A microcosm of the very newest music: one is staggered by the extensive differentiation of technique and form... Modern music is rarely so multi-dimensional, rich in changes and exciting.”
— Münchner Merkur.
H ormesis (from Greek: hórmēsis – ‘rapid motion, eagerness’; from ancient Greek: hormáein – ‘to set in motion, impel, urge on’)
n. favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors.”
M iniatures—whether literary or film or musical—have a special power if they are well-constructed. Reading Harvey Stanbrough’s guide for authors who wish to write
‘flash fiction’, I put pianist Guy Livingston’s ‘Don’t Panic’ disc in the CD player...
L ife as character-piece, life as inevitably ‘miniature’ compared to what we might wish.
A nd ‘humor’ turns out to be a luxury that depends on our having a future to reflect on what was funny and a past to contain things remembered. No future, not much past, not much memory, then no humor—at least not in the normal sense of ‘humor’.
A ny exposure that exhibits a ‘U-shaped’ dose-response curve, something that yields beneficial effects in small doses and deleterious effects in large doses, is said to be ‘hormetic’. Through miniature character pieces like the ones on Livingston’s CD and DVD, we vicariously are able to experience a kind of musical hormesis. We receive just enough sonic stimuli to grasp what the narrative means; the narrative inspires us and propels us; and then it is gone.
M any insect species have very short lives, you know, some existing for only days. The mayfly famously has the shortest life span of all—the adult stage lasts for as little as 30 minutes, sometimes as much as a day. Some humans have tragically truncated lives, too, living on borrowed time. Our species is not prepared for this.
I n the days ahead here in the middle north latitudes, mayflies will be swarming over treetops near rivers or freshwater ponds or lakes. The pre-adult stages are aquatic and will last a few days. And they will moult and moult, again and again, and then live just minutes to hours as adults: just long enough to mate and, for the females, to deposit their fertilized eggs. Some male mayflies are lucky enough to perform their mating dance over placid water at sunset, joined by females. Others who moulted early in the day won’t make it to such an auspicious, romantic hour—noon, only, or 3 p.m.
D enis McKeown and colleagues at the Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, study the neurophysiology of sonic ephemera (see links below). They find that when listeners attempt to discriminate between sounds separated by an interval of time—seconds, minutes—they do rather well, to the extent they are able to encode the remembered sound into a category with a verbal description. When we remember what someone has said some minutes ago, we recall word- and sentence-level descriptions and usually not fine, detailed acoustical information. Actually, not quite. We may recall the timbre of the voices, or macro-acoustical information, such as remembering “Cecelia sounded hoarse this morning.”
W hen we listeners discriminate between motivic material separated by seconds instead of minutes, we do really well. And if we know in advance that the narrative, whatever there may be of it, will be transacted within seconds and then vanish, then our attention is tremendously acute.
N europsychologists have recently studied how our brains perform ongoing, continuous, realtime processing comparing recently experienced or common sounds with transient new or slightly different sounds. This involves subtracting the averaged pattern of the evoked potentials record for the common repeated sound from the averaged response to the less common slightly different sound.
T he difference is what’s called a ‘mismatch response’ or ‘mismatch negativity’ (MMN). MMN signals reveal that our brains are compiling auditory models of the recent past, and, when something novel comes along, the auditor and mental models are updated. There is good evidence that the ‘model’ is not actually a log of sensory memory, but neither is it a verbal description. More like an unsayable abstraction, on the boundary between higher-order sonic abstractions and the ‘hardware-level’ sensory trace from the ears’ cochlear function.
T he ‘timbre memory model’ (TMM) proposed by McKeown and Wellsted (link below) offers a scheme that accounts for interference in auditory memory. TMM postulates a memory buffer which retains recent sonic information in the form of a compressed encoded spectrum. This spectral code is comprised of a number of frequency-specific components of each tone—features that define different auditory objects (here ‘feature’ refers to predominant spectral peaks, not just frequencies of a component tone, but amplitudes and phases of components as well). Together, these individual short-term memories build up a contextual model of our recent auditory environment and its trajectory.
