<p>I would love to tell you that I hear music in all things.</p>
<p>I would love to tell you, as a composer, that I hear in the thunder timpani, in the wind soft flutes, or in the rain a gentle snapping of fingers or rustling of paper; that there is some divine rhythm beneath all things that those gifted by God with talent or who have studied for years are able to hear.</p>
<p>I would love to tell you that the everyday world is filled with music. I would love to tell you that to hear a car start bears some greater meaning or that the slow ramp up of a flywheel moves me. It doesn’t though. Its noise, and even when it’s ordered, I don’t feel any sort of savant connection to some deeper source.</p>
<p>I would also love to tell you that the patterns in my dogs’ wet fur or windswept snow that has melted and refrozen is the written form of that same language of angels that shows up in the everyday sounds of the world, but these things aren’t music, they aren’t deeper patterns. It’s all just bullshit. It’s all just sound. White noise or pink noise or random expressions told through vibrations in the air.</p>
<p>Did you know that the ear is actually really cool?</p>
<p>So sound comes at you from all angles, and it bounces off the ridges of your ear and your earlobes, and all of the subtle, fine hairs there on your skin move just enough that your brain can register them moving, even if you can’t fell them. That’s how you can tell if a sound is coming from in front of or behind you, by which hairs vibrate.</p>
<p>Then the sound bounces around down your ear canal until it hits the eardrum, which is this super thin membrane. Attached to that are the three auditory ossicles, these teeny tiny bones that move with the eardrum when it vibrates hearing sound. They have a fulcrum action going for them, where the one attached to the eardrum rocks the middle one, which then moves the inner one attached to the oval window, leading into the inner ear.</p>
<p>The inner ear is this spiral shape that’s filled with fluid and has <em>another</em> thin membrane of skin running through it, but this one is filled with tiny holes. Growing up from one side of the cochlea are these very fine hairs that pass through those holes, and when the <em>stapes</em>, the innermost of those three tiny bones, moves and causes the fluid in there to move as well, the hairs move through the holes and cause the smallest bit of static electricity in the process. </p>
<p>That current is what your nerves pick up on. It’s what your brain registers as sound. It’s all a super fancy way of translating the physical to the electrical to the conceptual.</p>
<p>It’s beautiful. It lets you hear that thunder, that wind, that rain. It lets you judge the timing of your car starting. It lets you hum along with that flywheel spinning up. It’s enough to make a believer out of one, if you happen to have that propensity.</p>
<p>All that beautiful simplicity that grew into place over however many millions of years.</p>
<p>And all these things that you pick up on, all these sounds that are undoubtedly beautiful, random or not, they’re not music, they are moods.</p>
<p>There is a difference between music and a mood. Perhaps some composers hear the music in the everyday world, but I was never one of them. Moods, sure. Moods out the wazoo. I gain endless satisfaction on the perfect click of a switch, or a little thrill of excitement on hearing the three-phase converter’s flywheel spinning up.</p>
<p>Maybe John Corigliano felt that, ‘cause like, that bit in <em>Circus Maximus</em> when all the brass and winds come down on this long glissando is supposed to be a siren or something, but all I can hear is the mood that goes along with my husband getting so fucking frustrated at his machines that he turns the converter off and stomps up the stairs and I’m supposed to comfort him but I don’t know how.</p>
<p>The sound of wind coming down over the Flatirons in Boulder made me feel hollowed out — and I know that doesn’t sound like an emotion, but I promise it was — like some sort of pipe in an organ, like the wind was blowing <em>through me</em>. It was not quite longing, not quite <em>saudade</em>. It was like if the unbidden thought of “is astral projection just a wish with very visual imagery?” were a mood. I would see myself, with my arms outstretched, borne away over the valley to the east of the Flatirons, looking down over the quiet and dark highway 93, past the cement factory, until I was set down amidst the wind turbine testing range, because wasn’t that where the wind wanted to go?</p>
<p>You know.</p>
<p>Not music, but a feeling. Music always has feeling, but not always the other way around.</p>
<p>I don’t hear music in the everyday world, but every single bit of music contains within it a mood and every single sound has a feeling to it. There’s overlap, but feelings exist in silence, too. Feelings exist in that dusty lavender color that I can never seem to recreate. Feelings exist in the softness of the dog, freshly bathed.</p>
<p>I wish I could tell you that I hear music in all of the sounds of the every day world, but I don’t. All I do is feel things.</p>
