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Music with cellist Matthew Pierce
164 Plays1 year ago
What do musicians see in their mind’s eyes and ears while playing? How do they use that to create the impact of the music on the audience?
Vynn and Francis interview professional cellist Matthew Pierce who is aphantasic - he has no visual imagination. He uses his audio, spatial, emotional and bodily imagination to perform music.
Matthew goes into detail about learning to play an instrument, using different kinds of imagination to train the subconscious to control the body while playing.
How does the body move while playing a cello and a piano? Where do you need to visually pay attention while in an orchestra? What are they different layers of habit that are built up while learning an instrument?
To finish, there’s a discussion about a lack of visual imagination making it harder to do paperwork.
After this interview, Matthew composed, performed and recorded the intro and outro music for “Imagine an Apple”. Thanks Matthew, it’s very much appreciated! Check out his other musical work in the links below.
Timestamps:
01:33 Inner audio experience
04:16 Spatial imagination
05:56 Teaching playing an instrument
09:40 Body position while playing cello
11:09 Imagining what you want to play
15:11 Difference with visual imagination
16:19 Places you look while playing in orchestra
18:35 Reading music as sound vs notation
23:21 Musical keys, embodiment of playing
30:52 Imagining audio of an orchestral piece
36:15 Imagining emotions of audience
41:50 Different kinds of mind’s eyes
44:39 Paperwork when aphantasic
50:02 Vynn and Francis chat about the episode
Show Links:
- Piercello’s Progress - Matthew’s email newsletter on Substack
- Matthew’s Twitter account
- Matthew’s YouTube channel
- Prelude from J. S. Bach's Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello
Contact Details:
Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences!
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Email: imagine@flourish.org
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Appearance
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Imagine of Apple, the podcast about our inner mental experiences.
00:00:05
Speaker
I'm Francis and my co-host is Vin.
00:00:08
Speaker
So Vin, what have we got going today?
00:00:10
Speaker
So today for our guests, we have Matt, who is a phantastic cellist, someone who plays the cello.
00:00:19
Speaker
And he's about to talk us through his process and what goes in his mind whenever he does music, whenever he imagines music and whenever he imagines playing music.
00:00:32
Speaker
Music
00:00:41
Speaker
Matthew, welcome to our podcast.
00:00:43
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:44
Speaker
Glad to be here.
00:00:45
Speaker
Awesome.
00:00:46
Speaker
I think the cello can say hello as well.
00:00:49
Speaker
All right.
00:00:51
Speaker
The cello will introduce itself in just a moment of Bach here for you.
00:00:55
Speaker
This is early morning Bach, mind you, so we'll see what comes out.
00:00:58
Speaker
But that's the intent.
00:01:00
Speaker
So anyway, that's a little Bach.
00:01:23
Speaker
Incredible.
00:01:23
Speaker
I wish we had more people who are musicians to come on board.
00:01:28
Speaker
That sounded amazing.
Experiencing Music with Aphantasia
00:01:31
Speaker
Thank you.
00:01:32
Speaker
So like the first question I would like to ask you is what your inner audio experience is like whenever you begin to play or just imagine music in your head.
00:01:45
Speaker
Sure.
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, I think for me, it's always been a bit of an oddity.
00:01:51
Speaker
You know, many people will
00:01:53
Speaker
hear the lyrics and really respond to the lyrics, but I don't pick up words terribly well.
00:01:58
Speaker
And some people will see music as sort of colors and visuals, but I don't do those very well either as an aphantasic.
00:02:05
Speaker
And to be precise, for the people who are unfamiliar with that term, it's a relatively recent coinage.
00:02:13
Speaker
It came up in an article maybe five or 10 years ago, possibly for the first time.
00:02:16
Speaker
Certainly that's when it started to become popular.
00:02:19
Speaker
And what it refers to is nothing wrong with the actual vision itself.
00:02:24
Speaker
It's just that the vision happens to be unconnected to the ability to pull up an image of what you have just seen in your head.
00:02:32
Speaker
So I have visual memory, but I can't access it in real time.
00:02:38
Speaker
And I will recognize things when I see them, but I can't imagine a picture in my head.
00:02:44
Speaker
Just absolutely nothing happens.
00:02:46
Speaker
And for me, what that tends to result in is a sort of an architectural change
00:02:53
Speaker
mock-up, like if you imagine sort of a computer line drawing of a building where you've got all these corners and edges and angles, but nothing on the face is actually filled in.
00:03:04
Speaker
It's kind of like that.
00:03:06
Speaker
And so if I kind of rotate that and flow through it with my sense of perspective, it's sort of like sonar in the dark in a cathedral, right?
00:03:15
Speaker
Then I have this architecturally evolving sense, and that is how I process music.
00:03:21
Speaker
So for example, in the Bach that I was just playing, there's a sort of a foundation, right?
00:03:26
Speaker
The bottom notes are setting up a sort of a foundation or a basement.
00:03:33
Speaker
And that the chord progression as you move through different chords is sort of like, I don't know, moving down a hallway that takes you a particular place.
00:03:43
Speaker
So this room connects to that one, and then there's a staircase down there.
00:03:47
Speaker
And so it's a very architectural sense of,
00:03:51
Speaker
not just in a volume defined, but in a sense of, oh, there has to be a flying buttress over there to hold up this rooftop, right?
00:03:58
Speaker
We're talking balance of forces and stresses in addition to spaces.
00:04:02
Speaker
So that's how I get music.
00:04:04
Speaker
And that's probably why I drew myself into orchestra playing, because there is so much architecture in the music of a symphonic piece.
00:04:15
Speaker
Interesting.
00:04:15
Speaker
So you mentioned the words cathedral, sonar in the dark, architecture.
00:04:21
Speaker
These are a lot of spatial metaphors for describing your inner mental experience.
00:04:27
Speaker
Would you say that's an accurate description of the things that you... I would say it is.
00:04:32
Speaker
If you asked me to draw a room that I was familiar with, what I would do is I would reverse engineer how it should look from my sense of how the space is.
00:04:44
Speaker
So, you know, oh, there's a door over here and there's a window about that far from it.
00:04:47
Speaker
So I guess it would look about like this.
00:04:49
Speaker
Oh, no, the window goes about this close to the ceiling and that close to the floor.
00:04:53
Speaker
So, you know, so I'm reconstructing the visual from my sense of how the space works.
00:04:58
Speaker
So, yeah, I'd say that's just exactly right.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:01
Speaker
So a Fantasia Meow, who talks about does coaching on a Fantasia stuff, he splits visual into components, one of which is spatial and the others are things like color and texture.
00:05:12
Speaker
So I think it sounds like you've got the spatial component, but you don't have color, texture, lighting, things like that.
00:05:17
Speaker
Not exactly, or at least not visually, because we do in music talk about color, you know, that might be a very bright sound or a very dark and mysterious sound.
00:05:30
Speaker
Or you might think of the texture of the sound as, okay, the strings are going to fuzz back into the background here while the woodwinds come to the prominent four.
00:05:38
Speaker
So the textures are there.
00:05:40
Speaker
But even then, you might say I probably map them in some sense architecturally within the sound.
00:05:47
Speaker
And certainly I don't deal with visual things in terms of textures and stuff, not when I'm imagining them.
Teaching Techniques and Musical Skill-building
00:05:53
Speaker
Is there anything else that you think sets you apart from other musicians or other cellists specifically that might be contributed to your aphantasia?
00:06:05
Speaker
I'm not sure whether they contribute to the Aphantasia or whether it's the other way around.
00:06:10
Speaker
For example, I'm one of those people who's interested in everything, has been for a long time.
00:06:16
Speaker
So I've read my fair share of books on complexity theory and habit formation and all these sorts of things.
00:06:23
Speaker
And I've incorporated a lot of what I've found there into my teaching.
00:06:27
Speaker
So if you have a very complex activity, such as playing an instrument, well, what's actually happening when you're playing it is a sort of a critical piece that anyone who plays well must figure out in some sense or another.
00:06:43
Speaker
And if you're someone who plays and teaches, well, then you have to figure out how to transfer that general understanding that you have into their own heads in a way that fits with them, but still makes the cello do what it's supposed to do.
