Stapedius Spasms: Mixed Boon / Bane

I   dreamt of instruments obedient to my thought—ones which, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.”

  —  Edgard Varese

CMT: Temporary tinnitus and hearing loss elicited by contraction of facial mimetic muscles are often observed in patients recovering from facial nerve paralysis. But they’re sometimes experienced by otherwise healthy people, too. This type of clicking and tinnitus and/or hearing loss is due to nonacoustic contraction of the stapedius muscle, synchronous with contraction of the facial mimetic muscles. Not much has been published on this, but Yamamoto in Kyoto has studied a number of people.

DSM: We tend to think only of the problem of people perceiving clicks or ringing or “sounds that are not there”—acoustic perceptions associated with nonacoustic stimuli. But Yamamoto and others have actually encountered persons whose ears emit sounds, typically sounds that the person himself/herself cannot hear but which people near to them can hear. Yamamoto published a paper in 1987 reporting otolaryngological findings regarding a 25-year-old man who emitted a continuous, high-pitched, pure tone (6.1 kHz, 37-dB sound pressure level) from his right ear. The tone was not audible to the patient but was clearly audible to his family members. He had sensorineural deafness over a 1 kHz range with a dip of 45 dB at 6 kHz. The tone was emitted through his right eardrum from the inner ear. Such things are given the fancy name “spontaneous otoacoustic emission”.


CMT: Mathis and colleagues in Lucerne reported a case, too, about 15 years ago. They describe a kid who emitted a continuous audible sound from his left ear. The spontaneous otoacoustic emission was measured at the frequency of 5.6 kHz with an amplitude of 55 dB sound pressure level. The kid had high-frequency hearing loss in both ears, worse in the squeal-emitting ear. These spontaneous emissions are probably related to some kind of defect in the cochlea, but it’s not clear what sort of abnormality that might be. The structures are too tiny for MRI or CT to be of any use. And the cases are rare, so—no surgeries, no autopsies—no knowledge.

DSM: My own stapedial spasms—the nonacoustic clicking noises—are mostly a problem at night. I almost never have the clicking noise in the morning. It seems mostly to occur when I’m very tired. It’s entirely absent, though, when I’m stressed or angry. Never happens when I’m in the cold, or sailing, or sea kayaking, or running. It generally only happens when I’m very relaxed and warm and happy. More pronounced when I’ve had some alcohol or am dehydrated. Or when I’ve run a half-marathon or 10K and have perspired a lot and have replenished with a lot of regular water and have low blood sodium. Or when I have a low blood potassium level. It’s more pronounced when I’m sitting or lying horizontally, and less often when I’m standing upright. The clicking doesn’t really synchronize with any music that I may be playing or listening to. The clicks don’t occur on the beats of the music. But the rhythm and dynamics of the music do tend to cause the clicking to speed up or slow down or go in bursts that correlate with the pulse of the music. Slow tempos make the clicking worse. Presto, Vivace, Allegro—the clicking goes entirely away. Adagio, andante, moderato, allegretto—clicking is usually there but not always. Largo, grave, lentissimo—clicking is always present. The clicking is irregularly irregular. It goes in bursts or clusters. The fastest would be a burst of clicks at about 6 clicks per second. The slowest would be one click every 5 to 10 seconds or so. The quality of the clicks varies—sometimes quite crisp, somewhat like a snare drum; at other times more like a dull thump or thud, like a damped kick drum. It has always been with me, since I was a child. Seems not to have changed over more than 50 years. Sorry to go on and on about this. I’ve had a lifetime to observe the natural history of this oddity. I should be a specimen in a museum!


CMT: And then there are Colleen LePrell, Keith Duncan, Richard Altschuler, David Dolan, and others at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan and their work on the acoustic sensation termed “electromotile hearing”. When sinusoidal electric stimulation is applied to the intact cochlea, a frequency-specific acoustic emission can be recorded in the ear canal. Acoustic emissions are produced by basilar membrane motion in the inner ear. Electromotile hearing has been specifically attributed to electric stimulation of outer hair cells in the intact organ of Corti. Colleen’s work involves a rodent model and external electrical stimulation, but the idea is to mimic the electromotile effects that may occur spontaneously in humans (and other animals) in connection with neural impulses within the ear.