T o do this, our auditory memory buffer is continuously updated by incoming sensory events over 8- to 20-second periods. Auditory events consisting of novel features require the model to be updated—whereas auditory events comprised of repeated features don’t drive model-updates. TMM hypothesizes that auditory interference and ‘mismatch’ is only caused by tones that present features that are ‘novel-in-recent-context’ and cause updates and memory scavenging, a bit like
‘garbage collection’ (GC) in Java or LISP or other programming languages.
O ur meat computer’s fusion of direct and reflected sounds into a single ‘image’ that is perceived at the location of the original sound is referred to as the ‘precedence effect’. Precedence enables us to localize the sound source and understand it with reasonable accuracy despite the presence of potentially conflicting multi-directional information from reflections.
M aybe there are ‘precedence effects’ at higher levels of abstraction as well.
I n general, my own meat computer experiences each of the compositions on the Guy Livingston CD and DVD as something like
free-fall with a parachute.
T here’s a cognitive/narrative difference, I should think, between a 3-sec free-fall in an amusement-park ride (
Tower of Power) and a 5-min parachute-jump
free-fall from an airplane and a 20-min descent in an unpowered glider. The 3-sec experience resembles, I think, literary microfictions; the piano miniatures that Livingston performs; the lives of mayflies.
I t’s been postulated that memory consolidation processes require post-learning molecular changes that will support long-term experiences. Blocking dopaminergic D1 and/or N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors impairs consolidation processes: it degrades long-term memory but not short-term memory. But if no long-term experiences will be forthcoming for us--as for mayflies, as in the Livingston CD and DVD--then short-term incentive-salience is all there is, and our neurobiology would do well to maximize the short-term experience for what it is, D1 and NMDA signals or no D1 and NMDA signals.
A lthough interference is a well-established forgetting function in short-term auditory memory, an adequate understanding of its underlying mechanisms is still a ways off into the future. McKeown's listeners compared standard and comparison complex tones, having distinct timbres (four components varying in frequency), over a 5-sec retention interval and made a same-different response. This interval either was silent or included one of 15 distractor tones occurring 0 millisec, 100 millisec, or 1,200 millisec after the standard. The distractors varied in the extent to which the frequencies of their component tones were shared with the standard. Individuals’ performance in comparing the consecutive tones was significantly impaired by distractors composed of novel frequencies, regardless of the temporal position at which the distractor occurred.
T hese results, compatible with teh TMM put forward by McKeown and Wellsted, suggest that interference in our meat computer’s auditory memory operates via a ‘feature-overwriting’ mechanism with automatic GC. We don’t ordinarily notice it much. But the Livingston CD and DVD can make the mechanism very apparent.
B ased in Paris and Amsterdam, Livingston performs all over the world, notably as soloist with the Chicago Symphony, the Orchestre Nationale de France, and as a recitalist at the Centre Pompidou, the Théâtre du Chatelet, the IJsbreker, the MuziekGebouw, the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, and Le Poisson Rouge. His recordings of 20th and 21st Century repertoire include premieres of music by John Cage, George Antheil, and over 100 other ‘feature-overwriting, GC and update-inducing’ composers from around the world.
M ight there be a limit on the maximum number of rapid variations that our species can stand before dying, about 40 maybe (the so-called
Hayflick limit), just like for the maximum number of moults or the maximum number of passages in cell culture?
- Carkeet D. Unplanned freefall? Some survival tips. GreenHarbor, 2004.
- Ebstein R, et al. Genetics of human social behavior. Neuron. 2010;65:831-44.
- Jones R, Lins R. Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management. Wiley, 1996.
- Keen R, Freyman R. Release and re-buildup of listeners' models of auditory space. J Acoust Soc Am. 2009;125:3243-52.
- Mercer T, McKeown D. Interference in short-term auditory memory. Q J Exp Psychol (Colchester). 2010 May 2:1-10. [Epub ahead of print]
- McKeown D, Wellsted D. Auditory memory for timbre. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2009;35:855-75.
- Miller F, Vandome A, McBrewster J, eds. Parachute. AlphaScript, 2009.
- Mizunami M, et al. Roles of octopaminergic and dopaminergic neurons in appetitive and aversive memory recall in an insect. BMC Biol. 2009;7:46-61.
- Piekema C, et al. Dissociating the neural correlates of intra-item and inter-item working-memory binding. PLoS One. 2010;5:e10214-20.