00:06:57
Speaker
And so I've done a lot of investigation into what it means to build a stack of habits that actually work in terms of habits of thought, meaning understanding, and habits of action, meaning execution of that understanding.
00:07:12
Speaker
And so does the aphantasia inform all of that structure?
00:07:17
Speaker
Oh, I'm sure it does.
00:07:19
Speaker
But, you know, to give you an example that isn't cello related, imagine yourself doing something fairly routine, such as running up a flight of stairs while thinking about what to have for lunch.
00:07:31
Speaker
You know, people can do this.
00:07:34
Speaker
We can do these incredibly deep, sophisticated layers of activity that when you actually stop and think about it, it looks utterly impossible.
00:07:46
Speaker
If you, for example, tried to run up the stairs while microcontrolling every single muscle movement you made in real time, you just face plant.
00:07:55
Speaker
You know, and it's obvious.
00:07:57
Speaker
And even in the speaking of what I'm doing,
00:08:01
Speaker
If I were to say attempt to learn a little more Hindi than I have, you know, because my Hindi is terrible, frankly.
00:08:08
Speaker
The problem is that my mouth muscles do not fully understand with an accurate picture what they're supposed to be doing.
00:08:17
Speaker
And so it's all terribly garbled.
00:08:19
Speaker
So if I try to speak the sounds, they come out extremely slowly and generally wrong.
00:08:23
Speaker
Right.
00:08:25
Speaker
So.
00:08:26
Speaker
But my English, I can just rattle on for ages and everything comes out just fine.
00:08:31
Speaker
But I'm not, again, micro-controlling the muscles.
00:08:33
Speaker
There's something else going on within the architecture.
00:08:37
Speaker
And so, yeah, and so to wrap that around a cello, what I teach is how to bridge the relatively tiny attentional span that we have, that we can focus on things, to the vast systemic architecture of how the body can process that into real sound.
00:08:55
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:08:56
Speaker
So it's basically what you're saying is that you have a deeper intuition for the skills, be it language or music, that you have better, greater practice in than the things that you might need to exercise greater micro control, as you said, in order to be able to execute them to the same level.
00:09:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:19
Speaker
Is that correct?
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:21
Speaker
It's sort of a skill of skill building, if you will.
00:09:25
Speaker
And that sort of meta skill turns out to be a very useful thing in a lot of ways.
00:09:30
Speaker
It's very useful for making sense of all kinds of strange things in the world that people do or do not do.
00:09:36
Speaker
And so that's increasingly where I find my interests taking me.
00:09:40
Speaker
But, you know, so for example, if we were to sit down and have a first cello lesson, right?
00:09:47
Speaker
The first thing I have to do is communicate to you the rough positioning your body needs to be in.
00:09:54
Speaker
And of course, I can't use pictures because I don't have pictures in my head.
00:09:58
Speaker
So I'm going to give you spatial relationships.
00:10:01
Speaker
And for example, I'm going to say you want to be sitting on a decently sturdy chair.
00:10:06
Speaker
such that your knees are below your hips and your feet are under your knees.
00:10:12
Speaker
And the reason we do it that way is that if your knees are above your hips, you don't have room to tuck a cello in there.
00:10:19
Speaker
because the cello has to go roughly from your knees to your chest.
00:10:22
Speaker
So the first thing is rough positioning and then, okay.
00:10:25
Speaker
All right.
00:10:26
Speaker
So if that's where you are, then I'm going to set the cello against you like this and you're going to feel it hit your body in two or three very specific places.
00:10:35
Speaker
You know, the, uh, the,
00:10:38
Speaker
On your left knee, the bone on the inside of the knee tucks very nicely in a specific place in the curve on the instrument.
00:10:44
Speaker
And then the right leg just keeps it there, that kind of thing.
00:10:47
Speaker
So you see what I'm doing.
00:10:48
Speaker
I'm setting up very high level descriptions of the general architectural relationships.
00:10:54
Speaker
This is like saying the roof is above the floor.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yes.
00:10:57
Speaker
But I'm not piling down with a list of 400 different muscles and the relative tensions on each.
00:11:04
Speaker
The body is going to solve those for you once I've given you a framework.
00:11:09
Speaker
And then the playing is the same way.
00:11:11
Speaker
All right.
00:11:11
Speaker
So for example...
00:11:13
Speaker
cello says hello again.
00:11:15
Speaker
That's a nice note, but if I move the bow too slowly and too heavily, it will do this.
00:11:22
Speaker
And if I move it too fast, it will do that.
00:11:25
Speaker
So I can give you movement parameters and say, okay, if you want a good result and you're not getting it,
00:11:33
Speaker
Here's your steering.
00:11:35
Speaker
If you hear this, go that way.
00:11:36
Speaker
If you hear that, go this way.
00:11:38
Speaker
Because the thing about cello playing is it's not static, right?
00:11:42
Speaker
You're moving your body.
00:11:43
Speaker
And if you're trying to get a good result while moving your body, the most important thing is to know in which direction you're off so that you can work dynamically back toward the proper balance.
00:11:54
Speaker
And so I have to give you all these sorts of mental instructions in very digestible bite-size mental snapshots.
00:12:03
Speaker
And then what I'm going to tell you is say, all right, so now you've got an idea of what you want to accomplish.
00:12:08
Speaker
This is what the cello wants.
00:12:10
Speaker
This is about what you want your body to do.
00:12:12
Speaker
I'm going to say, hold an image of what you want to have come out of the cello in your head.
00:12:17
Speaker
And it can be an audio, can be architecture, can be a visual, doesn't matter.
00:12:21
Speaker
Whatever works for you.
00:12:22
Speaker
And then I'm going to say, and ask your body to go find it.
00:12:28
Speaker
Give your body permission to use all those different joints, which act as sensors and information dumps and networked all together way below where you can access it consciously.
00:12:38
Speaker
And just go try things.
00:12:39
Speaker
And the first two will be hilariously wrong.
00:12:42
Speaker
And the third will be about right.
00:12:44
Speaker
And then once it's about right, your mind is going to start sharpening the image and trying to leap in and take control.
00:12:49
Speaker
And I'm going to say, no, no, let your body keep trying.
00:12:52
Speaker
And once it's working, I can say, good, that's it.
00:12:56
Speaker
Try to remember that and then practice that motion mentally and physically several times a day over about the next four or five days so that the pattern is sharp enough and stable enough over long enough time that it starts to implant as a habit.
00:13:12
Speaker
And then we stack habits.
00:13:15
Speaker
So that sounds really fascinating to me because it sounds like what you're doing is you're patterning a habit.
Music Practice and Visual Limitations
00:13:21
Speaker
And you're doing this almost by trial and error by giving instructions that pair both
00:13:28
Speaker
proprioceptive information with auditory information.
00:13:32
Speaker
So you're telling not only for people to hold the cello in a certain way in a special relationship to your body, but also what to expect when you stroke in one direction rather than the other.
00:13:47
Speaker
Is that correct?
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:13:49
Speaker
You're looking to develop an awareness of the relationship to the feel of what you are doing to the sound that is coming out and hold that at the right level in the mind.
00:14:01
Speaker
Because again, you know, back to the running up the stairs analogy, that's a very high level analogy.
00:14:06
Speaker
It's a very high level output.
00:14:08
Speaker
You can drop that onto any staircase you can find within reason, you know, as long as the steps aren't three feet apart or something, right?
00:14:14
Speaker
But
00:14:15
Speaker
You're not tied to a specific staircase.
00:14:18
Speaker
There's a generalized pattern.
00:14:20
Speaker
And at the level of attentional resource that people actually have, you've got to abstract your sense of what you're doing far enough out that it can be simple and precise in an open-ended way.
00:14:35
Speaker
So it's running up the stairs so that the body can go and solve it using all of the resources at its disposal.
00:14:42
Speaker
And your goal when you're dealing with a specifically learned skill, like whether it's mathematics or cello playing, is to do that, target it in a direction that allows the sort of more distributed systems to catch on to what you have in mind.
00:14:59
Speaker
And it is.
00:14:59
Speaker
It's exactly that.
00:15:00
Speaker
Trial and error.
00:15:02
Speaker
And then you iterate trial and error, and you make it better.
00:15:05
Speaker
And then you add layers.
00:15:09
Speaker
Cool.
