6

The Four Listening Modes

6.1. THE FUNCTIONAL ASPECT OF THE EAR

Although this treatise is about the musical object, we should acknowledge that what is obvious to musical experience in every age is not, as we have seen, the musical object but instrumental activity, which gives rise to musical languages. Nor, as far as musical consciousness is concerned, is the mechanism of the ear, so eagerly analyzed in the manuals, of the first importance. Nor is the daily activity of hearing (entendre) itself, which appears elementary.

If the object chimes with our way of making and hearing, we must, to get near to it, apply simple common sense in these two fields of our most ordinary everyday activity. The first book gave an overview of the various activities linked with musical making. This second book concentrates on hearing (entendre), and the last chapter contains an initial description of the possible usages of this word, based on its current meanings.

In this chapter we will methodically delve more deeply into these meanings, while trying to attach them to typical attitudes and characteristic, although in practice almost indissociable, behaviors. In fact, rather than tackle the simple adjective musical directly, to see what is behind it, it seems to us better to start from the usual meanings of “to hear” (entendre) and, with reference to these meanings, highlight the listening functions that correspond to them.

To give a quite empirical description of “what happens” when we listen, we will make a sort of summary of the various forms of activity of the ear. Indeed, from the most to the least complex, to perceive aurally (ouïr), to hear (entendre) and to understand (comprendre) suggest a perceptual itinerary going from one stage to the next. Our intention here is not to break down listening into a chronological sequence of events proceeding one from the other as effects flow from causes but, for methodological reasons, to describe the objectives of specific listening functions. As these functions are involved in the sound “communication circuit” that goes from production to reception, and inasmuch as they have complementary characteristics, we thought that placing them on a symmetrical, perhaps rather too systematic, diagram might be of help to some of our readers. This is an initial plan of the diagram:

6.2. LITTRÉ (CONT.): THE COMMUNICATION CIRCUIT

We will start from the findings in the last chapter and examine them more closely.

1. I listen (j’écoute) to what interests me.

2. Provided I am not deaf, I perceive aurally (j’ouïs) the sounds that go on around me, and this whatever my activities and interests are.

3. I hear (j’entends) in relation to what interests me, what I already know, and what I seek to understand (comprendre).

4. After hearing (entendre), I understand (je comprends) what I was trying to understand, what I was listening for (j’écoutais).

This analysis could probably be applied to any perceptual activity. We would find similarities between to look at (regarder) and to listen (écouter), to perceive aurally (ouïr) and to see (voir), to hear (entendre) and to notice (apercevoir). The difference is less marked, it is true, the etymology closer between to see (voir) and to notice (apercevoir) than between to perceive aurally (ouïr) and to hear (entendre). Doubtless because we more often experience a mechanically perceived background noise than a mechanically perceived sight. Whatever may be the case, we can easily imagine all this being transposed into the visual domain.

We will now return to each of these points:

1. Silence, thought to be universal, is broken by a sound event. It may be a natural event (a stone rolling, a weathervane creaking) or the willed production of a sound (by an instrument, for example). In any case, what we spontaneously listen to at this level is the energetic anecdote communicated by the sound.

2. Corresponding to the objective event, we find the subjective event in the listener, the raw perception of the sound, which is linked, on the one hand, to the physical nature of the sound and, on the other hand, to general laws of perception that we are justified in assuming are grosso modo the same for all human beings (as, for example, the gestaltists do in their descriptions).

3. This perception, which is then related to past experiences, to dominant, current, interests, brings about a choice and a judgment. We would say the perception is qualified.

4. Qualified perceptions are directed toward a particular form of knowledge, and ultimately what the perceiving individual finally achieves is abstract significations rather than the concrete sound itself. Generally speaking, at this level the individual understands a particular sound language.

6.3. THE INDIVIDUAL AND OBJECTS: PERCEPTUAL INTENTIONS

We must first clarify this communications terminology. In what ways can a sound present itself to me?

1. I listen to the event, and I try to identify the sound source: “What’s that? What’s happened?” So I do not stop at what I perceive; I use it without realizing. I treat the sound as an indicator that tells me something. This is doubtless what happens most commonly, because it tallies with our most spontaneous attitude, the most primitive role of perception: to warn of danger, to guide an action. Generally, identifying the sound event with its causal context in this way is instantaneous. But it may also be that, when the indicators are ambiguous, it happens only after various comparisons and deductions. Scientific curiosity, although using highly developed knowledge, pursues a basically similar goal to spontaneous perception of the event.

