Some thoughts about music

This is the first post in what will be a series reflecting on the ways in which my autism has affected the way I listen and hear, and the consequences of that for my subsequent involvement in music as a composer, performer, musicologist and ultimately Professor of Music. My involvement with music has reduced considerably over the past decade thanks to serious hearing problems brought about by Ménière’s Disease. I can’t really listen to or make music comfortably any more. But it remains very important to me, even though I am nowadays more involved in computing.

I can remember having piano lessons as a child and being fascinated by the sound of the instrument. I now realise that I was hearing the interiorities of the notes in a way that others did not. Today this would be called ‘spectral listening’ and is a staple of electroacoustic music, but I know I heard in this way instinctively all along. Sound is made up of harmonics that vary over time. A musical ‘note’ is in fact not a single pitch but a complex chord made of these shifting relationships. The perception of a single pitch comes from the fact that one harmonic is louder than the rest. I have always heard many of the harmonics and the way they change.

In addition, my listening was complicated by the fact that I also heard environmental sounds that blended with the instrument. It was hard to separate these out. For example, fluorescent lighting and electricity generally emits a sound which combines with musical sounds to create confusion. I assumed everybody could hear this, but I now know they could not. For me, it conditioned what I enjoyed in music a great deal.

Most of the standard piano repertoire I was given to learn I found tedious, because to my ears the sounds lacked granularity. I now understand that this was due to the ways in which the piano is engineered. The wire strings, sound board and above all tuning of the instrument combine to create an evened-out series of pitches called equal temperament, a complicated tuning system which divides the octave into 12 equal steps on a logarithmic scale with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2 (12√2 ≈ 1.05946). Unaware of this, I had a more straightforward, visceral response to the “well-tempered” piano, and only really got interested when I was given more discordant music to play, by composers such as Bartók and Hindemith. These seemed more in tune with the instrument than Mozart etc.

My school had an extensive record library, so I sat down and listened to the entire collection from A-Z in alphabetical order, something that I now understand was quite an autistic thing to do. I was rigorous about it, and I loved the cardboard sleeves that housed the LPs (I can still see them now in my mind’s eye) and the organisational system of the library. Fortunately for me, one of the early records I encountered was a box-set entitled ‘avant-garde’. I adored the works by Stockhausen, Ligeti, Kagel and Berio on these records. I remember being so excited by Stockhausen’s ‘Gruppen’ for three orchestras because it seemed to depict the way I normally heard. 

There may be something here that is more generalisable about autistic people’s preferences in sounds. It would be fascinating to test this as a hypothesis. All I know is that I was drawn to atonal music at that time (I was 13/14). A few years later I had the opportunity to attend the premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s ‘Ave Maris Stella’ at the Bath festival. The piece (which I greatly enjoyed) contained a marimba solo. The low notes on the marimba took me into a world of sound that I never really left, and many of my compositions subsequently included marimba. It was the resonance, which I learned was effectively in just intonation, rather than the engineered equal temperament of a piano note. I was hearing, possibly for the first time, what genuine consonance meant and, lo and behold, it wasn’t boring at all! As it happened, I sat next to the local music critic, who absolutely hated the piece. He was following the score and afterwards, seeing my enthusiasm, very kindly gave it to me. He was pleased to see the back of it. I spent much time replaying the sounds in my head using the score as a guide.

The result of all this was that I left school with what would be considered rather advanced tastes and a comprehensive knowledge of music, which I carried forwards at degree level. I had very acute pitch perception including an ability to listen to every separate instrument in an orchestra as they played simultaneously, strong audiation skills (hearing in my head while reading a score), and excellent abilities to discern and analyse structures and patterns. There was also a synaesthetic component in which certain notes and chords became associated with colours and tastes in my mind. “Synaesthesia” means, literally, confusion of the senses and I have always had it to some degree. So, colours become tastes or sounds, certain smells become colours, and so on. I became fascinated by other synaesthetic composers such as Scriabin and Messiaen. 

Another example of what I now consider to have been an autistic trait, was my ‘party trick’ of identifying pieces of music by ‘reading’ the grooves on an LP. I would look at the fine grained patterns on the surface of the disc and read them as a kind of score. It was not completely infallible and only worked with music that I already knew, of course, but it used to impress people quite a lot, as I recall.

But all these abilities could be easily thrown off-kilter by what I now recognise as hyperacusis (an increased sensitivity to certain frequencies and types of sounds). Elements of the soundscape could intrude and distort my musical perception. Everyday sounds like the clatter of cutlery would cause me immediate distress, which I would then have to overcome. Too many of them could lead to overload and would interfere not just with my hearing but also with rational thought. As my hearing has declined, it has become harder and harder to listen ‘past’ these sounds. Loud noises like these can lead me to shut down.