00:15:09
Speaker
So I can see why you wouldn't need as sharp a visual imagination since most of the information you're dealing with is of an auditory and proprioceptive nature.
00:15:23
Speaker
And having to pair that with your instruction doesn't involve as much of the imagistic or the visual type of information.
00:15:31
Speaker
But
00:15:32
Speaker
Do you think that having a visual component might be useful in some way?
00:15:39
Speaker
Or if you don't have it, do you think others might do?
00:15:43
Speaker
Other cellists, I mean specifically, do you think they might use it?
00:15:46
Speaker
I have no doubt that they do.
00:15:48
Speaker
I mean, I would say that sort of causality runs the other way.
00:15:52
Speaker
Given that I don't have ready access to visual components, I have to find other workarounds.
00:15:59
Speaker
So
00:16:00
Speaker
I'm sure that whatever other people are using for their images have whatever components are available to them.
00:16:07
Speaker
I'm sure there are cellists who are colorblind, for example.
00:16:10
Speaker
Well, they've got a great visual component, but the red green isn't there.
00:16:13
Speaker
So they can't think of it in terms of those terms because they don't have that to hand.
00:16:19
Speaker
The interesting thing about it is that even though you can have visual components, it can't exactly be only visual.
00:16:29
Speaker
And the best way to explain that is that as a cellist, you have to look in about five directions at once if you're playing in an orchestra.
00:16:37
Speaker
And by look, I mean track what's going on.
00:16:40
Speaker
One direction you have to look is at the left hand, which is changing the notes.
00:16:47
Speaker
by dropping fingers onto the strings to make them shorter so they make different frequencies.
00:16:52
Speaker
And that is happening directly to the left of your face at about chin level most of the time.
00:16:57
Speaker
So in order to watch that happen, you'd have to turn your head left.
00:17:01
Speaker
On the other hand, you also have to watch your bow as it strokes along the string for, you know, on the order of 30 inches worth of bow.
00:17:12
Speaker
So that, at that point, your right hand is now, your arm is straight out and a bit forward if you're on the high strings.
00:17:19
Speaker
And so now you've got to turn your head right.
00:17:22
Speaker
But at the same time,
00:17:24
Speaker
You need to be watching the interface of the string and the bow so you don't get grindy sounds or too wispy.
00:17:31
Speaker
You have to watch that you're in the right place and just track that.
00:17:35
Speaker
So that's the third direction.
00:17:36
Speaker
That's kind of straight down.
00:17:38
Speaker
Then you also have to be reading the music that's on your stand and watching the conductor, and that's directions four and five.
00:17:44
Speaker
So you can't learn the whole process visually at the same time.
00:17:50
Speaker
You can't turn your head in five directions at once.
00:17:53
Speaker
So what we have to do as teachers is build it very, very, very carefully and get the foundations right because you can use your eyes to look at what's supposed to happen.
00:18:04
Speaker
If you have that capacity, you can visualize what's supposed to happen, but you can't be looking at it all at the same time when you're actually playing.
00:18:13
Speaker
So I imagine there are people who have visual models of hand shapes and all these kinds of things, but they still are...
00:18:22
Speaker
It has to be in some sense an architectural sense because you can't have a visual model that has you looking at all of the details at the same time.
00:18:30
Speaker
They're too widespread and there's too many of them.
00:18:32
Speaker
Right, right.
00:18:34
Speaker
Interesting.
00:18:36
Speaker
So you mentioned reading.
00:18:38
Speaker
This is something that I find really quite fascinating is when I hear a word,
00:18:45
Speaker
I tend to commit it to memory and I usually do that by spelling it out.
00:18:50
Speaker
And so I see the word not just
00:18:54
Speaker
as a, I imagine the word not just as a sound, but also as its spelling.
00:19:00
Speaker
And it helps to, it aids in keeping it to, committing it to memory.
00:19:07
Speaker
I wonder if you also do the same thing with musical notes, where instead of just like memorizing or remembering what the tones are like, it automatically converts into, you know,
00:19:24
Speaker
musical notation.
00:19:25
Speaker
And this is something that I always struggled with as a pianist.
00:19:29
Speaker
I could never really sight read.
00:19:30
Speaker
So I had to always go by heart.
00:19:34
Speaker
But I wonder if this is something that you tend to do as well.
00:19:39
Speaker
Let's see if I can figure out how to answer that one.
00:19:41
Speaker
There's a lot of directions I could go.
00:19:45
Speaker
Let me start with exactly what you described, which is that sight reading is difficult for a lot of people.
00:19:53
Speaker
And basically the reason that happens is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about with not having a purely visual model of the sound, that there isn't enough bandwidth.
00:20:08
Speaker
It's like running up the stairs.
00:20:09
Speaker
There isn't enough bandwidth to see and process all of the stuff on the page such that it comes out through the hands and still route that all through conscious attention.
00:20:19
Speaker
There just isn't room.
00:20:21
Speaker
So what it comes down to is sort of like what does happen in reading.
00:20:30
Speaker
Let's say you're reading a piece of written material and you're reading it in the sense that you're giving a live speech of something you've never read before.
00:20:40
Speaker
right?
00:20:41
Speaker
That complicates it because now you're not just sitting at home enjoying, you know, the flow of the words and the meanings they bring to mind automatically in your brain.
00:20:50
Speaker
You're also dealing with how do I pronounce this?
00:20:52
Speaker
How do I not run out of breath?
00:20:54
Speaker
What do other people think of what I'm saying?
00:20:56
Speaker
Or is it hot up here under the lights?
00:20:58
Speaker
How long is the reverb in the acoustic?
00:21:00
Speaker
Do I have to slow down?
00:21:02
Speaker
Do I have to re-enunciate with more time?
00:21:06
Speaker
You know, all these things that come into play.
00:21:09
Speaker
But again, you can sort of do it because you have such a fluent physical understanding of how to make the word shapes in your mouth that that is happening without attention.
00:21:23
Speaker
And what we try to do as sight readers in music is learn the same visual fluency with the eyes so that your recognition is so fast that you can do it.
00:21:34
Speaker
And the way that we usually do that is through what we like to call music theory.
00:21:40
Speaker
If you're looking at a page of squiggles and dots, how quickly can you recognize the components on the page and say, oh, look, that's a waltz, right?
00:21:50
Speaker
Or, oh, hey, we're in the key of G minor.
00:21:53
Speaker
Or, oh, it's going to be about this fast.
00:21:55
Speaker
Or, oh, look, that's one of this kind of chord progression.
00:21:59
Speaker
Because when you're actually reading a page with letters on it, you're not actually scanning each letter and identifying each letter consciously, are you?
Music Reading and Perception
00:22:13
Speaker
Here's a book page.
00:22:14
Speaker
How many E's are on it?
00:22:15
Speaker
Well, you could tell me that, but you couldn't tell me that while you were reading it for meaning unless you have a very, very specific type of brain, which I think is pretty rare.
00:22:26
Speaker
And that sort of processing is what we're looking at.
00:22:30
Speaker
And again, this is back to the idea of habit.
00:22:33
Speaker
The difference between habits of thought and habits of action is that habits of action are just habits of thought attached to muscle outputs.
00:22:43
Speaker
It's the same architecture.
00:22:44
Speaker
So you can use the physiological habit building process as a lever to move the mental habit building process.
00:22:53
Speaker
So when I'm reading, for example, a piece of music,
00:22:57
Speaker
I'm not exactly looking at the notes.
00:23:01
Speaker
I'm looking at the shapes made by collections of notes.
00:23:04
Speaker
I'm looking at the syllables and the syntactical structure and the general expected meaning of the thing.
00:23:12
Speaker
And that's kind of an idea of how I do it, I guess.
00:23:15
Speaker
I think I've drifted from your original question, but hopefully that was interesting.
00:23:18
Speaker
No, that was definitely interesting.
00:23:20
Speaker
So like you mentioned key of G minor and the syntax of everything.
00:23:26
Speaker
So to me, I don't think I can pinpoint a, I don't think you could play a note for me and then I'd be able to detect like, okay, that's a C or that's a D. But if you play the cadence and, um,
00:23:42
Speaker
incorporated into like a melodic structure, I'd more be able to more easily identify it as belonging to like a particular major key or a particular minor key or something like that.
