems in history. But I want to ask you to look upon it with fresh eyes. I want you to forget who wrote it, the subject matter you think it is addressing and all context surrounding why it might have been written.

Now, look at the first line:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Who is the addressee of the poem? We can't quite tell yet, we know nothing remember, but I'll suggest something. I believe that the real purpose of the of the poem is to describe who, or what, 'thee' is, and to allow the reader to form a mental impression of their nature. Let's look back at the line again.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Many people, on encountering this will immediately assume something. That is, that the poet is saying "Well, you're clearly so beautiful, so I'll now compare to you to a summer's day and tell you how much more lovely you are". To that I'll simply tell you to look at the second line, and those that follow it.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Now, what sort of adoration would prompt someone to praise their object of affection by telling them they are more temperate? Milder, less wild, plainer, more demure. It may really be a quality that the poet finds attractive, but it would feel a strange thing to throw out in order to say, woo a lover. So I'll posit something else. In the first line, the poet is honestly asking a question. Let's say that the subject is of such a nature that the poet is perhaps not really sure if they even ought to be comparing them to a summer's day in the first place and so is genuinely asking them, maybe somewhat wryly, if he ought to. So what then is this subject? Could we even say they are human or mortal?
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
The whole of Summer is limited and inconstant; from the start of the Northern May, Summer wrestles the hemisphere from Spring, but then only has control of the season for a time, until its lease ends and gives way to the Autumn.
The addressee is not like this.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
Even heavenly bodies that grant warmth and life are, with regard to their effect on the Earth, things that pass beyond clouds and the horizon. Even the ever-watching face of the celestial will become dark, or overly bright.
This is, again, different from the nature of the true object of the poem.
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
Still, during the ordinary course of nature, even the merely pleasant and pleasing will be disrupted or fade, whether temporarily or not. And not necessarily even from any special or unusual circumstance that might cut something's lifespan short.
Our subject is yet perhaps not even comparable.
So up until now, the subject has been described through negatives, though her comparative stability and absence of changing qualities. She is neither like the Summer, which captures a quarter of the year at best, nor the daylight, which still only dominates half the day at most.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So here we have the second part of the poem, the Eternal, the Eternal Summer. This is permanent, beyond the ordinary summer that effects the globe. Its light is unyielding to death's shadow. Because of this, our subject flourishes as time progresses through eternity, yet is also beyond any transient change that would mar her.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
So this, this eternal facet will provide the sustenance of the subject (or an aspect of it/her) as long as there are living beings for this to manifest within.
So who or what is the subject? Throughout the poem, we are told a lot about them, but only through negative descriptions, comparisons to aspects of nature they are not like, things that have extremes and cycles. We are also told how they relate to 'this', a thing that we are to trust is genuinely eternal. And so the whole of the poem builds up this mysterious image of the subject and hints at many subtitles of their nature. So I will ask you, keeping all this in mind, to read through the poem again. Mind that temperate is supposed to rhyme with short a date. If you have poetic sense, you ought to be capable of, with a little practice, taking in the poem as a whole and understanding how all of it builds up and cumulates into a single idea, the nature of thee, who is maybe incomparable to a summer's day. The exact form of this idea, this person, is not stated, we cannot say that they look like anything at all, but we can use the impression the poem provides us to imagine and grasp at the possibilities of what they could be. Play with these possibilities in your mind.
Now, I am aware of the 'traditional' interpretation of this poem in historical context as one of the 'Fair Youth' sonnets. I'd rather put that out of my mind though, as even thinking about that destroys the beauty of the poem as I see it when taken by itself.

Looking at Poetry 1: In a Station of the Metro

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

                    Petals on a wet, black bough.

                                              - Ezra Pound

This poem is the simplest I know of which I can now enjoy, but which I found off-putting prior to developing poetic sense through Super Grammatical Perception. It has no grand, complex structure that would make it a bother to read to anyone who was not willing or able to put in the effort to grasp it, but nevertheless, I do not believe that anyone who lacks SGP will be able to really feel the effect of it.

When you, the reader, first saw this poem at the top of the post, you likely has a gut reaction on reading it. It may have been positive, or it may have been negative. Accept this feeling, but do not rely too heavily on initial judgement. Try reading the poem again, understanding the context the title gives, and following the rhythm of each line, which contrasts the two images together.

