Sound rather than sight is the great passageway to human experience. And the pictures are better.
In the hierarchy of sensory richness the bias of our times tends to give the top spot to the visual. People who make it their business to explore how we connect in the 21st Century describe our culture as increasingly “ocular-centric,” or image-driven. We now worry more about hours of “screen time” consumed per day than time spent in “idle” conversation.
Those who lobby for the primacy of the visual justifiably note that images are mostly free of the challenges of mastering the complexities of verbal literacy. They also rightly conclude that the body is an instrument for universal communication. “Talk” to an outsider with no knowledge of your language, and you still receive lots of meaning in visual cues and gestures that bridge cultural boundaries. Anywhere on earth we can hand-gesture our way to the idea that we are hungry.
But there is reason to affirm that our most vital sensory equipment—and also the most fragile—resides along the cochlear nerve that links our ears to the brain. More than sight, sound is the great passageway into the human experience. Sound is the primary agency for knowing and understanding others. Like so many other higher-order animals, binaural hearing provides most of the context clues we need in order to map our location in specific physical and social environments. We disguise the body in clothing and create architecture to separate ourselves from open space. But our words carry less camouflage. Even when we are in full rhetorical flight, our essential selves tend to be visible. As the saying goes, you can lie in print more easily than on a phone.
It’s also important to remember that language is acquired in the very young by hearing others. Language is speech. The visual mode of print is vital but derivative. In its subtle tonalities talk gives us feelings and attitudes that can easily be lost on the page, a fact that makes it somewhat easier for a blind person to meld into diverse communities than those with chronic deafness.
Humans have organized noise into music for the sheer pleasure of finding perfect avenues for expressing emotional intensity.
Perhaps the trump card for the importance of regaining a “sound-centric” view of human capabilities is in the unique and miraculous realm of music. Music untethers sound from its purely stipulative duties of standing for things and ideas. It is the perfect proxy for human feeling. Humans have organized noise into music for the sheer pleasure of finding perfect avenues for expressing emotional intensity. Music is the reliable substitute that takes over when the verbal fails.
To be sure, as an industry the music business is in shambles. But that is partly because the pleasures of songs must be satisfied even in the face of faltering attempts to monetize their value. Downloaded music files and ubiquitous earbuds reign with the young and increasingly the old because we need the catharsis that music makes possible.
Even in the visually rich world of film many of the deepest pleasures come from the sound design of a different class of genuine auteurs: film composers. Music creates an expressive language that is frequently more evocative than what even a master-director can make literal on the screen. Consider Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The film pulls in viewers by the kind of aural “foretelling” that so often gives its slow and confusing plot an unmistakable urgency. Most of the film’s mystery lies between the staves of Bernard Herrmann’s dreamlike score (the longest of any Hitchcock film). The same can be said for Sidney Pollock’s thriller, The Firm (1993). Pollock papered his story of a creepy Memphis law office with the solo work of Dave Grusin. The film today is a reminder of how much its exquisite tension was actually created in post-production by Grusin’s piano-only score.
Music heightens and transforms the natural limits of human action. It’s a novice’s mistake when a film director treats aural elements as merely supportive of the story. Sound is more fragile. It’s easily swamped by the visual clutter of daily life. But that’s all the more reason to reclaim its special status as the realm that converts intensity of feeling into something that is both sensate and accessible.
The experience of facing a discrepant and uncomfortable new role is universal. Everyone knows the feeling. We identify with the person who makes the effort to pull it off.
Assessing someone’s comfort as a communicator usually involves comparing their perfected repertoire of roles against new roles thrust on them. Over a lifetime we acquire all sorts of comfortable responses to settings and situations we have learned to master. In the language of the theater, we know the scripts and we can easily pull of the requirements they place on us.
Functioning as an effective spouse, lover, best friend, reliable employee, dutiful parent, devoted son or daughter–even a competent chairperson of this or that committee–is not always easy. Even when we think we’ve become more or less a one-person repertory company ready for prime time, life has a way of placing us in situations we did not seek. Maybe a person is absolutely uncomfortable speaking in public, finding the right words to say at a funeral, or facing the daunting task of dismissing an employee who has not worked out. We all know the feeling of being pushed into what academics would call a “discrepant role.”
Think of Cameron Diaz as “Kimberly” in My Best Friend’s Wedding. She is mercilessly set up by Julia Robert’s character to be humiliated at a karaoke bar. Kimberly couldn’t carry a tune even if she was given a waterproof bag. Even so, her good-natured self easily triumphs over some truly awful warbling.
People who handle discrepant roles unusually well are usually called actors. We marvel at how they can inhabit another character so different than who they are. Theater is also a model in another sense. Within the literature of drama the inability to successfully pull of the requirements of a setting is actually a major premise of comedy. We love to see characters having little success coping with unfamiliar social situations. Film and television stars ranging from Lucille Ball and Cary Grant to Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler have all sold plenty of tickets on the premise that a botched effort to pass off a different self can be hilarious. For the rest of us, a potential loss of “face” weighs as a good reason to recoil from what can look like a disaster in the making. And yet the existence of the familiar comedy trope of a fish out of water ought to give us some comfort. To be sure, we don’t want to be the source of someone else’s entertainment. But the experience of facing and conquering what is for us a situational stretch is universal. Everyone knows the feeling. We identify with persons challenged by the new circumstance. And we know that grace in handling the pressure counts for a lot.
For Americans public speaking is the most dreaded discrepant role. Many of us—actually about 30 percent—are terrified by the prospect. It ranks with snake-handling as a cause of fear. And yet most of us do pretty well overcoming these doubts and finding that it is a challenge we can conquer.
There is no trick to overcoming this natural apprehension, but there is a useful method working past it. Focus on what you have to say. Think of a presentation as simply a heightened form of conversation about something you regard as important. Don’t apologize for being nervous. Use notes, but don’t memorize or simply read them. Prepare an outline as an aid in delivering your ideas in your own words. This is called extemporaneous speaking. You’ve prepared. But you’ve also left yourself the advantage of delivering your ideas in your authentic personal style. If a speech includes data like the line, “Because of epidemic in childhood obesity, many children are predicted to have shortened lives than their parents,” say it with the urgency and shock it deserves. Good remarks are simply an amplified and slightly more organized version of your conversational self.
Remember that audiences expect you to be you. Even a discrepant role never really changes that.