00:23:56
Speaker
Do you identify notes or keys as easily as most people can identify color?
00:24:03
Speaker
At this point, probably so.
00:24:05
Speaker
And I should mention, too, that as far as color goes, I am one of those people where if you put a color palette or a color wheel down, it is organized for me, even if it's very subtle.
00:24:14
Speaker
I can rapidly organize it exactly right.
00:24:17
Speaker
So I have a finely developed sense of color, just can't see it in my head.
00:24:22
Speaker
What's funny is I can recognize it once I see it.
00:24:24
Speaker
But, you know, it makes it really interesting if you're going to the store trying to match a color.
00:24:30
Speaker
If I go without a sample, I have no clue.
00:24:33
Speaker
But if I guess, I'm usually right.
00:24:35
Speaker
It's very strange.
00:24:36
Speaker
So what it comes down to, well, you know, for the listeners, let me play some of that Bach again.
00:24:46
Speaker
That would be G major.
00:24:49
Speaker
Because I had sort of a happy, luminous kind of a feel to it.
00:24:52
Speaker
Here would be G minor of the same music.
00:24:56
Speaker
And see, it makes it kind of sadder, darker kind of a thing.
00:25:00
Speaker
So...
00:25:01
Speaker
All I'm doing is changing the relative pitch of a couple of notes to give you that mood change.
00:25:07
Speaker
And once you sensitize yourself to anything like that, you can grab it pretty quickly.
00:25:12
Speaker
As far as recognizing notes, some people talk about perfect pitch.
00:25:20
Speaker
I don't think I have perfect pitch, but what I do have is long-term pitch memory.
00:25:26
Speaker
Like, for example,
00:25:27
Speaker
That Bach, oh, I don't know, the first time I played that was probably 30 years ago, right?
00:25:32
Speaker
So I've been playing this a long time, but more to the point, when I play this cello, the upper part of the resonating body is nested against my chest, and the physical vibrations of that transfer into my body, and I know what they feel like.
00:25:51
Speaker
So sound is just vibration, right?
00:25:53
Speaker
So you can actually go by feel, and
00:25:57
Speaker
One way I like to describe this sort of thing is that if you imagine going into your kitchen, which you know very well, and unbeknownst to you, someone had gone in there and they had, I don't know, raised your kitchen countertops by a couple of centimeters or something.
00:26:12
Speaker
Then you're going to go in there and you're going to feel that and you're going to say, wait, something's off.
00:26:19
Speaker
And you might not figure out what it is right away, but you're going to notice.
00:26:23
Speaker
And so it's that sort of a physiological recognition of, hey, this space is wrong.
00:26:30
Speaker
And that's sort of what I'm going off of.
00:26:32
Speaker
So often what I will do if I'm trying to figure out what notes I am hearing is,
00:26:37
Speaker
is I will compare them, the sound in my ears, to the feel of known notes in my head.
00:26:45
Speaker
For example, my cello has four strings, right?
00:26:50
Speaker
And they're always tuned the same way, except for a few very crazy composers who sometimes ask you to retune, but mostly we keep it, you know, 99.9 is the same.
00:26:59
Speaker
So I have a strong...
00:27:01
Speaker
38 years something physiological memory of what that open string sounds like.
00:27:07
Speaker
So I have a physical reference point and I can pull that up and compare to what I'm hearing it and reverse engineer what I am hearing.
00:27:15
Speaker
And then, you know, so when it comes down to me reading a piece of music, well, what I'm looking for is familiar architectures.
00:27:23
Speaker
If you're reading a text and you come across the word hippopotamus, you're unlikely to have to read the whole word to formulate a pretty accurate guess as to what the word is going to be.
00:27:36
Speaker
And it's that sort of business.
00:27:37
Speaker
If I knocked out a couple of letters, you'd probably get it, you know.
00:27:41
Speaker
And musical stuff is like that.
00:27:44
Speaker
if you're looking at the notes themselves, well, that's one thing.
00:27:48
Speaker
If you're overwhelmed by something like how many notes are vertically stacked or what the rhythm is or what the key is or the tempo is, well, all of those are just fluency issues in those subdomains.
00:28:00
Speaker
So, you know, if I'm not good at reading a lot of sharps because they've altered each pitch of the note and now I have to push that on the piano from a white key up to the next black key or something, well, that's just, I need more mental practice reading sharps.
00:28:14
Speaker
If I can read it but I can't play it, that's when I need to practice the subdomains of the physiological stuff.
00:28:23
Speaker
What does it mean in my hand setup to move that first finger up and then over a centimeter and then bring it down with a subtly different curvature on a black key while still living the other fingers where they are?
00:28:36
Speaker
And how does that feel in my shoulders, in my spine, in my neck?
00:28:40
Speaker
And you have to let the body process it broadly.
00:28:43
Speaker
So, you know, it's two different things.
00:28:44
Speaker
I used to really annoy my piano teachers as an undergrad because we all had to take a little piano, you know, and I had some piano anyway.
00:28:51
Speaker
But I would they would say, OK, go learn this.
00:28:53
Speaker
And I would come back and drag myself in the next morning because they were all very early morning.
00:28:57
Speaker
People got up at four in the morning kind of people.
00:29:00
Speaker
And I wasn't.
00:29:01
Speaker
So they were teaching their lessons at 8.30 in the morning and I would stagger in there and I would know the piece cold and I couldn't play it because I hadn't physically practiced it.
00:29:11
Speaker
So, you know, technically was I correct?
00:29:14
Speaker
I guess maybe, but...
00:29:16
Speaker
We definitely annoyed each other that way.
00:29:20
Speaker
So it's, yeah, okay, go ahead.
00:29:22
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:29:23
Speaker
So it sounds like you have a very strong bodily connection to the instrument that you're playing because you need to really feel and use the vibrations as some kind of physical reference point in order to properly play the music, as it were.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:29:41
Speaker
You can't play a cello any other way because too much movement is happening to it.
00:29:46
Speaker
Unlike the piano, you know, I mean, you're sitting there next to the piano and that's about it because it's a very large, massive, stable instrument.
00:29:53
Speaker
Or passive, yeah.
00:29:55
Speaker
And not only that, it's not so continuous, it's discrete.
00:29:59
Speaker
Once you hit that key, you're on to the next one.
00:30:02
Speaker
But with the cello, the bow is a continuous function.
00:30:06
Speaker
You stop moving the bow, the sound stops right now, and you can change it with the bow.
00:30:11
Speaker
On top of that, as you play the instrument, it is flexing because it's quite delicate.
00:30:16
Speaker
And so, you know, when I put my left hand down on the strings to put it into the notes, I am making a cello sandwich between the force of my fingertips going toward my sternum, my breastbone, and the cello just happens to be squished in the way.
00:30:31
Speaker
So I'm pouring energy through the cello into my chest and down into the floor.
00:30:35
Speaker
But when I do that, it actually flexes the cello, but it also flexes the ribcage.
00:30:41
Speaker
And it meanwhile lowers the string relative to the other strings.
00:30:44
Speaker
So the bow path has to accommodate all three of those motions at once or I lose the sound.
00:30:50
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:30:51
Speaker
So yeah, this seems like a lot of motion involved as well in producing the sound.
00:30:56
Speaker
What about sounds that don't involve your motion specifically?
00:31:00
Speaker
Say, for example, if you were to imagine the audio of an orchestral piece, do you hear all of the parts that are being played in it?
00:31:09
Speaker
Do you hear every last line of melody or what's it like for you?
00:31:15
Speaker
I would say if I'm listening to music, I'm going to feel the inner critic is going to say, well, did this orchestra and conductor do the right architectural things for my tastes?
00:31:29
Speaker
You know, here's a cadence here.
00:31:31
Speaker
Did they arrive at it with a satisfying rush or did they relax into it with just the right slow down at the right time?
00:31:39
Speaker
You know, does it, that sort of,
00:31:42
Speaker
How would I put that?
00:31:43
Speaker
Like architecture, but in the sense of physics and motion, like a roller coaster ride.
00:31:49
Speaker
If you watch a roller coaster, it should go up and then slow down at the peak and then accelerate down.
00:31:54
Speaker
And if it doesn't do that, naturally it feels off.
00:31:57
Speaker
And I feel something like that in terms of the music.
