OKAY!, or: How I learned to stop worrying and embraced the dissonance. In 1761, a French melody based on an old folk song named ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman.’ was created, and some 20 years later, a young and eccentric Austrian prodigy with an unprecedented gift for musical composition took the melody and recomposed it into 12 variations. This fellow had the peculiar name of ‘Wolfgang’, and—coming to be quite renowned and revered in the annals of history—has since had most everything he’s done attract quite a good bit of attention. This little simplistic French melody he’d shone a light on has thenceforth been sung by preschoolers and kindergarteners worldwide ever since. Presented for your edification are the profound and riveting lyrics that have been applied to said-melody. If you can (and you can), please sing along: “A-b-c-d-e f g. H-i-j-k-l m n o p. Q-r-s, t-u-v, w-x, y and z. Now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me.” Now, while these lyrics don’t quite rival Bob Dylan, they do succinctly and lightheartedly cover the short span of letters that makes up the English language, and therefore must be appreciated for their educational as well as their melodically pleasing value. I’m assuming if you’ve come this far, it is likely you already know how to read. And if you don’t know how to read: sdlfkjkenkljf. That, of course, was not a real word, but a somewhat cruel mockery of those who lack the ability to understand it for the rest of us to enjoy. With, then, the ‘alphabetic education’ bit I’m assuming covered, I’d like to bring up the ‘melodically pleasing’ part. I must assume that when you started reading those time-tested lyrics of alphabetical illumination, even without my prompt to sing along, the ingrained melody that started as that simple French folk song began playing in your head. It is an easy melody to remember, nothing too challenging, and was likely imposed upon you at a time when your youthful mind was elastic and, thenceforth, impressionable. We know why it’s a melody: if it wasn’t, it was just be a long, monotonous, drone, and all the fun of learning would be eradicated from its composition. But we might not all know why it’s ‘pleasing’. Music composition is based around two fundamental states of being: consonance and dissonance. To better understand these two, it is helpful to be reminded of how, exactly, sound works in the first place; of course, you being the type who can string together the alphabetic code I’ve laid out here and ‘read’ it, I wouldn’t dare suggest you don’t already know this process on some elementary level. If I were to pluck a string on a guitar (or blow a note into a tuba, press a key on a piano, sing, ect…) the fundamental act I would be accomplishing is manipulating the air for a short distance. That is, a string on a guitar will vibrate air into a wave when plucked. This wave (whose makeup in both pitch and tone depends on several nuanced factors including the size of the string, the force in which it was plucked, and the quality of the guitar body’s wood) will travel through the air, enter your ear, strike against your ear drum, and trigger a whole labyrinth of complexities involving bones and membranes and fluids and nerve fibers - the end result of which is that a signal will be carried to your brain to be processed as sound, or more accurately in this case: a note. Me, as the plucker of said string, has caused this domino-effect phenomenon in your ear and mind, and overall, I’m probably feeling pretty good about it. If I pluck at the string again, but move my hand somewhere else on the guitar to perhaps shorten the string’s length, I will reproduce the phenomenon, but this time with a newly constructed sound wave (since I shortened the length of the string, so have I the wave). If I keep going, and I’m a good guitar player with some idea of music theory and sense of tempo, I might get a smile out of you, followed by an almost instinctual nodding of the head, a tapping of the foot, and—if I’m really rocking the place—a total body takeover, leaving you helpless but to move about and (dependent on your personal dancing skills) turn you into either a flailing fool or a masterful contortionist. Pretty powerful stuff, right? But… how do I do this? Tempo isn’t a particularly hard concept to figure out, (count 1,2,3,4 in steady rhythm and the benefits of holding that steady rhythm become apparent immediately) but why do some of these curious little wave lengths hit our ears in sizes that make the brain interpret them as ‘pleasant’ and some others that make us cringe and begin concocting dastardly schemes to smash the guitar player’s evil tool over his equally-evil head? The answer is math. Sound waves, when divided up into smaller waves or elongated into larger ones, are essentially hitting your brain with audible math equations, whose problems and solutions lie only in relation to one another. When the problem is in a state of rest, we call this harmony, or ‘consonance’. When the problem is in a state of unrest, we call this ‘dissonance’. Now, that’s not to say dissonance is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in a world without dissonance, our music would be quite bland. Sing the ABC song again but never change the first note, so that you maybe sound a bit like a text-to-speech computer voice. This gives you an idea of a mathematically-resolved world of sound. Not very interesting, huh? The ABC song (and all others songs, really) have a tonal ‘center’; that is, a sound wave whose length we base all other wavelengths off of for the duration of the song, and those corresponding lengths are mostly nothing more than providing some slight dissonance on that tonal center so that when we come back around: problem