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.