Sound and Vision
For a while this evening when I could “see” every note I was playing on the guitar. It’s a form of synesthesia I’m entirely familiar with on horn, where the sound, the physical act of producing the sound, and the notation all occur pretty much all at once. It passed after a bit, but it’s an encouraging sign.
There’s usually a piece of staff paper kicking around in my head, following – or leading, I can’t really tell – what I’m playing The best visual analogy I’ve seen for this is brush writing on a stone with water instead of ink. By the time you get to the end of the stone, the water at the beginning has evaporated and you can start again at the top. Endless and ephemeral.
Posted at 9:46 pm
August 8th, 2006 at 11:37 am
That’s always such a nice experience. Since I memorize most of the music we play in il Troubadore, often when I close my eyes I get visual images of the score that I can “read” while playing.
It’s been interesting learning much more music by ear, however, and a completely different experience. Since I don’t have that visual image to fall back on if I “lost my place” I sometimes refer to either internal finger/bow patterns, or sometimes just a visual memory of them. This is especially pertinent since alot of the folk music we play (like the middle eastern, balkan dance music, and Irish music) have different ornamental styles that just can’t be notated efficiently in Western notation anyway.
Playing doumbek (or technically, darabuka, since I have a Turkish style goblet drum) is entirely different since I leanred by the more traditional style of vocalizing the patterns first–the “Dum’s” and “Tek’s”–so more often than not I find myself “subvocalizing” the rhythmic patterns while playing.