2. I may, on the contrary, return to the type of perception I was using a moment ago, and the question “What’s that?” will apply to the sound itself. That is, I am treating it as an object in itself. This is what we call the raw sound object. (This topic will be treated at length in book 4.) It is what remains the same throughout the “flood” of successive and various impressions I have of it, as well as in the face of my various intentions regarding it. The second essential characteristic of a perceived object is to reveal itself piecemeal: in the sound object I am listening to, there is always more to be heard; it is a wellspring of potentialities that never runs dry. Thus, every time a recorded sound is repeated, I listen to the same object: although I never hear it in the same way, although from being unknown it becomes familiar, although I perceive different aspects in succession, and it is therefore never the same, I still identify it as that clearly defined object.

4. Finally, I may treat sound as an indicator that brings me into a particular domain of values and focus on its meaning. The most typical example is, of course, the word. Here we have a semantic listening mode, revolving around semantic signs. Among the various possible “signifier” listening modes, we are naturally most particularly interested in musical listening, referring to musical values and giving access to a musical meaning. We would point out that the values in question here could, just about, be detached from their sound context, which is then reduced to the role of medium. It is generally believed that communication effects a coming together of minds; hence, it is natural that at the two extremities of the circuit, and particularly here, at the receptive stage, we should abandon the contingency of the sound vehicle for its signifying content. Traditional musical values are no exception, inasmuch as musical symbols preexist performance: we strive to improve the latter in relation to the former, not vice versa. This is why, at point 4, we could talk about abstract meanings; the abstract at this level is the opposite of the tangible of level 1:

Listening functions.

6.4. STAGES AND OUTCOMES OF LISTENING: DIVERSITY AND COMPLEMENTARITY

We can now put together everything we have discovered in the diagram above.1 Of course—we must emphasize this—we must not infer from our compartmentalizations and numberings a chronology or a logic that our perceptual mechanism obeys. If we find this diagram useful in highlighting a number of processes that are not normally analyzed, that does not mean it is a working diagram. Therefore:

• The need to move from one sector to another in order to give a logical description of a particular perceptual process is simply an expository device and does not imply any time sequence in the perceptual experience itself. Perceptual deciphering happens instantaneously, even when all four sectors are involved.

• Even if we have isolated what we call qualified perceptions in sector 3, we must not forget that these are refined and enriched by the tacit references made by the listener to the events in sector 1, the values in sector 4, and the sound detail of the raw object in sector 2.

• The listener has direct access to objective results, both when he is looking for the meaning in a series of sound signs or wishes to decipher the sound signals in terms of events (physicists, acousticians, often instrumentalists). In the first case, however, the signs he obtains in 4 emerge from qualified listening in 3: in the second, it is listening to the raw sound object (in 2) that brings about its organization into indicators in 1. Naturally, the listener will not be aware in either situation that he is practicing two kinds of listening in parallel, he will only feel involved in the last aspect of his perceptual activity, which gives him what he is looking for, and he will have difficulty imagining that it is only one of many other possible aspects, as well as that he is implicitly dependent on them. This spontaneous listening for signs or indicators can be represented in two “short-circuits”:

• As long as there remains perceptual uncertainty in relation to the object being listened to, whatever the sector in which this occurs, the investigation will consist in highlighting and cross-referencing the “partial” objects obtained in the auditory activity as a whole; this is why listening several times and going more deeply into the phenomenon will clarify the results in all four directions at once.

• Group listening to new objects will probably reveal great divergences among different listeners from the outset. It will only be after listening many times, facilitating an in-depth exploration of both group and individual perceptual experience at every level, that the listeners will be able to reach a consensus on results. This will lead to a sort of paring down that would just about exhaust the potential of sector 2 (the raw sound object): a degree of objectivity, or at least a number of intersubjective agreements, will then emerge from comparing observations.

