A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES

Hearing

I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death.

-- John Milton, "Comus"

THE HEARING HEART

In Arabic, absurdity is not being able to hear. A "surd" is a mathematical impossibility, the core of the word "absurdity," which we get from the Latin surdus, "deaf or mute," which is a translation from the Arabic jadr asamm, a "deaf root," which in, turn is a translation from the Greek alogos, "speechless or irrational." The assumption hidden in this etymological nest of spiders is that the world will still make sense to someone who is blind or armless or minus a nose. But if you lose your sense of hearing, a crucial thread dissolves and you lose track of life's logic. You become cut off from the daily commerce of the world, as if you were a root buried beneath the soil. Despite Keats's observation that "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter," we would rather hear the world's Niagara of song, noise, and talk. Sounds thicken the sensory stew of our lives, and we depend on them to help us interpret, communicate with, and express the world around us. Outer space is silent, but on earth almost everything can make sound. Couples have favorite songs, even a few bars of which bring back sweet memories of a first meeting on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, or the steamy summer nights in a Midwestern town when, as teenagers, they sat in their Chevies at the A & W Root Beer stand, burning up hours like so many dried leaves. Mothers sing their babies to sleep with lullabies that rock and soothe, not just cradlesongs, but cradles of song. Music rallies people to action, as civil rights marches, Live Aid concerts, political demonstrations, Woodstock, and other mass communions have shown. Work songs and military cadence calls [1] make long marches or repetitive tasks less boring. Solo joggers, fast-walkers, people schussing on cross-country ski machines, astronauts pedaling stationary bikes in space, leotard-clad aerobics classes, all get psyched up from exercising to loud music that has a regular, pounding beat. A campfire wouldn't be as exciting if it were silent. And, when the campers launch their floating candles upon the lake at sunset at the end of the summer, they usually accompany the ritual with a hymnlike song of devotion to camp and one other. People want certain foods (potato chips, pretzels, cereals, and the like) to crunch; noise is an important ingredient in the marketing of such foods. Music accompanies weddings, funerals, state occasions, religious holidays, sports, even television news. Paid choirs sing poignant anthems to homeowner's insurance, laundry soap, and toilet paper. On a busy street at rush hour, despite the growl of traffic and the gyrations of thousands of hurrying strangers, we can still recognize the voice of a friend who comes up behind us and says hello. As we stroll along the reimagined streets of Williamsburg, Virginia, we hear a melodic clanging and recognize at once the sound of a blacksmith hammering on an anvil. Sitting in a chair in the living room, idly stroking the cat while sunlight streams through a window rimed with frost, may be relaxing, but when we hear the cat purr loudly we feel even more contented. Most restaurants serve obligatory music with every course; some even hire violinists or guitarists to stand at your table and ladle out enormous helpings of music as you chew. In the lobbies of hotels in India, and on the slate patios of Houston, wind chimes tinkle in the breeze. During so-called silent hours, the inmates of Alcatraz managed to whisper into the empty water pipe that led from sink to sink and then put an ear to the pipe to hear. Hikers llama-trekking along Point Reyes National Seashore in California, or climbing the boulder face of Mount Camelback in Pennsylvania, revel alike in the sounds of birds, river rapids, skirling wind, dry seedpods rattling on the trees like tiny gourds. In the robust festivity of a dinner party, a waiter pours a luscious Liebfraumilch, whose apricot blush we behold, whose bouquet we inhale, whose savory fruitiness we taste. Then, wishing one another well, we clink our glasses together because sound is the only sense missing from our full enjoyment of the wine.

What we call "sound" is really an onrushing, cresting, and withdrawing wave of air molecules that begins with the movement of any object, however large or small, and ripples out in all directions. First something has to move -- a tractor, a cricket's wings -- that shakes the air molecules all around it, then the molecules next to them begin trembling, too, and so on. Waves of sound roll like tides to our ears, where they make the eardrum vibrate; this in turn moves three colorfully named bones (the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup), the tiniest bones in the body. Although the cavity they sit in is only about a third of an inch wide and a sixth of an inch deep, the air trapped there by blocked Eustachian tubes is what gives scuba divers and airplane passengers such grief when the air pressure changes. The three bones press fluid in the inner ear against membranes, which brush tiny hairs that trigger nearby nerve cells, which telegraph messages to the brain: We hear. It may not seem like a particularly complicated route, but in practice it follows an elaborate pathway that looks something like a maniacal miniature golf course, with curlicues, branches, roundabouts, relays, levers, hydraulics, and feedback loops.

Sound is transmitted in three stages. The outer ear acts as a funnel to catch and direct it, though many people lacking outer ears hear just fine (as one usually can even wearing a hat or helmet). When the sound waves hit the fanlike eardrum, it moves the first tiny bone, whose head fits in the cuplike socket on the second, which then moves the third, which presses like a piston against the soft, fluid-filled inner ear, in which there is a snail-shaped tube called the cochlea, containing hairs whose purpose is to signal the auditory nerve cells. When the fluid vibrates, the hairs move, exciting the nerve cells, and they send their information to the brain. So, the act of hearing bridges the ancient barrier between air and water, taking the sound waves, translating them into fluid waves, and then into electrical impulses. Of all the senses, hearing most resembles a contraption some ingenious plumber has put together from spare parts. Its job is partly spatial. A gently swishing field of grain that seems to surround one in an earthy whisper doesn't have the urgency of a panther growling behind and to the right. Sounds have to be located in space, identified by type, intensity, and other features. There is a geographical quality to listening.

But it all begins with quivering molecules of air, each being jostled into the next, like a crowd pressing forward into a subway. The waves they set up have a certain frequency (the number of compressions and relaxations in each second), which we hear as pitch: The greater the frequency, the higher pitched we find the sound. A large part of a sound registers as loud. Sound travels through the air at 1,100 feet per second, significantly slower than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). That's why, during a thunderstorm, one often sees a flash of lightning and hears the thunder a few moments later. When I was a Girl Scout, we learned to start counting seconds right after we saw the lightning flash, stop when we heard the thunder, then divide by five to find out how many miles away the lightning was.

What we hear occupies quite a large range of intensities -- from the sound of a ladybug landing on a caladium leaf to a launch at Cape Canaveral -- but we rarely hear the internal workings of our body, the caustic churning of our stomach, the whooshing of our blood, the flexing of our joints, our eyelids' relentless opening and closing. At most, if we're wearing earplugs, or have one ear pressed against a pillow at night, we might hear our heartbeat. But for a baby in the womb the mother's heartbeat performs the ultimate cradlesong of peace and plenty; the surflike waves of her respiration lull and soothe. The womb is a snug, familiar landscape, an envelope of rhythmic warmth, and the mother's heartbeat a steady clarion of safety. Do we ever forget that sound? When babies begin talking, their first words are usually the same sound repeated: Mama, Papa, boo-boo. New parents can even buy a small box to set in the crib, which thrub-dubs a recording of a strong, regular heart rhythm at about seventy beats a minute. But if for experimental purposes the boxed heart is set faster than normal, so that it suggests an unhealthy mother, or a mother under stress, the baby will become agitated. Mother and child are united by an umbilical cord of sound.

Nothing was as perfect as that sojourn in the womb, when like little madmen we lay in our padded cells, free of want, free of time. A newborn, nursing at its mother's breast, or just being held close, hears that steady womb-beat, and life feels continuous and livable. Our own heartbeat reassures us that we are well. We dread its one day stopping, we dread the heart-silence of those we love. When we lie with our lover in bed in the morning, cuddling and dozing, pressed tight as two spoons, we feel his or her heartbeat and warmth enveloping us and are at peace. How are you really feeling, deep in your heart? we ask. My heart is broken, we answer, as if it were a block of chalk hit by a sledgehammer. Intellectually, we know that love, passion, and devotion do not lie in any one organ. A person isn't necessarily declared dead if their heart stops; brain death is the clincher. Yet when we speak of love, we use the robust metaphor of the heart, and everyone understands it. There is no need to explain. From our earliest moments, the heart measures our lives and our loves. In films, a tense, fast heartbeat is often mixed in with the musical score for scenes designed to be scary. But there are also films, like Murmur of the Heart, about the at-one-point-incestuous relationship between a mother and her son, where a soft, regular heartbeat enters the music to underscore the complexly loving relationship. Poems have traditionally been written in iambic pentameter, which sounds like this: ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM, ba-BUM. Of course, there are many other meters in which to write, and these days most poets don't write in formal meter at all. But there's something innately satisfying about reading a poem written in iambs. For one thing, we tend to get around in iambs; it is the rhythm of a casual stroll. But it also locks up the heartbeat in a cage of words, and we, who respond so deeply to heart sounds, read the poem with our own pulse as a silent metronome.

PHANTOMS AND DRAPES

Even those of us who damn the intrusive banalities of Muzak consider a romantic, oceanside restaurant where you have to endure a long, sappy instrumental version of "Danny Boy" three times before paying the check sets you free -- know that the brain makes its own Muzak from what it considers normal and unthreatening. Office sounds, traffic noise, heating and air-conditioning gusts, voices in a crowded room. We live in a landscape of familiar sounds. But if you're all alone at night, a familiar sound may leap out at you like a thug. Was that a screen-door hinge being opened by an ax murderer, or just a branch creaking? We hallucinate sounds more often than sights. There are auditory mirages, which vanish without trace; auditory illusions that turn out to be something other than they seemed; and, of course, voices that speak to saints, seers, and psychotics, telling them how to act and what to believe. "Listen to that little voice inside you," we say, as if the conscience were a gnome living below the sternum. But when otherwise normal people are pursued by a voice -- the call of a small boy, for example, as Anthony Quinn reports hearing in his autobiography -- then, like Quinn, they seek psychiatric help. Sometimes it isn't a voice, but music people hear, hallucinating so relentlessly they think they're going mad. A doctor writing in Australian Family Physician Magazine in 1987 reported two cases he'd seen of severe musical epilepsy, which he thought were probably the result of a stroke affecting the temporal lobes of the brain. One of the women heard "Green Shamrock of Ireland" playing over and over in her head, and took medication to at least quiet it down some; the other, who lived until she was ninety-one and preferred the music to drugs, heard medleys of such songs as "Daisy," "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," "After the Ball," and "Nearer, My God, To Thee." The deep-dyed fright of this disorder is its hooliganism.

On the other hand, we sometimes want a sound to leap out at us. We want our baby's colicky cry from the other end of the house to wake us from a deep sleep, even if a louder and more abrasive sound -- a garbage truck engorging, say -- will not. At a busy cocktail party in a room with a low ceiling and poor acoustics, sound waves hit the wall and bounce back rather than being absorbed, and you feel as if you're in the center of a handball court in the middle of a game. Yet you can slice straight through all the noise to hear one conversation taking place between your spouse and a flirtatious stranger. It's as if we had zoom lenses on our ears. Our ability to move some sounds to the almost unnoticeable rear and drag others right up front is truly astonishing. It is possible because we actually hear things twice. The outer ear is a complicated reflector, which takes sound and hurls some of it straight into the hole; but a tiny fraction of the sound is reflected off the top, bottom, or side rims of the outer ear and directed into the hole a few seconds later. As a result, there is a special set of delays, depending on which angle the sound is coming from. The brain reads the delays and knows where to locate the sound. Blind people use their ears to map out the world by tapping with a cane and then listening carefully to the echoes. There are also times when we wish sound to preoccupy us enough to drive out conscious thought. What could be more soothing than sitting on a balcony and hearing the ocean rhythmically caressing the shore? White-noise machines fill a sleeper's room with an aerial surf, which is often just enough to free the mind from thought's clutches.