Aspects of listening to soundscape which others would regard as strange were commonplace to me, so listening to motorways, to fridges, to engines, and being able to separate them into their acoustic components was something I did constantly. I would frequently sing along to them! So when I encountered John Cage’s music, and his mantra “let sounds be themselves”, it felt like a homecoming. This inclusion of what would otherwise be regarded as either non-musical or, worse, noise, was what attracted me to electroacoustic music. I have frequently used non-musical sounds in my own compositions, weaving them with musical sounds to which I respond.

Father's Day

My Father died in 1979 of a heart attack. It was his third major coronary, but even so it was a shock.

I was in my second year at university and, despite high academic success, having a rough time personally. I had ongoing problems with my throat (quinsy) which resulted in an  operation, but also psychological issues which I now recognise were down to my undiagnosed autism. The psychiatrists and doctors I saw at that time completely failed to spot that problem, which is not surprising given the state of autism diagnosis in those days.

Looking back, I think my father probably tried his best to deal with me. He was ill-equipped to do so. As a traditional Christian disciplinarian, his only frame of reference for me was wilful disobedience, as I failed to conform to everything he expected. I was constantly disapproved of and frequently punished. The only time that changed was in my first year at university when I achieved very high marks in exams and was top of the class. For the first, and possibly only, time in my life, he showed genuine approval of my achievements.

But how could he have done so? I was a composer, something that was completely alien to him, and I refused to follow him into the family engineering business. I was terrible at sport, which he loved. But most of all my brain just would not function in the way he thought good. We had so many challenging encounters it is hard to describe them in detail, but the gist of them was that I thought in a divergent way whereas he was entirely convergent. In other words, any initial stimulus would set me off into a train of speculative reasoning that led to creative outcomes, whereas he wanted to gather facts and information in order to find a straightforward solution to any problem or situation.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you!” he would shout as, yet again, I failed to make eye contact. “It’s just common sense!” “Are you thick or something?” And, most tellingly: “you’re just trying to be different!”. The problem, I now know, was that I am different. I’m not trying to be anything. I am simply ‘wired’ differently. What he saw as wilful disobedience was just honesty. I was never a naughty child.

I try to be fair to him, despite the fact that I had to go into counselling some years later to try to resolve the many issues in my relationship with him. The counsellor also failed to spot my autism, once again because autism was not well recognised at that time. But my memories of my father are often negative. We were very different. I read voraciously, whereas he was proud of never having read a book in his life. He was an authoritarian right-winger who strongly supported Margaret Thatcher, whereas I was always left-leaning and believed in freedom. He seemed to dedicate himself to diminishing and suppressing me as much as possible.

But I do wonder whether, had I had an autism diagnosis then rather than now, would that have changed his attitude? I think he did have the capacity for sympathy and understanding. He struggled with me because he was frustrated by me. He went away to National Service and returned when I was three years old to find a difficult and problematic child. He probably blamed my mother for that. If only he had known, perhaps life could have been very different…

Lockdown thoughts

After nearly three months of lockdown I thought it would be a good moment to reflect on the experience from my autistic viewpoint. As ever, I speak only for myself. Other autistic people, I know, have had very different experiences. But there may be some who can relate to what I am saying.

On the positive side, I have discovered how much I like working from home. In fact, it is a revelation just how much time in a typical non-lockdown day I have spent coping with environmental and social challenges. My biggest memory of the last meeting I had at the university is not what was said but rather the horrendous strip lighting, the asymmetry of panels on the walls, and my efforts to mask.

At home, I have almost complete control over my environment, a great routine and a set of rules to live by. I really like social distancing - in fact, I’ve been longing for it all my life - and I find online communication mostly fine, apart from some of the unexpected noises. The only problem, really, is that I don’t know when to stop working, which makes me more productive than ever, but perhaps not sufficiently work/life balanced.

But the message change from ‘stay home’ to ‘stay alert’ has lost me. I can follow the first, but the second is meaningless. And the constant lying and hypocrisy from our political leaders is really distressing. I can only deal with it by treating it all as nonsense.

Worse still, the recent ‘relaxation’ has created all sorts of uncertainty about social interaction. For example, keeping two metres distance is a clear rule, but how can I do that when there are so many more people about? What are the rules if someone is coming towards you in a narrow spot and showing no signs of wanting to move out of the way? I’m just staying at home as much as possible - it’s clearer and safer.

Shopping continues to create anxiety. Whereas before the difficulty was mainly sensory overload, now it’s more about social interaction. I had to leave the queue outside my local Tescos because people were getting cross with me about where I was standing. They actually shouted at me. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. I left before I shut down, but the result was that I did not go shopping that day.

My biggest anxiety is that the university will force me to return to campus. I can do my job perfectly well from home, including all the research AND the teaching. It requires some adjustments, of course, but I find these a creative challenge rather than a major problem. But universities are worried about their futures and are keen to see us back together on campus as soon as possible. If it gets to a situation where they require me to return before there is a vaccine, I don’t know what I’d do. Perhaps I’d resign. I try to reassure myself that  management has been very good at understanding my needs so far, but it still does worry me just the same. 

I like living in a locked-down way, free from many of the sensory/social challenges that I grapple with every day. I hope I don’t have to give up my job to preserve that.