Up to date!

Posted on Feb 20, 2009 | 1 comment

Well just about. Computer time in the library comes in one-hour chunks, and I’ve used a few of those this week to copy blog posts from my original blog to here.

What I haven’t transferred is all the comments and discussion which took place there. I’m undecided what to do about that. Link to it? Copy selected comments and add them here?

Any thoughts?

It feels good having transferred the posts, though.

Some of them are quite long. Unlike the other site, this one lets me decide post-by-post whether to display the full post or just the introduction. So for longer or more specialised posts, I could display just the introductions. What do you think?

See the poll on the right. I’m waiting with interest to see whether the poll displays in Opera Mini on my phone…

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Noise, distraction, and caffeine?

Posted on Feb 17, 2009 | 5 comments

Yesterday this appeared on Twitter. It was posted by a freelance editor and writer who works from home:

Dying JUST DYING to know why writers go to coffee shops to write! Isn’t it noisy & distracting? I really wanna know what the appeal is!

If you’ve read my earlier post Shhhhhh… you’ll know I’m quite sensitive to noise when I’m trying to work. In fact, I think real, total silence can be a wonderful thing…

… or it would be, if it existed. In fact the search for silence is elusive. The avant-garde composer John Cage discovered this when he visited a completely soundproofed room, and could still hear two sounds. He asked why; he was told that one came from his nervous system, and the other from the blood circulation through his ears.

So I think the issue isn’t so much about silence versus noise, as about distracting versus non-distracting sounds. Maybe being a musician makes me more sensitive to sound. I’m not sure. Anyway Sherrie’s Twitter question set me thinking about what the differences might be.

Demands, reactions and associations

What makes sounds distracting, then? I think several kinds of noise make it particularly difficult to work (or, for that matter, to go to sleep, or whatever else you’re doing which requires you to ignore them):

Sounds which make demands

If your phone or doorbell rings, it demands to be answered (regardless of whether you decide its demand is justified). If you cat miaows at you maybe it’s demanding to be fed. If you’re living with somebody frail whose sense of balance is dodgy and you hear an unexpected heavy thud from upstairs, the sound demands you go and check whether they’re OK.

Sounds you automatically react to

By coincidence, many announcement systems in public places use a sound almost exactly like that of our doorbell to signal an announcement. Even though I’m not at home and it can’t possibly be the doorbell, my reflex reaction is to wonder immediately who’s at the door and why. Typically this almost completely breaks my attention on what I was doing. Occasionally, a mobile phone with a ringtone identical to mine will ring: I find myself checking my phone even though I’m certain that it’s set to vibrate and can’t possibly be ringing. Instinct is immediate; thought takes time.

For me, muffled speech works similarly–for example a television in the next room, with the volume low enough for me not to hear the actual words, but high enough for me to hear the bursts of speech. My brain automatically hears that there’s speech going on and tries to listen, even though there’s no hope of making it out.

Sounds with unhelpful emotions attached

This might be the voice of someone you really can’t stand, or the sound of their footsteps going past as you hope they won’t come and talk to you… or the sound of your neighbours squabbling, heard through the wall.

Sounds with strong associations

I play the violin rather a lot. As a result, I find it next to impossible to concentrate if there’s violin music going on in the background. Inevitably I find myself listening to the playing style, imagining the technique of playing it, noticing whether it’s in tune or not, thinking that if I were the player I’d prefer to do different phrasing, wondering how difficult it is to play and how easy the music is to get hold of, listening to hear what bowings and maybe even fingerings the player is doing, trying to identify the composer, remembering the time when I was in an orchestra accompanying that particular concerto… “Background music” is an impossibility if it’s violin music. Music on an instrument which I’ve never attempted to play–maybe that would work. But violin music is a disaster for doing anything else to.

However, there’s another kind of distraction, which I find quite a fascinating one.

Sound and mental channels

Try this simple-sounding exercise. write d en;goenovneojco ddo… Sorry, that should have said: try to speak and write simultaneously. This is something which most of us probably think we have no trouble doing when, for example, we’re writing notes while speaking to someone on the phone. But if you watch someone doing it, you’ll see that actually, they alternate between speaking and writing. You won’t see the pen writing on the page, or the fingers typing on the keyboard, at the same time as the lips are speaking words. It seems that the brain has one channel for creating words, and that if one activity is using it, another one can’t. The gibberish sentence above was the result of me trying to type “Write some words down” at the same time as saying “Speak a sentence”. “Write” came out OK, after three tries, but only because I told my fingers beforehand what the first few letters were which they had to type. And even then, it didn’t come out as “write” until the third attempt.