00:32:01
Speaker
Matt, if you're not actively listening to it, if you're just thinking about music, do you hear it in your head?
00:32:06
Speaker
at all?
00:32:07
Speaker
Or like, how do you experience thinking about a musical piece when you're not either playing it or listening to it at that moment?
00:32:13
Speaker
I can play it like an architectural stereo.
00:32:17
Speaker
I'm because having and it's a little different if I haven't actually played the piece.
00:32:24
Speaker
before, it's less interesting to me because I don't know it from inside out.
00:32:28
Speaker
But if I want to put on in my head, say Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony, you know, I can do that because I've played it before and I know how my role works in it.
00:32:38
Speaker
And it's the sort of thing where if you're listening to it, you might sort of duplicate the physical motions a bit.
00:32:44
Speaker
This is like... It's more like you're remembering playing it or re-enacting playing it rather than you're hearing... Because some people go even just like hearing a rock band, they can re-hear the song and exactly hear every part in the song in detail, exactly how it was played in that recording they love, and then pay attention to it in their minds, in their memory.
00:33:06
Speaker
Do you get that kind of thing as well?
00:33:08
Speaker
Or is it more you just remember the bodily motions and the architecture?
00:33:12
Speaker
I can do both.
00:33:13
Speaker
there's a certain air guitar component to these things.
00:33:17
Speaker
But the fun part about that is that cello motions unconnected to the cello don't particularly look like cello motions.
00:33:26
Speaker
The way I would, so, so again, here's one of those mental high, high,
00:33:31
Speaker
high resolution or sort of high level images of how this goes.
Performance Preparation and Execution
00:33:35
Speaker
Your shoulder has about a billion muscles and stuff in it, and nobody really knows except people who studied anatomy.
00:33:41
Speaker
So you can't teach details of shoulder anatomy to a 10 year old, right?
00:33:45
Speaker
It's not gonna work.
00:33:46
Speaker
But almost everyone who has tension when they start playing has it in the shoulders because the fundamental idea of cello playing is you have to lift your arms into playing position and then push down.
00:34:03
Speaker
And that manifests as tension.
00:34:05
Speaker
The solution to it that we use is to realize that there's only three fundamental ways you can move a shoulder joint.
00:34:12
Speaker
The first one is you can change your arm angle at the shoulders.
00:34:15
Speaker
Stick your arm straight out, forward, whatever.
00:34:18
Speaker
The second one is to relocate the shoulder itself by some kind of a complicated shrug.
00:34:24
Speaker
And you can see, you can do both classes of movement in opposite directions at the same time.
00:34:29
Speaker
You can have a high shoulder and a low arm.
00:34:31
Speaker
You can have a low shoulder and a high arm, right?
00:34:33
Speaker
And the third one is you can rotate the upper arm at the shoulder, like throwing a baseball or something.
00:34:41
Speaker
And so the solution we use as players is we provide all of our power into the instrument on both hands rotationally at the shoulder, and we use the other two classes of shoulder positioning and arm positioning as just places to get into the right place to give the right torque rotationally.
00:34:56
Speaker
And that's how the tension goes away.
00:34:58
Speaker
So if you watch me air playing a cello, what you're actually going to see is little rotational twitches and occasional widenings of the left hand as the left hand fakes the fingerings a bit.
00:35:09
Speaker
And I will lean my upper body as if I were leaning into the cello, even if it's not there.
00:35:15
Speaker
So it just looks like somebody twitching.
00:35:18
Speaker
I don't have my arms out and moving around because the control is actually in the shoulder rotation.
00:35:25
Speaker
So I do that, but I'm also capable of letting the body shut down and mentally rehearsing the same motions without moving.
00:35:37
Speaker
And I can't really tell you for sure whether I'm duplicating in my head the sound, although I suspect that I am, or whether I'm duplicating the intended emotional effect of the desired sound.
00:35:52
Speaker
You know, if I want to move my audience this direction that much at this time in the music, am I thinking about that?
00:36:00
Speaker
Or am I thinking about the color of sound and the architectures that make it happen?
00:36:05
Speaker
Or am I just hearing the sound itself?
00:36:06
Speaker
And I'm not sure how that breaks down.
00:36:08
Speaker
Right.
00:36:10
Speaker
So you're imagining other people's emotions as well as the audio.
00:36:15
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:36:18
Speaker
So, yeah, if you think about the music from the position of the performer, the whole point of it is to take your audience and lean them out over some emotional edge farther than they thought was safe and bring them back transformed.
00:36:34
Speaker
That's the whole idea.
00:36:36
Speaker
And so that's your performing goal.
00:36:38
Speaker
And everything you're doing on stage is designed to make that possible.
00:36:42
Speaker
And all of your practicing at home is engineered to make that come to life on stage when you have four hours to put together a concert with 100 other people.
00:36:51
Speaker
you need to be ready so you've really worked out and engineered all this very precise technique but then when you're actually playing on stage you have to have your your attention sort of in three dimensions at once and one is very deep into your own body in a sort of a resonant way like the spider sitting in the center of the web and just feeling what all is happening together and the second is toward coordinating with the other musicians so that's your conductor
00:37:20
Speaker
and your ears open to the rest of the ensemble and the notes on the page.
00:37:24
Speaker
And the third is, hey, what effect is this having on my audience?
00:37:28
Speaker
And you're thinking about throwing the sound past the conductor and out into the hall and mixing it to where it just catches the point of the music and just gets into people's minds and makes them really glad they came to your concert.
00:37:42
Speaker
Right.
00:37:42
Speaker
So this paying attention to the emotions of the audience, this is obviously very salient when you're performing, but is it also present when you are merely practicing without an audience?
00:37:55
Speaker
Eventually.
00:37:58
Speaker
I did a recital somewhere back in grad school and I was making to the point because, you know, if you don't know the piece at all, you can't think about the high level stuff at all.
00:38:06
Speaker
You just have to work out the mechanics.
00:38:09
Speaker
And okay, this is okay.
00:38:10
Speaker
What is the next note?
00:38:11
Speaker
How long is it?
00:38:12
Speaker
You know, what finger am I playing it on?
00:38:14
Speaker
What, what string, where in the bow am I playing?
00:38:16
Speaker
All these little mechanical details have to get sorted out in a sort of a flow sense.
00:38:21
Speaker
Once they all start to flow together, then you say, all right, who am I coordinating this with?
00:38:26
Speaker
You know, do I have to play this with a piano or can I take a little time?
00:38:29
Speaker
Cause no one else is playing.
00:38:30
Speaker
Right.
00:38:31
Speaker
And then beyond that, you're getting into the audience considerations.
00:38:35
Speaker
So once you have gotten the mechanics, the bass mechanics worked out really well, and I had a violinist friend explain it this way.
00:38:42
Speaker
If you're practicing to play a concerto with an orchestra as a soloist, here's your readiness level.
00:38:47
Speaker
You want to be able to play through your entire piece without making any mistakes while watching TV or reading an article and still tell me what you read or watched.
00:38:58
Speaker
You want that level of automation.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:02
Speaker
Practice not till you can get it right, till you can't get it wrong.
00:39:05
Speaker
That's how deep this goes.
00:39:08
Speaker
But once you're there, then you're in the space and you're like, okay, well, I'm a little nervous, so I'm just going to kind of focus on what I'm doing.
00:39:15
Speaker
Well, that's not very musically persuasive.
00:39:18
Speaker
The three levels that I find as a performer are first, you're in the room, you're performing.
00:39:24
Speaker
First level is you just, you play your instrument, you perform your instrument.
00:39:28
Speaker
The second level is you play the room.
00:39:31
Speaker
You use the architecture.
00:39:32
Speaker
You throw a phrase over here.
00:39:34
Speaker
You throw a phrase over there.
00:39:35
Speaker
And you use this physical contrast in the space to help break up the musical narrative and move it around.
00:39:41
Speaker
But the highest level is when you play the audience.
00:39:45
Speaker
And you pull them into your sound.
00:39:48
Speaker
But there are stair steps.
00:39:49
Speaker
You can't go straight to the third one until you've been through the first two.
00:39:54
Speaker
And so when you're practicing, the first step is just learn the basics, right?
00:39:58
Speaker
Get it flowing so you can play the thing.
