Музыкофилия

Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2.10 pm: this time properly awake…. 2.14 pm: this time finally awake…. 2.35 pm: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9.40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10.35 pm, and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was canceled out by the next entry.

This striking discrepancy led Deutsch et al. to conjecture that “if given the opportunity, infants can acquire AP as a feature of speech, which can then carry over to music.” For speakers of a nontonal language such as English, they felt, “the acquisition of AP during music training is analogous to learning the tones of a second language.” They observed that there was a critical period for the development of absolute pitch, before the age of eight or so— roughly the same age at which children find it much more difficult to learn the phonemes of another language (and thus to speak a second language with a native accent)

We are a linguistic species - we turn to language to express whatever we are thinking, and it is usually there for us instantly. But for those with aphasia, the inability to comminicate verbally may be almost unbearably frustrating and isolating; to make matters worse, they are often treated by others as idiots, almost as nonpersons, because the cannot speak. Much of this can change with the discovery that such patients can sing - sing not only tunes, but the words of operas, hymns, or songs. Suddenly their disability, their cut-offness, seems much less - and though singing is not propositional communication, it is a very basic existential comunication.

I see my room, my furniture every day, but they do not represent themseves as "pictures in the mind". Nor do i hear imaginary dog barks or traffic noises in the background of my mind, or smell aromas of imaginary meals cooking, even though i am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind, but with nothing like the richness and range of my spontaneous musical imagery. Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it - its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions.

Gian Beeli, Michaela Esslen, and Lutz Jäncke, researchers in Zurich, have described a professional musician with both music-color and music-taste synesthesia: “Whenever she hears a specific musical interval, she automatically experiences a taste on her tongue that is consistently linked to that musical interval.” In a 2005 article in Nature, they detailed her associations:

Minor second - Sour;
Major second - Bitter;
Minor third - Salty;
Major third - Sweet;
Fourth - (Mown grass);
Tritone - (Disgust);
Fifth - Pure water;
Minor sixth - Cream;
Major sixth - Low-fat cream;
Minor seventh - Bitter;
Major seventh - Sour;
Octave - No taste.