I think something similar happens with noise. It’s most obvious with speech, of course: if I’m writing words, then hearing other words is typically very distracting. And sometimes I’ve missed chunks of a speech programme on the radio by texting someone to tell them that it’s on: while the language part of my brain is processing the words to go in the text message, it’s not processing the words from the radio. But generally if I send someone a text about some music I’m hearing, that doesn’t make me miss any of the music. But obviously if I’m looking through a violin part to think how to play it, then background music can be extremely unhelpful. (Playing in an orchestra does eventually give one the ability to shut irrelevant music out in that situation, though–for example you can be mentally trying out your difficult passage while another section of the orchestra is rehearsing something else.)

Music, though, is related to language in some ways, and some researchers now believe we probably evolved music as a species before we evolved words. For example it’s thought that the way music communicates emotion is similar to the way tone of voice does, and a startling experiment some years ago demonstrated that people from different countries actually heard musical pitches differently.

Is there such a thing as “background music”? For some people there is, and some swear that they can’t work without music. For others, music is an impossibly compelling distraction which makes work impossible.

For me, the situation tends to be somewhere in between. I remember a particular occasion at university when I was studying (yes, I occasionally did!), and thought it would be helpful and enjoyable to have some music on at the same time. I put on one of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. Could I work with it on? Not at all! And yet, I sometimes studied quite happily with music on in the background.

What I now know is that different kinds of music are different for me in this respect. I think it’s to do with the way the music is structured, and how similar it is to language. Baroque music, Bach in particular, is next to impossible to work to. It virtually breaks down in to sentences and words and letters. Music from the classical period is rather easier to work to. The nineteenth-century Romantic composers are much easier; with twentieth-century composers it depends on the style; probably the least distracting is the kind of atonal piece which has no discernible rhythm and consists of shifting tone-colours, long crescendos and the like. I think that’s because it’s the kind of music which is least like language, so it’s not using the same channels.

Non-distracting noise

What, then, is non-distracting noise? And why do people go to coffee shops?

I think there are three main aspects to it:

Sounds with relaxed or studious associations

These probably vary from person to person. As I type this, I can hear the comfortingly pleasant whirring of my laptop’s hard drive. For those of us who like working in a quiet place, I think that paradoxically the sounds can be part of what makes it feel quiet; being able to hear the birds outside, for example (as long as they’re behaving themselves, singing nicely and not squawking away).

Sound which shuts out other sounds

A good example of this is the tradition of playing quiet organ music before a church service: it helps people not to notice the distracting noises of people coming in, shifting in their seats, and doing all the things people do before a service.

Less obviously, but importantly:

Sound which doesn’t let you listen to it

I think this is where the coffee shop comes in. If enough people are having conversations around you, it’s hard to accidentally start listening to one of the conversations. You only catch the occasional word, and there’s nothing to latch on to. The situation’s over-complex for the ear, so it’s easier to give up trying to follow anyone’s conversation and just enjoy the pleasant atmosphere while getting on with whatever you’re trying to do.

So maybe that’s why people work in coffee shops. The emotional and attention-demanding noises are left at home, and the congenial, non-distracting noise envelops you so you can work.

That’s my theory, anyway.

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The Original Blog With No Name

Posted on Feb 13, 2009 | 3 comments

As you can see, I’ve not created any real posts here yet. But you can visit my original Blog With No Name at my.opera.com. [Edit: I’ve now copied quite a few posts here from the original site. I’ve kept their original dates, so see below.]

I’ve been posting there for a while, but many visitors have had problems posting comments, making it frustrating—I enjoy the discussions with readers but can’t have them.

There you’ll find posts about violin playing, science, religion, books, art, and general reflections.

Some recent posts there:

I’m undecided whether to copy old posts from there to here, or just post new ones. It might get confusing having discussions on the same post in two places. Any thoughts?

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Creative cycles

Posted on Feb 9, 2009 | 1 comment

If you read this regularly, or read back a few pages, you’ll know that I’ve recently come back to blogging here after quite a long break, and that there’s been a mini-flurry of posts. You can read them below!

Resolutions

A while ago, an online artist friend wrote in her blog that she’d decided to try to draw something every day, to practise her art skills. I was immediately attracted to the idea of trying to write something every day, maybe for this blog, as a similar useful discipline. But then I hadn’t the energy for it and the idea foundered.

