May 26, 2015

May 26, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

When I first discovered the importance of how we sound, while we speak, I described this process in which a speaker realizes that he or she can be his or her own listener as the restoration of sound-experience while we speak.  My background in singing made aware of how others sound while they talk and in my opinion most people sounded terrible. I still think that way, but now I call it Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), on the other hand, is that way of talking in which the speaker sounds good. 

There is something strikingly natural about SVB, but something profoundly unnatural about NVB. Only in SVB can speakers and listeners completely relax, because only in SVB does the speaker speak with his or her natural voice, the voice which he or she only has when he or she feels calm and at ease. In NVB, in which we speak with a sound which indicates that we are feeling not good, we are bound to create and perpetuate our problems. 

In the paper “The Voice of The Forest: A Conception of Music for Music Therapy” (1991), Kenneth Aigen describes “a river is also guided by logic, although it is not a logic that is rigidly linear, but instead one that molds to the quality of the land in shaping and forming the contours in which the river flows.” This “meandering logic of the river”, which follows the “contour of the land” refers to SVB, which is talking that causes and maintains the well-being of both the speaker and the listener. Although this article is of interest to me as it mentions behaviorist aspects of the  foundation for music therapy, I don’t want people to consider SVB as therapeutic, because it’s enhancing effect on the well-being of speakers and  listeners is completely natural. SVB is not therapy and is against anything replacing it, which is always NVB. I think not therapy, but SVB is needed. Since the presence of NVB prevents SVB, environmental control must be aimed at making SVB possible. Since the natural environment doesn’t need to be improved and since we are not, in need of dikes, dams, artificial lakes or canals, we let the landscape determine where and how the water of the river flows. The same goes for how we sound. Our environment  determines how we sound. If we can have SVB, we will have it, effortlessly. 

We enhance and increase or undermine and make impossible communication and personal transformation by how we sound while we speak. Our lack of communication or our problematic interaction presumably requires therapeutic intervention, but SVB makes clear that therapy is not needed. We either have or don’t have SVB. This is illustrated by a light that is on or off. In SVB the light is on, but in NVB the light is off. We haven’t seen that because we are used to NVB. NVB has kept us in the dark about a lot of things. The article details “the context of a music therapy session.” I will use that as a way to point out the difference between the environment in which we can talk or in which we pretend to talk. In the former we have SVB, in the latter, we have NVB. 

Only when we choose listening to talking as our “unique and singular domain” will we be able to recognize, as listeners, that there is no need for empirical justification, for approval from listeners other than the we, the speakers, as in SVB we are listening to ourselves. It has been detrimental to vocal verbal behavior that we study, read and write about it as we lost touch with our sound and became less and less involved in speaking and listening. This is exactly what has happened: in the name of psychology, spirituality, science, education, politics and economics, we have learned to stop, exploit and pretend our own involvement in our vocal verbal behavior. The idea that something other than talking can benefit us more than talking itself befooled us many times. 

Certainly Music “has been used throughout the human history to promote physical well-being and spiritual and emotional development”, but I claim this so-called well-being has always happened at the expense of talking and has enhanced the disintegration of human relationship and society as a whole. 

“Once we abandon the intellectual exercise of superimposing psychological systems” on the talking process (rather than “on the music process”), “we must look elsewhere for a conceptual basis” of listening while we speak. Whenever radical behaviorists or other intellectuals began to write and read about verbal behavior, they inadvertently went to a different level of analysis which could never do justice to the speaker in the same way as the listener could. Only the listener can reinforce the speaker and the speaker must speak to be reinforced by the listener. Moreover, unless the speaker produces music, the listener reinforces noise. We have have such high rates of NVB as we reinforce noise.

In SVB the speaker’s voice is an appetitive stimulus and therefore controls the behavior of the listener with a positive contingency. In NVB, by contrast, the opposite happens. In NVB the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as an aversive stimulus , which controls his or her behavior with a coercive contingency. As we are dealing in SVB and NVB with the listener’s perspective of the speaker, that is, with what the listener is experiencing within his or her own skin, there is no need for scientific approval because it just is what it is. 

Aigen raises an interesting question as to “whether scientific laws can best be characterized as being discovered, or are better characterized as human creations, thus existing as objects of definition?” What matters to music therapists should matter to anyone who is interested in why human beings talk the way they do, which, as we all know, is deeply problematic. 

Certain conditions have to be met before we can talk with each other. One condition we have yet to fully comprehend and appreciate is to view our interactions as an “act of discovery.” We must ask ourselves “Is ”talking (instead of “music”) a purely human convention whose nature we define according to arbitrary and pragmatic considerations, or do the processes characteristic of"   talking (instead of “musical creation”) contain a universal essence existing apart from our considerations of them? Another way of phrasing this question is to ask whether” talking (instead of “music”) is merely a human artifact or whether” talking (instead of music”) possesses an extra-human source or significance.”

If music therapists were able to agree upon the discovery of “inherent organic, psychological or symbolic processes essential to music therapy” then nothing should stand in the way of the discovery of the basic principles of talking. Like music therapy, talking can and must be defined, but in practice, we can never ignore the fact that in spite of our definitions we still need to discover talking as we go. The beneficial effects of SVB cannot be obtained by writing or reading about it and will have to be discovered while we talk. Empirical research can after that validate what we have discovered while we had SVB. Moreover, as there is neither a “profession” of talking nor a “discipline” of talking, nothing about talking is decided by any professionals and the nature and essence of talking can be discovered only by those who are willing and capable to explore it.