- Rana O, Martinez L, Singleton R. From the Left and More Micro-fiction: Poems and Prose. Leaf, 2010.
- Ryan C. Magnificent Failure: Free Fall from the Edge of Space. Smithsonian, 2003.
- Seugnet L, et al. Persistent short-term memory defects following sleep deprivation in a drosophila model of Parkinson disease. Sleep. 2009;32:984-92.
- Shapard R, Thomas J, eds. Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories. Norton, 2006.
- Shapard R, Thomas J, eds. New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond. Norton, 2007.
- Stanbrough H. Writing Realistic Dialogue and Flash Fiction. CentralAve, 2004.
- Stern J, ed. Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories. Norton, 2006.
- Vaiserman A. Hormesis, adaptive epigenetic reorganization, and implications for human health and longevity. Dose Response. 2010;8:16-21.
- Yashin A. Hormesis against aging and diseases: using properties of biological adaptation for health and survival improvement. Dose Response. 2010;8:41-7.
- Zhang J, et al. A neural computational model of incentive salience. PLoS Comput Biol. 2009;5:e1000437-50.
- Denis McKeown page at Univ Leeds
- StratoCat EXCELSIOR-III freefall
- Wikipedia page on longevity
- Wikipedia page on long-lived organisms
W orks on the ‘Don’t Panic!’ CD.
- Dan Warburton: Speed Study I
- Jonathan Katz: WENDIGO
- Daniel Landau: Losing it again
- Carl Faia: What if I just said...
- Roger Kleier: Step out of the Car
- Donal Fox: The Scream
- James Baiye: Database of Desire & spoken word
- Roberto Andreoni: scendi un minuto
- Brian Escriv: Mason and Dixon
- Annie Gosfield: Brooklyn, October 5, 1941
- Paul Beaudoin: re: dance (PNMR)
- Marek Zebrowski: Ex tempore
- Louis Andriessen: non [an] anfang
- Christopher Culpo: Spangles
- Isak Goldschneider: 42 Second Piano, tape effects & electronics
- Richard Brooks: Conflict of Interest
- Danielle Baas: Joke
- Charles Shadle: Cowboy Song
- Sophie de Wit: Who asked you?
- Pepe-Tonino Caravaggio: EIGHT 8
- Thomas Jefferson Anderson: Watermelon Revisited
- Paul von Hippel: Kodaly Music Box
- Eilon Aviram: NA'OU'RA (the Wedding Dance), prepared piano & percussion
- Jonathan Norton: 59" of Piano
- Alan Frederick Shockley: cold springs brand, 10 p.m.
- Moritz Eggert: Hämmerklavier XI
- Derek Bermel: MEDITATION
- Tuyet Tran: Tonal Imagery
- Fritz Lauer: Slusha, for C.E.
- William Bolcom: A 60-second Ballet for chickens
- Joshua Cody: Two-Chord Warp
- Joanna Bailie: GIRO I
- Martial Robert: I' de Tonio Kröger
- Patricia Elizabeth Martinez: Absolutis-s
- Riccardo Vaglini: PASSATEMPO
- Gene Pritsker: i'm afraid you might ask for a fragment of my soul
- Newt Hinton: Nakano-ku (à S.D.)
- John New: Moondrunk
- Patrick Cahallan: xxx.rhapsody
- Yoichi Togawa: prelude I
- Barbara Engel: Punch and Judy's Waltz
- Joseph Rovan: Miro Sketch - Mostly Yellow
- Frederick Frahm: Sonata Moirai
- Victor Ekimovsky: Jenseits des Guten und des Bösen
- Alper Maral: Verschiebung
- Stephane Leach: Piano Piece for Guy
- Ketzel Cotel: piece for paws
- Vanessa Lann: DD (Double D)
- Walter Haven: Minute Rice
- Giovanni Mancuso: Saltarello for Guy, for piano, prepared tape & percussion
- Sergio Pallante: Polis
- D. Andrew Stewart: réveil
- Elliott Sharp: Snaps
- Robert Eidschun: Specks
- Lionel Sainsbury: Prelude
- Richard Carrick: Slowness
- Walter Sanchez: Thinking
- Atsushi Yoshinka: HARU NO YOI - Miyabi no Uta
- Atanasio Khyrsch: Parce que je le vaux bien
- Lansing McLoskey: Theft