DSM: You know, over the years I’ve gotten used to the clicking. The ringing has not changed since I was in my teens, and I’ve gotten used to that as well. The fractal, irregularly irregular aspect of the stapedial spasms and clicking in fact lends a certain charm to them. They have the subtle quality of, say, averted gaze—the things that you subliminally apprehend in your peripheral vision. There is a beauty in the body’s involuntary reactions to stimuli—the surprises that a lover brings. The clicking, the little bursts of clicks and how they are lazily evoked by the music—I have come to appreciate the beauty of them. If I am listening to or playing a piece that is very familiar to me and I am approaching a very emotion-filled passage, then the stapedial spasms and clicking gets more intense. The fractal variability increases; the standard deviation of the intervals between clicks increases. My stapedius is a trusty sentinel for what’s coming. And then the passage arrives and the stapedius goes wild. In a way, the stapedial spasms augment the emotionality of the musical experience for me. There’s a purity to them, insofar as the onset is spasmodic—little paroxysms that are alien, not-me. I am not voluntarily causing them. They simply happen, and this automatism is pure and honest. I witness my body simply being a body. A bit like being aware of your thumping heart and its involuntary responses to stimuli. That’s the source of their beauty! Beautiful convening of accident and will, self and non-self!

A   characteristic element in Bacon’s use of chance in his painting is a white blotch, as found, for example, in Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967, Study of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968 and Study for bullfight No.2, 1969. In these pictures Bacon throws thick white paint at the canvas: at the face of the figure, at the bull, at the centre of the painting. The resulting white blotch looks as though the undiluted paint had been accidentally added to the painting by hand. In Bacon’s explanation of the meaning of the white spots and slashes that he added to the canvas so abruptly and almost thoughtlessly, he speaks of ‘pure accident,’ of ‘instinct,’ and that the picture almost paints itself. He says that the subconscious is finding expression in his his work.”

  —  Barbara Steffen, Chance and the Tradition of Art in Francis Bacon’s Work, Francis Bacon & the Tradition of Art, Skira, 2003.

A ccident, as Bacon understands it, is not manifested in the sort of beauty that Lautréamont described as the ‘fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table,’ Such anticipation of the the Surrealists’ collages shows Bacon’s lack of interest in uniting two apparently irreconcilable realities on a plane where they seem not to belong, in the manner of Max Ernst. Accident’s territory is essentially in the palpable signs of the artist’s work process; it manifests itself in the traces and marks of the paint-saturated brush on the canvas. According to Gilles Deleuze, these marks are, these traits, are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: They are a-signifying traits. [...] These almost blind manual marks attest to the intrusion of another world into the visual world of figuration. [...] They mark out possibilities of fact, but do not yet constitute a fact (the pictorial fact).”

  —  Armin Zweite, ‘Accident, Instinct and Inspiration, Affect and the Unconscious’ in The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, 2006.

DSM: So Accident, as something taken out of the artist’s hands, may be imagined to be incompatible with the idea of the ‘act of free creation.’ But, if so, this contradiction raises the question of how art is possible at all. It’s an enigmatic quality. Following Paul Valéry and Theodor W. Adorno, the meaninglessness that Accident (or, in this case, the stapedial spasms) brings into any work can be said to replicate in a certain way the meaninglessness of the era. It’s in protest against this that Accident achieves its artistic function. In any event, Bacon endeavors to take Accident as a departure point, to accept what has arisen spontaneously as the initiation, yet then to modify, to transform, to control it and finally to ascribe some function and hence some of the apparently meaningless, be it a sense of the resistant, the unassimilable, the disconcerting or the grotesque. The element of chance that Bacon invokes obviously has nothing to do with automatism or spontaneity; in his terminology the accidental is bound to the force of instinct, which plays a central role in his thinking.

