The Music in Your Head

When asked to sing a piano note that he or she has just heard, a reasonably musical person will do so effortlessly.

We're hardly aware of the complexity of the process. The ear hears the piano note, and the brain establishes some kind of electrochemical "picture" of the note. It then sends a neural instruction to the vocal cords, which instinctively adjust to re-create the note out of the air passing through.

Even without the help of a piano or any other immediate musical source, we can spontaneously sing London Bridge or some other simple familiar tune, with all the notes perfectly delivered, in the correct rhythmic setting.

I recently found out that this long-established singing skill can still exist -- neurally -- in a person who has lost his voicebox.

At the piano last week I was approached by a such a person. At the start he was attempting to request a tune, with what seemed like the the worst case of laryngitis I'd ever encountered, so I thought.

After a few futile attempts to make himself understood, he went back to his place at the bar, and returned with his "electrolarynx". According to a dictionary I consulted later, this "handheld device is placed under the lower jaw, producing vibration to allow speech". I'd seen people speaking this way a few times before, but I'd never "conversed" with such a person.

But my new friend - Artie - had a song he wanted to hear, and in that urgency, and in the urgency of the music that followed, I forgot about how and when he lost his larynx, or whatever serious thoughts he might have about it. This guy wanted to SING.

The tune - "If I Had My Way" - is a sentimental ditty written in 1913, performed a million times by barbershop singers. Luckily, I came across it in an old Mills Brothers album a long time ago, and immediately loved it -- truly an endearing old ballad, and it happened to be Artie's parents' wedding song.

He was delighted that I knew the song -- I even knew the lyric and sang it -- and he "sang" along with me. The electrolarynx produces a robotic, monotone pitch, and this is what Artie sang with. But in a truer sense, Artie's musical experience that night actually had nothing to do with this electronic gadget.

It would turn out in later conversation that Artie had spent almost his whole life singing, in small groups on street corners, in large barbershop-style choruses, and solo. The neural mechanism of his note creation is still alive and well. Unfortunately the last piece of the process - the vocal cords - is missing. Something like a stereo signal going to disconnected speakers.

Artie's electrolarynx provided a very consistent Dflat, and for a while I tried to place the various tunes in keys that favored that note. It probably wasn't necessary.

Artie smiled, wiggled, and shook to the music. Not only do I think he tuned out his Dflat electrovoice -- I found that I had tuned it out as well. I felt sure that the melodies were alive and well in his "mind's ear", that he heard himself really singing the tunes, as surely as I can hear the music in my own "mind's ear" at the present moment, as I write this.

It is part of the Beethoven legend that he wrote his Ninth Symphony while completely deaf. There are many musicians that are not too amazed by this.

Once again, the "mind's ear". Beethoven had decades of adequate hearing, during which he completely encoded the sounds of the orchestra in his head. He could close his eyes and "hear" his musical creations before he wrote them down.

I could do this too. But it would sound like junk because I'm not a creative genius like Beethoven to start with.

After running through many tunes with Artie, I took a break and heard him talk about growing up in Astoria in the early 50s, where one could walk down the street and find "a group of people singing on every corner". Surely they were the great times of Artie's youth, and he recounts them happily.

Obviously he caught a bad break later on. But so did Lou Gehrig, who subsequently declared himself the "luckiest man on the face of the earth". I'm richer for the "Artie" experience, and I hope his "mind's ear" and his joyous attitude will grace that piano again soon.