May 29, 2015

May 29, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

It is evening and I sit in my garden near the fire. I am happy and quiet and I enjoy this peaceful moment. Tonight I am alone and I like it. There is no need to fulfill, everything seems to have been done and I am not doing anything. 

I hear a pigeon and a car while the silence is descending. Tomorrow things will be very different, but I will not forget this time in which I digest who I have been and think of who I am going to be, taking my instructions from the flames. 

Two birds flew in the evening sky and nearby animated neighbors are talking with family members. Each has their domain. I feel complete. The birds flew by and the neighbors went inside to watch TV. 

Air-conditioners are humming and one bird sings one last song before the darkness sets in. As the wood is consumed the logs rearrange themselves and the smoke goes straight up because there is no wind. 

A mosquito tried to land on my skin, but its sound near my ear gave it away and made my hand move. A dog barks at the arrival of a car and from my back yard I can hear what is happening in my street. 

Oh fire, I love and admire you for being so lively and beautiful. The light is just right for these words to make sense. My shadowy friends have left without saying good bye while I was staring at the glow.

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. 

May 27, 2015

May 27, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today on the radio I heard that students who were taking hand-written notes during a lecture scored significantly higher on a memory test than those who typed their notes on their laptop. I could have predicted such a result because I have experimented with different types of writing: pen, pencil, brush and keyboard. In the same way that a different voice would make me say different things, different fonts and different writing tools affect a different writing. 

I liked Aigen’s metaphor of the landscape which determines how the river flows, in the paper “The Voice of The Forest: A Conception of Music for Music Therapy” (1991). Just as we say different things under different circumstances, we also sound different under different circumstances. This is why under certain conditions the speaker speaks with an aversive voice and although the listener is negatively affected by this, he or she will still reinforce that speaker. Under more positive circumstances, the speaker speaks with a sound which functions as an appetitive stimulus and he or she affects the listener in a nicer way. In the former the speaker produces Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but in the latter, the speaker produces Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Although under both circumstances the listener reinforces the speaker, in one condition the listener reinforces coercive, uni-directional speech or NVB, while in the other condition he or she reinforces sensitive, bi-directional speech or SVB. 

The statement “to understand the music therapy process is to understand the original purpose of creating music” makes me think that to understand the problems involved in talking is to understand the original purpose of talking. It is easy to think of purposes for which music can be used, which don’t capture the essence of music. Music played in an elevator or between news reports serves a purpose, but there is much more to music. Likewise, talking is used for many purposes often leaving out the most important purpose. We may be talking about who won a match, the weather, a movie, but there is more to talking than these mundane topics. Like music, talking or vocal verbal behavior “is oriented toward establishing, maintaining and improving one’s health and general functioning” that is, it is or can be a “life-enhancing activity.” 

Aigen argues in favor of “the construction of a worldview for music therapy”, but I doubt if he got any further with that construction than by writing that paper. The creation of such a world view is not going to have much of a reach as long as it doesn’t generalize to how we talk. Although I find myself aligned with music therapists, I think it is more pragmatic to work towards constructing a worldview of how we talk. If we would accomplish SVB understanding – which is based on the validation of the listener’s experience of the sound of the voice of the speaker – we would simultaneously become more interested in music and in its many magnificent effects. Although Aigen is aware of the importance of “how” questions regarding the formulation of an adequate music therapy theory, he is more interested in “why” music is so life enhancing.

The problems involved in asking “how” or “why” questions have not been and are not going to be solved by asking more “how” or “why” questions. They are both important, of course, but NVB doesn't allow us to answer them correctly.  SVB, on the other hand, is based on our common sense understanding that ‘it is not what you say, but how you say it.’ Moreover, in SVB what a person says is understood to be a function of how he or she says it; what a person says is either enhanced and understood or is diminished and misunderstood because of how he or she says it. Thus, in SVB we are giving different answers to “how” and “what” questions than in NVB.  

What a person is saying informs us about why he or she is saying it. The content of SVB and NVB is different because in NVB the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency, while in SVB the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive contingency. “Why” questions gain new significance because of the SVB/NVB distinction. When we, the listeners, ask ourselves why we experience SVB or NVB, it becomes apparent to us that in SVB we experience positive, but in NVB we experience negative emotions. The “why”-question is answered by the listener with: the speaker affects me in a negative or in a positive manner. If we, the listeners, ask why this is happening, we agree the speaker’s voice creates this effect. The question “why” a speaker speaks with a voice which sounds negative can be accurately answered by the listener with: because he or she is stressed out or frustrated or because he or she thinks that he or she is better than us. 

In NVB the speaker doesn’t receive any feedback which would change his or her unequal relationship with the listener. Therefore, in NVB the listener usually doesn’t even become a speaker and if he or she does, he or she is careful to tell the first speaker only what he or she wants to hear. In other words, in NVB, we, the listeners, adhere to, that is, reinforce, a hierarchical way of talking in which the speaker is allowed to get away with his or her negativity. In SVB, by contrast, no such negativity occurs. 

Aigen writes that “we can approach the phenomenon of music on its own terms and thereby facilitate the emergence of indigenous and progressive research and treatment.” I would like us, that is, the listeners, to approach speaking on its own terms, because we are the mediators of the speaker. The only way our approach is going to work is if we become SVB speakers. Only SVB speakers can change the behavior of NVB speakers. Ideally, SVB will extinguish NVB.

Toward the end of each semester the NVB of my students has significantly decreased. Their papers are evidence of the changes that have began to occur due to the increase of SVB and the decrease of NVB. Aigen, like any other academic, assumes that he is the speaker as the writer, but he is only affecting readers, not listeners. The same energy that went into writing and publishing should be going into speaking, that is, into SVB, in which the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. When SVB catches on, as it predictably does in every class I teach, the listener, by becoming a speaker, is validated as the expert on what he or she is actually experiencing. SVB allows us to skip steps which were put in place by our NVB. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel and SVB will revolutionize all our scientific endeavors. 

I like to read Aigen’s paper, because it helps me to articulate certain matters about SVB, which are otherwise easily overlooked. For instance, he mentions “one important function of ritual activity” is that “it allows the participants to enter into relation with the unseen forces that control events in both the inner (psychological) and outer (social, physical) world.” This beautifully describes SVB in which our private speech is expressed and included into our public speech. In NVB, however, our private speech is excluded from our public speech. 

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.