For a few months now I have had a blind pupil from birth who decided to study guitar, Nicolas, 15 years old.
I thought about it for a while before accepting, I asked myself many questions about the method to follow, how he would perceive the non-linearity of the frets on the neck, the distance of the fingers, the passage between one string and another and what it would be been telling him a semibreve, a pause ...
But this is not an article aimed at the blind, far from it! Rather it will be useful to those who want to see - indeed hear - beyond!
What struck me most during the lessons is Nicolas's ear and memory. My teaching is often simply memorized, with remarkable precision and concentration, whether it is tactile or auditory memory.
I delved a little bit into the subject of “blindness and music” discovering a world that I didn't know, a Musical Braille, a huge bibliography, various reading software (Braille Music Reader) that through a computer convert a score from Braille to classical notation and vice versa.
In this first phase, however, I preferred a more direct and instinctive didactic approach: I play the musical phrase, I "show" him the positions, the system to reach the desired key as quickly and accurately as possible, he repeats, elaborating and memorizing.
I studied cello, the keys are not there, in part it is a "blind" technique based on the distance of the fingers and the position of the hands, the sight obviously helps but you can get results even without it. I thought it might work with him too and in fact it works for the moment.
As anticipated in the preface, however, I do not want to relate here my experience with such a singular teaching. Not having had a lot of acquaintances with the blind and also being quite distracted by the music, I sometimes forget who I am in front of, I pass him a pick or ask him to repeat a chord waiting for a reaction that, this is the point, incredibly often comes!
What seems to me a movement with an imperceptible noise, such as that of passing an object, touching the guitar in a certain point, is very often intercepted thanks to auditory training. I am not talking about the precise identification of a note or a musical phrase - which can also be trivial for many musicians - but of the tracking of the position of an object, of the position of my hand, thanks to the perception of the noise produced by the movement, rubbing of a dress. Nicolas is as if he instinctively perceives the presence of an obstacle inside the room, he avoids it, he understands which way I am offering him something, in short, there are many things that surprise.
Human echolocation
I did some research on these hearing abilities and I found people who have become aware of them and are knowingly developing them, taking their ability to orient and map the surrounding objects / environments to remarkable levels. It is an active process, not a simple acoustic orientation that is obtained by listening to and interpreting the surrounding environment, it is about echolocation. The technique is, neither more nor less, that used by bats and Dolphins (and many other animals) for orientation. Sounds / ultrasounds are produced and in relation to their way of bouncing in the environment and returning to whoever emitted them, it is possible to make a 3D map of what is around. Practically the principle of sonar ("ability to analyze the characteristics of the echo reflected by an acoustic signal that strikes an object in order to understand the shape and movement of the object itself" - enc. Treccani).
So far it still looks like science fiction. Science begins when I have seen Daniel Kish, blind from birth, blissfully ride a bike alone!
Daniel has become - play force - an echolocation expert and is president of World Access for the Blind, an association that on the one hand seeks solutions for the blind and on the other makes them available to anyone who wants to use them.
Following this path, Daniel has made echolocation a subject of study, practice and teaching, bringing its limits to truly surprising results.
Click your tongue and you will know where you are
The technique consists of clicking the tongue. The snapping of the tongue produces a rapid, high frequency sound. We are far from the ultrasounds of animals but it is the one that humanly comes closest with the simplicity of the emission. The sound waves produced hit the objects in the environment and return to the ear with different angles and delays, are modulated in frequency and are enriched or depleted of harmonic composition. With the right exercise, they can be interpreted.
Just to name a few successful examples of human echolocation, Juan Ruiz is in the Guinness Book of Records for slalom cycling "blindfolded" (he is blind), Ben Underwood, always blind, he can play basketball and make a basket on a regulation field, go skateboarding (just to name a few) ... I refer you to the videos at the bottom of this article to see with your own eyes.
If you've come this far in your reading, you're probably instinctively letting out a few clicks of your tongue, good!
Try walking silently with your eyes closed with a wall or door in front. Without warning you will almost certainly catch it in full!
Instead, try walking by making some intermittent sounds, saying a word or clicking your tongue. You will see that you will stop in time, without head trauma! What happens is that at some point the sound waves returning to your ears will allow you to understand that there is the presence of an object. The technique is obviously more complex and requires concentration and listening tests with the most varied objects, those as large as a door are simpler. Each object has a different reflective power of sound waves and a different ability to shield from ambient noise. This allows us with the right exercise to recognize a shape, the presence of a material, the proximity or distance of a wall.
We are musicians and music lovers, all this cannot leave us indifferent! There is an auditory world around us that with a little attention can be discovered and we are only just beginning. I don't want to push anyone to orient themselves in the dark or to jump on a bike blindfolded!
- I would just like to stimulate interest in this type of analysis, the acoustic examination of an environment at "first sight", understand what response a room can offer, the ability to repeat or suppress a frequency, what material we have in front of us, the goodness of the acoustics of an instrument. These are skills that every expert in the field often develops unconsciously.
Human echolocation and environmental acoustic analysis are only at the beginning of a research that opens horizons that we do not yet know. I like to think that the reality that surrounds us has an acoustic map that accompanies us at all times, like a piece of music that tells us what is not visible in a language that we just have to learn to grasp.
Insights on the topics covered
- Human echolocation on Wikipedia (English)
- Daniel Kish by bike (English video)
- A special on Juan Ruiz from the show "Superhumans" (English 2013)
- Special on Ben Underwood (English 2012)
- A report on Superquark echolocation (Italian)
- Braille music notation manual
- Contrapuncus - Free Braille reading music software
- World Access For the Blind site
the next
Fabio Pesce
