From Nature and Language to Everyday Silence: Discovering the Musical Beauty of Life's Sounds

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As a singer-songwriter, people often ask me about my influences, or as I like to call them my sonic lineages. And I could easily tell you that I was shaped by the jazz and hip-hop that I grew up with, by the Ethiopian heritage of my ancestors, or by the 1980s pop on my childhood radio stations. But beyond genre, there is another question. How do the sounds we hear every day influence the music that we make? I believe that every day soundscape can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting, and to look at this idea a little bit more closely, I'm going to talk today about three things: nature, language, and silence, or rather the impossibility of true silence. Through this, I hope to give you a sense of a world already alive with musical expression, with each of us serving as active participants, whether we know it or not.

I'm going to start today with nature, but before we do that, let's quickly listen to this snippet of an opera singer warming up. Here it is. It's beautiful, isn't it? Gacha. That is actually not the sound of an opera singer warming up. That is the sound of a bird. Go down to a pace that the human ear mistakenly recognizes as its own. It was released as part of Peter Zokis 1987 Hungarian recording, The Unknown Music of Birds, where he records many birds and slows down their pitches to reveal what's underneath. Let's listen to the full speed recording. Now let's hear the two of them together so your brain can juxtapose them. It's incredible. Perhaps the techniques of opera singing were inspired by bird song. As humans we intuitively understand birds to be our musical teachers. In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part of the origin of music itself.

The story goes like this. 1500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Oxum, a major trading center of the ancient world. His name was Yadid. When Yadid was seven years old, his father died, and his mother sent him to live with an uncle who was a priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. This tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yadid had to study extensively. One day, while studying under a tree, three birds came to him. One by one, these birds became his teachers. They taught him musical scales. Yadid eventually recognized as Saint Yadid used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. He also created an indigenous musical notation system. These scales evolved into what is known as Kany?, the unique pentatonic five-note modal system that is very much alive and thriving in Ethiopia today.

Now I love this story because it's true at multiple levels. Saint Yadid was a real historical figure, and the natural world can be our musical teacher. We have many examples of this. The Pygmies of the Congo tune their instruments to the pitches of the birds in the forest around them. Musician and natural soundscape expert Bernie Kraus describes how a healthy environment has animals and insects taking up low, medium, and high frequency bands in exactly the same way as a symphony does. Countless works of music were inspired by bird and forest song. Yes, the natural world can be our cultural teacher. So let's go now to the uniquely human world of language.

Every language communicates with pitch to varying degrees. Whether it's Mandarin Chinese, where a shift in melodic inflection gives the same phonetic syllable an entirely different meaning, or a language like English, where a raised pitch at the end of a sentence implies a question. As an Ethiopian American woman, I grew up around the language of Amharic, Amarinya. It was my first language, the language of my parents, one of the main languages of Ethiopia. There are countless reasons to fall in love with this language: its depth of poetry, its humor, its proverbs illuminating the wisdom and follies of life. There's also a melodicism, a musicality built right in. I find this most clearly in what I like to call emphatic language, meant to highlight or underline through surprise. For example, the word "in day" has a pitch that dips and rises, almost like a musical phrase, which inspired me as a composer to create musical parts based on these linguistic inflections.

Finally, we go to the 1950s United States and the seminal work of 20th-century avant-garde composition: John Cage's 4'33", written for any instrument or combination of instruments. Musicians are invited to walk onto the stage with a stopwatch and open the score, which has not a single note written. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, no note is played. Cage shows that even when no strings are being plucked or keys hammered, there is still music. This music arises from the audience themselves—their coughs, sneezes, rustles, whispers, and the room itself. Cage's point is that true silence does not exist. Even in the most silent environments, we still hear and feel the sound of our own heartbeats. The world is alive with musical expression, and we are already immersed.

I had my own moment of remixing John Cage a few months ago when I was cooking lentils late at night. When I lifted the lid of a pot, it rolled on the counter, producing a peculiar rhythm. Inspired, I rushed to my backyard studio and transformed this everyday sound into music. Cage wasn't instructing musicians to create from the environment; he was demonstrating that the environment itself is musically generative, generous, and fertile. Musician, researcher, and human hearing expert Charles Lim suggests that the human auditory system may have evolved to hear music because it is more complex than needed for language alone. If true, we are hardwired for music. There is no musical desert; we are constantly at a musical oasis. We can add to it, but the soundtrack is always playing.

Therefore, when seeking percussion inspiration, look at everyday sounds like tires rolling over unusual grooves or the click of a stove burner. When seeking melodic inspiration, observe dawn and dusk avian orchestras or the musicality in emphatic language. We are both the audience and the composers, taking pieces we're given to create endlessly. With nature, language, and everyday soundscape, there is no limit to inspiration if we are listening.