May 28, 2015

May 28, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to Aigen’s paper “The Voice of The Forest: A Conception of Music for Music Therapy” (1991). For a long time “participation in sacred rites” was used as the “way the individual’s natural, psychological resistance to change was overcome as the instinctual energy was put in the service of the inner impetus of development.” When we translate this sentence to the Sound Verbal Behavior(SVB)/Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, we find that an “individual’s natural resistance to change” is in fact always an individual’s unexpressed resistance to NVB. Moreover, “the inner impetus of development” is also suppressed by NVB.

  

The promotion of music therapy might as well be used to promote SVB. After all SVB is based on the inclusion and expression of a person’s private speech in public speech. “In music therapy we are given the opportunity to create external forms, that is, musical structures, whose purpose is to manifest and provide a field for interaction with the “unseen realm” comprising our affective and spiritual selves.” We have a need to express our private speech during our public speech, because this is from where our private speech originated. In NVB, however, we have no chance to do this because in NVB we are led to believe that our private speech is equivalent to an inner behavior-causing self. Consequently, struggle is the basic characteristic of NVB. The struggle in NVB is between the inner and the outer, our private speech and our public speech, but also between the speaker and the listener. 

In SVB, we “create external forms”, that is, we, as listeners become speakers, who express a vocal verbal behavior, which sounds good, according to us. As speakers, we evaluate our own sound in terms of whether we like it or not. If we don’t like it, it is NVB, but if we like it, it is SVB.

Whatever these so-called “hidden forces and entities” may be, which are brought out by “the shaman in ritual” or the “therapist in therapy”, we can deal more pragmatically with such expressions by treating them as verbal behavior. After all, the shaman or the therapist, they mediate and reinforce the speaker, who listens to him or herself, while he or she speaks.

Although “the shamanic perspective attributes causality to external, supernatural agents” while the “psychological perspective explains human actions based on internal entities based on natural influences” this only led to the illusion of “enhanced rationality”, which is still with us today and prevents understanding and implementation of a thoroughgoing behaviorist account.

The behaviorist account has not and could not spread because the SVB/NVB distinction is not widely known. Once it is known it will be much easier to talk about behaviorism. Right now, most behaviorists, like the non-behaviorists, produce mainly NVB while they speak, that is, they don’t listen to themselves while they speak, but they only want others to listen to them. 

Aigen reports having some spiritual revelation while he is in the Arizona high desert. While being there, he realizes that “Music – as the sound of sacred, once-living substances – is the voice of wisdom in nature.” Moreover, “It is the vehicle by which we contact that force of nature that maintains a dynamic balance in both our inner and outer worlds. To truly understand music is then to understand the secret and maintenance of life itself.” Aigen was apparently alone and didn’t state that he was talking with anyone, but he definitely talks, that is, he writes about it, in his paper. What is lost in this picture is the fact that Aigen, who himself is not a “once-living substance”, but someone who is alive, is behaving verbally and that the reader reads his story about the presumed importance of music. If we are to stay with the fact that his verbal behavior is about “the sound of the sacred”, it is not a big leap to imagine that Aigen wants to express SVB. Since he doesn’t know SVB, he writes “music…is the voice of nature.” Furthermore, SVB, which expresses accurately what happens within our own skin, because we listen to ourselves while we speak, “maintains a dynamic balance in both inner and outer worlds.” Not by making music, but by becoming truly verbal, and by producing SVB as a speaker, we will be less enthralled with understanding the presumed “secret of life”. The “secret of life” is overrated and doesn’t need “maintenance”, but our relationships do. 

Aigen’s familiarity with NVB is evident from the statement “relating in a manner that facilitates the life and functioning of the whole” is “not comprised of purely harmonious and tension-free – and ultimately lifeless – music, at times promoted for use in healing contexts.” According to him, music must always “reflect the intense, vital, alternatively joyful and suffering wail characteristic of the life struggle.” Presumably, “it is in music that we can fully integrate our dissonances, as well as our consonances.” However, SVB stops the moment that there is NVB. From a SVB-perspective the music stops when it depicts “the life struggle.” The basic characteristic of NVB is “struggle” and “suffering”, but the basic principle of SVB is “joy” and “vitality”. In other words, in SVB there are no “dissonances” at all. Aigen's wrong notion that “harmonious”, “tension-free” music (read:conversation), is “ultimately lifeless” is of course based on a behavioral history that involved a lot of “struggle” and “suffering”.

 

On the one hand Aigen states that our “psychic problems are both reflected in, and exacerbated by, our pathological physical environment”, but on the other hand, he insists that “individuals have lost contact with the sacred within themselves.” Such a statement reflects the struggle between the inner and outer, which is characteristic for NVB. Supposedly “the pollution of our external world is an external manifestation of the alienation of the life spirit that is at the root of contemporary psychological disturbances.” All of this mumbo jumbo is obfuscating NVB. Aigen only pays lip-service to the importance of “creative activity for emotional wellbeing.” What good will it do to us to “explore the connections between creation (of life) and creativity” as long as we keep our NVB going? These questions Aigen dissociates from, because he prefers to live in the almost autistic world of music therapy. 

When Aigen, at the end of his paper, calls behaviorism a “de-sacralized approach to science”, I realize that he is not really a behaviorist. His yearning for something sacred signifies his loneliness and isolation, which is based on a lack of SVB and his involvement in meaningless NVB. We do not need to get back in touch with the life spirit, but with each other. It is amazing that an educated person talks about the maintenance of life, without once in the paper elaborating on the importance of how we sound while we speak. Are we going to bring music into our conversation or are we moving away from conversation with esoteric dreams about how music will solve our problems? Since we have done that already and subsequently have perpetuated NVB, we might as well figure out how SVB works. It is NVB, which is lifeless, but in SVB we are full of life. During SVB we will speak with our authentic, resonant, musical voice.