When I walked into my house last evening, I heard a noise that puzzled me at first, a sporadic creaking and almost inaudible rattling. After a few moments, I realized what it was: a field mouse writhing in a trap under the kitchen counter. Pulling back the yellow curtain, I saw him. The trap was supposed to have broken his neck fast and clean, but it had caught him across the stomach instead; without crying out or whining, he was urgently wrestling with wood and springs. Then his turmoil stopped for good. Lifting the mouse, trap and all, with a pair of fireplace tongs, I placed it carefully in a bag and put it out in the subzero garage. I'm sure he froze his fluff last night, a Scott of the Antarctic nodding as the heat-dreams fled. A homeowner needs the bloodlust of a tabby, and I don't have it. Once, at the stable, I saw a razor-boned cat harrowing a mouse until the ruin of its bloody carcass whined and thrashed, but would not quite die. The cat was following its instinct, and they were both playing out their roles in Nature, which neither gives nor expects mercy. The stable owners kept the cat specifically to hunt mice. It was not for me to intrude. But, when the cat began flaying the mouse remains, I went out back to settle my flesh-crawl by listening to the drum of ice/water melting splosh-thud on scattered hay. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so upended by the scene of Nature, "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson puts it. But what would I have gained by waiting out the bloody finish, the spreading wide of the ribs till they arched like open wings, the hot red jams and afterglow wiped thin across the stale cement? Instead, I focused hard on one sound -- the ice water dripping onto the hay -- and in a few moments relaxed enough to be able to get on with my day. I had used sound as an emotional curtain.

JAGUAR OF SWEET LAUGHTER [2]

We open our mouths, force air from our lungs into our larynx, our voice box, and through an opening between our vocal cords, which vibrate. And then we speak. If the cords vibrate quickly, we hear the voice as higher pitched, a tenor or soprano; if slowly, we hear an alto or bass. It seems so simple, but it's made it possible for empires to rise and fall; for children to teach small workable armistices with their parents; for corporations to control a nation as if it were a great big wind-up bathtub toy; for lovers to run the emotional rapids of courtship; for societies to express their loftiest dreams or lowest prejudices. Many of these qualities we find branded into the words themselves. Language records the fashions and feelings of a people. When William the Conquerer invaded England in 1066, he imposed French customs, laws, and language, many of which we still use. The class-conscious French elite thought the subjugated Saxons uncouth and crude, and the Saxon language even at its most polite coarse and rude, first because it wasn't French, second because it was blunt. Hence, the French-derived word "perspiration" was considered polite, whereas the Saxon "sweat" was not; the French "urine" and "excrement" were polite, while the Saxon "piss" and "shit" were not. The Saxon word for lovemaking was "fuck" (from Old English fokken, "to beat against"), [3] but the French used the word "fornicate" (from the Latin fornix, a vaulted or arched basement room in Rome which prostitutes rented; it became a euphemism for brothel, and then a verb that meant to frequent a brothel, and finally the act performed in a brothel. Fornix is related to fornax, a "vaulted brick oven," which derives ultimately from the Latin formus, which meant simply warm). So "to fornicate" is to pay a visit to a small, warm subterranean room with arched ceilings. This obviously appealed more to French sensibility than the idea of "to beat against" someone, which must have seemed too animal and crude, the epitome of things Saxon. [4]

Sounds so captivate us that we love hearing words rhyme, we like their sounds to ricochet off of one another. Sometimes we prefer words to sound like what they mean, in the aural equivalent of a pun: hiss, whisper, chirp, slither, babble, thump. The word murmur makes us murmur just to say it, which is why these lines by Alfred, Lord Tennyson sound so perfectly full of a summer glade:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

The Greeks called this phenomenon "onomatopoeia," but there are forms of it so subtle that their origin has disappeared into etymological history. For example, the word "poet" comes from an Aramaic word that denotes the sound of water flowing over pebbles. And when we call an incompetent doctor a "quack," we're using a shortened version of the Dutch word kwakzalver, which literally means one who is always quacking about his salves or remedies. The way we pronounce words singles us out, gives us a sense of local or national identity, draws the rough threads of immigrant pronunciation into one reasonably smooth fabric. When people need a fresh vocabulary to deal with new challenges, terrain, or social climate, a dialect emerges. Dialects are fascinating because you can overhear in them the evolution of a familiar language, something that usually sprawls through centuries. The national language of Bermuda is English, and locals will talk to you in standard British English laced with slang gleaned from American TV, but among themselves they use a dialect not as syncopated as Jamaica-talk, but arcane and colorful all the same. ''I'm gonna go ron my skirt's gates tonight and get some eez," a young Bermudian says to his friend, meaning that he's going over to his girlfriend's house to make love to her. But he needs to borrow a bike. "Can I borrow your blade?" "Don't ax about my blade, it's got a flat," his pal replies. Across the road, a pretty Bermudian girl "cuts her eyes" (looks malevolently) at them as she passes from one hotel building to another. "Bye, I'm vext!" the second young man says of his cantankerous girlfriend. "If that vedgy don't catcherself, I'm gonna slap her upside her head!"

Over the years we've tried to teach many different kinds of mammals to speak the way humans do, and though some small success has been reached with primates, dolphins, and harbor seals, we haven't had much real luck. Our ability to speak is special. We can talk for the same reason we choke so easily: Our larynx lies low in the throat. Other mammals have a voice box high in the throat, so that they can continue breathing while they eat. We can't. Remember the ventriloquist's greatest feat? Appearing to drink water and make his dummy talk at the same time. When we swallow, food slides past the trachea; if it catches there, it blocks air to the lungs. Many of us choke every year, and there's no one who doesn't know the sensation of almost choking. "It went down the wrong pipe," we gasp, perhaps lifting our arms over our head to open the airway wider. The Heimlich maneuver uses air stored in the lungs to pop the trapped food back out of the trachea. Just consider what a bad design feature this was for us. In the course of evolution, speech must have been so crucial to survival that it was worth the risk of choking.

Even if other mammals had a low larynx and a tongue in the position that would allow them to make the identical sounds we make, they would need a special part of the brain, called Broca's area, to process speech the way we do. My last answering machine had a computerized voice that gave me directions and told me what calls had arrived. I named him "Gort" after the robot in the old Michael Rennie sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, because his overly flattened male voice -- half zombie, half butler -- sounded like an outtake from the movie. Whenever there was a power surge, Gort's logic got scrambled and he became so unreliable that I finally had to retire him. My new machine, whom I call "Gertie," speaks to me in an even flatter but female voice, which sounds uneducated and sluttish. In action, both Gort and Gertie sound subservient and unthreatening, and I suppose the manufacturers feel that's a plus. In the cockpits of large airplanes, I've heard the annunciator's computerized warning -- almost always a slightly sultry woman's voice [5] -- saying such urgent things to the pilot as "Fly up! You're too low. Fly up! You're too low," or reminders such as "Your flaps are down." The synthesized cockpit voices sound a little more lifelike because they have inflections and modulations, but computer voices in general still sound artificial. I'm sure that will change one day soon, and we'll chat amiably with articulate computers like Hal in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. It's only taken so long because speech is more complex than the sum of its parts. We can feed the word "top" into a computer as t-ah-p, but who speaks as clearly as a BBC announcer? Yet we're able to understand people talking so fast that the phonemes blur, so slowly that they drawl, in different tones, at different pitches, and with different accents. One man's pork is another man's pahk. We make sense of one another with amazing agility, although we do occasionally have to work at it. As hard as it is for many native English speakers to understand Shakespeare's English, it's equally difficult for an American of one region to understand an American from another, since dialects are, in part, changes in the pronunciation of familiar words. Once when I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I asked my host if there were any spas around. I knew of the famous Hot Springs in the southern part of the state, and I thought visiting it might be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. "Spas?" he said in a thick Arkansas accent. "You mean Russian agents?"

LOUD NOISES

One fall semester a few years ago, I accepted an appointment as a visiting professor at a college in a small leafy town in Ohio. The only visiting faculty housing was a suite in a sophomore boys' dorm, whose residents found a woman living in their midst -- however discreetly -- too much of a temptation. It was still brutally hot in Ohio, but almost every night someone crept up to the fusebox outside my door and threw the circuit breakers, so that my airconditioning and all other electrical appliances loudly stopped; when I opened the door to reset the fuses, I heard scurrying and giggling down the hallway. Whenever I passed the peephole in my door, I saw an eye staring back in at me, so I covered the hole with masking tape. Twice I woke up to see a young man hanging upside down in front of my living-room window while he illegally spliced into my television cable, reducing my signal to sand. And, without fail, at nine every morning an Armageddon of heavy-metal rock began that lasted well into the night. The one sure thing I learned about sophomore boys is that they're all decibel and testosterone. Not only did their stereo music throb through the walls, it was physically painful to walk down the hallway toward the torture-level noise, and knocking on a door meant removing one hand from over an ear. The door usually opened onto a smoky room in which girls were quickly rearranging themselves and liquor or drugs hurriedly disappearing. The diabolical noise didn't seem to bother any of them. At that volume, it was barely decipherable as music. In part, they were prematurely deaf, as frequently happens these days among loud-rock addicts. But many teenagers like to listen to music played at such high and distorting levels that it ceases to be anything but loudness. I think the loudness must excite them in an erotic way. Unfortunately, hearing can be permanently destroyed by loudness. Researchers have taken photographs of cochlear hair cells irrevocably damaged after only one exposure to a very loud noise. [6] Playing a ghetto-blaster at full tilt on a calm afternoon in a quiet retreat, or on the streets of a busy city, is probably more an act of aggression and dominance than of love for music: anyone within earshot will have his personal territory invaded, his peace of mind slit open.

Arlene Bronzaft, a psychologist, discovered that exposing children to chronic noise "amplifies aggression and tends to dampen healthful behavior." In a study of pupils in grades 2-6, at PS 98, a grade school in Manhattan, she showed that children assigned classrooms in the half of the building facing the elevated train tracks were eleven months behind in reading by their sixth year, compared to those on the quieter side of the building. After the N.Y. City Transit Authority installed noise abatement equipment on the tracks, a follow-up study showed no difference in the two groups. Parents don't stop to worry about which side of a building their child is going to be sitting on, and yet an eleven-month retardation in the course of only four years of school is disastrous. A child would have to struggle hard to catch up. And we wonder why kids can't read, we wonder why the drop-out rate is so high in New York. Jackhammers, riveting, and other construction noises are part of what we associate with life in big cities, but by hanging steel-mesh blankets over the construction site to absorb sound it is possible to erect a building quietly. As civilization swells, even sanctuaries in the country could become too clattery to endure, and we may go to extremes to find peace and quiet: a silent park in the Antarctic, an underground dacha.

"Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany," Hitler wrote in his Manual of German Radio in 1938. When we think of noise, we picture loudspeakers, radios that sound like front-line armaments, subways thundering and rattling. What is noise? Is it simply random, pain-level sound? Technically, noise is a sound that contains all frequencies; it is to sound what white is to light. But the noises that irritate us are sounds loud or spiky enough to be potentially damaging to the ear. Because a loud noise grates on our psyche, or actually hurts, we want to get away from it. But there are also nonthreatening sounds we just don't like, and we tend to classify them as noise, too. Musical dissonance, for instance. In 1899, when audiences first heard Arnold Schonberg's revolutionary "Transfigured Night," they thought it closer to organized noise than to music. Noisy! one passenger yells to another across the narrow aisle of a small commuter plane, like the Metroliner or Beech 1900, as the props burr, acute as a dentist's drill, and then become a denser throbbing near the bone. When someone scrapes his fingernails across a chalkboard, we twitch and convulse. So many people around the world get the willies when they hear that blackboard sound that it must not be simply a learned response, but something biological. Neurologists have suggested that it may be a relic of our evolution, when shrieks of terror alerted us to sudden doom. Or perhaps it's too much like the sound of a predator's claws skidding gently along the rock just behind us.

THE LIMITS OF HEARING, THE POWER OF SOUND

At the peak of our youth, our ears hear frequencies between sixteen and 20,000 cycles per second -- almost ten octaves -- beautifully, and that encompasses a vast array of sounds. Middle C is only 256 cycles per second, whereas the principle frequencies of the human voice are between 100 cycles per second for males and 150 for females. As we age and the eardrum thickens, high-frequency sounds don't pass as easily along and between the bones to the inner ear, and we start to lose both ends of the range, especially the high notes, as we may discover when we listen to our favorite music.  Humans don't hear low frequencies very well at all, which is merciful; if we did, the sounds of our own bodies would be as deafening as sitting in a lawn chair next to a waterfall. But, even though we may be limited to a certain range of hearing, we're skilled extenders of our senses. A doctor listens better to a patient's heart with a stethoscope. We hang microphones in unlikely places: beneath boats to record whale songs, inside the body to record blood flow. We "hear" from the deep reaches of space and time by means of radio telescopes. Bats and bottlenose dolphins have evolved ingenious uses of sounds that are inaudible to us, and which we later invented. Doctors often rely on a form of echolocation, known as ultrasound and consisting of over 20,000 cycles per second, to help diagnose tumors. The first view a pregnant woman gets of her baby is usually an ultrasound picture. Engineers use ultrasound to test the flyability of airplane parts. Jewelers use ultrasound to clean precious gems. Sports medicine uses ultrasound to help heal sprains. And, of course, the Navy uses echolocation in submarines, though they call it sonar. You can buy a flea collar for your dog or cat that uses high-frequency sound waves to annoy fleas and ticks so that they'll vacate your pet, who supposedly doesn't hear the siren any better than you do. We may say "I'm all ears," but we tend to cock our heads or cup an ear with one hand to help out, and, when hearing fades, we aid our ears with resoundingly small electronic speakers. The original hearing aids were as large as lamp shades and only added twenty decibels; now they are small and discreet and much more powerful. But, in amplifying the world, they don't select what's meaningful from it, what needs to be heard from the pour of sheer noise.

In a cardiac intensive care unit's jungle of wires and monitors, small lights blink like the eyes of wild animals, and human hearts reveal their fury in tiny monotonous beeps. When someone's heart begins to gabble, alert technicians hear the change and come running. But researchers at Michigan State are proposing more complex and subtle monitors, ones that will produce a series of notes, not just beeps. The changing melody of each heart would offer subtle clues to its condition. Because we're used to associating the heart with sound, this doesn't strike us as particularly farfetched. However, the researchers' other proposed use of sound -- to hear chemical abnormalities in a patient's urine -- does, and they've borne the brunt of endless jokes about their study of musical pee.

We think of sound as something fey, lighter-than-air, an insubstantial thing, not a force with muscle. But at Intersonics, Inc., in Northbrook, Illinois, they've begun using sound to lift objects, in what they refer to as "acoustical levitation." Most objects up to now have been levitated aerodynamically or electromagnetically. Ultrasound can lift objects, too. Four acoustic transducers, emitting ultrasound waves, are arranged so that they direct narrow beams to a central spot. Where the beams intersect, an invisible stockade is created in which small objects can be suspended. Although the sound is louder than that of a jet engine, adults don't hear it. While they're floating, the objects don't feel any acoustic force, but if they drift to the side of the stockade walls, then the sound police push them back in place. Unaware of their cage unless they try to leave it, the objects seem to float in the abracadabra realm of lying carpets. But it is not a parlor game to industry, for whom this ideal crucible allows them to hold an object in place without touching or contaminating it. Ultrasound beams are powerful enough to heat a small space to the temperature of the sun, or shatter and rearrange molecules, layers of which can be stacked like flapjacks. Scientists are hoping to use ultrasound to create new glasses, including perfectly uniform glass capsules to contain hydrogen fuel in nuclear fusion reactors; brilliant alloy lenses; and fabulous electronics and superconductors. One likely application is manufacturing in outer space. "Ultrasonic levitation furnaces" went aboard the space shuttles in 1983 and 1985. New metal alloys could indeed be made of very high-temperature materials, since there would be no crucible to melt.

DEAFNESS

John Cage once emerged from a soundproof room to declare that there was no such state as silence. Even if we don't hear the outside world, we hear the rustling, throbbing, whooshing of our bodies, as well as incidental buzzings, ringings, and squeakings. Deaf people often remark on the variety of sounds they hear. Many who are legally deaf can hear gunfire, low-flying airplanes, jackhammers, motorcycles, and other loud noises. Being deaf doesn't protect them from ear distress, since humans use their ears for more than hearing. As anyone who has had an inner-ear infection knows, one of the ear's most important jobs is to keep balance and equilibrium; the internal workings of the ear are like a biological gyroscope. In the inner ear, semicircular canals (three tubes filled with fluid) tell the brain when the head moves, and how. If you were to half fill a glass with water and swirl it in a circle, the water would spin around, and, even after you stopped, the water would continue swirling for a little while. In a similar way, we feel dizzy even after we've gotten off of a merry-go-round. Not all animals hear, but they all need to know which way is up. We tend to think of the deaf as people minus ears, but they're as much prey to ear-related illnesses as hearing people are.

Despite all the folk wisdom about how important hearing is (including Epictetus the Stoic's 2,000 year-old axiom: "God gave man two ears, but only one mouth, that he might hear twice as much as he speaks"), most people, given a choice, would rather lose their hearing than their sight. But people who are both deaf and blind often lament the loss of their hearing more than anything else, perhaps none so persuasively as Helen Keller:

I am just as deaf as I am blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus -- the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.

... If I could live again I should do much more than I have for the deaf. I have found deafness to be a much greater handicap than blindness. [7]

The literature of deafness is extraordinarily rich. Writers and thinkers from Herodotus to Guy de Maupassant have written about their own deafness or the deafness of friends and loved ones with poignancy, eloquence, and charm. The interested reader may turn to Brian Grant's anthology, The Quiet Ear, a line sampler of writings on deafness that spans the centuries and many different cultures. Mark Medoff has written a powerful play called Children of a Lesser God, which was recently made into an equally powerful movie. My two favorite books about deafness are Deafness: A Personal Account, an autobiography by the poet David Wright, and Words for a Deaf Daughter, a classic memoir by the novelist Paul West. From Wright, we learn that his world, though it has little sound in it, "seldom appears silent," because his brain translates movement into a gratifying sense of sound:

Suppose it is a calm day, absolutely still, not a twig or leaf stirring. To me it will seem quiet as a tomb though hedgerows are full of noisy but invisible birds. Then comes a breath of air, enough to unsettle a leaf; I will see and hear that movement like an exclamation. The illusory soundlessness has been interrupted. I see, as if I heard, a visionary noise of wind in a disturbance of foliage.... I have sometimes to make a deliberate effort to remember I am not 'hearing' anything, because there is nothing to hear. Such non-sounds include the flight and movement of birds, even fish swimming in clear water or the tank of an aquarium. I take it that the flight of most birds, at least at a distance, must be silent.... Yet it appears audible, each species creating a different "eye-music" from the nonchalant melancholy of seagulls to the staccato of flitting tits ...

West's Words for a Deaf Daughter frequently appears in college syllabuses, but not, as one might imagine, only in courses for or about the deaf. Lavishly written, with much wit and phenomenological devotion, it also appeals to students of philosophy and literature as a jubilant hymn to language and life. Told in the second person throughout, it addresses and at times impersonates West's deaf daughter Mandy. And, unlike many memoirs about handicapped children, it isn't at all maudlin, but rompy, poetic, and concerned with the struggle we all wage to know ourselves and to make ourselves known. These books allow one to eavesdrop on the inner life of the deaf, a special privilege, since many people assume the deaf, especially if they don't read or write, think differently, dwelling in a no-man's-land between concept and word. But, as the literature of the deaf makes clear, ideas and emotions find their way through with surprising ingenuity, whether in English, Ameslan, or some other language, from silence to the inner world where words can be "heard."

ANIMALS

An ancient Chinese proverb says: "A bird does not sing because it has an answer -- it sings because it has a song." Few animal sounds are as beautiful as bird song. Once you've heard a whippoorwill throwing the boomerang of its voice across the summer marshes, you listen with a new sense of privilege. Baby birds aren't born knowing their song; they learn the song of their parents. If you raised some birds away from their parents and whistled a different song -- the opening notes of Beethoven's Ninth, say -- then they would learn your song, and neighbors might well call them "the Beethoven birds." Until they get the knack of making real songs, baby birds often babble and chatter and make a lot of noise that doesn't seem to mean anything. Like human babies, they are discovering the shock of being able to make sounds at all; eventually they learn to control the sounds, and they practice. A voice is an elaborate instrument, which one can use without knowing much about it. But to make sense with it, you really need to know its limits and capabilities. Hence the babblings. Birds speak dialects, as people do. A New Hampshire crow that hasn't traveled won't respond to the call of a Texas crow, but crows from different regions get to understand each other just as fiddlers from different states do when they meet at a convention in the Ozarks.

