as a singer-songwriter, people often ask me about my influencesor, as i like to call them, my sonic lineages. and i could easily tell you that i was shaped by the jazzand hip hop that i grew up with, by the ethiopian heritage of my ancestors, or by the 1980s popon my childhood radio stations. but beyond genre,there is another question: how do the sounds we hear every dayinfluence the music that we make?
i believe that everyday soundscape can be the most unexpectedinspiration for songwriting, and to look at this ideaa little bit more closely, i'm going to talk todayabout three things: nature, language and silence -- or rather, the impossibilityof true silence. and through this i hope to give youa sense of a world already alive with musical expression, with each of us servingas 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 snippetof an opera singer warming up. here it is. (singing) (singing ends) it's beautiful, isn't it? gotcha! that is actually not the soundof an opera singer warming up.
that is the sound of a bird slowed down to a pace that the human ear mistakenlyrecognizes as its own. it was released as part of peter szã¶ke's1987 hungarian recording "the unknown music of birds," where he records many birdsand slows down their pitches to reveal what's underneath. let's listen to the full-speed recording. (bird singing)
now, let's hear the two of them together so your brain can juxtapose them. (bird singing at slow then full speed) it's incredible. perhaps the techniques of opera singingwere inspired by birdsong. as humans, we intuitively understand birdsto be our musical teachers. in ethiopia, birdsare considered an integral part of the origin of music itself. the story goes like this:
1,500 years ago, a young manwas born in the empire of aksum, a major trading centerof the ancient world. his name was yared. when yared was seven years oldhis father died, and his mother sent him to go livewith an uncle, who was a priest of the ethiopian orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. now, this tradition has an enormous amountof scholarship and learning, and yared had to study and studyand study and study,
and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him. one by one, these birdsbecame his teachers. they taught him music -- scales, in fact. and yared, eventuallyrecognized as saint yared, used these scales to composefive volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. and he used these scalesto compose and to create an indigenous musical notation system.
and these scales evolvedinto what is known as kiã±it, the unique, pentatonic, five-note,modal system that is very much alive and thriving and still evolvingin ethiopia today. now, i love this story becauseit's true at multiple levels. saint yared was a real, historical figure, and the natural worldcan be our musical teacher. and we have so many examples of this: the pygmies of the congotune their instruments to the pitches of the birdsin the forest around them.
musician and natural soundscapeexpert bernie krause describes how a healthy environmenthas animals and insects taking up low, mediumand high-frequency bands, in exactly the same wayas a symphony does. and countless works of musicwere inspired by bird and forest song. yes, the natural worldcan be our cultural teacher. so let's go now to the uniquelyhuman world of language. every language communicateswith pitch to varying degrees, whether it's mandarin chinese,
where a shift in melodic inflectiongives the same phonetic syllable an entirely different meaning, to a language like english, where a raised pitchat the end of a sentence ... (going up in pitch) implies a question? (laughter) as an ethiopian-american woman, i grew up around the languageof amharic, amhariã±a. it was my first language,the language of my parents,
one of the main languages of ethiopia. and there are a million reasonsto fall in love with this language: its depth of poetics,its double entendres, its wax and gold, its humor, its proverbs that illuminatethe wisdom and follies of life. but there's also this melodicism,a musicality built right in. and i find this distilled most clearly in what i like to callemphatic language -- language that's meantto highlight or underline
or that springs from surprise. take, for example, the word: "indey." now, if there are ethiopiansin the audience, they're probably chuckling to themselves, because the word meanssomething like "no!" or "how could he?" or "no, he didn't." it kind of depends on the situation. but when i was a kid,this was my very favorite word, and i think it's because it has a pitch.
it has a melody. you can almost see the shapeas it springs from someone's mouth. "indey" -- it dips, and then raises again. and as a musician and composer,when i hear that word, something like thisis floating through my mind. (music and singing "indey") (music ends) or take, for example, the phrasefor "it is right" or "it is correct" -- "lickih nehu ... lickih nehu."
it's an affirmation, an agreement. "lickih nehu." when i hear that phrase, something like this starts rollingthrough my mind. (music and singing "lickih nehu") and in both of those cases,what i did was i took the melody and the phrasingof those words and phrases and i turned them into musical partsto use in these short compositions. and i like to write bass lines,
so they both ended upkind of as bass lines. now, this is based on the workof jason moran and others who work intimatelywith music and language, but it's also something i've hadin my head since i was a kid, how musical my parents sounded when they were speakingto each other and to us. it was from themand from amhariã±a that i learned that we are awash in musical expression with every word,every sentence that we speak,
every word, every sentencethat we receive. perhaps you can hear itin the words i'm speaking even now. finally, we go to the 1950s united states and the most seminal workof 20th century avant-garde composition: john cage's "4:33," written for any instrumentor combination of instruments. the musician or musicians are invitedto walk onto the stage with a stopwatch and open the score, which was actually purchasedby the museum of modern art --
the score, that is. and this score has nota single note written and there is not a single note played for four minutes and 33 seconds. and, at once enraging and enrapturing, cage shows us that evenwhen there are no strings being plucked by fingersor hands hammering piano keys, still there is music,still there is music, still there is music.
and what is this music? it was that sneeze in the back. it is the everyday soundscapethat arises from the audience themselves: their coughs, their sighs, their rustles,their whispers, their sneezes, the room, the woodof the floors and the walls expanding and contracting,creaking and groaning with the heat and the cold, the pipes clanking and contributing. and controversial though it was,and even controversial though it remains,
cage's point is that there is nosuch thing as true silence. even in the most silent environments,we still hear and feel the sound of our own heartbeats. the world is alivewith musical expression. we are already immersed. now, i had my own moment of,let's say, remixing john cage a couple of months ago when i was standingin front of the stove cooking lentils. and it was late one nightand it was time to stir,
so i lifted the lid off the cooking pot, and i placed it ontothe kitchen counter next to me, and it started to roll back and forth making this sound. (sound of metal lidclanking against a counter) (clanking ends) and it stopped me cold. i thought, "what a weird, cool swingthat cooking pan lid has." so when the lentils were ready and eaten,
i hightailed it to my backyard studio, and i made this. (music, including the soundof the lid, and singing) now, john cagewasn't instructing musicians to mine the soundscapefor sonic textures to turn into music. he was saying that on its own, the environment is musically generative, that it is generous, that it is fertile, that we are already immersed.
musician, music researcher, surgeonand human hearing expert charles limb is a professor at johns hopkins university and he studies music and the brain. and he has a theory that it is possible -- it is possible -- that the human auditory systemactually evolved to hear music, because it is so much more complexthan it needs to be for language alone. and if that's true, it means that we're hard-wired for music,
that we can find it anywhere, that there is no such thingas a musical desert, that we are permanentlyhanging out at the oasis, and that is marvelous. we can add to the soundtrack,but it's already playing. and it doesn't mean don't study music. study music, trace your sonic lineagesand enjoy that exploration. but there is a kind of sonic lineageto which we all belong. so the next time you are seekingpercussion inspiration,
look no further than your tires,as they roll over the unusual grooves of the freeway, or the top-right burner of your stove and that strange way that it clicks as it is preparing to light. when seeking melodic inspiration, look no further than dawnand dusk avian orchestras or to the natural liltof emphatic language. we are the audienceand we are the composers
and we take from these pieces we are given. we make, we make, we make, we make, knowing that when it comes to natureor language or soundscape, there is no end to the inspiration -- if we are listening. thank you. (applause)