6.5. TWO PAIRS: SUBJECTIVE-OBJECTIVE AND CONCRETE-ABSTRACT

The top and bottom parts of our diagram, that is sectors 2 and 3, on the one hand, and 4 and 1, on the other, are a good illustration of the pair subjective and objective, or, rather, subjective and intersubjective. Everyone hears what he can in sector 3, knowing that the possibility of hearing something comes before sector 2. Moreover, there are (sound, musical) reference signs (sector 4) and techniques for sound production (sector 1) specific to a given civilization, and these are, therefore, objectively present in a particular sociological and cultural context. Similarly, in scientific experiments we will find, at sectors 2 and 3, observations that depend quite specifically on the observers, and, for the purposes of explaining or determining the event (1), go against the body of knowledge to which these observations are linked (4).

The vertical line in the middle of the diagram contrasts the two abstract sectors (3 and 4) on the left and the two concrete sectors (1 and 2) on the right. For both qualified listening at the subjective level and the values and knowledge that emerge collectively, the whole effort in 3 and 4 is toward stripping down and consists in retaining only qualities of the object that enable it to be linked with others or to be referred to signifying systems. In 1 and 2, on the contrary, whether we are dealing with all the perceptual possibilities contained in the sound object or all the causal references contained in the event, listening focuses on a concrete given, which as such is inexhaustible, although specific.

So in every mode of listening there is, on the one hand, a confrontation between an individual, who is receptive within certain limits, and an objective reality; on the other hand, abstract value judgments and logical descriptions detach themselves from the concrete given, which tends to organize itself around these without ever being reduced to them. Of course, different listeners will place a different emphasis on each of the four poles that result from this two-way tension and will favor only the one that pertains to the explicit aim of his listening; there will therefore be specialists in each listening function. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that one of them (for example, the listening musician) only brings into play the function that pertains to the obvious aim of his listening (here listening for musical meaning). To express what we are describing in appropriate language, we should say that no specialist could, in fact, dispense with “running through” the whole cycle of sectors several times; for none of them can escape either from his own subjectivity when faced with a meaning or an event that is presumed to be objective, or from logically deciphering a concrete phenomenon inexplicable in itself, hence from the uncertainties and gradual learning processes of perception. So even within a given discipline, one single diagram is not enough to give an account of all our listeners’ approaches. We would come quite near to a figurative representation of the complexity of the auditory process if, on the one hand, we balanced out the emphasis placed on each section in a given “run-through” of the cycle and, on the other hand, superimposed such “run-throughs” one on top of the other in a vertical third dimension, as it were. The overall result would then give a picture of the type of discipline, the personality of the experimenter, and the successive stages of its development.

6.6. TWO PAIRS OF LISTENING MODES: NATURAL AND CULTURAL, ORDINARY AND SPECIALIZED

Given that, with the help of our theoretical “summary,” we managed to define the two contrasting pairs in the last section, we can find the same pattern in ordinary or spontaneous approaches to listening. This analysis will help to define a terminology that we will use constantly from now on.

So we will examine two pairs of characteristic tendencies in listening: first, we will contrast natural and cultural listening; then we will compare ordinary and expert or specialized listening.

(a) By natural listening we mean the primary and primitive tendency to use sound for information about the event. This approach we will (as is generally accepted) call natural, because it seems to us to be common not only to all people whatever their civilization but also to man and certain animals. Some animals have more acute hearing than humans. This not only means that they can hear better “physically” but that they can more easily infer from such signals the circumstances that have caused or are revealed by the sound event. Here the ultimate aim is clearly at sector 1, and we assume that there is a particularly acute aural perception (ouïe) at sector 2. It is the concrete, the right-hand part of the diagram, that we find used spontaneously, and universally, almost as a priority. In contrast, giving priority to sector 4 can be a result of explicit conventions (codes such as language systems, Morse code, warning bells, or horns). If there is no explicit code, there are forms of conditioning to musical sounds, for example, in a community in a clear historical or geographical context. Here (without ceasing to hear it), the sound event and the circumstances it reveals are deliberately ignored in favor of the message, the meaning, the values it conveys. This listening mode—less universal than the previous one in the sense that it varies from one community to another and that the most intelligent animals can only master a few pitiful elements of it, and only after training that goes against their nature—could be called cultural. It sums up the left-hand side of the diagram: the two abstract quadrants.

(b) In the same way we could contrast ordinary and specialized listening—not simply in order to complete the pair natural-cultural (in sectors 1 and 4) with another (in sectors 2 and 3) but to illustrate the difference in listening skill, quality of attention, and the confusion of intentions in ordinary listening, whereas specialized listening deliberately chooses from the mass of things to be listened to only what it wants to hear and elucidate.

