Episode 2: How Does it Sound? Beautifully Imperfect

Last week I turned left - this time across Europe on my Adventure in Sound. When driving across this wonderfully diverse landmass, I experienced tremendous storms of lightning and thunder followed by torrential rain. A derelict, outdoor bar in a tiny town late at night. Wildflower meadows full of dry colours. The generosity of a petrol station attendant’s smile. A spontaneous ‘healing’ by my AirBnB host, who in the morning decided I was inhabited by 4 spirits, and who proceeded to ‘extract’ them from me. The memory of spending time with my gremlins back in the UK while passing through new landscapes for hours without music, without conversation … without forethought. The crossing of two blue seas, which - as a sailor - ‘becalms’ me. Each moment unique. Each moment filled with its own music. Each moment beautiful. 

Throughout this adventure, I will be asking one question: What is Beauty?

My short answer is this: Imperfection. But not just any kind of imperfection. 

Consider the mechanical piano. What is the principal difference between a machine playing the piano and an expert human? You can imagine what a machine-based performance sounds like. You can feel its ‘coldness’. Its “soullessness”. Its lack of aesthetic. Why? Because the machine plays the score perfectly. Every note. Every measure. Every tempo. The machine does not make mistakes. It does not hesitate. It does not fall or doubt or act with spontaneity. It does not feel and so it does not have anything to share. It has no desires or passions, and therefore no incentive to move. 

Your brain, therefore, perceives the machine’s ‘music’ as unnatural … stagnant ... even dead. And unnatural things that stagnate are not beautiful … they are not ‘alive’. Which means your brain perceives the perfection that our society so often aspires to as unnatural, and therefore not beautiful. Why? 

Because nature IS imperfect. But not imperfectly randomly. It’s imperfect in a very important kind of way. 

Consider the human pianist playing the same score as the machine. You already know what that sounds like. Her / His playing is nuanced. At times unpredictable even when you know the score in detail. It’s complex. If you were to follow along note-by-note, as did an audience at one of my Experiential Experiment performances at the National Sawdust in New York, you’d have seen the world’s greatest ‘site reader’ make many ‘mistakes’. He played remarkably imperfectly. To make his imperfection obvious to the audience, I projected the musical score onto a large screen, and superimposed the notes he was actually playing as he played them. The two were clearly non-isomorphic. Despite this, when the audience was asked “how does it sound?” they answered … 

“Beautiful”

“Alive” 

What made it so? The answer - I hypothesise - is an imperfection that generates the perception of moving in your brain. While your brain is drawn to certainty. It’s also drawn to a certain kind of “noise” … noise that creates difference. And it’s this difference that creates movement. Fast or slow, minor or major, waltz or salsa. It’s all movement. 

Music, then, IS movement in sound. 

It’s also true for your body and mind. It’s imperfection that enables your body … indeed any body ... to move emotionally, intellectually and quite literally physically.  

Consider babies. They are all born helpless (relative to other animals). Unable to move from wherever it is that you left them. As a parent, this was super useful, since I could always find them. But the baby’s brain also comes into the world full of awe and wonder (my view is exactly opposite that of William James). It has an innate desire to step forward. But step it cannot yet do. So it tries … and tries … and tries … propelled by awe. Eventually, after thousands of imperfect steps, the baby’s brain experiences the joyful moment of discovering that it's a bipedal animal. An experience that required tears, frustration and pain. 

But imagine for a moment what would happen if you ‘protected’ the baby’s brain from experiencing those tears, frustrations and pains, which is a very natural inclination. Imagine catching them each time they were about to topple over. You would have taken away the possibility for their brain learning how to move, since learning to walk requires learning to fall in a controlled way. And learning to run requires learning to fall  faster … again, in a controlled way.  Your kindness would have handicapped their life. 

And yet parents - including myself - so often do exactly this. We so often prevent our children from expanding beyond us, which is their primary function in life. We do so because we project our own fears onto them, many of which are unconscious even to us (since many of our fears were also inherited). Through learning-through-mimicry, their brain comes to see the world like our brain, but without an actual reason to do so. 

When in New York, or San Francisco, or London, or Nashville, or Shanghai, or wherever it is that I find myself, I so often see wee gremlins - no taller than my knee - trying with the energy of wonder to propel themselves forward on 4-wheel scooters. But their movement is hampered by helmets that are half the size of their body, by oversized plastic and padded coverings over their knees, hands and elbows … indeed it seems their entire body is ‘protected’. When I see this, I wonder what their brain is learning? Is it learning its own fears, or is it inheriting the fears deeply encoded in their parent’s brain? Is it learning that the world is a dangerous place to be avoided, or is it learning the desire to complexify itself at the cost of pain and suffering that is usually survivable? Are they learning how to take meaningful risks, which is essential for making good decisions? Indeed, are they even learning about risk at all? How could they if they cannot feel the consequence of falling. How will their brain learn to take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions in the future as adults?  