Then I re-read her post the other week, and was encouraged to have a go. My flurry of posts ensued.
I believe in encouraging the encourager, so I mentioned to her that she’d encouraged me to start writing again. Her reply was along the lines: “Well actually… Yes, I really ought to get back to doing that.. I’m not doing it at the moment”.

Another online friend, a clarinettist, had had good intentions of practising every day. She wrote in her blog about feeling discouraged at not managing to do it. (She also wrote very encouragingly about being encouraged by me! Thank you.) And as you know if you’ve read below, my violin practice lapsed over Christmas…

How many of your New Year resolutions took the form “I will [insert idealistic ambition of personal perfection] every day”? Did they succeed?

I very much doubt that they did, but I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Reflecting on my own situatiion and the experiences of my fellow bloggers, I found myself thinking about the idea of creative cycles.

Learning, rest and cycles

I think any creative activity is in fact a learning process. Musical performance is included in this, by the way, because you have to create your particular style of playing. You’re always trying to develop and move forwards…

But learning is hard work for the brain. It doesn’t like concentrating hard on one thing indefinitely; after working at something new, it likes time to assimilate what has been learnt. If you play an instrument, imagine this scenario: one day, you go to a long rehearsal, or you do some intense practice at home. You work hard at it. When you stop, you’re definitely ready for a rest… Next day, when you practise some more, you don’t want to work on the same piece again, so you practise something else. Or you do try to play the same music, but seem to be having an “off day”. Or, more likely than not, you have a day off from playing, but the music you were practising is still going through your head. You find yourself unconsciously whistling tunes from it as you do other things. A few days later, you play the music again. You find it has improved a lot–while you weren’t working on it. Your practice told your brain what was required to play. Afterwards–most likely while you were asleep, if the suggestions of recent research are right–your brain set about “reprogramming” itself to achieve what you’d fed into it.

It does seem that most of the improvement happens between practice periods, not during them. That’s one reason why it’s a bad idea to force yourself to practise the same thing for hours on end, expecting it to become perfect as you practise. When your brain says you need to stop, you need to stop.

I think something similar might apply over longer timescales. Maybe we shouldn’t expect to keep our self-promise to do a particular activity every day–or even every week. Maybe it’s not even desirable that we should. (Or maybe our needs in this respect vary from person to person.) Each activity needs rest periods. A particularly long, intense period of one activity might need to be followed by a particularly long and complete rest from it. This might actually be healthy and not a failure on our part at all; it might be the success of recognising the way of working that enables us to give the best results.

Solo musicians whom I’ve met generally say that they like to learn the notes for a piece, then put it aside for several months before coming back to it. Then they’re ready to work on getting it ready for public performance. Slogging away for ever isn’t necessarily the best approach. In fact I’m pretty sure that for any creative activity it’s entirely the wrong one. (On a smaller timescale: I wrote the bulk of this post a week or so ago. Then I left it, and now that I’ve come back to edit it, the process feels a lot easier than it did then.)

I’m interested in a lot of different things–that’s probably obvious from my blog posts. But with most of them I’m never happy unless I involve myself in them in some depth. I’ll buy a textbook on a subject and study it. I’ll try to find out what the “professional” approach to it is. I’m interested in music, mathematics, computer programming, writing, and so on. Well, I can’t do all of those at once in the sort of depth I want to. Typically I’ll immerse myself in one of them for several months. Then I come to a natural point where it feels like time to do something else. I take a break from the activity I’ve immersed in, and immerse myself in the next one. So each activity happens in cycles, interspersed with the others.

The most important activities never quite go away, though. For example, there’s no time in the last twenty years when I’ve not been playing regularly in at least one orchestra. But there have been times when I was working hard at improving my violin technique, and others when I simply did what was required to prepare for the next concert. Those times haven’t been ones of musical inactivity, though: I’ve had the sense of using and consolidating the technique that was previously worked on. A period of learning followed by a period of consolidation.

So that’s how it seems to work for me. If you’re involved in any creative activity, do you have a similar experience of it going in cycles? I’d love to hear from you.

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Changing Planes

Posted on Jan 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ursula le Guin, Changing Planes, Gollancz, 2004

This book describes itself as “armchair travel for the mind”. It’s a kind of travel guide, written by people who have visited interesting places. Only in this case, what’s on offer isn’t different parts of the country, or different countries, but a whole variety of different worlds and places. Imagine, for example

  • a people whose experience of time is not sequential like ours
  • a society based entirely on anger and ill temper
  • a world in which people routinely overhear their neigbours’ dreams at night
  • a world where it is permanently the worst kind of commercialised Christmas
  • an island population created to live without sleep as a scientific experiment
  • a language too complex to be translated, based on words which individually have no meaning
  • a world where some people grow wings and can fly, but are ostracized by the rest of society.