solved, and we feel good about it. Hell, we feel GREAT about it. In the ABC song, we’ve just presented our mind a musical quandary and, 26 letters and a two short sentences later, solved this quandary entirely. (not to mention ingrained that vital alphabet into out head for future use if we didn’t quite have it down yet). The wave lengths of the notes in our little educational song there are sliced up in such a way that everything is, for the most part, mathematically pleasing, and the grand moment of subconscious triumph is the final note. As an experiment, sing the ABC song again (and I promise I’ll only ask once more after this) and leave out the final word/note, which in this case would be ‘me’. At the very end of our song, we would now have “next time won’t you sing with”. Sit there with that for awhile. Ruminate on it. Let its decidedly unresolved silence linger. Now, depending on how musically ‘tuned up’ of a person you are, that little act of denying yourself the pleasantry of resolving the song’s tension likely agitated you on a scale of ‘mildly annoyed’ to ‘considerably infuriated’ to ‘I hate Adam for making me do this and wish ill health befalls him’. The scale the song is based upon is a European division and pattern of wavelengths commonly referred to as ‘the major scale’. It’s cut up in such a way to only provide the slightest of dissonance, but—as I hopefully just proved—can still be quite maddening if applied in a certain way. This ‘major scale’ and all its variations is what likely every song you’ve ever heard is based around, but this doesn’t make the consonance and dissonance of it exclusive to a particular culture. We’ve brought our scales and melodies and harmonies to corners of the Earth that had scarcely had the pleasure of our westernized music, and the results are the same: smile at the consonance, wince at the dissonance (if its dissonant enough of course). This means our subconscious phenomenon of desiring harmonic resolution is not a cultural trait, but a human one. You might be asking by now: ‘So what, Adam? I’ve read every word of this little write-up of yours so far and it may have been mildly amusing or somewhat interesting here and there, but what’s the point?’ The point, thank you for asking, is that our brains want consonance. That is, they want to be in a state of rest and harmony as often as possible, and will often do whatever it takes on a conscious, subconscious, or emotional level to achieve this sort of ‘euphoric state of unrest’. If my music example didn’t yet sway you to this conclusion, you need only think about any story you’ve ever read, heard, or watched unfold for further evidence. Storytelling is based upon the same principal of keeping your interest by inducing oscillating phases of consonance and dissonance. You’ve likely noticed how towards the end of most, everything seems to start going terrible for our helpless protagonist and his cohorts, creating an almost unbearable amount of tension (dissonance) until we finally get that sweet, sweet, moment known as an ending, in which the hero somehow saves the girl, defeats the bad guy, blows up the fortress, and rides off into the sunset as the music swells and the credits roll to coalesce into a perfect amalgamation of utter resolution (consonance). This isn’t ‘by accident’. Your emotions/mind are being manipulated, and we’ve pretty much decided as a culture here in America, even if we’ve been through this whole song and dance many times before, that’s okay with us (see the same, rote, rehashed movies that get churned out systematically by the big studios each and every year known as ‘Summer Blockbusters’). Or, perhaps, consider the following short story as an example: Bob’s Big Discovery “Bob got home from work a half-hour late on Tuesday. He pulled his car into the driveway and noticed a light was on in his living room downstairs. This deeply disturbed Bob, as Bob lived alone, and had, in fact, for the last eleven years. Bob, overtaken with a sudden rush of anger and fear, retrieved his gun from the glove compartment, ducked out of the car, and rushed up to his doorstep. He kicked in the door, angled the gun’s nozzle forth, and stormed in without a moment’s hesitation. His eyes widened, his jaw fell agape, he gasped.” The End If this was my story, I do not believe I would sell many copies. In fact, I’d be chastised and vilified around the world for my cruel and idiotic ending. Just what the hell did Bob see in there, anyway!? The answer is irrelevant, but if you asked it, this once again demonstrates our undeniable hunger for having questions answered and problems resolved. (and for the record, Bob had simply forgotten to turn off his lights before leaving for work earlier that day, and the only thing greeting him in the living room was his grumpy and somewhat-indignant cat, who was wondering why, exactly, his can of food was a half-hour late in being opened and why his often-confusing owner was pointing a gun at him). Again, you might be saying: “So what, Adam? Sure, this is all true, but I pretty much knew all this already. Do you have a point to make yet or what?” Thank you, figurative reader, as this happens to be the precise moment our ‘point’ is revealed. In the 1950s, an American social psychologist named Leon Festinger took this idea of consonance and dissonance and applied it, not only to the art and entertainment we consume, but to the entirety of the cognitive mind itself. Specifically, Festinger focused on the dissonance, and, with the blunt appropriateness only a psychologist could muster, named the uncomfortable feelings that arises in a mind in conflict with itself as ‘Cognitive Dissonance’. Google it if you’re interested, but know the rest of this little conversation we’re having is going to