00:40:00
Speaker
Then you've got to go work with the other musicians and say, oh, shoot, I thought you were going to do this here, but you're doing that, so I need to rethink it.
00:40:08
Speaker
Oh, no, this worked well when I was alone, but it's not vivid enough against your sound, so I need to bring this up, and can you come down here?
00:40:15
Speaker
You sort of calibrate.
00:40:17
Speaker
Once that's working, and it kind of recedes into the background for all but the worst technical passages when you need to go back down there for a second,
00:40:25
Speaker
Then you go into the room you're going to play in and you try it and you say, oh, how's this work?
00:40:31
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:40:32
Speaker
Oh, well, you can't hear that part up there.
00:40:33
Speaker
It's too muddy.
00:40:34
Speaker
All right.
00:40:34
Speaker
We need to slow down in this acoustic or whatever.
00:40:38
Speaker
And then when you finally have the audience in there, you want to be so familiar with the room that you can use your ability to throw music to different corners of the room to pull their minds into the journey you want them to take.
00:40:52
Speaker
So you do practice all of those things, but it's a massive ladder of competency and it works from getting the basic fluency first at the deep levels.
00:41:02
Speaker
And then once you've got enough of it, you go higher and then you realize we need to go back down there and sort of add a few more decimal points to your precisions.
00:41:09
Speaker
And you do that and you do it again and you go up the ladder again.
00:41:11
Speaker
You say, oh, that was much better, but now I got to go back down there and fix.
00:41:15
Speaker
So, you know, stuff I use for auditions, I've rebuilt from the ground up seven or eight times easily.
00:41:21
Speaker
Fascinating.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:23
Speaker
So it's a very physiological process and the visual is a big part of it.
00:41:29
Speaker
You know, you have to look at what you are doing.
00:41:32
Speaker
But even if you can't store it visually, you still want to see, all right, okay, when I'm doing this, where is my bow, right?
00:41:38
Speaker
Is it too far from the bridge?
00:41:40
Speaker
What part of the bow did I start that phrase in?
00:41:43
Speaker
And I want accuracy in my mind's eye that isn't visual to within a half an inch on the bow hair.
00:41:49
Speaker
And then, yeah, go ahead.
00:41:51
Speaker
So do you think that if you were blind, you'd be able to pull this off or?
00:41:56
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:41:57
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:41:58
Speaker
So it's not quite the mind's eye that you're relying on then.
00:42:02
Speaker
Well, it's again, that's the thing that in the sense that the mind's eye isn't constrained to be visual in the sense that the language makes it appear to be, that's where the architectural mind's eye works.
00:42:14
Speaker
It's the same way a blind person would navigate around a familiar space.
00:42:19
Speaker
It's just in this case, the space happens to be habits of technique and acoustics.
00:42:25
Speaker
And the only thing I couldn't do blind is read the music and follow the orchestra, right?
00:42:31
Speaker
Because all of the conductor's cues are visual.
00:42:34
Speaker
And unless you actually memorize the cello part to say Brahms's Third Symphony, you're going to have to look at it while you're playing it.
00:42:42
Speaker
So the visual channels are input channels, but the functional channels, the output channels, they're no longer visual for the most part.
00:42:53
Speaker
And some of them gain a little from visual, but it's the sort of sense where if I ask you to close your eyes and touch your nose with your finger, the first try, if you're being cautious, you might miss by an inch.
00:43:07
Speaker
The 10th try, you'll hit the same spot with the same pressure as you did on the 8th and the 9th.
00:43:12
Speaker
And the 1,000th try, you'll be able to do anything you want.
00:43:17
Speaker
So you're gaining these sorts of deep physiological knowledges.
00:43:21
Speaker
And they do work on habits, like people who can cut vegetables faster than you can think.
00:43:26
Speaker
Just chop, chop, chop, done.
00:43:28
Speaker
Well, that's a habit too.
00:43:30
Speaker
And they're not really looking at what they're doing, are they?
00:43:32
Speaker
Because there's not time.
00:43:35
Speaker
So it's the pathway into all of that.
00:43:37
Speaker
And the visual is an aspect of picking it up.
00:43:40
Speaker
But the visualization of it in the mind doesn't actually have to involve looking at what you're doing.
00:43:46
Speaker
It could be sort of a 3D feel or a sound or any kind of modality, really.
00:43:55
Speaker
Right.
00:43:56
Speaker
Francis, do you have any final questions you'd like to put forward?
00:44:02
Speaker
I think, yeah, I kind of do want to quickly ask, there was another conversation we had online, Matt, about paperwork.
00:44:09
Speaker
Uh-huh, yes.
00:44:11
Speaker
Very different topic.
00:44:12
Speaker
And you were saying you reckon being aphantasic made it harder for you to do that?
00:44:16
Speaker
And I'm kind of quite hyperphantasic.
00:44:20
Speaker
I do have some spatial stuff, but that's it.
00:44:22
Speaker
And I just don't even think that I might need to remember a form while I'm filling it in.
00:44:27
Speaker
I just remember it conceptually.
00:44:29
Speaker
So I'm just wondering, did you come across someone who was doing it visually in some way you're envious of?
00:44:34
Speaker
Like, what happened?
00:44:36
Speaker
Well, you know.
00:44:37
Speaker
It's like anything else.
00:44:39
Speaker
Some stuff is easier for some people than others.
00:44:42
Speaker
And the visual field itself, the visual field of focus is actually quite small, isn't it?
00:44:49
Speaker
And you're using a lot of the peripheral to generally keep track of what's going on.
00:44:55
Speaker
But what you're actually looking at is quite tiny.
00:44:58
Speaker
And the problem with a computer screen or a piece of paper is that it's all visual.
00:45:05
Speaker
If I have a stack of, say, standard-sized pieces of paper with text written on them or whatever, I...
00:45:15
Speaker
I can look at them and I can read everything and it's great.
00:45:19
Speaker
But as soon as I'm not looking at a particular part of that page, it vanishes from my mind's eye as if it were never there.
00:45:26
Speaker
The page is functionally blank in my mind because there's no difference between one piece of paper and the next.
00:45:34
Speaker
Right?
00:45:34
Speaker
So...
00:45:36
Speaker
What I do when I'm learning a piece of music is I'm saying to myself, okay, so we have measure numbers and rehearsal numbers.
00:45:43
Speaker
And I might say, okay, rehearsal number H is on page 14 on the top left.
00:45:51
Speaker
And I'll track it spatially so that if someone says, hey, let's start at H, I know roughly where to go.
00:45:56
Speaker
But if I'm trying to fill out a form that
00:45:59
Speaker
And it says, all right, take the number on whatever, line 14, and apply it to line 53 or whatever.
00:46:07
Speaker
Well, all those things are gone, so I have to go back and find it.
00:46:11
Speaker
I may even have to write it down somewhere else or take a picture of it so I can turn the page and go look at the other one.
00:46:19
Speaker
And it's even worse on computer forms.
00:46:22
Speaker
I actually, at one point when I was filling out an online form, there was a certain box that needed to be checked, but the page was so dense, I literally couldn't find it.
00:46:32
Speaker
I had to call a helpline and say, where is this?
00:46:35
Speaker
I can't find it on your form.
00:46:37
Speaker
And it's this tiny little box right in the center of everything.
00:46:40
Speaker
But my search function is useless in that sense because I look at the top left and I see, okay, it's not here.
00:46:48
Speaker
And then I look down two inches on the screen and instantly that's blank in my mind's eye.
00:46:55
Speaker
So when you route everything through computer forms, it makes them unusable for someone such as me.
00:47:03
Speaker
And I have all these highly developed physiological things that don't work on computers.
00:47:08
Speaker
And it's just massively frustrating at times.
00:47:11
Speaker
This is super subtle because, yeah, I'm also aphantasic, nearly.
00:47:17
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:47:18
Speaker
As you are not quite fully either, but it's different.
00:47:22
Speaker
Like we've got very different capabilities.
00:47:25
Speaker
It's so complex and subtle.
00:47:27
Speaker
Interesting.
00:47:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:28
Speaker
And so I'm, for whatever reason, I'm very aware of my body and that presumably that means that was always there to some extent.
00:47:36
Speaker
Certainly.
00:47:37
Speaker
I know that I have always been aware of harmonic progressions more so than your average person.