Furthermore, the confusion between these two levels of listening explains many misunderstandings. Because in ordinary listening, even if our ear is untrained, we are always free to attend to some dominant perception, natural or cultural, we forget that specialized listening, precisely because of the intention to hear this and not that, precisely because it is trained and skilled, loses this character of universality and overall intuition, which is one of the advantages of ordinary listening.

Certainly, ordinary listening pays little attention to sectors 2 and 3: it goes immediately to the event and its cultural significance but remains relatively superficial. I hear a violin playing in the high register. But I do not know that, were I more of a musician, I should hear many details about the quality of the violin or the violinist, the accuracy of the note he is playing and so forth, which I cannot access because of my lack of specialized training. I therefore have a “subjective” mode of listening, not because I hear anything and everything but because I have refined neither my aural perception (ouïe) nor my ear. The ordinary ear, however untrained it is, has, however, the merit of being able to be open to all sorts of things that would be closed to it by later specialization.

Take, on the contrary, an acoustician, a musician, and . . . a Native American from the Wild West. The same galloping horse will be heard by them in very different ways. Immediately, the acoustician will have an idea of how the physical signal is made up (frequency band, fading due to transmission, etc.); the musician will go spontaneously to the rhythmic groups; the Native American will immediately conclude that he is in danger of being attacked, by how many, and how far away. So these types of listening will tend to be thought of as more objective. Yes, insofar as, not being concerned with the same objects (the sound is merely the medium), they explain and relate these objects to sector 1 and sector 4. But at the same time we can see that this can only be achieved through enhanced subjective input, because, in each of these different listeners’ consciousness, the raw or qualified sound object is perceived or analyzed quite differently on each occasion. So it is not surprising that misunderstandings tend to arise among such skilled people. This all the more as they are not talking about the same thing. But don’t they hear the same sound? Certainly, it cannot be denied that the same physical signal reaches ears that we suppose to be identically human, potentially alike, but their perceptual activity, from the sensory to the mental, certainly does not function in the same way.

So we can see how far we need to be wary of the terms objectivity and subjectivity if we wish to apply them to listening—the former to specialized, the latter to ordinary. For we could just as well argue the contrary: that ordinary listening is more open to the objective (even though the individual is not skilled), whereas specialized listening is profoundly affected by the individual’s intention (even though his attention is focused on objects that are precise in a different way).

This section will, we hope, help the reader to understand the last section better: that a specialized use of a certain listening mode has only very little to do with the use by another expert: each has made a choice from the potential for interest of ordinary listening and has developed its aims and also the training it requires.

We will now look more closely at the specialization of listening modes.

6.7. EXCLUSIVES OF SPECIALIZED LISTENING

In ordinary listening, the listening done by everyone, the listener has no particular curiosity or reference point; he simply, as we all do daily, locates what he hears in the multitude of sound entities that make up his usual sound world—a sound world that, being common to a whole community, has no a priori content as far as meanings are concerned. I hear and understand that someone is speaking, a car is going by, a child is playing the piano: nothing, in short, that anyone else would not hear as I do, at my level of attention.

The specialist is initially an ordinary listener. Like everyone else, he first orients himself in relation to everyday sound data. But, in addition, he approaches the object through a well-determined system of sound significations, thus with the deliberate intention to hear only what his attention is specifically focused on. The hallmark of specialized listening is precisely that ordinary meaning gives way to the aims of a particular activity. Thus, the phonetician ignores the meanings of words and hears only their phonetic elements; the doctor only uses “99, 99 . . .” to deduce the state of his patient’s lungs; the musician shows no interest in the equation of the vibrating strings but thinks only about the quality and accuracy of his notes. The acoustician, in his turn, armed with his Sonagraph,2 is busy with the sound, ignoring, like everyone else, what does not concern him: the meaning of a word, intonation, instrumental sophistication; he attends only to the specific aim of his work as a physicist: the measurable characteristics of sound (frequencies, amplitudes, transients, etc.).

