Tin Ear
“Table Talk”
by Snow Tempest
I have a tin ear. The expression has always made me think of the old ear trumpets Victorians hard of hearing clutched to their heads like giant metal lilies, before microchips made possible tiny amplifiers that hide inside the ear. I don’t need an amplifier, though. I can hear sound. What I can’t do is distinguish those mysterious qualities, like tone and key and pitch, that even amateur musicians talk about. I can’t carry a tune to save my life. The only song coming from my throat is an unmelodic squawk.
The thing is, I love music. Opera makes me quiver like a struck cymbal. I go to see live rock and folk shows whenever I get the chance, not simply to hear the new tunes, but to watch the musicians. They all stand looking out at the audience, or down at th e floor, and somehow know how to fit the notes together. Now and then, the bass player watches the guitarist’s hands change chords and plays along. It’s a perfect wordless understanding; so close, perhaps, to love. I like to feel the bass rumble through t he floorboards as the guitars and keyboards clang through my skull. At a crowded nightclub show, I can close my eyes and feel like a vessel of rhythm. In reality, I can’t clap in time.
Not that I don’t sing anyway. I get in the car, crank up the windows, and caterwaul away. It sounds all right to me, and I can’t look any more ridiculous than the boy I once knew who played air drums on the steering wheel. On some level, I’m convinced, I have some sense of music. I figured out, for instance, that “Clementine” and “Found a Peanut” have the same tune. Still, I can’t sing to other people, and I can’t tell why.
Probably because I’ve never been able to chime in at sing-a-longs, I keep track of music history and trivia. I’m usually the one who can remember the words to the old folk melody or the dance hit from 1988. the idea of music I want to think I understand - - but music isn’t just an idea. As much as I may wield my abstract reasoning skills, music will never entirely be more than an abstraction to me. Still, I pore over concert and album reviews, trying to figure out what it is they’re describing. Though I can’t really get outside my own experience, I know a whole vocabulary exists to describe something I can’t quite perceive.
This amusicality seems to be hereditary, and it has on occasion led to a funny kind of kinship. My father can’t sing a note either, although, oddly, he can whistle in time and on key. Once, when I spent a summer with my cousin Sarah, we discovered that we had both inherited the same dismal lack of melody. Delighted, we formed a duo, and walked around warbling every tune we could think of, off-key and at the top of our lungs. We sounded fabulous to ourselves, and beamed with mutual appreciation, almost like real musicians.
I’ve never taken Music Appreciation, figuring it would be lost on me. It may be that the closest I’ll get to understanding music will be through science rather than symphonies. I’ve been reading that tone is quantifiable, that pitch is a matter of the frequency and wavelength of sound, just as color is a function of the frequency and wavelength of light. Carl Sagan writes that a blind person can perceive color, in a mathematical sense, with a spectrometer to measure the light waves. It is even possible, h e says, to have the variations in hue expressed as musical tones. Imagining this setup in reverse, I almost get it. I can picture a sound wave, and I can tell the difference between crimson and scarlet at a glance, whereas I’m not certain I would recognize re and mi on the street. I know that musicians sometimes say that they experience sensations of colors and intensities accompanying sound, so perhaps my thoughts are closer to their perceptions that I’ll ever know for sure.
Then again, perhaps I don’t need physics equipment to appreciate music. I appreciate that music exists. Because how they do it is a puzzle to me, that people can beat drums in rhythm and blend their voices in harmony seems all the more precious.