T he Geschick of being: a child that plays, shifting the pawns. The Geschick of being, a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The ‘because’ withers away in the play. The play is without ‘why.’ It plays since it plays. It simply remains play: the most elevated and the most profound sort of play. But this ‘simply’ is everything, the one, the only. The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.”

  —  Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason: 1955-1956, Indiana University Press, 1991.

P aul Cézanne’s painting suspends the habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself.”

  —  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne's Doubt: Sense and Non-Sense, Northwestern University Press, 1964.

W  hat I call Accident suddenly appears out of the blue. In the end, painting is the result of the interaction of those accidents and the will of the artist, if you prefer, the interaction of the unconscious and the conscious. But that’s not at all what it’s like when you’re at the canvas. There you don't know where you are or where you’re going or, above all, what’s going to happen.”

  —  Francis Bacon, In conversation with Michel Archimbaud, Phaidon, 1993.

CMT: Brent Michael Davids ‘Tinnitus Quartet’ explicitly addresses some of these experiences. Davids gives an idea of how the ringing in the ears feels. The sustained A is passed among the players. In turn, the other quartet members explore the varied emotions that accompany the experience: anger, struggle and hope. Toward the end, Davids evokes the cricket sounds that help him cope with the condition. Davids’ piece is being performed by Miró Quartet in a Chamber Music Cincinnati program on March 6th.

DSM: And Anne Lebaron’s ‘Concerto for Active Frogs’ uses some similar tonal and rhythmic compositional techniques. Not unlike Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” with inter-species and cyborg interactions. Haraway, writing as a feminist and philosopher about the practices of science, articulated the now well-known concept of how knowledge, always situated by the various historical and cultural positions of a knowing person, must be understood as both partial and plural—a postmodern vision of knowledge as malleable, perspectival, and always provisional. These situations range across the various strands of history, ethnicity, gender, politics and technology that, when woven together, are manifested in LeBaron’s creative persona and compositions.

CMT: György Ligeti’s ‘Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes’ is somewhat in the same vein, same surreal automatism vein.



Since its world premiere in the Netherlands in 1963, Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes has been only rarely performed in public. The complicated scenographic staging, the detailed preparation by hand, the need for around ten technicians to activate more or less simultaneously the 100 metronomes—all of these make the demand for performances limited. In 1995, the sculptor and installation artist Gilles Lacombe created a machine able to perform the piece automatically—shown in this video. Ever since, Poème Symphonique can be performed accurately, at any time, and in public. The magic of Poème Symphonique is that patterns do emerge—sometimes a few metronomes, or lots of metronomes, do beat in near-synchrony for awhile. Hearing those patterns emerge and decay, or morph into other rhythms, is fascinating. Sad to think that Ligeti is no longer among us . . .


DSM: The random/stochastic aspect is there, yes, in Poème Symphonique. And the aleatoric/antiphonal aspect is there. But it doesn’t have the burstiness or the rubato that my nice stapedius has. The Lebaron frogs are good comparison, though. They have that fractal irregular irregularity to them. Theirs is an idiosyncratic rhythm that is organic and warm, not mechanical and cold. There is also the aspect of a flock or herd—the collective animal “sixth sense” that governs their choral vocalises and that, conversely, governs the periods when they are quiet together.

CMT: Cage’s ‘4'33"’, or Varése’s and Le Corbusie’s 1958 ‘Poême électronique’? Stockhausen? Babbitt? Lotus Wire’s ‘Little Chill’?

DSM: No, not organic enough. Stick with the frogs. Or dogs, or walruses, or elephants. Possibly cats on pianos.

Anatomy

1. Malleus ;
   
2. Malleus ligament ;
   
3. Incus ;
   
4. Incus ligament;
   
5. Stapedius muscle;
   
6. Stapes footplate;
   
7. Tympanic membrane (eardrum);
   
8. Eustachian tube;
   
9. Malleus muscle (tensor tympani);
   
10. Nerve (chorda tympani).

Here! See! The stapedius muscle lies in the posterior wall of the middle ear. The muscle fibers converge into a round tendon which passes anteriorly to emerge from the pyramidal eminence. The tendon inserts into the posterior part of the stapes head, the posterior crus and in some cases, the capsule of the incudostapedial joint.