be inflected with my own interpretations and ideas, so… if you want only the professional rundown, the exit is not far, and I thank you for sticking with me to this point. Now, the mind in a state of unrest is not a pleasant experience. Don’t believe me? Think back to our previous tinkerings with music and story-telling, or better yet: try the following experiment (though, admittedly, it’s not an easy one). Think of something you firmly, vehemently, believe in. Anything. The easy examples would likely be a political or religious ideology, as we often somewhat define ourselves by where we stand in either or both of those invariably polarizing and controversial topics. Or, perhaps, maybe it is something you profoundly believe about yourself. Maybe its that you’re a good person, have an attractive face, an incredible sense of humor. Maybe you think you’re smart, wise, patient, caring, strong, ambitious. It doesn’t matter. There’s always something someone somewhere believes in. Now, if you can (and this is the hard part) imagine you’re wrong; and not just ‘wrong’ but dead wrong. Find the counter-points to your view and try to believe in them with as much passion or conviction as you believe in your own. …get there yet? If not, keep trying: this is, after all, counter-intuitive and increasingly difficult for a mind set in its ways. Once you have gotten there—or as close to, realistically, as you can—realize that this isn’t just an ‘imagination’ your concocting, but there is someone out there (or perhaps a great number of people) who actually feel this way about your precious belief, and—this is the killer—in some ways, they’re very likely right. The mind (again, always desperate for consonance) prefers a black and white world to a grey one, and, specifically, one that is painted in your favor, and so we often find ourselves committing to things quite frequently. The more fervent the commitment, the less critical we become of the belief we’ve entrenched in and the more dismissive we become of the belief we haven’t, creating a sort of ‘self-imposed indoctrination’. Festinger said, “Humans are not a rationale animal, but a rationalizing one.” In the short span of 27 years I’ve spent on a planet full of them, myself included, I have to agree. From consonance comes comfort (please repeat that three times in quick succession for a gold star at the end of this piece of writing), and from comfort comes complacency, and from complacency comes stagnation. A stagnant mind is, in essence, a useless one. It breeds apathy and lethargy and ignorance, and is resolutely committed to nothing and no one, and (it seems) is quite alright with this vapid existence forever - for a complacent world is infinitely less frightening and unnerving than a challenging one. The interminable irony of this whole thing is that this dissonance we so deeply fear is not only the source of our greatest self-delusions, but also happens to be the fundamental driving force that brought about all our modern advancements. After all, someone had to look at the sky once and, instead of accepting one of the various dogmatic beliefs enforced by the ruling classes of their time (the Sun as God, Greek Gods, Roman Gods, Christianity’s God, ect…) said ‘nuh-uh’ and rejected the comforting harmony of an answer in favor of the somewhat uncomfortable state of a question. This sort of logic-based thinking led to the Age of Enlightenment, the Revolutionary Wars across Europe that overthrew the monarchies and started the era which would lead to the modern nation-state, freedom of religion, and founded all the varying bodies of science (or ‘natural philosophies’ in their day) including geography and chemistry and physics and biology. The things we know about the world and the body and the mind, and the sciences that fueled such momentous thrusts of progress as the Industrial Revolution or the modern Information Age, started in a brain that would not content itself with self-imposed pseudo-consonance. …but so what? Well, this is why I feel we (you and I, and now more than ever in a time where information is infinitely more obtainable, spreadable, and ubiquitous than it was for those crazy Europeans who had to shout on a platform and sneak pamphlets around to spread their own concept of ‘liberating information’ ) should learn to stop worrying and embrace the dissonance. The first step to solving any problem is admitting there’s a problem. How do we get to this admittance if we’re too busy in our personal bubbles of comforting consonance? Consider this: I say I think you’re stubborn (or any other flaw). Your initial reaction is likely one of emotion, most commonly anger or incredulity, but soon enough you’ll be coping with this accusation by either dismissing the opinion, dismissing me as the holder of said opinion, bolstering your own point of view that you are, in fact, not stubborn, or seeking some hint of condolence in the world/people around you, present or past. (wait a second, Tom once told me I’m not stubborn! HA!) Now consider this: I say I think you’re stubborn (or any other flaw). Your initial response (not ‘reaction’ anymore as a reaction is an emotional knee-jerk, a response is a thoughtful moment of reflection) is not to immediately seek to resolve this new dissonance I’ve injected into your, otherwise harmonious (and decidedly not stubborn) existence, but to consider my words. This is uncomfortable to you, but there might be some truth in it. Perhaps you find that truth and accept it, and from this point of acceptance, you’ve been now granted with a far more profound state of liberation and empowerment than the ‘denial’ state you once had, for now you know you have a flaw, and now you can set out to conquer it. You’ve just become a better person by embracing the dissonance. Congratulations. Consider this: here are two things that happened in the world in the last few weeks: 1.) A mounting tension in Ukraine between a sect of people who want to migrate their polices more ‘westernized’ towards the EU and an opposed sect that wants to migrate more ‘eastern’ towards Russia has plunged the country into a state of near civil war, at the head of which is a kleptocratic president who refuses to stand down. This sort of polarized, propagated, and indoctrinated clashing of citizens under the umbrella of corruption could not only be looked as a microcosm and potential future for the United States, but it might have major ramifications in the world as a whole if things grow too heated between the EU and Russia. 