In my previous post I talked about the value of alternative worlds for thinking about ours. Here we have a whole host of them, described in a gentle and witty style: sometimes reflective, sometimes loaded with deadly satire, always beautifully written and very readable.

People visit these worlds during tedious waits at airports, using “Sita Dulip’s method”, described in the first chapter. Sita Dulip discovered it while trapped “between planes” in the hell of waiting for an increasingly and horrendously delayed flight which was eventually

taken off the departures list. There was no one at the gate to answer questions. The lines at the desks were eight miles long, only slightly shorter than the lines at the toilets. Sita Dulip had eaten a nasty lunch standing up at a dirty plastic counter … She had long ago read the editorials in the local newspaper, which … applauded the recent tax break for citizens whose income surpassed that of Rumania. The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. She had been sitting for over an hour on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor facing a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor, when (as she later said), ‘It came to me.’
She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere–be anywhere–because she was already between planes.
She found herself in Strupsirts…

We learn later that the method requires “a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom” to work, making the airport an ideal place to use it. People relieve the agony by travelling to other “planes”, and the book recounts some of their experiences.

The stories are highly inventive, diverse, and wonderfully written. Some are reflective, some satirical, some challenging; all immensely readable. It’s tempting to quote the whole book. I’ll content myself with a few highlights.

“Seasons of the Ansarac” describes a world where the “humans” are a migratory species, travelling north every twenty-four years (in our terms) to breed; on their planet this means they breed each spring. In their terms, it takes someone one year to reach adulthood from birth, and their lifespan is about three years (72 of ours).

The story describes a typical cycle: people live in the cities during autumn and winter, getting on with their lives and feeling no sense of sexuality. Then comes the urge to migrate; everyone just feels like travelling north. There they form or renew partnerships, and have children; they then migrate back to the cities. By next spring, the children have grown up and it’s time for the new generation to migrate north and repeat the cycle… It’s hard to express the beauty and sensitivity of the way le Guin paints this unfolding picture.

The Ansarac encounter a medically advanced people, who don’t see the point of the lifestyle and want to “cure” them:

‘They said, “All that will change. You will see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your hormones, your genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you will be free of your irrational and useless behaviour patterns.

The reply is telling:

‘We answered, “But will we be free of your irrational and useless behaviour patterns?” ‘

Ouch!

The most challenging story, “The Island of the Immortals”, does not describe a place of eternal youth populated by people who live forever. The truth is far more disturbing. An extremely rare disease can be caught there, wjhich prevents the sufferer from dying, but doesn’t prevent ageing–for hundreds of years. A truly horrifying picture. Real, alarming questions in our own world inevitably come to mind: this is a world we have already glimpsed. Suppose medicine could keep someone alive indefinitely, regardless of their condition… Suppose you could be kept alive forever. Would you want to be? The story doesn’t explicitly mention these questions at all, yet we’re brought powerfully face to face with them.

In more humorous vein–but still with a serious point in the end–we hear “Woeful tales from Mahigul”, relating a variety of historical incidents. One is of a highly pointless war over a tiny piece of land. A river boundary is involved. One side discovers how to make explosives. This does not, however, lead to the result you’d expect, but to something much more creative. Why not move the river, and hence the boundary?

Given the highly infectious nature of technologies of destruction, it was inevitable that Meyun should discover explosives as powerful as those of their rival. What was perhaps unusual was that neither city chose to use them as a weapon. As soon as Meyun had the explosives, their army, led by a man in the newly created rank of Sapper General, marched out and blew up the dam across the old bed of the Alon. The river rushed into its former course, and the army marched back to Meyun.

Under their new Supreme Engineer, appointed by the disapointed and vindictive Councilwomen of Huy, the guards marched out and did some sophisticated dynamiting, which, by blocking the old course and deepening access to the new course of the river, led the Alon to flow happily back into the latter.

Henceforth the territorialism of the two city-states was expressed almost entirely in explosions…

and the story continues to its logical conclusion… which I will not describe here.

All of the stories are as inventive as these. Ursula le Guin’s skill is in painting a full and believable picture of each society, or at least as much of it as a tourist might experience. If you liked the quotes, and would like to read something entertaining and inventive, I hope you will give the whole book a try.

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