CMT: Inspired by Duchamp’s ‘Three Standard Stoppages’ (1913-14) and other art work that used chance, William Anastasi made “unsighted” work - the Blind drawings (in the early 60s) and Pocket drawings (late 60s). These led to the Subway Drawings of 1968 and the late 70s (and onwards):


In the late 70's he reinvestigated the Subway Drawings riding to and from daily chess games with John Cage. Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the back rest, Anastasi was operating as a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train - its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations, to be transformed into lines on paper. This signifies the internalization of chance in his work. Like your stapedius spasms, it’s an art object that expresses the physicality of its making.

DSM: Anastasi obsessed about “not seeing” as contributing to his art. And, in a 1990 interview about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis a vis Surrealism’s Automatism, John Cage made a clear distinction: “It’s not psychological! It’s physical!” Anastasi actively seeks to add a random process to his creative process, allowing deeper or more intricate figures to surface. The results are mysterious and subtle, revealing another order, a noncausal scenario of universal conditions.

CMT: The explicit importance of physicality and chance, the implied importance of physiology, and the denial of psychological as a goal makes Anastasi much closer to the random artists, process/documentation artists (like Spoerri), and plotter artists (like Verostko), than to Surrealist automatic drawing/writing. Where the Surrealist strategy attempted to remove the brain/intention from eye-brain-hand activity in order to short-circuit a more direct link to the unconscious, Anastasi, the demented archivist, removes eye (and brain) from the loop to gain distance, to allow a more indirect link—the body as seismographic machine, the artwork as record—attempting its own documentation (and yet ‘noncausal’, an involuntary alienation from onesself?).

S ince the middle of the century, the music has become very irregular in rhythm. In particular, what is most important to me is the transformation of a sound by slowing it down, sometimes extremely, so that the inner sound becomes a conceivable rhythm. The other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.”

  —  Karlheinz Stockhausen

DSM: I’ve recently been re-reading Joyce’s “The Dead”. There’s plenty of alienation from the self in that! In “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy is a teacher and writer who, though he lives and works in Dublin, feels that his own cultural allegiances lie in Europe. With his wife Gretta, Gabriel attends a Christmas party organized by his aunts, and after the meal delivers a little oration extolling the traditional Irish virtues. Before leaving the house, he catches sight of his wife listening to an old Irish lament being sung by another of the guests, and is struck by her attitude of entranced attention. As they leave and go to their hotel, Gabriel reminiscences about his life with Gretta, and is seized by overwhelming physical desire for her. When he makes tentative efforts to cuddle her later, however, he discovers that she is thinking not of him but of someone else who is associated in her mind with the music she was listening to at the party. This is a someone named Michael Furey, with whom Gretta was in love when she was a young girl in Galway, and who died of pneumonia after venturing out on a cold, rainy night in order to see her one final time before her departure for Dublin. The story concludes with the transformation of Gabriel’s feelings from jealousy and humiliation to pity.

Gabriel’s situation is one of alienation, of estrangement from his wife, his race and himself. A symptom of Gabriel’s compulsion to distance himself from what in fact lies in his own nature is his addiction to language, and this constitutes one pole in the most fully-developed antithesis in “The Dead”, that between speech and music. Gabriel is intensely verbal, and this sets him apart, in a house that is devoted to music rather than speech. All the women of the household engage in musical pursuits of one sort or another, and the entertainment offered at the party too revolves around music and dancing. Gabriel has inherited his mother’s intellectualism and her bookishness. The alienating effect of the verbal orientation he acquired from his mother betrays itself when he cites the need to “keep in touch with the languages” as one of the principal reasons for his preference for European over Irish vacations.