We can have the poet himself clarify his intention:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/metro.htm

Maybe you see the station, and feel negative associations because of the wet, blackness of the bough. You might get the impression of a bleak station, slick with rain water, as random faceless people move about in this drudgery, trying to endure the day, while being interchangeable to the person viewing them. That was the impression I first had of it, as something negative, as if it were saying that the human faces, whoever they were, were nobodies on the damp tree branch that was their dark environment. There was nothing I could do but see this as a kind of bleak portrait of humanity.

But maybe this is not the case for you. Maybe you are capable of taking on the whole poem at once, and in a way that bypasses this natural sense of bleakness, seeing it purely as a novel and striking contrast of two separate images, with no intention of saying that the qualities of one are like the other in a negative way.

In this case I will make the claim that you likely have the poetic sense that I call SGP, which allows you to intuitively feel contrasting images build up into abstract impressions.

A Theory of Perception

Here, I'll start off by running through the basics of my theory. I propose that there are specific, discrete kinds of linguistic/musical ability, which can be used to explain why it is possible for human beings to appreciate specific art forms, and that in each individual person, each of these abilities will necessarily be either active or inactive. This places hard limits on what a given person is capable of perceiving and understanding at a given point in time. A person who has not activated an individual ability will simply not be capable of comprehending the forms of art that demand that level of ability, so any piece of music, poetic phrase, passage of prose writing or visual image that demands a specific kind or level of ability in order to be understood will simply not be comprehensible to anyone who has not activated the appropriate level of perception needed.

What are these perceptive abilities then? In short, I believe that I have discovered and can classify two new separate kinds of perceptual ability that previously lacked any theories addressing them. These are 'Encompassing Voice' and 'Super Grammar'. Each one allows the perception of different kinds of structures, and can combine together to allow the perception of specific forms that would not be possible with either alone (for instance, the structure of a symphony).

...

Encompassing Voice Perception (EVP) is, at its core, the perceptive ability that allows you to hear what key a piece of music is in. This does not mean that a person with Encompassing Voice will necessarily be able to name the specific key (or mode), simply that they feel, at any given point, that there might be a certain chord or sequence of notes that should be played in order for the piece to finally feel completed, and that in the absence of this being played, that the music is left feeling tense and unresolved. If you have this faculty active, you should be able to feel what I'm talking about when listening to a piece of music based around this kind of tonal tension. However, it is also possible that you may actually not have this, will hence not feel this at all, and will then likely be confused as to what I'm talking about here.

If you are unsure, then I will try to offer a preliminary method of gauging so. Keep in mind that this will not necessarily be conclusive, as even if you have Encompassing Voice Perception it still takes active concentration on the piece or work in question in order to understand it, and in many cases it may take a number of repeat listenings to take in the form of the work and familiarize yourself with its conventions before you are able to wrap your head around its themes. It is only if you find yourself incapable of following along with melodies in the ways I will detail that you can be reasonably confident you do not yet have EVP. But there is no need to treat this as a test, as something you ought to pass, the point of this is that any understanding you may gain will be yours and for your own purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86WGK9xwjTw

For example, in the above video (from Stephen Malinowski, whom I owe a great deal of debt to), which I will ask the reader to listen to, a fairly slow paced version of Chopin's opus 27 no.2 is played. At around 0:27, 0:37 and 0:46 certain notes in the main melody will sound. To a non-EVP listener, while the very beginning of the piece may have been somewhat pleasant up to then, they will likely find these dissonances to be grating, and they will unable to gain much, if any, enjoyment or positive emotion out of the following treble melodies as they develop in complexity. At best, they will only be able to really enjoy the bass melody as it repeats throughout the piece. But to a listener with EVP on the other hand, other options are available. They should be able to follow through the dissonant parts, interpreting them instead as a kind of longing for a further response, as opposed to shear dissonance, and feel in the rest of the piece, in an abstract way, possible expressions of compassion, companionship, confessions of worry and all kinds of romantic feeling as the melodic lines passionately 'speak' within themselves and to one another. It is this sense of 'speaking' purely through tone that is my main reason for calling this kind of perception Encompassing Voice. But, regardless of what you are capable of, concerning yourself about how much you like the music or what that might say about you isn't the point here, your taste is your own and this is not something I want people to fret about.

As an additional aside, the main reason I chose the particular particular Chopin piece I did to illustrate Encompassing Voice is that, aside from having the notes nicely illustrated by the imagery in this example, while real appreciation of it does demands Encompassing Voice, it does not really require you to also have Super Grammar, the other ability I want to illuminate. This is not the case in so much other Art Music. Symphonies especially will generally require Super Grammar in order to extend the structure of the musical themes granted by Encompassing Voice and build them up into larger forms. But this is something I intend to address later.

