Tonal Refraction
Early Participants
Amateur:
Focal Dystonia
This individual, an internationally prominent cultural figure, is an amateur guitarist with multiple personality disorder. He states unequivocally that music is what holds him together and is distressed that focal dystonia has limited his playing to three fingers of his left hand.
Step One:
This is his full-page image of a tone that would exist without effort: 18” x 24.”
Step Two:
Starting this way recalled other meditative practices he uses; it was fun. The tricky part came in relating that energy to “actual” tone in printed music. This, though literally agonizing for him, came as no surprise to me, as I had had recurrent childhood nightmares about specific notes.
The loneliness of this transition needs to be affirmed as something shared with others, whether or not still living. I have come to believe that this is what we experience in the works of the masters. It is very much at the core of Tonal Refraction.
Step Three:
He struggled with the notion that the scale has 7 tones. “Going up;” he said, “would require placing the 6th tone lower than the 5th, in fact, below the tonic.” This called to mind two masterworks (cf. note above).
Professional:
Synæsthesia
A cellist, Juilliard DMA, is unable to play long, sweeping phrases she craves. She experiences painful tightness in the neck and shoulders while playing, even while listening to others.
Steps One, Two, Three:
She showed her innate sense of color/pitch relatedness, describing the colors as “Expressionist:” i.e., bold, mutually exclusive. Despite protesting that she would be unable to do so, she visualized an Alberti bass on the grid using an alternative palette. When she played a Beethoven sonata for friends first with her colors in mind, then with the alternative palette, her audience reported notably freer flow with the alternative palette.
Amateur:
Stroke
This image was produced during the only meeting with an accomplished amateur pianist who, as a result of a stroke, has severe ulnar nerve damage in her right arm and can no longer play.
I had suggested she bring a score that she loved, so we began with the score, usually Step Three. She chose blue for the tonic, red for the dominant—her choices. It took twenty-five minutes to produce this image of the first phrase. As this exhausted her, I made an exception to the usual practice and had her sit at the piano. She played through the entire piece without hesitation. “I have no idea how I did that; I don’t remember how!”
Professional:
Inconsistent Rhythm
A gifted cellist/composer was subject to ridicule because of his inability to count and play at the same time, a problem common to young people with acutely pitch-sensitive hearing.
Step One:
Drawing this ideal tone took thirty minutes (original: 22” x 3”).
Drawing the open G, his favorite cello note, took another thirty minutes (original: 22” x 3”).
lmmediately he perceived the problem: To respect the difference between that immeasurable auditory vitality and the visual experience of a single square on the grid.
Step Three: Part of a cello piece, in which he develops his own imagery to show pitch relationships.Three months later he reported, “My teacher doesn’t yell at me anymore.”
Child:
Difficulty Reading Music
Steps Two/ Three:
He was trying to read Bartok’s Mikrokosmos I, No. 3.
For this image he chose reds and pinks, revealing his sense of the white keys as closely related. From an early age he showed the quick auditory intelligence of a gifted improviser, but was never a fluent reader. He quickly grasped the sense of fitting the melody into 1 - 3 - 5 spacing on the grid, and enjoyed slanting the pencil strokes. At the end of m6 he reached excitedly for a blue pencil, drew in the waves of the “lake” suggested by the image, with a waterfall released at E, the lowest note so far.
Continuing to the final D (his favorite note), he exclaimed: “That’s where the water really flows!” He corrected the waterfall, added a flying fish and other creatures.
Tonal Refraction and Neuroscience
Tonal Refraction visualizes the pre-conscious moment during which memories and anticipations collide to produce the musical response. The emphasis of this study is to validate subjective responses to the highly variable perception of tone and tone relatedness. Neuroscientists observing Tonal Refraction remark on its parallels to scientific studies of pre-conscious responses currently underway. Some have identified parallels with experimental treatments for PTSD.
The terms and purpose of this study, the product of an artist/scholar’s insights, may indeed, be parallel to, even ahead of, scientific inquiry. It would not be the first time.