 
PRIVATE SESSIONS |
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In the first stage, the player or listener is asked to choose one of the following as a starting point:
surprised to find that they have one!) • the first tone of a piece that is causing difficulties. • particular moments in pieces that she especially loves or hates, or particular positions on her instrument which provide a peculiar sense of security or insecurity (acoustically and physically) | ||
| Selecting from hundreds of colored pencils, the player expresses in color the tone picked. Even for people who maintain they never equate tone with color, this activity, once accepted as 'only a game,' usually evokes surprising finesse in adjusting hue and intensity. This 'fine-tuning' in color stimulates memories and associations clarifying the persons intimate response to the quality of what may turn out to be a very specific tone, indeed -- perhaps the Bb of his grandmother's piano or E on the D string of his first full-size violin." Figure 1 Figure 1 One tone/color ordinarily leads to another in some kind of sensible sequence -- commonly a scale, perhaps a melody, or tones related via the natural harmonic series. Once a sequence emerges, the next step is to organize the colors on a grid, so as to spatially depict aspects of the player's pitch perception. This may take the form of a kind of tablature or picture of the disposition of the pitches on an instrument--pianists may visualize a piano keyboard, for example. It may be one-dimensional, with the colors lined up horizontally without commitment to melodic rise or fall; or it may be an alternative reconfiguration of conventional music notation. The guidance accompanying each of these steps is designed to give the player maximum flexibility in interpreting the instructions. There is complete freedom in the initial depictions the player makes, both in determining which aspects of her perceptual experience to emphasize, and in exploring various visual gestures or notations for tracking and organizing these. (People often remark how liberating it is to be deeply involved with pitch without fear of making a mistake.) Once the instructions are understood and the task is under way, most people readily accept the process as a useful depiction of something fundamental about how they hear -- something which they have not been able to express previously, and which they feel is not captured by traditional notation, something music theory doesn't find relevant. Essentially, the purpose of this stage is to transform our common conception of hearing as a passive phenomenon, according to which sound waves entering the inner ear cause physiological and neurological responses, into a more constructive and dynamic conception of hearing as an active process which has, of course, been going on all along but out of awareness. By means of such a conception we see that the perception of music is affected by many levels of active ear-imagination that might be thought of as different modes of hearing. To bring such possibilities to the attention of the player, it is useful to ask her to imagine various acoustic experiences, paying special attention to how her perceptual posture shifts in each of the following types of movement: | ||
• from silence into sound • from anticipated sound into actual sound • from remembered sound of a particular instrument;(such asMost musical people are only dimly aware of how different each of these modes of hearing can be. Yet any one of them may profoundly affect our receptivity to the music we play and the music we hear. Thus, the goal of this stage of TONALRefraction is to elicit awareness of the many modes of hearing and of their impact.  Figure 2 The concrete result of these initial steps is a series of sketches. Sometimes a primitive system emerges right away, reflecting the extent of the player's subconscious organization of pitch (though often the underlying structure of the various gestures remains inchoate in the earliest stages). Regardless, the important point is that these initial sketches now exist substantially in the world, where they act as a tangible symbol of the previously overlooked aspects of personal musical experience. (Because of this stirring up it has been suggested that TONALRefraction is to acoustic experience what psychotherapy is to emotional experience.) The sketches are already a reference point that the player can use to remind herself of what it is like to increase attention to subjective sound perception, and to consider the possibility that the kind of increased attention required for this exercise might be employed when actually playing or listening to music. This externalization of subjective experience -- the actual visual depiction of personal sound perception -- is the crucial device for addressing the player's musical difficulty. It seems not to matter what the actual problem is, whether severe anxiety or physical pain - even such a seemingly intractable disability as focal dystonia. The person's experience of it is forever changed once her unrealized perceptual organization is discerned. The next major stage in the TONALRefraction process is to show that perception of pitch is malleable and thus that certain unhelpful habits of hearing can be changed, replaced with newer and more fertile options.  Figure 3 This can be achieved by such simple means as altering the player's color palette to suggest pitch relationships not previously imagined. Another effective means of altering pitch perception is to introduce variables reflecting subjective responses to melodic rise and fall. We tend to borrow words like 'high,' 'low,' 'up,' and 'down' to describe pitch relationships whereas tone has its own spatial sense. Many people, conditioned by the piano keyboard and by the conventions of modern music notation, are greatly relieved to find that their seemingly confused responses to pitch and to melodic motion make sense within an auditory framework. An example of this is the octave relationship: though measured by eight keys on the piano it is often experienced as so close as to be the same note.  Figure 4 This awareness in turn empowers individuals to alter their playing and listening by systematically using auditory models which have been suggested by each person's own colors and spatial depictions. It is deeply moving and often quite striking to observe musicians free themselves from habitual limitations of hearing; for instance, shifting from major/minor organization into chromatic organization, or, going in the opposite direction, into the riches of pre-Baroque modal logic. Acceptance of multiple listening contexts may occur quite quickly depending on each person's readiness to move forward with the autonomy TONALRefraction invites.  Figure 5 BACK |
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