Padded children do not learn to expand. Nor do padded adults.

Which is why I took - and continue to take - a fairly darwinian approach to parenting. The result - so far - are three gremlins who have stumbled and at times fallen. Who have felt strong pain, deep sadness and even loss. But have also felt the greatest joys of being people ‘who are able’, and of the comfort of love that always (I hope) came after their pains, sadness and loss. They are now three complex, beautifully imperfect beings. 

So the pain of falling is essential to thriving in a world that is uncertain.

Why, then, do so many of us create a world that does not complexify our brains, which is a concept my Lab of Misfits has studied for over 20 years? Because it comes with risk. The risk of falling … of failure … of being imperfect. And in our world, perfection is the aspiration of many - if not most. As is the resulting anxiety of not feeling ‘not good enough’. Just look at the images / videos most often shared on ‘social media’ (which is anything but social). In contrast, the process of complexifying your world is necessarily imperfect. It is a painful process, as I learned when running along the rocky, ‘mountain’ path shown in the image below. 

I’ve been staying with a dear friend on the top of a ‘mountain’ in the North of Ibiza. It’s an off-grid, pine scented, breezy oasis on a rough, rocky track that adjoins ridges on either side. It’s a wonderful track for trail-running - ideally in the morning before the rising heat. (If you’re so inclined, you’re welcome to follow my runs and cycles on Strava). 

Off-road running complexifies your brain. The ridges, loose rocks, unpredictable soil requires your brain to actively engage with the world. To dynamically adapt its vestibular system, its ocular-motor reflexes and skeletal-muscular physiology. The result is physical and mental resilience through positive stress. It was the wonderful Marian Diamond who first demonstrated what happens to a brain fed on a diet of ecological complexity. 

Marian was my mentor when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the late 1980s. The rats in her experiments lived in two kinds of worlds. The enriched world had lots of rats and toys that were changed regularly. The other world was ‘deprived’ (no rats or toys). The result was that the complexity of the world became manifest in the complexity of the rat’s brain … even in the old rats who were the equivalent of 80 year old humans. Specifically, their number of neurons and the connections between them increased, which also increased their ability to think. 

You see … their brain, like yours, is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, you will lose it. The reason is that thinking is expensive. It requires a great deal of ATP, and even brain tissue. Without movement, your body will save its energy and match its brain to its sedation. A fundamental concept that Marian applied to her own life. 

When in her 70s and 80s, every day she’d hike up the long hill to the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the Berkeley Hills. Each time she’d walk with one foot on the road and another on the side-walk. She risked falling in order to complexify her world. This small act may seem relatively insignificant. But remember that - on average - those who fall and become immobile in their 80s have a 30% chance of dying within 12 months, even if the injury heals. To put that into a contemporary perspective, the risk of mortality for those who are unable to move because of a fall at 80 is 15x the risk of dying from COVID at the same age. Marian’s life embodied this tradeoff. It also embodied the fact that while nature might be infinitely complex, it doesn’t mean your experience of it is. The complexity of your world is a choice. Whatever you choose, that choice will be reflected in the complexity of your brain - and subsequently in your thinking, your joy, your resilience and even the probability of your longevity. 

In choosing to enrich my world by running along this track I fell … and not softly. The result - it seems - was a dislocated right shoulder, which I only discovered two weeks later after fairly constant pain and eventual complete loss of strength of my deltoid muscle. I’ve a high tolerance to pain, which has been a useful antidote to the challenging moments of my life (both physically and emotionally). But at times it has also maintained me (and maybe you) in physical and/or emotional situations that should have been extinguished long ago. 

Hope is a double-edged sword. 

So, this time, when dislocating my shoulder, I decided to keep my shoulder alive by keeping it moving. Sensibly of course. But in movement nonetheless. What is true for my body, is true for yours. It’s also true for your mind, and even for your relationships with others (and your relationships with the infinitely complex world). Bodies that don’t move, eventually deteriorate. Love that doesn’t grow, ends. A perceptual brain that doesn’t expand ... that doesn’t complexify … stagnates and becomes fragile. 

M … O … V … E … M … E … N … T … IS … L … I … F … E

The source of that movement is nature’s imperfection. As long as that imperfection is not random, or complicated, or dishonest. It must be an imperfection that complexifies, that creates movement … that creates music … that creates beauty. Look at the photos below. Manifest in their ‘lines’ … in their ‘imperfections’ … is history of movement. It’s why we are drawn to them. We’re drawn to their character. Without them, there would be less life. Less beauty. 

Your life is also a musical score. And you are its music. Like music, you are imperfect. But it’s your imperfections ... your DEVIANCES . . . that define you, since to deviate is to deviate towards yourself … towards your vitality … towards your resilience … towards expansive movement that complexifies your brain, your thinking, your imaginations and ultimately your life. But you will fall and hurt yourself … necessarilly so. 

So, our adventure into sound is an adventure into the celebration of the beauty that lives in the imperfection of you.