Some animals hear in much higher or lower ranges than we do, and with a delicacy and finesse that's astonishing. A dog can tell the difference between the sound of its master's footsteps and those of other family members or visitors. My family once had a dog that could tell the sound of my mother's car engine from any other traffic going by the house. In department stores all across America one can now buy a pair of what look like miniature foghorns, which attach to each side of a car. When the car goes about 35 mph, the wind rushing through the horns makes a high whistle that alerts deer, dogs, or other animals to get out of the way. It's too high to annoy a human ear, but to a dog napping in the road it is like an air-raid siren. Deer are nearly silent, but they hear well. An experimenter in New Zealand was recently able to cause female red deer to go into heat by playing the sound of a male red deer's mating roar. Fish don't have outer ears, but they hear vibrations through the water as we hear sounds traveling through air. Some animals can move their ears like small radar dishes, without moving their heads. I've seen deer, cats, and horses run through arpeggios of ear twitching. Thanks to a clever arrangement of their ears -- one slightly higher than the other -- nocturnal owls can pinpoint a sound to within one degree, and the edges of their feathers are softly fringed to muffle the sound of their approach when they are hunting. It might be more convenient to have just one centrally located ear, but having two makes it easier to locate a sound, just as having two eyes provides depth perception. African elephants have big floppy ears that mainly pick up sounds from below, and they produce a low-frequency infrasound too low for us to hear, with which they communicate. [8] Insects often have ears on unlikely parts of their bodies, such as on their legs or under their wings.

I once knew an aging cat who, when she went into heat, kept meow-screaming "Now! Now! Now!" over and over like a berserk harmonica player as she staggered around the apartment, occasionally stopping to thrust her rump high in that feline invitation to mating known as lordosis. Few sounds are as lovely as those made by the tree frogs in Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and other sunny isles. Often not more than an inch long, such frogs sweetly call through the night like tuneful thumb harps. It's thought that the coqui frogs of Puerto Rico locate sounds by using their lungs. Sound waves hit the sides of the frog's body, and travel to the eardrum on a pathway through the lungs. In these days of super-specialization, we assume that the body specializes, too, evolving each part for one purpose. But as it turns out, some parts have various chores. Not only frogs, but some snakes and lizards as well, hear through their lungs; in porpoises and dolphins, sound is believed to travel through an oil-filled lower jaw. Not all animals use sound just for hearing. Sperm whales, bottlenose dolphins, and others may be using sound as a weapon. It is thought that they stun their prey with loud "bangs," the blasts from which can even cause a small fish like an anchovy to hemorrhage internally.

***

Tonight the crickets are loud and furious, rubbing their wings into strident song. They seem to be singing in unison, but that's just an accidental felicity. I'm not hearing them talk to one another at all, since crickets communicate in the ultrasonic range, too high for human ears. What I'm hearing is accidental and to them irrelevant sounds made by their scraping wings. If I were to record the chirps and play them back for the crickets, they wouldn't answer. Animals seem to have their own lanes of sound, ones in which they communicate and to which their ears are most sensitive. If they didn't, they'd have to shriek all the time to make themselves heard above the din of other creatures.

There are auditory niches. Nature allows an animal a little decorum and privacy when it comes to its own species. [9] Otherwise, a warning to its brethren would also signal a predator. Of course, this doesn't always work as it should. One Central American bat, which has a special taste for the frog Physalemus, stalks its prey by sound. It listens for the male frog's mating call, knowing that the louder the song is, the plumper and juicier the frog will be. This puts the frog in an appalling predicament. Full of sexual longing in the steamy tropical night, it must sing loudly to attract a mate -- but if it does, it may also attract a hungry bat. And yet a poor song attracts neither.

One day in December I went with bat expert Merlin D. Tuttle to Bracken Cave in Texas, a nursery cave where millions of mother and baby bats live. Just before sunset, we sat down in the natural amphitheater of stone outside the cave and waited for the thrilling spectacle we knew was ahead of us. As a ruddy sunset began, a few bats flew out of the cave, circled to gain altitude, and flew off into the night to feed; then a few more came, and dozens after that, and hundreds after that, until suddenly the sky was thick with them. Merlin and I could feel the strong breeze they made as they identified us by echolocation and flew close to our heads without hitting us. Then Merlin swung an arm up fast and grabbed one out of the air, holding it carefully so we could look at its adaptations for echolocation, obvious even in the skin on its face: little folds and flaps that work like radar dishes.

Bats whistle or call to their prey with a steady stream of high-frequency clicks. For most of us, their vocal Braille is too high to hear, since bats click at an average of 50,000 cycles per second. In our youth, we could hear only sounds of up to 20,000. Bats click at intervals of ten or twenty times a second, and the "bat-detector" naturalists use translates the ultrasonic noises into warbles and clicks audible to human ears. Like winged megaphones, bats broadcast their voices, then listen for the sounds to bounce back at them. As they close in on their prey, echoes start coming faster or louder and, judging the time between the echoes, a bat knows how close its prey is. The solid echoes a bat hears from a brick wall or the ground sound different from the fluid echoes of a flower or leaf. A bat can build a complete echo picture of its world, a canvas on which all the objects and animals reveal themselves in detail, down to their texture, motion, distance, and size. If you stand in a quiet yard filled with bats, the bats will be shouting very loudly; you just won't hear them. In The Scale of Nature, biologist John Tyler Bonner offers this way of putting echolocation into human terms:

I can remember going through the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound in a fog. The channel between the islands is very narrow, yet it was impossible to see either shore. The ferryboat pilot first politely told all the mothers to ask their children to stop their ears. Then he blasted his horn while he leaned out the pilothouse on one side, and repeated the operation as he leaned out the other side. By judging the time it took for the echo to return, he could gauge his distance from the shore. He seemed far more composed about the process than I.

Echolocation is just one of many animal sounds beyond our hearing. Praying mantises use ultrasonics; elephants and crocodilians use infrasonics. Few animal displays are as thrilling to watch as the "water dance" of a male alligator. Stretching its enormous head out of the water, it puffs up its throat, tenses hard like a body builder, and then a rolling thunder-buster bellow splits the air, and the water sizzles all around its body, raining upward like frying diamonds. We see the water dance, but other alligators hear its infrasonic signal, made only by the males, perhaps as a courtship display or perhaps also as a full-body raspberry directed at other males. Although female alligators bellow, too, and even slap their heads on the water from time to time, they don't do a water dance. But they do read its message like seasoned code-breakers. And occasionally a male, hot and bothered and truly inspired, does a cluster of water dances -- as many as eight or nine -- in a long ballet of dance, song, and yearning.

We also don't hear most underwater sounds, and that leads us to assume that the vast oceans are silent, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Leonardo da Vinci once suggested dipping an oar into the water and listening, with one's ear against its handle. Fishermen in West Africa and also in the South Seas discovered the same trick. Using the oar as a kind of listening straw, you can hear the sounds of the underwater world. Some fish are a noisy lot. Sea robins, drum-fishes and many others make sounds with their swim bladders; croakers grunt loud enough to keep China Sea fishermen awake at night; Hawaiian triggerfish grind their teeth loudly; the male toadfish growls; bottlenose dolphins click and squeak like badly oiled office chairs; bowhead whales purr and twirp; humpback whales put on a songfest. The ocean looks mute, but is alive with sounds from animals, breaking waves, tidal scouring, ship traffic, and nomadic storms, locked within the atmosphere of water as our sounds are within the atmosphere of air.

How empty the world would be without animal sounds. The blackbirds quibbling like druids. Horses galloping on a soft track. The crows, which sound as if they're choking in the trees. The burbling chickadees hanging upside down from the branches. The elk's bugling, like the sound of distant war games. The metallic ping of nighthawks. The kindergarten band of crickets (from the Old French criquet, "to creak"). The electric whine of hungry female mosquitoes. The Morse code of the red-headed woodpecker.

QUICKSAND AND WHALE SONGS

Sitting on the beach in Bermuda, I decide to make quicksand in a glass. First I partially fill the glass with sand, then add water until it just covers the sand, and stir hard. The result looks solid, like firm sand, but when I stick a finger in it, it sinks fast. Quicksand is just a suspension of sand in water, sand that's become so saturated it pours like a milkshake -- something temporary, not a permanent booby trap. Scary movies show people taking a wrong step, sticking deep, sinking agonizingly, and then suffocating. But that's not likely, unless you thrash about so much in panic that your body goes under and you swallow, inhale water, and drown, as you might in any swimming pool or lake. Water is denser than the human body, as is sand; and the combination makes floating doubly easy. The body is buoyant, if allowed to be. I encountered quicksand once out West, on a ranch where I was working. A cow had wandered into it and panicked trying to escape, finally drowning. When we lassoed the carcass and dragged it out, the hide was coated in a rough porridge, and the eyelids looked as if they were sewn shut with burlap. I'm sorry now I didn't wade in myself and test the waters, but at the time I listened to the cowboys' warnings. Their land-savvy never failed me, and often delighted with its intuition and clarity. They'd seen frightened horses and cattle thrash until they disappeared in the mire, and had assumed that quicksand was aggressive and always deadly.

The hypnotic crash of the waves lulls me. Bending, I press my ear against the beach and hear the waves break even sooner. The vibrations travel about ten times as fast through the ground. Were I a Kalahari Bushman, I would be sleeping on my right side tonight, ear to the ground, so I could listen for the approach of a dangerous animal; my husband would sleep on his left side, and between us there would be a small fire to keep us warm while we slept, our ears cupping the earth. Or, if I were a character in one of the old cowboy movies, I might put my ear to the tracks and listen for the sound of the oncoming mail train. Because sound waves stay inside the metal rather than dispersing into the air, I'd hear the vibrations some distance away and know the payroll, or my sweetheart, would soon be arriving.

For hours, I've been watching the ocean for signs of humpback whales, whose songs were first recorded off Bermuda by Frank Watlington, and then later by Roger Payne. When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I attended a concert that Payne gave on his cello, accompanied by whale songs that boomed, yowled, gnashed, squeaked and throbbed, filling the large auditorium with otherworldly music, and making my bones resonate from the low-down bass notes. This wasn't the first time I'd heard whale songs; I had a record of Alan Hovhaness's musical composition "And God Created Great Whales," a piece haunted by a raga of sounds one doesn't expect to add up to song. And yet the whales do sing. In fact, they croon. Lone, inactive males start to sing during winter, the breeding season, and continue their ballads until company arrives to interrupt them. Their songs often last fifteen minutes or so, and they repeat like carols over many hours. How structured the songs are, obeying the sort of rules one associates with classical music.

What's more, the whales vary their songs. New phrases and elements arise each year, allowing the songs to evolve the way a language does. Each has half a dozen or so themes arranged in a certain order; if one theme is removed, the others still stay in their original order. When you sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," you may choose to leave out the verse in which soldiers have built God an altar "in the evening dews and damps," but you'll keep the rest of the verses in the right order. Within the whale songs, there are repeating phrases that follow a carefully structured whale-song grammar. Perhaps the most impressive thing about all this is that the whales not only learn the complex language, but remember it from season to season. They arrive singing the song of the previous year, like coeds returning to school in September; when new phrases and slang evolve over the season, they remember them for the following year and abandon the lingo that's out of date. They don't sing by expelling air, as one might guess. Nor do they use their blowholes in a clarinet-like way, as is sometimes shown in cartoons. Instead, they probably make their sounds by moving air around inside their heads. Like opera singers, they control their breathing very carefully, so as not to interrupt the fluency of the song. Most whales choose to do their breath-snatching in the same passages, and that allows researchers to listen for the breath spot and identify the singer.