During the party, Gabriel’s lack of participation in the musical life of the house figures his essential detachment. This detachment appears in subtly rendered descriptive details, such as that of Gabriel waiting “outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish”. Shortly afterwards “Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece ... He liked music, but the piece she was playing had no melody for him”. Gabriel does not contribute to the dinner table conversation concerning opera singers of past and present. He continually attempts to convert musical experiences into verbal ones—he mentally assigns the artificial title ‘Distant Music’ to the observation of his wife listening to music, and he is totally oblivious to the meaning that the music holds for her. Gretta by contrast “seemed unaware of the talk about her” while she is under the spell of the song, her genuine susceptibility to music thus tending to separate her from the verbal world in which he husband moves. The Air she hears D’Arcy sing is associated in her mind with her past, with her home in the west, and in particular with Michael Furey, who “had a very good voice” and used to sing that song. Because of these associations, the song is also linked with death, as the air that Gabriel’s aunt sings — “Arrayed for the Bridal” — comes to be as well. If language tends to create and enforce distinctions, and is therefore estranging by its very nature, then the effect of music is to unite, although the things it unites include life and death.

So Gabriel experiences moments in which he feels drawn to the outer world beyond the window, so is he sometimes seized by spasms of doubt as to the authenticity of this mode of existence which is so intimately bound up with language.

As in the case of the other polarities we’re talking about, the implied antithesis between speech and music begins to be undermined in the course of the party, and this process continues in its aftermath. As they are walking towards their hotel Gabriel remembers a letter he wrote to Gretta many years before in which he asked: “Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?” On this occasion in the past words were used to express their own inadequacy before an emotional truth, and their poetic sincerity presents a striking contrast to the routine formula with which Gabriel deprecates his power to express his sentiments during his after-dinner speech. The mood in which Gabriel recalls this letter is conveyed in a simile which possesses telling reflexive significance: “Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past”. In this case words have become music, have become in fact genuinely “distant music” in ironic contrast with the artificial and characteristically literary title which Gabriel would have assigned to the portrait of his wife listening to D’Arcy’s singing. So here is a breakdown of the polarity between speech and music. For if speech erects a temporary bulwark against death, music undermines this and implies and contains death, so that the convergence of speech and music entails the convergence of death and life as well. The imagery of “The Dead” comprises these pairs of symbolic poles or opposites:

• living/dead
  
• east/west
  
• inside/outside
  
• light/darkness
  
• warmth/cold
  
• present/past
  
• speech/music
  
• self/other

The symbolic meanings of these depend on their relation to other symbols belonging to the same side of the slash. The speech/music polarity is special—since it’s speech that makes possible the distinctions that these various pairs embody, whereas music tends to overcome them. The east is of course associated metonymically with the morning sunrise, and metaphorically with birth and life. Conversely, the west is traditionally associated with sunset, with the extinction of light, and with death. In this particular story the idea of the west is also coupled with that of the past, and with the memory of a specific person whose death was provoked by a vigil kept in the cold and darkness of a garden. That person is in his turn recalled in connection with music, and music is linked with the past and with death throughout the story.

CMT: These conceptual polarizations might at first seem coherent and plausible enough, but it’s undermined by irony almost from the beginning of the story. Thoughts in the present dwell obsessively upon the past. The dead refuse to remain quietly buried, but return to haunt the conversations of the living. The relation between these formal oppositions becomes in the end confused to the degree that they become fungible. The supposedly living are spiritually dead, the bland automatism of their continuance in a vegetal routine of existence attesting to a fear of living. If the past seems at first to have vanished beyond recall, Gabriel makes the disconcerting discovery that Gretta’s spiritual being is anchored in the past, which has more meaning for her than the present she shares with her husband. Also, yet another fragment of the past that emerges from memory to exert an influence upon the arid present takes the form of a reversal of the inside/outside, warmth/cold polarities, and Gabriel recalls standing with Gretta in the cold, looking in through a window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. All uncontrollable, all unmasterable. Brilliant automatisms! Fractal spasms!