00:47:43
Speaker
Cause I noticed this when I was like six years.
00:47:47
Speaker
And it's one of the reasons I don't listen to very much pop music because pop music isn't about chord progressions.
00:47:55
Speaker
It's about repetition of the same chord progression.
00:47:58
Speaker
It's not a long extended ramble through harmonic space and time.
00:48:02
Speaker
It's a loop.
00:48:03
Speaker
And I hear it twice, I'm done.
00:48:07
Speaker
You know, all pop songs are Pachelbel's canon.
00:48:10
Speaker
It's like that.
00:48:11
Speaker
But really, they're just all the same to me.
00:48:14
Speaker
Maybe 1% of 1% is different.
00:48:17
Speaker
But that's, again, why I went into symphonic playing, because there's all this complexity and nuance and exploration in this non-visual architectural world.
Conclusion
00:48:26
Speaker
And it's like open world play in a game or something.
00:48:29
Speaker
You just go wherever you want.
00:48:31
Speaker
And it's great.
00:48:33
Speaker
But yeah, anything that I need to take a mental snapshot of,
00:48:37
Speaker
to go and do, I'm instantly in a lot of trouble.
00:48:44
Speaker
Thanks.
00:48:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:46
Speaker
Thanks, Matthew.
00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah, you're very welcome.
00:48:48
Speaker
It's been fun.
00:48:49
Speaker
I know I've kind of info dumped on you guys a little bit, but that's perfect.
00:48:54
Speaker
That's great.
00:48:54
Speaker
That's fantastic.
00:48:55
Speaker
And thanks for having me on.
00:48:56
Speaker
I'm looking forward to see the next few episodes and the podcast and everything.
00:49:00
Speaker
It's going to be great.
00:49:02
Speaker
Thanks for the cello too.
00:49:04
Speaker
Oh, my pleasure.
00:49:06
Speaker
We do enjoy working together.
00:49:07
Speaker
It helps.
00:49:11
Speaker
Let's play a goodbye note.
00:49:13
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:49:14
Speaker
So let's see.
00:49:17
Speaker
What would be appropriate for a goodbye note?
00:49:21
Speaker
Well, here's some classic............
00:49:36
Speaker
So a little bit of the, the Swan, which is very famous from Carnival of the Animals, but I won't play the whole thing.
00:49:52
Speaker
It'll take too long, but you get the idea.
00:49:54
Speaker
Right.
00:49:54
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:49:55
Speaker
I guess that's about it.
00:49:57
Speaker
We can stop recording.
00:49:59
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:50:00
Speaker
All right.
00:50:00
Speaker
Thanks guys.
00:50:03
Speaker
That's interesting.
00:50:04
Speaker
What did you make of that, Ren?
00:50:06
Speaker
I thought it was really fascinating, but I also don't think we got down to the core of the aphantasic experience.
00:50:13
Speaker
I think he was definitely speaking more about his teaching techniques.
00:50:18
Speaker
And what I thought was interesting was how he used terms in, I thought were unconventional or like he was using terms in ways that I wouldn't use them.
00:50:29
Speaker
And one of those, and for instance, this would be the terms like visualization or mind's eye, visual imagery.
00:50:40
Speaker
And I usually use those terms to mean images as in what I would imagine, or like what I would see with my eye, but just in my mind instead.
00:50:51
Speaker
But it seems like he was using that to refer to proprioception or some type of proprioceptive state.
00:50:59
Speaker
He definitely had lots of imagined spatial.
00:51:01
Speaker
I think his architectural one, he's imagining the shape of a cathedral with different things in it and the shape of, he very clearly described movement and spatial location and movement.
00:51:12
Speaker
It really increased the amount, I think, people's minds are different.
00:51:16
Speaker
I mean, there's partly a vocabulary problem going on here.
00:51:18
Speaker
It's really hard to talk about this stuff, which is why we're doing this podcast, because everyone doesn't have enough common vocabulary.
00:51:24
Speaker
We just don't talk about it enough as a society.
00:51:28
Speaker
But also just, yeah, everyone's doing it very, very differently.
00:51:33
Speaker
His kind of aphantasia is definitely distinctive from mine because I didn't, I would need like a whole several hours of conversation.
00:51:43
Speaker
It's like a research project to understand just what you were saying about paperwork.
00:51:47
Speaker
I don't think I have that problem, but I'm still not sure.
00:51:51
Speaker
I might have that problem.
00:51:52
Speaker
I've just, but it might be, I've always assumed that that, you know, the thing he's missing can't be done.
00:51:57
Speaker
And I just routinely like write down things on one page of the form and copy them across and I just don't pay attention to it.
00:52:03
Speaker
Whereas he knows from music that he can do a much more powerful technique with audio and he just is way efficient and then can't do that with a visual medium.
00:52:12
Speaker
So I'm not sure whether that's what's happening or whether we've just got a very different, what we're good at in Aphantasia is different from each other.
00:52:22
Speaker
Yeah, super fascinating.
00:52:24
Speaker
And what other ways do you think you differ from, your Aphantasia differs from his Aphantasia?
00:52:31
Speaker
I think actually quite similar is my prior and I asked him this because we both have spatial.
00:52:37
Speaker
You didn't quite get to ask him about the map.
00:52:40
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:52:41
Speaker
We both have spatial and not colour and texture, but he does it.
00:52:44
Speaker
I wasn't sure if the colour he has in the metaphorical colour of music, if he saw that as well, we didn't quite manage to dig into that.
00:52:52
Speaker
It takes a long time to dig into these questions.
00:52:54
Speaker
So.
00:52:56
Speaker
It was interesting comparing... So I've... I mean, my experience with music is very limited, but there was a period where I had a piano and I had depression and I just got shown some simple... I worked out the basic, you know, simple chords and could just improvise melodies.
00:53:16
Speaker
A really limited technique.
00:53:17
Speaker
And yet I found if I just let my subconscious play, it could express itself emotionally and I would, like, be moved in a way I couldn't with a verbal...
00:53:27
Speaker
production with very, very simple things.
00:53:29
Speaker
And my only attention was on my own emotion and the impact on my own emotion of the playing.
00:53:34
Speaker
And it was like, it was, it was really, really powerful.
00:53:37
Speaker
And it was, I found it really interesting when he said, yeah, and when I'm imagining a piece, I'm not just imagining the audio.
00:53:44
Speaker
I'm imagining what the emotional effect will be.
00:53:48
Speaker
And I'm imagining proprioceptively where my body is and what the cello feels like when I'm playing it.
00:53:54
Speaker
So it's a very rich, multimodal form of imagination, even though there's nothing visual in it for him.
00:54:00
Speaker
That's three different things he's imagining that aren't visual at all.
00:54:04
Speaker
Audio, proprioception, and emotion.
00:54:09
Speaker
Which is cool.
00:54:11
Speaker
Yeah, definitely the part about emotions was something I wasn't expecting to be so intricately intertwined with his...
00:54:24
Speaker
I don't know how to describe this, but I guess his imagination.
00:54:28
Speaker
He was very much focused on not just how his body was moving, but also how other people were potentially feeling.
00:54:36
Speaker
And there was this very clear endpoint to why he was imagining the music and the proprioceptive information and the way that he did.
00:54:47
Speaker
It was for the purpose of influencing or affecting people's emotions.
00:54:53
Speaker
Right, because I don't, if I'm trying to persuade something of someone, I don't actively consciously imagine they have the, you know, emotion of happiness or the emotion of compliance or something in order to train my brain to, you know, to persuade them better or something like that.
00:55:07
Speaker
But maybe I could.
00:55:09
Speaker
It's making me weirdly think of the Buddhist metatype prayers, which are thinking good of the world in various ways, or yourself and others, and changing your mind like that.
00:55:19
Speaker
They're kind of imagining having more positive feelings about parts of the world, right?
00:55:25
Speaker
In a funny kind of way, which is a use of imagined emotion.
00:55:29
Speaker
So that's really interesting.
00:55:33
Speaker
Have you got anything else about music that you can think of that's come up in like mental experience in music, either yourself or people you know?
00:55:43
Speaker
Not so much for music.
00:55:44
Speaker
I mean, I think I can agree with Matt on the fact that
00:55:49
Speaker
I can also imagine orchestras at least up to four polyphonic lines and be able to distinguish them in my head.