Those who have dived among the singing whales describe the feel of the song as a drum pounding on the chest, or a pedal organ played inside the ribs. If you can't be in the water with them, you can hear and feel them singing through the wooden boards of a boat. And not only humpbacks sing. White beluga whales have such a sweet, trilling voice that early whalers called them "sea canaries." Now that their numbers are drastically reduced by pollution, the belugas are becoming the canaries in a liquid mine, warning us about the health of the oceans. Superstitious sailors used to hear the mournful songs of whales echoing up through the hulls of their ships, and were enraptured. Singing whales once inhabited the Mediterranean, and probably are the Sirens Greek myth says lured sailors to their doom on the rocks. Coming through the wood of a boat, their songs would be diffused in such a way that a sailor couldn't localize them; the sounds would seem to be enveloping the ship in an eerie veil of song. Because whales ululate in sounds unique and varied, it's a little difficult to describe their voices, but I once wrote the following sound poem after hearing a whale concert, and it may give a better sense of their songs:

WHALE SONGS

Speaking in storm language,
a humpback, before it blows,
lows a mournful ballad
in the salad-krill sea, murmurs
deep dirges; like a demiurge,
it booms from Erb to Santa Cruz,
bog low, its foghorn a thick liqueur.

Crepe black as a funeral procession,
the pod glides, mummer-deft,
through galloping brine,
each whale singing the same
runaway, roundelay tune:

Dry fingers rub, drag, drub
a taut balloon. Glottal stops. Pops.
Dry fingers resume, then, ringing
skeletal chimes, they ping
and rhyme -- villanelles, canticles,
even a Gregorian done on ton tongues

as, trapped below the consciousness
of air, hungry, or wooing,
or lamenting slaughter,
jazzy or appalled,
they beat against the wailing wall
of water, voices all
in the marzipany murk they swim,
invisible but for their songs.

And often they raise high
as angels' eyes a refrain
swoony as the sea, question-mad,
sad, all interrogatives, as if
trying to fathom the fathomless
reach from ladle-shaped ocean,
scurrilous surf, to breach-birth
upon beach and blue algae's cradle.

Sleek black troubadours
playing their own pipes, each body
a mouth organ, each shape a daguerreotype
of an oblate friar caroling,
they migrate, glad to chain rattle
and banshee moan, roaming the seas
like uneasy spirits, a song on their bones.

THE VIOLIN REMEMBERS

Music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act, to arouse groups of people. Drums set the heart sprinting in no time, and a trumpet can transport one on chariots of sound. As far back as we can see, people made music. The first instruments used in western music were probably just sticks or rocks thwacked together to make a beat. There would have been many occasions for them: religious dances and other rituals; to accompany work songs; as a musical way to teach lessons to the young. Mesopotamian instruments have been found dating back some 5,500 years (pipes, triangles, stringed instruments, and drums), and the Mesopotamians even devised a method of musical notation. People probably made music even earlier than that, by blowing on blades of grass held between their thumbs or banging sticks and stones together -- instruments we wouldn't now be able to recognize. The Mayans played an array of intricately carved clay whistles, flutes, recorders, and ocarinas. Whistles shaped like men produced lower notes than those shaped like women. Some of them had secret chambers and could play as many as seventeen notes, others were meant to hold water while you played them, which affected the sound, and some multi-headed flutes played several notes simultaneously. According to Chinese texts, Oriental music began around 2700 B.C., when Huang Ti, the emperor, ordered bamboo pipes of the right length to be cut so that he could imitate the song of the phoenix. If one contrasts 2,400-year-old Chinese bells with a present-day Chinese flute, one finds that the tones are very similar, and nearly match on an oscilloscope. From the outset, our brains and nervous systems have led us to prefer certain intervals between sounds. Our instruments have evolved from a deep inner delight in music, but one that has boundaries. Much of what we hear strikes us as dissonance or as noise, and what falls within a certain range we find sweet, intellectually satisfying, and mellifluous.

I first learned to play the violin in junior high, and though I practiced haphazardly for eight years, I never got past the mechanical bowing, palsied vibrato, and lusterless finger work of an amateur. I loved the gritty yet oily shine of the resin, which allowed the bow to tug gently, as if dragged over a raspy cat's tongue. The strings I bought were referred to as "catgut," but of course they weren't really from a cat; the slang term dated back to an early period in violin playing, when audiences thought the strings screeched like a disemboweled tabby. "Better go buy some more catgut," they used to jeer, and the expression caught on. Even when I was a "tweenager" (as thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were then called), endlessly rehearsing "The Entrance March of the Peers," "The Young Prince and the Young Princess," and "Say It with Music" for school assembly, I'd heard rumors of a dark, nearly mythical violin that could virtually play itself, a violin that smoldered with caged emotion even when lying in its case. The name of it floated in my mouth like magical smoke: Strad-i-var-i-us. How often I lusted after a Stradivarius that would transmute my sandpapery sounds to pure gold. In time, I rose through the ranks to the orchestra's honored position of "first violin," which meant that I got to play the melody, which is why I chose to learn violin in the first place. I pitied the tuba players oompahing their way into oblivion. Some of them, though boys, weren't athletically built, and when they stood up they half disappeared into the shiny, heavy, hallucinating brass, as if swallowed whole by a mirrored nautilus. The percussionists made such a nerve-jangling racket, I thought they should be given a polite burial in their own kettledrums. Nothing about the finicky, birdlike oboe appealed to me. The girls who played flute always had runny noses and looked as if they were trying to blow out a small flame when they played. The clarinets sounded too mouselike. And the idea of playing cello, viola, bass, or any of the other to-my-mind subservient instruments left me cold. I wanted to make music, and music to me was melody, a soulfully singing violin. Although I had never heard a Stradivarius up close, I heard them on records and on television, and I wondered along with everyone else what magical resin or lacquer had gone into their manufacture to produce their uniquely sultry richness. The most precious instruments in the world are still the violins made by Stradivarius. At last scientists are beginning to understand why.

Over the years, researchers have attributed the unique sound to animal fluids, special resins, a water fungus, and many other arcane potions. A more likely explanation was proposed recently by Peter Edwards and a team of researchers at Cambridge University. Using EDAX (energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), they showered a fragment of a cello with high-energy electrons, which allowed them to analyze the wood's ingredients. To their surprise, they found a thin layer of pozzolana -- a volcanic ash from Cremona, Italy, where Stradivarius lived. The ash lay between the varnish and the wood, and Stradivarius probably applied it as a simple strengthening agent for his instruments; since it was a commonly used cement, it probably never occurred to him it could affect their tone. Of course, pozzolana alone won't produce a Stradivarius, whose age, architecture, and craftsmanship contribute to its sound. Many violinists and violinmakers insist that violins grow into their beautiful throaty sounds, and that a violin played exquisitely for a long time eventually contains the exquisite sounds within itself. Somehow the wood keeps track of the robust lyrical flights. In down-to-earth terms: Certain vibrations made over and over for years, along with all the normal processes of aging, could make microscopic changes in the wood; we perceive those cellular changes as enriched tone. In poetic terms: The wood remembers. Thus, part of a master violinist's duties is to educate a violin for future generations.

MUSIC AND EMOTION

One of the most soothing things in the world is to put your tongue to the roof of your mouth right behind the teeth and sing la, la, la, la, la, la, la. When we sing, not only do our vocal cords vibrate, but so do some of our bones. Hum with your mouth closed, and the sound travels to your inner ear directly through the skull, not bothering with the eardrum. Chant "om," or any other mantra, in a solid, prolonged tone, and you will feel the bones in your head, as well as the cartilage in your sternum, vibrate. It's like a massage from the inside, very soothing. Another reason it may be so conducive to meditation is that it creates an inner white noise, which cancels out extraneous noises, making your body a soundproof booth. Hebrew davening, in which the faithful bend and chant, bend and chant, has a similar effect. The drumbeat in a macumba ceremony seizes one in a crescendo of fury that climbs higher and higher, as if scaling the Himalaya of one's belief. All these sounds repeat hypnotically. Every religion has its own liturgy, which is important not just in its teachings but also because it forces the initiate to utter the same sounds over and over until they are ingrained in memory, until they become a kind of aural landscape. We are a species capable of adding things, ideas, and creative artifacts to the world, even sounds, and when we do, they become  as real a fact as a forest.

The odd thing about music is that we understand and respond to it without actually having to learn it. Each word in a verbal phrase tells something all by itself; it has a history and nuances. But musical tones mean something only in relation to one another, when they're teamed up. You needn't understand the tones to be moved. Say the words "It's a gift to be simple. It's a gift to be free. It's a gift to come down where we ought to be," and nothing much happens. You might even disagree with its minimalist doctrine. Yet if you add the tuneful Shaker music that goes with it (which Aaron Copland adapted so beautifully in Appalachian Spring [10]), its haunting melody, full of enough ebullience, joy, and conviction to inspire a whole village to put up a neighbor's barn in one afternoon, will truly captivate you. When I was in Florida, at an artist's colony on a tidal estuary, one of my writing students, also a professional whistler, regaled us one evening with a whistle concert, including this Shaker tune, "Simple Gifts," and for the next week you could hear people humming, whistling, or singing its gaily hammering rhythm. Catchy is the right word for such a melody; it hooks onto your subconscious and won't let go. Many hymns would thrill us even if they didn't have words, but, with words, they're a double score: emotional music tied to emotional messages. It works particularly well if the hymn has a dying fall in it, a musical swoon. In Blake's "Jerusalem," that swoon comes in the third stanza, in the second syllable of the word "desire," which you have to sing as a sigh to a lower note:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of de-sire!

Few desires sound as smoldery and secular as that one, especially if you're reminded of Cupid's arrow and the double meaning of a word like "quiver." In the Christmas hymn "O Holy Night," the swoon comes right after the word "fall," in the line "Fall on your knees," and just singing it enacts the supplication. Most often hymns soar steadily in slow sweeping steps, from lower to higher notes, as the singer climbs a mystical staircase onto progressively higher planes of feeling. "Amazing Grace" is a good example of that lighter-than-air sort of hymn, full of musical striving and stretching, as if one's spirit itself were being elongated. Think lofty thoughts and sing that elevating tune, and soon enough you will feel uplifted (even despite having to sing such unmelodious words as "wretch"). Hypnotists use a similar technique when they put people into a deeply suggestive meditative trance: They often count from one to ten a few times over, telling patients to imagine themselves climbing deeper and deeper down with each number.

Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words. A musical passage can make us cry, or send our blood pressure soaring. Asked to define the feeling, we say something vague: It made me sad. Or: It thrilled me. In Great Pianists Speak for Themselves, Vol. II, Paul Badura-Skoda says of Mozart's Fantasy in C minor:

What about the emotional content? What does the work say to you and me? Surprisingly, when I ask such questions in my master classes, I get rather tepid answers such as, "It is a serious work," or none at all. Then I am forced to exclaim, "Don't you realize, my dear fellows, that music is a language which communicates experience? And what experience! Life and death are involved in this Fantasy. May I tell you my personal interpretation of this Work? The opening phrase is a death symbol: The hour has struck -- there is no escape! The rest of the Fantasy is shock and anxiety, pages one and two, giving way then to a series of recollections: happy, serene ones, like the Adagio in D and the Andantino in B-flat major, or violent ones, full of anguish, like the two fast, modulating sections, until finally the original call returns. The inexorable fate seems to be now accepted, were it not for the heroic gesture of defiance at the very end.

Not all composers care for listeners to find such a clear program in their work, but people get so frustrated by the abstractions of music they try to elicit from it landscapes of emotions and events.

We find a profound sense of wholeness in the large, open structure of a classical composition, but it is a unity filled with tumult, with small comings and goings, with obstructed quests, with bouts of yearning and uncertainty, with insurpassable mountains, with interrupted passion, with knots that must be teased apart, with great washes of sentimentality, with idle ruminations, with strident blows to recover from, with love one hopes to consummate, with abruptness, disorder, but, ultimately, with reconciliation. One can re-create the emotional turmoil of an affair, a disappointment, a religious ecstasy, in as small a space as a concerto. Show, don't tell! writing teachers counsel their students. Say what one will, words rarely capture the immediate emotional assault of a piece of poignant music, which allows the composer to say not "It felt something like this," but rather "Here is the unnamable emotion I felt, and even my obsession with structure, proportion, and time, inside of you. " Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it in "The Dry Salvages," here is:

music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

There are still many questions to be answered about music and emotion. In his fascinating book on music theory, The Language of Music, Deryck Cooke, for example, offers a musical vocabulary, spelling out the emotional effects a composer knows he can create with certain sounds. But why is this so? Do we tend to respond to a minor seventh with "mournfulness" and to a major seventh with "violent longing" and to a minor second with "spiritless anguish" because we've formed the habit of responding to those sounds in that way, or is it something more intrinsic in our makeup? Listen to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and you'll hear pent-up, soaring, frustrated emotion of an intensity that may drive you to distraction. Yearning overflows the music like the meniscus on a too-full glass of wine, and this is how Wagner himself described the work:

... a tale of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honour, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living -- longing, longing, unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a anguishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption -- death, surcease, a sleep without awakening.

Another question we might ask, along with Cooke, is: If we transform music into emotion, "how closely does this emotion ... resemble the original emotion of Beethoven? ... There can only be one answer to this ... about as closely as the emotions of one human being can ever resemble those of another." And, because we're not Beethoven, we hear his joyous "Gloria" in the Missa Solemnis and feel joy, but probably not as passionately as he did when he wrote it. I suppose part of what's fascinating about creativity in any field is the author's necessity to share it with -- or impose it on -- the world. When he wrote the "Gloria," Beethoven underwent a volcanic, shriek-to-the-heavens joy, but instead of dancing around in delight, he "felt the need to convert it into a permanent, stored-up, transportable, and reproducible form of energy," as Cooke describes it, "a musical shout for joy, as it were, that all the world might hear, and still hear over and over again after he was dead and gone." The notes he jotted down "only ever were and only ever will be a command from Beethoven to blow his eternal shout for joy, together with a set of instructions ... exactly how to do so." When we proclaim that artists live on in their work, we're usually referring to the emotional steppingstones that lead through their lives, their disembodied moods and obsessions, but most of all their senses. Beethoven may be dead, but his sense of life at that moment lives in his score at this moment, at any moment.

IS MUSIC A LANGUAGE?

Music speaks to us so powerfully that many musicians and theorists think it may be an actual language, one that developed about the same time as speech. One Harvard psychologist believes strongly that music is a kind of intelligence, an aptitude like that for words or numbers, with which we're simply born. By experimenting with brain-damaged musicians, he's been able to locate musical ability in the right frontal region of the brain. In a related experiment, researchers at the UCLA School of Medicine gave volunteers a Sherlock Holmes story to read, then music to listen to, and recorded brain activity with a PET scan. Reading excited the left hemisphere of the brain, music the right. But knowing where our passion for music lies doesn't explain how it got there. No matter how far back in history we look, we find human beings making and listening to music, but how and why did our passion for it begin? Why do we feel driven to make music? Why does music differ so much between cultures? Why do many people feel the need to live in cocoons of organized sound, to keep music close at hand? Why do we respond to music's array of abstract sounds with intense, sometimes violently felt emotions? If music evolved along with spoken language, why did it evolve? What was its survival value? Music is meaningful, as anyone listening to a soulful symphony or an opera by Wagner would readily admit, but what is its meaning?

How do we assign a particular meaning to a piece of music? Why does music make sense even to people who don't play instruments themselves, and even claim to be tone-deaf, people who aren't particularly "musical"? Most of all: How do we understand the language of music without learning it? For the moment, the reasonable answer to that last question is that, like the ability to smile or analyze, it's deeply hereditary. At some point in our past it was important enough that all human beings born, no matter whether Bengalese, Inuit, or Quechua, no matter whether blind, left-handed, or freckled, were not merely capable of making music; they required music to add meaning to their lives. The newest infant responds to music, and by the time a child can toddle it can already sing songs, and even make them up. To a certain extent, music is also learned. Children in China learn to like music with small intervals and subtly changing pitches; children in Jamaica learn to like syncopated ballads; and children in Africa learn to like music with fast, intricate rhythms. One's musical preferences can be willful. Generations tend to define themselves by a music that differs from that of their parents, who usually describe the new music as noise, obscene, a waste of time, and lacking in any art. When the waltz first came in, it was thought avant-garde and scandalous. [11] After all, it caused men and women to hold on to each other and move rapidly, clinging wildly while their hair flew, their petticoats fluttered, and their hips rocked in unison. The same was true of swing music, which the older generations of the time found barbaric, repetitious, or just silly. What were they to make of lyrics like: "It must be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that"? And the tango had its own sneaky, insinuating rhythm and a sexy dance step in which a woman wraps her leg around a man's leg as if he were a tree and she a vanilla orchid's climbing vine. The words that accompanied all this carnal mayhem were usually sensuous, violent, and extravagantly heartrending. Here are the lyrics to a typical Argentinean tango, taken from Philip Hamburger's Curious World:

All my life, I have been a good friend to everyone. I have given away everything I own and now I am all alone, ill, in my dirty and gloomy small room in my neighborhood slum, coughing blood. No one comes to see me now except my dear mother. Ah, now I realize my cruelty to her. I am at the point of death and I recognize my love for her. She is the only one who really cares for me.

In recent times, science fiction has proposed music as the Esperanto of the universe, a language which even far-flung creatures might share. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is perhaps the best example of a sci-fi story based on that premise. A single chord is a calling card and, at that, a mighty simple chord, based on universally shared mathematics. This is an old idea, going back to the Greeks and the music of the spheres. There has always been a connection between music and mathematics, which is why scientists have often been inordinately fond of music, especially of composers such as Bach. The composer Borodin was first and mainly a scientist, who discovered a method for combining fluorine and carbon atoms to produce new compounds. We're indebted to his inspiration for Teflon, Freon, and a variety of aerosols. His hobby was composing music. At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, there is a concert hall among the offices and labs. Some West German physicists are studying the relationship between musical composition and the mathematics of fractals. Why is music mathematical? Because, as Pythagoras of Samos discovered in the fifth century B.C., notes can be precisely measured along a vibrating string, and the intervals between notes expressed as ratios. Of course, people sang what pleased them; they didn't decide to sing in ratios. This revelation, that mathematics was secretly determining the beauty of music, must have seemed just one more indisputable proof to the mathematically minded Greeks that the universe was an orderly, logical, knowable structure. The Greeks used to play or sing their scales downward, from high to low. We prefer to sing or play ours upward, from low to high. This change really began with Christianity and the Gregorian chant, and I think it came about as a result of religious uplift and a desire for transcendence. Science fiction argues that if music is mathematical then it must be universal. For interstellar space, don't bother with verbal messages; send a fugue. To be safe, send both. When Voyager I was launched in 1977, it carried assorted messages for other planetarians to find, including a record that contains miscellaneous sounds of Earth as well as Earth's music, and instructions as to how to play the record.

Does music, then, have a grammar, like language, or its own set of mathematical laws? If it's principally mathematical, how come mathematically illiterate people still revel in it? In an essay in New Literary History in 1971, composer George Rochberg argued that "music is a secondary 'language' system whose logic is closely related to the primary alpha logic of the central nervous system itself, i.e., of the human body. If I am right, then it follows that the perception of music is simply the process reversed, i.e., we listen with our bodies, with our nervous systems and their primary parallel/serial memory functions." We listen with our bodies. Indeed, it's hard to keep our bodies still when we hear music -- our feet begin tapping, our hands begin swaying, we pick up an invisible baton, or gyrate in some sketchy dance movements. In Peter Schaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, Salieri, the established and rival composer, says:

It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers -- bassoons and basset horns -- like a rusty squeezebox.... And then suddenly, high above it, sounded a single note on the oboe. It hung there unwavering, piercing me through, till breath could hold no longer, and a clarinet withdrew it out of me, and sweetened it to a phrase of such delight it had me trembling.

A musical note is just pulsating air stimulating the organs in our ears. It may have various qualities, like volume, pitch, or duration, but it is still just pulsating air. That's why the deaf often enjoy music, which they perceive as attractive vibration. Helen Keller "heard" Caruso sing by pressing her fingers to his lips and throat, and she writes beautifully about holding a radio and listening to a symphony concert, responding to the different instruments as they joined in. An oscilloscope can make the tones visible. Since it displays vibration, it can reveal the acoustical properties of the tone, but there is no way it can judge the musical experience. When Duke Ellington plays piano, I hear many of the pastel, water-ice phrases of Ravel, but how could I begin to describe an Ellington piece? If you haven't heard a tone before, there's no word that will reproduce it or faithfully conjure it up. Teddy Wilson, who played piano with the Duke's band for a while, remembers how Ellington used to play the dance rhythm with his left hand while with his right he created a splash of excitement, which he describes picturesquely as "like throwing colored sand up into the air."