C omplexity in itself will not provide rhythmic thrust. Harmonic rhythm has to operate in conjunction with actual rhythm in order to effect a sense of propulsion.”

  —  George Crumb

DSM: The gestalt of the stapedial spasms reminds me of the intuitive sense of the pulse set forth by a great, innovative jazz drummer. All on its own, the little stapedius muscle invents advanced fills; creates strong grooves; comes forth with all sorts of mixed stickings, flams and accents. And the bass drum technique has impressive flexibility . . . It’s a little like having a Buddy Rich in there who won’t go away. Once you accept that the spasms aren’t going away, you begin to appreciate that aesthetics of what they add . . .

CMT: And the first thing students need to understand is how drummers interpret the passage of time. Drumming is about pulse, which is an idea that often gets lost while students busy themselves learning technique. You can get flashy if you want, and you can play triple-flamacues up the yin-yang, but you’d better have a very clear idea in your head at all times about where the pulse is. You have to be able to feel the flow of the music or you’re useless to everyone, unless you are just drumming to amuse yourself. Good time and a solid sense of the pulse is, for a lot of people, a talent, but it is one that can be learned. The way to learn it is to listen very hard to people who are better drummers than you are, and to try to understand how it is that they communicate the pulse of the music to the listener, and more importantly, to the rest of the band. Also, working with a metronome can help.

DSM: One of the hardest concepts for beginning players to understand is the idea of “placement.” When people use the phrases “ahead of the beat”, “behind the beat”, and “on the beat”, placement is what they’re talking about. Every musical situation has a “beat”, made up of a series of precise times when each quarter note (or sixteenth note, or triplet, or whatever) occurs. The band instinctively knows when the beat is happening, and everyone ends up agreeing on when that precise moment is, in a kind of subconscious way. Remember that these moments are coming every few milliseconds - this is what makes the flow, or the pulse. Every member of the band gets to make a decision as to when they will play their part, in relation to that precise moment. Some people like to play their parts behind the beat. This does not mean that the player is playing slower than the rest of the band. The player is playing in perfect time, and his pulse matches the pulse of the rest of the band precisely. It is just that this player’s “pulse clock” got started a millisecond or two after the first note of “the beat,” and every note that this player plays is a little bit late, technically. But it can sound awesome - this is sometimes referred to as someone with a “fat” groove, or a “lazy” groove. The drummer from Little Feat is the king of this style, and it ends up being a very relaxed, comfortable feeling that he gets across. Notice, however, that he never “drags” - that would mean that he was slowing down, which he is not. People often assume that the “beat” is something dictated by the drummer, that the drummer is by definition playing “on the beat”, and that if they play ahead of the drummer they are automatically playing ahead of the beat. In most situations, this is true - the drums set the rhythmic foundation, and the other musicians adjust to it—but it’s not true of every situation. My stapedial spasms are stylistically a lot like the drummer from Little Feat.


CMT: Some other guys like to play ahead of the beat. Not to belabor the point, but this would mean someone who is thinking of “the beat” as happening a millisecond or two before it actually does. This gives a very “driving” feeling to that player’s part, and it can sound excellent. When guys talk about “pushing” the music, this is exactly what they mean. Jazz drummers tend to play ahead of the beat. Does your stapedius muscle tend to do that?

DSM: No. It’s more like drummers who play just a shade behind the beat.

I   listen to classical music a lot. Conversely, there’s a lot of jazz that I don’t enjoy listening to. I always felt, as a horn player, playing wasn’t satisfying enough for me. I should have been a drummer, actually. In some ways, Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician.”

  —  Lee Konitz

• Anne Lebaron at CalArts
  
• Wet Opera website
  
• Anne Lebaron website
  
• Kresge Hearing Research Institute website, Univ Michigan
  
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• Varése/LeCorbusier Poême électronique
  
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• National Novel Writing Month
  
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• DrumForum.org
  
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• Marcel Duchamp. Three Standard Stoppages.
  
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• ModernDrummer

R hythm and sounds are born with syllables.”

  — Jean Philippe Rameau