These few examples show in different ways how ordinary listening takes second place to specialized listening, once the ordinary man takes on his specialized functions. When the patient says “99, 99 . . .,” the repetition of the signal itself, demonstrating the semantic irrelevance of the words, shows clearly that the doctor’s interest is in something other than their usual meaning; similarly, the same series of 99s will enable the phonetician to recognize a certain accent or particularity of speech; however, neither the doctor nor the phonetician will be tempted to believe that the signs and indicators they finally deduce have anything to do with the meaning or musicality of the sound object they are using.

Awareness of the limitation of his skills is less clear in the case of the acoustician. He, for whom the spirit of the times has made a modest demeanor difficult, perceives with difficulty, or not at all, that he has chosen to abandon the world of ordinary listening to enter one in which everything that is heard is referred back to certain supposedly simple perceptions that can be shown as marks on dials or points on graphs. The example of the analysis of the spoken voice on the Sonagraph demonstrates this professional blindness particularly well: thinking that the meaning of the word or sentence under analysis is part and parcel of the overview of its acoustic characteristics, the acoustician really thinks he will find its material trace there. He can only make elementary reconstructions, however, and only very approximately recognize phonemes or syllables.

The musician also often does not know to what extent his specialized listening involves shifting and choosing significations when creating a field reserved for so-called musical objects. Outside this field nonvalues are discarded and called noises. Prone, like the physicist, to link his activity to some abstract and absolute target, the musician will easily ignore mechanical contingencies, the energetic origins of objects, and his cultural practices, and he will lose sight of the fact that there were vibrating and resonant bodies, familiar to ordinary listening, long before the first instrument came into being. Hence the great difficulties the boldest musicians had in getting the musical establishment to accept new objects, which were still as yet only “sound” and were always rejected precisely under the same pretext: that they were not “music.”

Here again the specialist’s conditioning dismisses and discredits ordinary meanings.

There is more. Although the acoustician abandons speech for phonemes or sonograms, and music conceals energetic events from the musician, we should acknowledge that neither is retreating to a desert island; on the contrary, each belongs to a community that is very much alive, within which specialized listening, which a moment ago seemed likely to turn them into loners, soon appears as normal and as open to potential description as the ordinary listening of the uninitiated was in the everyday sound world. Not stopping at the limited problem of the correlations between his own results and everyday sound significations, the acoustician pursues his specifically physics-based investigation, defines magnitudes, establishes links, sets up experiments, extensively compares his activities with those of his colleagues, in short sets about inhabiting the world that his specialized listening opens up to him. Similarly, the musician, soon tiring of the ordinary mechanical significations of sounds, moves into musical listening and practice, makes objects, seeks an expressive language, writes, sings, plays, listens, innovates.

So group practices take shape, based on communities that listen in the same way. We saw in the last section that we cannot understand these practices by situating them in one single sector of our diagram. In fact, we must take the view that when we move from ordinary to specialized listening, the circuit of communication belonging to ordinary significations is replaced by a new circuit linked to a different emphasis on descriptions and values. An emphasis that ordinary listening did no more than make possible: I heard music was being played or someone was speaking with a southern accent; as a musician or phonetician I attach myself exclusively to one or other of these particular approaches to my ordinary listening, and from this I define a general field of activity in which the two opposed pairs, abstract-concrete and subjective-objective, come into play all over again, in an original manner, and related to different aims.

These reflections enable us to go back and correct our initial idea of a dualism between ordinary and specialized listening within a broader context. The specialist cuts himself off from the world of ordinary significations in sector 3; but in so doing he sets up a new world of significations that, in turn, brings subtleties of perception into play in a new sector 3—subtleties soon made ordinary through habit—which perhaps subsequently sow the seed for the development of other auditory practices. Thus the increase in the number of approaches seems limitless. In other words, every specialized mode of listening suggests specialized types of attention that will make it ordinary.

The implications of these few findings are wide-ranging. We will retain only what is relevant to our discussion: if the auditory activity of the specialist is destined to supersede itself in this way through a perpetual renewal of listening, we can see that it would be at the very least problematic to attempt to define the general nature of the musical in terms of conventional musical practice; rather, not wishing to limit ourselves in any way to already established musics, we will have to ask the listener about his general approach to the music he chooses to hear, whatever his level. We will therefore conclude this book with an investigation into hearing intentions, in chapter 8.