Countries speak their own unique languages, but whole civilizations enjoy certain forms of music, which we, perhaps too chauvinistically, refer to as western music, Oriental music, African music, Islamic music, and so on. What we mean is that each civilization seems to prefer hearing tones arranged in certain patterns according to slightly different laws. For the past 2,500 years or so, Western music has been obsessed with one polyphonic arrangement of tones, but there are many other arrangements, each as profoundly meaningful as the next and yet incomprehensible to outsiders. "The barriers between music and music are far more impassable than language barriers," Victor Zuckerkandl writes in The Sense of Music. "We can translate from any language into any other language; yet the mere idea of translating, say, Chinese music into the Western tonal idiom is obvious nonsense." Why is that so? According to the composer Felix Mendelssohn, it's not because music is too vague, as one might think, but rather too precise to translate into other tonal idioms, let alone into words. Words are arbitrary. There's no direct link between them and the emotions they represent. Instead, they lasso an idea or emotion and drag it into view for a moment. We need words to corral how we feel and think; they allow us to reveal our inner lives to one another, as well as to exchange goods and services. But music is a controlled outcry from the quarry of emotions all humans share. Though most foreign words must be translated to be understood, we instinctively understand whimpering, crying, shrieking, joy, cooing, sighing, and the rest of our caravan of cries and calls. I believe that, in time, they led to two forms of organized sound -- words (rational sounds for objects, emotions, and ideas) and music (nonrational sounds for feelings). As Cooke observes, ''both awaken in the hearer an emotional response; the difference is that a word awakens both an emotional response and a comprehension of its meaning, whereas a note, having no meaning, awakens only an emotional response." What sort of response can a few notes of music awaken? Awe, rage, wonder, restlessness, defeat, stoicism, love, patriotism.... "What passion cannot Music raise and quell?" John Dryden asks in his "A Song for St. Cecelia's Day," and then goes on to say:

The soft complaining flute,
In dying notes, discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute.

Sharp violins proclaim
Their jealous pangs and desperation,
Fury, frantic indignation,
Depth of pains, and height of passion,
For the fair, disdainful dame.

In a letter to his father, written in Vienna on September 26, 1781 Mozart said of his Abduction from the Seraglio:

Now, as for Belmonte's aria in A major -- "O wie angstlich, O wie feurig" -- do you know how it is expressed? -- even the throbbing of his loving heart is indicated -- the two violins in octaves.... One sees, the trembling -- the wavering -- one sees how his swelling breast heaves -- this is expressed by a crescendo -- one hears the whispering and the sighing -- which is expressed by the first violins, muted with a flute in unison.

For Mozart, music was not only a passionately intense intellectual medium, it was one through which he felt, indeed conducted, precise emotions. The theme of the first movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony mimics his cardiac arrhythmia, and therefore laments his mortality. He died soon after, in the middle of writing his Tenth Symphony.

Of course, there is an odd sense in which music can't really be heard at all. Much of musical composition is tonal problem solving on a very complex scale, an effort undertaken entirely in the mind of the composer. Not only is the orchestra not necessary for that creative feat of legerdemain, it most likely will produce an inferior version of the music the composer imagines. How could Beethoven write the Ninth Symphony, so brilliantly when he was deaf, people wonder. The answer is that it wasn't necessary for Beethoven to "hear" the music. Not as sound, anyway. He heard it flawlessly and much more intimately in his mind. Everyone touched by a piece of music hears it differently. The composer hears it perfectly in the resonant chambers of his imagination. The general audience hears it emotionally, without understanding its craft. Other composers hear it with an insider's knowledge of form, structure, history, and incunabula. The members of an orchestra -- arranged according to instrument -- hear it boomingly, from "inside," but not as a balanced work.

Some animals and people speak in music alone. For example, on the island of Gomera in the Canaries, descendants of an aboriginal people called the Guanches, about whom little is known except that they lived in caves and mummified their dead, use an ancient whistling language to communicate across the sprawling valleys. They trill and warble a little like quails and other birds, but more elaborately, and, from as far away as nine miles, they hear one another and converse as their ancestors did. Silbo Gomero the idiom is called, and some islanders mix it with Spanish vocabulary to make a creole of whistle and word. They find this hybrid language precise enough.

In Australia, the aboriginals have divided up their land according to a maze of invisible roads, or Songlines, across which they travel to conduct the normal affairs of their lives. Closest perhaps to the way in which bird song maps out a territory, the Songlines are ancient and magical, but they are also precise map references. The continent is crisscrossed by a labyrinth of Songlines, and the aboriginals can sing their way along them. As Bruce Chatwin describes the process in The Songlines:

Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin's "Funeral March." If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnell escarpments, you'd have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsodies".

Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor's feet.... An expert songman, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge -- and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was.

When words and music meet in poetry or in song, each enhances the effect of the other. As our emotions flare, our speech naturally becomes more lyrical. "All passionate language does of itself become musical," Thomas Carlyle observes, "the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song." This is never more evident than in the sermons of fundamentalist preachers, or the rhetoric of strident political activists, or the stanzas of Russian poets, who sing their verse. Virtually all movies these days have soundtracks and background music. The assumption must be that we're not competent to hear the world, and that we need music to supply us with quick, relevant emotions. Is this because we don't think the world is worth listening to? Is it because filmmakers wish to combine words and music for the most intense emotional effect? Or is it just that they think we're too lazy, or too shallow, or too numb to have an emotional response to what we're viewing?

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Some facets of our biology are ideally shaped for music, which pours through them as beautifully as light through a stained-glass window. William Congreve was right: "Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast." Over the years, many people have slurred that aphorism to read beast, not breast, but Congreve didn't mean that lions are tamed by music, or cobras hypnotized by the snake charmer's flute (anyway, it's the movement of the flute and the charmer himself, not its sound, which fascinates the snake; snakes are deaf). He meant that music can calm the hearts of the most bloodthirsty of us, even against our will. Most often, our emotions are private things. We bottle them up like so many jars of peach preserves that we store on a top shelf in a hidden pantry; then, in a crisis, we reach for them, often taking off the lids on our emotions through song. People who sing and wail at wakes know how therapeutic this can be. We often vent great passion by breaking into song. Strangers who seem to share nothing, not even the same culture, can sing with a mournfulness or jubilation all understand. Manfried Klein, an Australian physiological psychologist, conducted studies in which he played passages of Bach and then measured the hand-muscle responses of a group of volunteers. Regardless of their cultural background (Japanese and American businessmen, Australian aboriginals, and others), all responded to the same passages of Bach in the same way. Next he measured hand-muscle responses when they felt joy, anger, and other strong emotions. The graphs plotted for the emotional states corresponded to those for the passages of Bach. Music seems to produce specific emotional states that all people share, and as a result, it allows us to communicate our most intimate emotions without having to talk about or define them in a loose net of words.

Our pupils dilate and our endorphin level rises when we sing; music engages the whole body, as well as the brain, and there is a healing quality to it. In World War II, it was discovered that even comatose patients could respond to music. Doctors and nurses use music to help them reach handicapped children, especially children with multiple handicaps. Autistic or learning-disabled children, who find speaking an insurmountable hurdle, frequently have less trouble communicating first in song, then transferring their facility to speech. Because music can be so uplifting and recharging, it encourages sedentary people to exercise longer and more often. The usual choice is jazz, swing, pop, or rock, whose rhythms jar our natural heart rhythm and make our blood pressure rise; we feel revved up. Music can also calm. Some therapists specialize in a course called "Guided Imagery in Music," working with blindfolded patients who are led into a relaxed state where fruitful images may form. In some cardiac intensive-care wards, angina patients listen to classical music as part of their recovery process. It both relaxes them and draws a musical blind down over the frightening scenes around them. Some doctors prescribe music for cancer patients, the elderly, the emotionally disturbed or mentally ill. And there's a large international organization of music therapists, whose most recent annual conference included sessions on "The Use of Music in Teaching Reading to Hearing-Impaired Children," "The Aging Nervous System: Problems for Music Therapists in Geropsychiatry," "Promoting Psychosocial Adjustment in Pediatric Burns through Music Therapy," "Music Therapy in the Rehabilitation of Traumatically Brain-Injured Persons," and many other intriguing-sounding topics.

To understand why music pleases us, we must ask why we feel pleasure at all. What we perceive as "pleasure" may be just the thrill of shooting the rapids on our body's "river of reward," as chemist James Olds nicknamed it. It was Olds who, when he was conducting experiments with rats, first located the brain's pleasure center. Like the rest of the body, the river of reward is a strange alloy of electricity and chemicals, and there are various ways to trigger or quiet it artificially, using electrodes or drugs. From the outset, we've evolved through a thick tapestry of rewards, so it shouldn't surprise us that quiz shows, contests, medals, and award-donating programs of every conceivable kind dominate our culture, or that addictions are so hard to break. Reward, one of the central players in the brain, wears many masks. Like a melody, it can appear in a higher or lower key, at a faster or slower pace, on a wide array of instruments; it can be simple or elaborate, and still be recognizable.

In the Addiction Research Laboratory at Stanford University, a woman sits in a soundproof room and listens to her favorite music through headphones. This happens to be a concerto by Rachmaninoff, which builds to one orgasmic crescendo after another, but other student volunteers will choose other classics, pop songs, or jazz. The choice is irrelevant as long as it sends shivers of delight through the listener. Tingles usually start at the back of the neck, creep over the face and across the scalp, dart along the shoulders, trickle down the arms, and then finally shiver up the spine. Isn't it odd that intense emotion or esthetic beauty gives us chills? When this happens, the woman in the soundproof room signals with one hand. Because she feels thrilled quite often while listening to music, she's put into a second group and tested again. This time, she's given naloxone, a drug that blocks endorphins, our natural opiates. Others being tested are given placebos. Van Cliburn begins his lusty performance of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, then sweeps into the tight, mounting rhythms of the first crescendo, which has always made her tingle. This time the music just lies flat in her mind. Her body feels nothing. The rapture is gone.

CATHEDRALS IN SOUND

For a long time, western music was homophonic, or "same voiced," which doesn't mean that only one person sang at a time but rather that there was one melody line or voice, and the rest of the music was harmony supporting it. Usually the main melody was the highest pitched, and identified the piece. Plainsong, the religious music of the fourth century, required no musical accompaniment at all; one voice sang the simple melody to Latin words. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I decided to govern music making; as a result, the Gregorian chant evolved, which was sung in unison. In the Middle Ages, people made the extraordinary discovery that many tones could be made at once without canceling one another out or resulting in mere noise, and polyphony was born. It seems impossible that it could have taken so long to reach that now-obvious conclusion. But music is not like vision. If you mix blue and yellow together, you lose the individual colors and make a new one; tones, on the other hand, may be combined without losing their individuality. What you end up with is a chord, something new, which has its own sound but in which the individual tones are also distinct and identifiable. Its not a blending or, as one might expect when one hears a number of people talking at once, just noise, but something of a different order. A chord "is something like an idea," philosopher of music Victor Zuckerkandl writes, "an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea." For colors to stay separate without blending, they have to occupy space next to one another. They can't occupy the same space. But notes can occupy the same space and remain separate. As Zuckerkandl reminds us, polyphony "coincided with the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, and the birth of harmony with the culmination of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern science and mathematics: that is, the two great changes in our understanding of space." [12] This may seem an odd observation, given the fact that vision is a spatial art, and music a temporal one, which "unfolds in time," a dynamic art that uses many devices, including syncopation, in which notes appear like hobgoblins where you don't expect them, and vanish just as startlingly; or like repetition, which snatches us back to an earlier pattern or flings us forward as if on the crest of a wave. "Music is not just in time," Zuckerkandl writes. "It does something with time.... It is as if the even flow of time were cut up by the regularly recurrent sounds into short stretches of equal duration: the tones mark time." They stain time, then they reassemble it into small groups like so many lengths of cloth that have been dyed separately. At least our western music does; we're used to measured time in music. When polyphony came in, the only way it could make sense was if each of the voices kept the same time. But if we look back about 1,500 years or so, we find unmeasured time in music. A Gregorian chant, like poetry, simply improvised time. Even today, unless everyone used the same metronome it would be hard to agree on the right beat in measured time, so the beats agree with one another, not with an absolute. Ravel's mournful "Pavane for a Dead Princess" can sound lugubrious and heartrending when interpreted by one conductor, but almost sprightly by comparison when we hear a recording of it played by Ravel himself.