...

Super Grammar/Hierarchical Form Perception (SGP) is more abstract than EVP and better demonstrated through specific examples, but enables 'hierarchical' imagination, the ability to intuitively feel the structure of things like Shakespearean verse and how language can be built up around a beat structure (like poetic metre) so that ideas, phrases and metaphors can be composed in more complex ways. Without it, there will be no appreciation of blank verse or similar forms of poetry (though simpler rhyming poetry will still be accessible), and I will make the claim that it is literally impossible to imagine the metaphorical ideas and images that arise from this kind of poetry without having this mode of perception. Many people have likely had the experience of being confronted with Shakespeare in school and encountering something that seemingly reads like an alien language. For a significant number of them, the idea that this is supposed to be comprehensible English, the same language that they have been using most of their lives, is baffling, even if they simply accept that this is supposedly simply a more ancient form of it. For these people, the best approach to showing their grasp of the material and passing examinations may essentially be to read CliffsNotes, figure out whatever sociopolitical interpretation is most likely to please their teacher, and write out whatever fluff they can manage to in order to give off a convincing impression that they have the ability to interpret the Bard's pen. The person without SGP will have no intuitive sense of poetic metre, and will need iambic pentameter explained to them before they grasp that they have little, if any, feel for it. The person with it, however, should simply be able to read off verse naturally, continuing through line breaks, and find that they can build up a sense of how the structure of the lines is significant and allows them to fit together in order to complete each other, building up ideas and metaphors as they go along.

Now, there may be some confusion here. You see, much old verse, and Shakespeare's especially, does contain a significant number of words and phrases whose specific use and function will not be familiar to the modern reader, and might not even have been immediately comprehensible to even his original audience. This, naturally, is a barrier to understanding, in addition to the extra grammatical demands made by the poetic structure itself. If so, then why choose Shakespeare as the prime candidate to draw initial examples from, as opposed to a more modern poet? The reason for this is that, from the currently limited experience that I can draw on, the density and vividness of Super Grammar based effects and the number and use of hierarchically constructed metaphors employed is greater in Shakespeare than in any other poet I am aware of. It is because of this, I believe, that Shakespeare is so beloved by those who are sensitive to poetry and ideas molded by poetic structure, yet also so despised by those who this is absent in. Without poetic, super grammatical sensibility, which directs imagination and dramatic sense, Elizabethan verse will come off as dry, awkward, confusing and pointless, in addition to feeling like it does not basically follow normal grammatical rules at all. The thing is, it really doesn't (follow ordinary grammar), and this will be a deal breaker for many, but for those who are super grammatically sensitive, the form and structure of the verse is intended to redirect your mental construction of the poetry's form so that otherwise nonsense sentences can instead give rise to novel forms of mental imagery and play.

It is repetition of rhythm, deliberate reuse of consonants (as in alliteration) and in general, setting parralel parts of sentences against each other so that they clash and contrast with each other in order to build up a new idea or feeling, that super grammatical forms give rise to high poetry. The first entrance of the ghost of Hamlet's father is a solid example of the effects that can be achieved with this. In the scene, the ghost appears by breaking the previous line mid way through, creating a sense of mystic horror as the previous flow of the verse is broken out of and responded to via abrupt phrases and hard repetition. This effect and others like it will not be accessible without SGP. There is much more to be said about this, and I intend to provide a larger number of examples, but as I mentioned above, this will be saved for later articles.

...

An important and significant thing to understand about these tiers of perceptual ability is that if you happen to have not yet activated one of them, you can still develop it later. It is absolutely possible for a person lacking a perceptual ability to gain it, and as far as I can tell at almost any arbitrary stage in life. It was experiencing this for myself twice, once for each of the above abilities, that prompted me to start writing this. However, achieving each of them did take a significant amount of work, and transitioning between tiers of ability was very disorienting; the effect of doing it is sudden and demands that you rapidly adjust respectively to each new way of perceiving the world. However, because of each respective transition, and things that were previously impossible subsequently became natural and effortless.

For further reading, I describe what I underwent in the case of each transformation in greater detail in a subsequent article (for EVP and SGP respectively) , and provide more basic information about Encompassing Voice here. I also make an attempt to systematically show how these different kinds of perception can synthesize in these multi-part pieces.

This blog will be used to present my theories on aesthetics, psychology and philosophy, showcase my software projects and discuss miscellaneous things.