00:55:59
Speaker
Any more than that, it's just too much.
00:56:01
Speaker
So you can have four parts, but you can't have like, you can't imagine like a hundred instruments and all the different instruments or something?
00:56:07
Speaker
No, not individual instruments at that level.
00:56:10
Speaker
I can imagine like...
00:56:12
Speaker
the sound of a choir, but not every individual who's singing in that choir.
00:56:18
Speaker
I can imagine them singing one melodic line, and that would be one part.
00:56:23
Speaker
And then I can imagine three other melodic lines of whatever instrument or groups of instruments.
00:56:30
Speaker
And that becomes the capping off, the maximum capacity for auditory imagination for me.
00:56:41
Speaker
And clearly, I mean, it would be lovely to talk to one, but my sense is that really good musicians can do vast numbers of them and really good composers even more so.
00:56:52
Speaker
Which is pretty cool to think you're designing all that in your mind and predicting what it's going to sound like.
00:57:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:00
Speaker
What Matt said, which was really interesting, was that he automatically...
00:57:05
Speaker
attach emotion and he's imagining emotion at the same time as imagining the music and that's not something I do personally it's probably because I'm not a performer I'm not imagining what influence what emotional influence this will have on other people I'm just imagining the sound as it is without you know any correlate of emotion yeah that I mean now you said it it feels kind of
00:57:35
Speaker
obvious and right but that's what you should do because the unique and special thing about music is is the magical way it has a an emotional impact yes yeah so paying attention to that is clearly the right thing to do when you're making music whether yeah playing it or composing it great it's also kind of like implicitly it's drawn my attention to whatever i'm doing when i'm
00:58:00
Speaker
arguing with someone or having a debate with someone.
00:58:03
Speaker
I think because this, like what music, musical performance is for Matt argument and debating is for me, whenever I'm constructing an argument or engaging in debate, I'm always very,
00:58:19
Speaker
attuned to the emotions of the other person that I'm debating with.
00:58:25
Speaker
So it made me realize, yes, I actually do do this for emotions.
00:58:30
Speaker
It's just in a different setting.
00:58:33
Speaker
And it makes sense that as a musician, Matt is finely attuned to emotional responses to music.
00:58:41
Speaker
And I am highly, you know, finely attuned to...
00:58:47
Speaker
If you were thinking about like a political issue, might you also be imagining the emotion of different people with different takes on that issue?
00:58:56
Speaker
Yes.
00:58:57
Speaker
Yes.
00:58:57
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing.
00:58:59
Speaker
So, and because I'm not just, um, so I think by now, you know, that I am very interested in religion and that's like my, um,
00:59:10
Speaker
main interests, whenever I have a religious discussion and I see disagreements on a religious front, I'm trying to imagine everything that would need to be held by the person.
00:59:26
Speaker
whether it be values or beliefs, in order for the emotion to then manifest itself.
00:59:32
Speaker
And if I can accurately imagine the emotion, that means I would have to have the prerequisite beliefs and values in place in order to mimic their emotional response.
00:59:45
Speaker
That seems great, particularly for topics that can be controversial, like religion and politics, that feel super valuable.
00:59:53
Speaker
Because that's often half of what matters and what's happening in the conversation is the emotion more than any logical, any kind of the actual rational part.
01:00:04
Speaker
And I think this happens very naturally or automatically for Matt when it comes to music.
01:00:11
Speaker
And in the same way, I don't really think about, I don't have to consciously imagine the emotional response of another person whenever they see this particular doctrine being disagreed with.
01:00:21
Speaker
I just know exactly what it feels like.
01:00:23
Speaker
And then...
01:00:24
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question.
01:00:25
Speaker
So how do you experience this imagined emotion?
01:00:28
Speaker
It does, like, I mean, I know we had a conversation the other week about how you experience actual emotion while it's happening.
01:00:36
Speaker
But if it's emotion that's kind of theoretical, do you experience it still in your body?
01:00:41
Speaker
Oh, that's a good one.
01:00:43
Speaker
It's still in my body, but it's less visceral, if that makes sense.
01:00:48
Speaker
It's less quite as affecting as if I truly held this belief, for instance.
01:01:00
Speaker
So say, for example...
01:01:03
Speaker
if someone were to insult the the prophet muhammad and because i am not a muslim myself i personally wouldn't be emotionally affected by it but because i also have developed um certain like i can take for uh for granted like these are the presuppositions that muslims typically hold and adopt these beliefs as if they were my own
01:01:29
Speaker
I can see how it would be jarring for them and what it would be to have a sacred belief like desacralize.
01:01:39
Speaker
And so I feel the emotion in the same way that Muslim would, but perhaps with lesser intensity.
01:01:47
Speaker
Right.
01:01:48
Speaker
So it's still, I guess it's the same because
01:01:52
Speaker
you can see some objects or you can imagine the objects and those are slightly different experiences.
01:01:57
Speaker
Like it's a second screen that the thing in your mind's eye happens on.
01:02:02
Speaker
Is it similar in that you can feel an emotion in your body, but you can also imagine that feeling in your body and that happens like it's not actually in your body, but you get some of the same neural pathways firing in some way.
01:02:15
Speaker
I think it's definitely the same neural pathways that are firing, but I sometimes feel...
01:02:24
Speaker
For example, I'll probably clench my jaw if someone makes a sacrilegious comment or like I'll type in somebody like I'll clench my butt or something from like some kind of like secondhand embarrassment on behalf of people of that identity group.
01:02:45
Speaker
You might have a secondary emotion of your own reacting to imagining the emotion of how the person will react to it.
01:02:52
Speaker
Yes.
01:02:54
Speaker
Humans are amazing.
01:02:56
Speaker
All these things that are going on.
01:02:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:59
Speaker
Maybe we can do one on
01:03:02
Speaker
political identity and disagreements at some point.
01:03:05
Speaker
That could be like a messy topic, but be really interesting to explore that.
01:03:10
Speaker
What's the experience of feeling bad when someone says something you politically disagree with?
01:03:14
Speaker
Hard topic.
01:03:17
Speaker
So Vin, can you do paperwork like super easily?
01:03:22
Speaker
I wouldn't say I'm especially good at it, but I wouldn't say I'm terribly bad at it.
01:03:27
Speaker
I think I do tend to procrastinate on simple paperwork depending on what's on my to-do list, but I'd say pretty average.
01:03:37
Speaker
But can you remember where things are on the form and stuff?
01:03:40
Speaker
Not really.
01:03:41
Speaker
I mean, unless, of course, I am doing a visual snapshot of it, then maybe I could do it, but it would have to be a form that I fill
01:03:53
Speaker
fill up on a very common basis.
01:03:57
Speaker
Good.
01:03:58
Speaker
Anything else you want to chat about?
01:04:01
Speaker
I think that's pretty good.
01:04:03
Speaker
We may or may not use this.
01:04:06
Speaker
What do you think about doing a follow-up episode?
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, so we don't know as much about music as we do about emotion.
01:04:16
Speaker
uh collectively but we could maybe put it at the end of the same episode or something we'll see oh there was a thing yeah i i'd want to do an episode by the way about uh inner experience of blind people at some point and if that's already in in the list yes it is because you mentioned you two had a little conversation about blind about blind imagination i think but we need to research it that there are um
01:04:42
Speaker
black cogenically blind blind from birth people and they still have an imagination yeah and it's like how can that be what does that even mean um i i think they might construct it from because the spatial part of imagination is common with the spatial part of feeling the world with your physical body they're kind of they're related yep so i i'm sure if you're blind that is probably super strong
01:05:07
Speaker
In fact, the parts that Matt and I have of imagination, which is more the visual, the spatial part, even if you're blind, you're going to have that.
01:05:16
Speaker
So I don't know how much is that and whether they then hear about colors and kind of layer them on top somehow, or if the brain innately knows about colors because, yeah, we need to be an interesting episode anyway.
01:05:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:29
Speaker
All right.
01:05:30
Speaker
I guess we can close.
01:05:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:32
Speaker
Cool.
01:05:36
Speaker
course to add a few months later that since this recording Matthew composed and performed the intro and outro music to Imagine an Apple so thanks Matthew it's fantastic and have a lovely week