If you look at the interior of an early Romanesque church, say Saint-Etienne in Burgundy, which was built between 1083 and 1097, you find a massive architectural style with a high vaulted ceiling, parallel walls, and a long arcade -- an ideal space for processions, but also for the reverberations of the Gregorian chant, which fills it like a dark wine poured into a heavy vessel. On the other hand, in a Gothic cathedral such as Notre Dame in Paris, with its nooks, corridors, statues, staircases, niches, and complex fugues in stone, a Gregorian chant would be broken up, fragmented. But at Saint-Etienne many voices can rise, mingle, and fill the elaborate space with glorious song. [13]

Western music has structures reminiscent of poetic verse forms. A sonata is as highly structured as the Malay verse form called a pantoum. The unstated warrant for the composer, as for the poet, is to stretch the limits of the form, to try to fly within the narrow corridors of a cage. That tension between the bright prison of a form and the freedom of imagination is what artistic genius is all about. Berlioz, for example, in his beautifully sensuous opera Beatrice et Benedict, created music both grandiose and intimate. The duets shimmer with close, soulful harmony, the arias surge with an obsessive yearning that at some point breaks into melodic sobbing and sighing. It's an emotional ordeal that's personal and yet also larger than any one moment or heart. Zuckerkandl asks: "Who is man, that this almost-nothing, this 'nothing but tones' could become one of his most significant experiences?"

In the Argentinean film Man Facing Southeast, Rantes, an extraterrestrial playing an organ in the chapel at an insane asylum, says, "It's only a series of vibrations, but they have a good effect on the men. Where does the magic lie? In the instruments? In the one who wrote it? In me? In those that hear it? I cannot understand what they feel. Yes. I can understand. I just can't feel it." Later he explains that sensations upset the people of his planet, who can be destroyed by a catchy saxophone melody or a luscious perfume. He is not the only emissary from his planet sent to ours to investigate our one weapon against which they have no defense: human stupidity. Sometimes the agents lose their way, become traitors, destroy themselves. A young, beautiful woman, Beatriz, who visits him in the asylum, we ultimately learn, is one of those lost agents who have become dangerously infatuated by the beauty of human sensory experience, unhinged by hearing a clarinet solo, "corrupted by sunsets, by certain fragrances ..."

EARTH CALLING

We think of music as an invention, something that fulfills an inner longing, perhaps, to be an integral part of the sounds of nature. But not everyone perceives music in that way. About eighty miles north of Bangkok, in the foothills of Wat Tham Krabok, is a Buddhist temple where a group of concerned monks help drug addicts to recover. They use a combination of herbal therapy, counseling, and vocational training. One of the monks, Phra Charoen, a sixty-one-year old naturalist by disposition, also busies himself in the music room, where, with electronic equipment, he records the electrical phenomena of the earth, which he then translates into musical notation. Charoen and his team of monks and nuns trace the fluctuating sound patterns onto transparent paper, then transfer the graphs to thin strips of cloth that can be catalogued and rolled up for storage. The graphs match up with the traditional eighteen-bar phrases of Thai music. These "pure melodies" are then played on a Thai instrument with an electronic organ as backup, and the result is recorded. Charoen's group are not musicians themselves, but they believe that music is not an imaginary thing, nor even something produced only by people; music falls out of the earth's rocks and roots, its trees and rain. [14] One western woman wrote that "under the temple trees, with birdsong filling the musical pauses, the visitor sits ... and hears the earth of ancient Ayuthaya sing, or the stones of the Grand Palace, the sidewalks of Bangkok -- or the cracks in the Hua Lampong Railway Station forecourt."

This would no doubt strike a familiar chord with the American composer Charles Dodge, who, in June and September 1970, recorded "the sun playing on the magnetic field of the earth" by feeding magnetic data for 1961 into a specially programmed computer and synthesizer. The performance has a subtitle -- "realizations in computed electronic sound" -- and three "scientific associates" are prominently mentioned on the album's cover. The result is at times booming, at times squeaking, but consists mainly of shimmering, cascadingly melodic violin and woodwind sounds. Harmonious and breathy, they often create small flourishes and partial fanfares; they don't seem random at all, but rather energized by what, for lack of a better word, I'll call entelechy, that dynamic restlessness working purposefully toward a goal we associate with composed music. I also have a recording of Jupiter's magnetic field, a gift from the TRW corporation to visitors to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the encounters of Voyager I and II with Jupiter in 1980. An electric-field detector aboard the spacecraft recorded a stream of ions, the chirping of heated electrons, the vibrating of charged particles, lightning whistling across the planet's atmosphere, all accompanied by an aurora we hear as a hiss. Gas from a volcano on the moon Io adds a tinkling and a banshee-like scream of radio waves. Fascinating as this concert is, and useful to scientists, it doesn't sound like music, nor is it supposed to, but music could easily be woven from or around it. Artists have always looked to nature for their organic forms, and so it's not surprising to find a rather pop-sounding composition called "Pulsar." Over four hundred pulsars are known, at various distances from Earth. Using the recorded rhythmic pulses of once-massive stars about 15,000 light-years away, the composer offers Caribbean-like melodies, in which his "drummer from outer space," as he puts it, supplies percussion. The pulsars are identified on the record sleeve by number -- 083 -- 45 on side one and 0329+54 on side two -- as if they were indeed side men who sat in on the session. On another occasion, Susumu Ohno, a California geneticist, assigned a different note to each of the four chemical bases in DNA (do for cytosine, re and mi for adenine, fa and sol for guanine, and la and ti for thymine) and then played the somewhat limited-sounding result. Our cells vibrate; there is music in them, even if we don't hear it. Different animals hear some frequencies better than we do. Perhaps a mite, lost in the canyon of a crease of skin, hears our cells ringing like a mountain of wind chimes every time we move.

When the earth calls, it rumbles and thunders; it creaks. In towns like Moodus, Connecticut, swarms of small earthquakes rattle the residents for months on end. The seismic center of the quake storm is a very small area only a few hundred yards wide near the north end of town. I'm amazed there haven't been horror films about a devil's sinkhole, or some equal abomination. Ground grumblings of this sort are now called "Moodus noises," but long ago, when the Wangunk Indians chose the area for their powwows because it was there the earth spoke to them, they called the spot Machemoodus, which meant "place of noises," and their myths told how a god made the noises by blowing angrily into a cave. Cluster earthquakes can sound as light as corks popping or as relentless as cavalry charging. "Thunder underfoot" is how some have described it. "It's like you got hit on the bottom of your feet with a sledgehammer," one resident complains. The Moodus quakes are noisier than most because they're shallower (only about a mile deep; quakes along the San Andreas Fault are usually six to nine miles deep). Normal deep quakes lose much of their voice to the ground, which dampens and stills it. It may also be that the earth around Moodus simply conducts sound well. Since the town is located between two nuclear power plants, its residents grow anxious when the quakes rage for months, shifting and cracking the earth and sounding like a chronically rattling pantry.

At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a pipe organ plays the sounds of San Francisco harbor as tide sloshes through its hollows, ringing with a thick brassy murmur. Now that the Russians and the Americans are planning a joint trip to Mars, I very much hope they'll take a set of panpipes along with them, so perfect for the windswept surface of Mars. Pipes would be an especially good choice because, although every culture on our planet makes music, each culture seems to invent drums and flutes before anything else. Something about the idea of breath or wind entering a piece of wood and filling it roundly with a vital cry -- a sound -- has captivated us for millennia. It's like the spirit of life playing through the whole length of a person's body. It's as if we could breathe into the trees and make them speak. We hold a branch in our hands, blow into it, and it groans, it sings.

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1.  Carol Burke, a folklorist researching military marching chants, sent me this typical one. Most of them, she informs me, are equally crude, repetitive, and insulting.

Rich girl uses Vaseline
Poor girl uses lard
But Lulu uses axle grease
And bangs 'em twice as hard

Bang, bang Lulu
Bang away all day
Bang, bang Lulu
Who ya gonna bang today?

Rich girl uses tampons
Poor girl uses rags
But Lulu's cunt's so goddamn big
She uses burlap bags.

Bang, bang Lulu
Bang away all day, etc.

2.  A creation myth found in the Popol Vuh, a book sacred to the Maya, explains that the first human creatures to appear on earth were "Jaguar of Sweet Laughter," "Black Jaguar," "Jaguar of the Night," and "Mahucutah, the Not-Brushed," with one thing in common: all could speak.

3.  Another Saxon word for having sex was swyve, which the British still sometimes use.

4.  Ultimately documents began doubling up their terms to include both French and Saxon, and that's how legalese has stayed to this day, as in the phrases' "let and hindrance," or "keep and maintain."

5.  Research has shown that a quiet woman's voice got a pilot's attention faster than a man speaking quietly or a man or woman speaking loudly.

6.  Finnish researchers studying diet and heart disease discovered that a low-fat diet can improve hearing.  Apparently, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, and drinking too much caffeine, which can slow up the circulation, limit blood flow through the ears, too. When rats on low-fat diets were exposed to loud noises they didn't have as much ear damage.

7.  From a letter to Dr. J. Kerr Love, March 31, 1910, from the souvenir program commemorating Helen Keller's visit to Queensland Adult Deaf and Dumb Mission in 1948.

8.  In a letter to the editor of the National Geographic (December 1989), Armand E. Singer reports that "I was riding an elephant in the Terai jungle of Nepal when I heard, so low-pitched as to be almost inaudible, a vague thudding like that of a distant diesel generator.  It turned out to be from my elephant, expressing fear of a nearby rhino whose scent it had caught."

9.  Just as there are niches in the sky, there are altitudes that various birds, bats, insects, pollen, and other fliers prefer (blue jays fly low by day when they migrate; shorebirds fly high by night), so that they won't be in extreme competition with one another.

10.  He wrote this music for Martha Graham while living in a Hollywood block house with no windows.

11.  Lord Byron wrote a famous poem about the waltz, whose excesses he admired.

12.  "Any apace is as much a part of the instrument as the instrument itself." -- Pauline Oliveros

13.  In The Hurt of the Hunter, Laurens van der Post reports that Bushmen speak of someone's death like this: "The sound which used to ring in the sky for him no longer rings."

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