Insights, diatribes and monologues.: July 2011

I don't have many regrets but one of the biggest is not learning music.

Around the age of 8, and by quite an accident, I discovered I had a mellifluous voice. In fact I was one of the best singers in the school! It was during those days that I tried my hand at my first instrument - harmonium. For the uninitiated Harmonium is a ancient Indian wind-powered keyboard, similar to an accordion. Then my attention was hijacked by percussion instrument, tabla. That did not last. I was soon fascinated by the Hawaiian guitar instead. Which was followed by a few weeks of acoustic guitar lessons.

No matter what the instrument, I leaned it intently for a few weeks but before I got actually good at it I moved on...Somewhere along all this cavorting around, puberty happened. Vocal chords cracked up, and I was kicked out of the choir. And as a final blow to the musician inside of me I switched to a school where there was no music teacher. No choir. No music.

In college I picked up violin but Gods willed otherwise.... Whenever I practiced violin in my room (which mostly meant in the evening), a stupid bat would enter my room and start circling around. I am not making this up! It used to be hot in Kanpur so typically our doors and windows were kept open. This stupid bat (all right I don't know for sure if it was the same one every time but still..) would invite himself. This was bad enough but one fine day the shit hit the fan. I mean literally, the bat hit the ceiling fan. Broke his wing and fell on the floor. My room mate, Devvrat, tried valiantly to cure him using antiseptic cream but the bugger did not survive the night. And that ladies and gentlemen was the last day I played violin. The end.

Now why after all these years am I boring you with the sissy story. For one it is funny (I mean seriously, a bat!). Secondly I heard an interesting fact. Because it is a tonal language, Mandarin speakers are more likely to have a perfect pitch. Perfect pitch, considered to be the preserve of only talented musicians, is the ability to

"differentiate a musical note of a particular pitch without the benefit of a reference note. The visual equivalent is calling a red apple "red". While most people do this effortlessly, without, for example, having to compare a red to a green apple, perfect pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe, with an estimated prevalence in the general population of less than one in 10,000."

Imagine the ability to reverse engineer a song it its constituent notes by just hearing it. Even more magical than deciphering the ingredients by sampling a dish, isn't it?

Of course the highest level of excellence is to not just recreate but invent - the talent of composing a brilliant new piece of music. Or is it?

Listen to this man. He not just composing music, he is extracting it from random chatter that most would consider noise. Notice the beauty here, he recreates an orchestra using weights, bottle caps, duct tape and ping-pong balls !!