2.) Justin Bieber got a D.U.I. It is very likely if your Facebook account holds a decent number of friends, by scrolling down your wall, you might see one of these two stories talked about a lot and the other a little, if at all. Why? Because one is vapid, easily-consumable, bullshit, and the other is a scary, complex, situation that’s happening so far away, you might as well pretend it doesn’t even exist. After all, our brains want consonance, and a potential outbreak of a civil war halfway around the world doesn’t quite provide that as much as looking at the dumb Canadian kid whose fame and success maybe got him in over his head. Consider this: watch someone with their face locked onto a screen. This screen can be a television screen (though, admittedly, this one is growing more archaic as time stomps on), a computer screen, or (most commonly now) a phone screen. Watch them—creepily if you must—for as long as you can. Maybe they’re watching ‘America’s Dumbest Human’. Maybe they’re playing a video game. Maybe they’re scrolling endlessly through Facebook. Maybe they’re somehow—in this increasingly multitaskular world of ours—doing all three. Watch for happiness. Watch for as long as you want. Spoilers: you’re probably not going to see it. Louis C.K. put it far more succinctly than I can, so I will (heavily) paraphrase him here: “Everyone staring at their screens is never really happy, they’re just barely staving off boredom or depression or loneliness. But, in the past, allowing yourself to feel these things is what might set you out to change them.” This ceaseless pursuit of comfort (consonance) is, literally, slowing destroying you; an insidious, surreptitious, disease eating you from the brain out. “But Adam,” you might protest, “Are you really saying you want me to spend time and interest in things that DON’T entertain and/or allow me to turn my brain off for a few measly hours a week? You realize I work 40 hours of that week at a job I’m not so crazy about, I’ve got a molar that’s throbbing, a bum ankle, a bad back, and the girl I was dating for the last three months just dumped me. You want me to give up the one comforting thing I can get out of a life that has beaten me down?” “Yes,” I would reply, “and here’s why.” This answer would then bring us back to that old, nostalgic, ABC song that we started with, where I’d ask you one last time to sing it with me. Again, though, let’s do it in the state of constant pseudo-consonance. We won’t introduce any of that pesky dissonance that gets away from the tonic center, we’ll just belt it out in a nice flat monotone devoid of any pitch variance. Ready? Go. … …finished yet? Well, there’s your perpetual state of self-imposed consonance (though without anything to resolve from, the word ‘consonance’ sort of no longer applies). Either way, there was no problems. No troubles. No worries. Just a flat and mind-numbing droll that produces the world’s dreariest alphabet, the death knell at a 26 letter funeral procession, the eulogy of discomfort. This is what the pursuit, imposed consciously or through subconscious/emotional subterfuge on your helpless cognitive self, of consonance creates. It is, theoretically, there to protect you and your ego and your ideals from a big, scary, world that doesn’t give a shit about them, but… is this naturally-occurring phenomenon truly necessary, or is there something more worthwhile by pushing past it? I suppose that about wraps it up. I have rambled on for quite longer than originally intended, but I don’t think it would be fitting to close a piece of writing that so heavily praises questions over answers with anything but a question, and so here is mine to you: If we strip away all the varying dissonances of life and replace them with the comforts of delusion and indoctrination and complacency and vapid, endless, consumptions of entertainment, does the peace, the stability, the comfort, the illusion of consonance… does it still hold meaning, or by eliminating its opposition, have we voided its purpose all together? Can the sweet ever really be sweet without the sour? If you were to play every song, sound, and recording at maximum volume, would you ever really hear anything? Do we owe it to those revolutionary minds of a bygone but (admittedly) often heavily-romanticized period of thought and curiosity to continue on their legacy of the Age of Enlightenment in our own current Age of Information, or were they simply idealists, much as this entire thing has been utterly idealistic, and them (like me) are searching for a more profound meaning in a life that comes down to, essentially, death and taxes? Maybe. Maybe not. To quote Socrates, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing at all.” And to that, I would add my own addendum: “That’s cool with me, bro.” Bring on the dissonance. Let it resolve or not resolve to consonance. And if it does: let it start again. “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 23:06:45 +0000
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