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My mother's second husband was a professional flute player, who practised every day in a music room in the basement. For months after he moved out, my sisters, my mother and I would sometimes look at each other and say, "Do you hear it too?" We could still hear him practising.
I thought of our phantom flute player while reading Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks's new book about music and the brain. His chapter on musical hallucinations includes several clinical tales of people who hear persistent music from what they first imagine to be an external source, before realizing they're tuned to the mind's own radio.
"The original part of memory is the memory of actions and procedures and sequences, starting with crawling and walking," said Sacks, during a phone interview from his New York office. "This part of memory also includes musical and textual sequences." It seems to be involved in the way some tunes replay themselves in our minds even after we're tired of them. It may also account for the way that musical and textual memory tends to work best with long units of information - on whole phrases in sequence, rather than on individual notes and words.
We tend to think of hearing as something that works more or less well, and that an ear for music is something you're born with or never acquire. But Sacks's book is full of stories of people whose experience of sound and music is dramatically changeable. A doctor, after being struck by lightning, develops a craving for music so intense that he teaches himself piano and becomes a composer. An elderly woman begins to sing all day long, so compulsively that she can't maintain a conversation for more than a minute or two.
Sacks, the author of such books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been meeting and treating such people for decades in his daily practice as a neurologist. He has touched on some of their experiences in his previous books, and now has devoted a volume to the many ways in which music can save or enslave us.
It's a topic that has earned itself firm footing in pop culture - Musicophilia comes on the heels of last year's successful This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin, the paperback edition of which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for five weeks. This Is Your Brain offers a beginner's guide to concepts such as pitch and rhythm, and a rough guide to which parts of the brain seem to be involved in musical memory, pitch placement and timbre recognition. Levitin considers such puzzles as why we like repetition in music, why many people's musical tastes are formed for life by the age of 20, and how we recognize a Beatles song even when played at different speeds by a bluegrass band or on a pennywhistle. He wants to know the origins of musical preference, how our brains suppress or extrapolate musical detail, and why some people are more musical than others.
Sacks's book deals with people of unusual deficits and abilities, including those with Williams syndrome, a rare congenital disorder associated with low IQ and poor spatial sense, but also with high sensitivity to music. He writes of people who develop epileptic reactions to music, of those (including the composer Michael Torke) for whom some sounds and keys are permanently fused with colours, and of a few (Che Guevara was a case in point) who are deaf to both musical pitch and rhythm. He describes a composer with Tourette's syndrome who regards his musicality as "a congenital disorder," and a French neurologist who, when he heard music, "could say only that it was The Marseillaise or that it was not."