6.8. COMPARISON BETWEEN SPECIALIZED MODES OF LISTENING

First, we must examine what happens when we attempt to compare the findings of one or two specialized modes of listening. In practice there are many cases where we try, or even where it is necessary, to establish correlations: for example, the physicist studying the sounds of words or music will express semantic or musical values in terms of pure acoustics; the concert hall builder has to perfect an acoustic area in accordance with requirements that are strictly musical; similarly, in another field, the linguist may be tempted to link the phonetic or grammatical structuring of speech with its semantic content (a problem that comes up in automatic translation).

As we have seen, every specialized mode of listening has a relatively independent specialized circuit of communication; we are therefore entitled to ask to what extent such comparisons are justified—that is, how far it is legitimate to use the findings of one specific practice in relation to another.

We will go back to what we consider the typical example, the acoustician who embarks on “an acoustic analysis of the phenomenon of speech.” Once, with the aid of that sophisticated instrument the Sonagraph, he has obtained the printout of all the acoustic components of the word as it is being said, the researcher tries to find the word on his printout; that is, he hopes to discover a constellation of points or curves (for frequencies, amplitudes, time) characteristic of that word. His aim in this is to define a method that would allow semantic values to be linked to physical structures and, later, perhaps, a general law setting out the acoustic nature of spoken language.

Now, we believe that such preoccupations are doomed to failure because they arise from a fundamental misunderstanding. Besides, at least until now, the acoustic recognition of words, whether by sight on a sonogram or automatically with equipment working along the same general lines as the Sonagraph, can only proceed by reconstituting syllables (from elements that in themselves are not semantic), which is all the more difficult as the word can, in fact, be pronounced in very many different ways. So we are nowhere near a synthetic printout that alone would reveal if there is a direct relationship between the word and an acoustic medium: such a reduction could not naturally correlate with a semantic content. The fact is that in reality language cannot have an acoustic identity, for the very general reason that language responds to semantic imperatives, which, as such, do not signify anything in relation to the particular concerns of acoustic investigation.

Even if it is still permissible to make comparisons, it is therefore unthinkable to hope for more than similarities, correlations, between spoken language and acoustics—the specialized “pathways” of oral communication and physics. Besides, no one has raised the question—the opposite of the question about the acoustic nature of spoken language—of the semantic nature of the physical components of sounds. An absurd question? Indeed. For the scientist, however, no more so than the first question. Obsessed with unity, the typical scientist can imagine no objectivity other than physical; his recognition of significations that are not those of physics is for him only the stage preceding their annexation. He does not see that all specialist auditory activity establishes a field of entirely original objective practices where one practice cannot use the findings of another unless it discounts the significations belonging to that practice.

This is why several modern musicians—discouraged by the prevailing disorder in musical values, and turning to one of the many forms of composition justified, according to their promoters, by their rational or scientific basis—have in effect lost sight of the musical essence of music and no longer compose anything but sound encodings of scientific notions, as it were.

We do not expect so easily to overcome the reticence of those among our readers who are most convinced of the validity of physical or mathematical explanations. They bank on these to get them out of dead ends, in particular the present musical dead end; they are too involved to take on the discussion at this resolutely theoretical level. In truth it is probably beyond us to persuade them; this is why, in writing all this, we are thinking mainly of a number of younger researchers—musicians, of course, but also artists in general, all the future creators of forms and languages who are to a greater or lesser extent mesmerized by the idol of science. These Tom Thumbs think themselves modern when they count off the Cartesian pebbles of “total reduction to numbers,” which today lead to the beloved Ogre: the electronic computer.

We do not despise this tool; we simply refuse to use it as inexperienced amateurs. Indeed, like any other tool, it functions in accordance with the principles imposed on it: so, no computer music without a priori reflection on the musical and deliberate choice about principles on the part of the user.

This basic consideration is precisely the subject of this treatise. However convinced we may be that in order to persuade the reader to make the effort, which is not slight and is very likely to disconcert him in both his artistic and scientific habits, we must patiently show him that there is no other way. We will therefore, in all honesty, attempt the physicist’s approach, in order to demonstrate that ultimately it leads nowhere. There is, however, no question of killing off acoustics for the sake of music; in accordance with our reflections on the previous pages, we believe that it is only when we have defined both the objects and the specific methods of each discipline that we can establish true correlations between them. And thus, even if the next chapter deals with giving proofs through the absurd, the whole of book 3 will give a summary of the reasonable and reasoned correlations between physics and music.