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As a singer-songwriter,
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people often ask me about my influences or, as I like to call them,
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my sonic lineages.
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And I could easily tell you
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that I was shaped by the jazz and hip hop that I grew up with,
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by the Ethiopian heritage of my ancestors,
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or by the 1980s pop on my childhood radio stations.
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But beyond genre, there is another question:
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how do the sounds we hear every day influence the music that we make?
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I believe that everyday soundscape
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can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting,
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and to look at this idea a little bit more closely,
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I'm going to talk today about three things:
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nature, language and silence --
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or rather, the impossibility of true silence.
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And through this I hope to give you a sense of a world
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already alive with musical expression,
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with each of us serving as active participants,
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whether we know it or not.
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I'm going to start today with nature, but before we do that,
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let's quickly listen to this snippet of an opera singer warming up.
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Here it is.
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(Singing)
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(Singing ends)
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It's beautiful, isn't it?
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Gotcha!
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That is actually not the sound of an opera singer warming up.
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That is the sound of a bird
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slowed down to a pace
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that the human ear mistakenly recognizes as its own.
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It was released as part of Peter Szöke's 1987 Hungarian recording
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"The Unknown Music of Birds,"
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where he records many birds and slows down their pitches
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to reveal what's underneath.
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Let's listen to the full-speed recording.
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(Bird singing)
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Now, let's hear the two of them together
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so your brain can juxtapose them.
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(Bird singing at slow then full speed)
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(Singing ends)
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It's incredible.
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Perhaps the techniques of opera singing were inspired by birdsong.
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As humans, we intuitively understand birds to be our musical teachers.
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In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part
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of the origin of music itself.
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The story goes like this:
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1,500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Aksum,
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a major trading center of the ancient world.
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His name was Yared.
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When Yared was seven years old his father died,
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and his mother sent him to go live with an uncle, who was a priest
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of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition,
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one of the oldest churches in the world.
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Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning,
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and Yared had to study and study and study and study,
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and one day he was studying under a tree,
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when three birds came to him.
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One by one, these birds became his teachers.
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They taught him music -- scales, in fact.
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And Yared, eventually recognized as Saint Yared,
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used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns
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for worship and celebration.
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And he used these scales to compose and to create
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an indigenous musical notation system.
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And these scales evolved into what is known as kiñit,
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the unique, pentatonic, five-note, modal system that is very much alive
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and thriving and still evolving in Ethiopia today.
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Now, I love this story because it's true at multiple levels.
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Saint Yared was a real, historical figure,
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and the natural world can be our musical teacher.
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And we have so many examples of this:
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the Pygmies of the Congo tune their instruments
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to the pitches of the birds in the forest around them.
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Musician and natural soundscape expert Bernie Krause describes
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how a healthy environment has animals and insects
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taking up low, medium and high-frequency bands,
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in exactly the same way as a symphony does.
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And countless works of music were inspired by bird and forest song.
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Yes, the natural world can be our cultural teacher.
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So let's go now to the uniquely human world of language.
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Every language communicates with pitch to varying degrees,
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whether it's Mandarin Chinese,
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where a shift in melodic inflection gives the same phonetic syllable
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an entirely different meaning,
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to a language like English,
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where a raised pitch at the end of a sentence ...
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(Going up in pitch) implies a question?
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(Laughter)
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As an Ethiopian-American woman,
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I grew up around the language of Amharic, Amhariña.
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It was my first language, the language of my parents,
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one of the main languages of Ethiopia.
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And there are a million reasons to fall in love with this language:
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its depth of poetics, its double entendres,
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its wax and gold, its humor,
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its proverbs that illuminate the wisdom and follies of life.
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But there's also this melodicism, a musicality built right in.
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And I find this distilled most clearly
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in what I like to call emphatic language --
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language that's meant to highlight or underline
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or that springs from surprise.
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Take, for example, the word: "indey."
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Now, if there are Ethiopians in the audience,
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they're probably chuckling to themselves,
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because the word means something like "No!"
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or "How could he?" or "No, he didn't."
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It kind of depends on the situation.
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But when I was a kid, this was my very favorite word,
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and I think it's because it has a pitch.
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It has a melody.
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You can almost see the shape as it springs from someone's mouth.
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"Indey" -- it dips, and then raises again.
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And as a musician and composer, when I hear that word,
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something like this is floating through my mind.
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(Music and singing "Indey")
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(Music ends)
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Or take, for example, the phrase for "It is right" or "It is correct" --
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"Lickih nehu ... Lickih nehu."
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It's an affirmation, an agreement.
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"Lickih nehu."
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When I hear that phrase,
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something like this starts rolling through my mind.
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(Music and singing "Lickih nehu")
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(Music ends)
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And in both of those cases, what I did was I took the melody
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and the phrasing of those words and phrases
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and I turned them into musical parts to use in these short compositions.
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And I like to write bass lines,
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so they both ended up kind of as bass lines.
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Now, this is based on the work of Jason Moran and others
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who work intimately with music and language,
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but it's also something I've had in my head since I was a kid,
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how musical my parents sounded
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when they were speaking to each other and to us.
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It was from them and from Amhariña that I learned
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that we are awash in musical expression
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with every word, every sentence that we speak,
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every word, every sentence that we receive.
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Perhaps you can hear it in the words I'm speaking even now.
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Finally, we go to the 1950s United States
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and the most seminal work of 20th century avant-garde composition:
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John Cage's "4:33,"
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written for any instrument or combination of instruments.
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The musician or musicians are invited to walk onto the stage
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with a stopwatch and open the score,
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which was actually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art --
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the score, that is.
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And this score has not a single note written
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and there is not a single note played
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for four minutes and 33 seconds.
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And, at once enraging and enrapturing,
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Cage shows us that even when there are no strings
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being plucked by fingers or hands hammering piano keys,
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still there is music, still there is music,
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still there is music.
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And what is this music?
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It was that sneeze in the back.
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(Laughter)
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It is the everyday soundscape that arises from the audience themselves:
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their coughs, their sighs, their rustles, their whispers, their sneezes,
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the room, the wood of the floors and the walls
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expanding and contracting, creaking and groaning
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with the heat and the cold,
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the pipes clanking and contributing.
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And controversial though it was, and even controversial though it remains,
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Cage's point is that there is no such thing as true silence.
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Even in the most silent environments, we still hear and feel the sound
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of our own heartbeats.
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The world is alive with musical expression.
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We are already immersed.
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Now, I had my own moment of, let's say, remixing John Cage
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a couple of months ago
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when I was standing in front of the stove cooking lentils.
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And it was late one night and it was time to stir,
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so I lifted the lid off the cooking pot,
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and I placed it onto the kitchen counter next to me,
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and it started to roll back and forth
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making this sound.
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(Sound of metal lid clanking against a counter)
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(Clanking ends)
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And it stopped me cold.
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I thought, "What a weird, cool swing that cooking pan lid has."
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So when the lentils were ready and eaten,
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I hightailed it to my backyard studio,
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and I made this.
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(Music, including the sound of the lid, and singing)
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(Music ends)
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Now, John Cage wasn't instructing musicians
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to mine the soundscape for sonic textures to turn into music.
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He was saying that on its own,
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the environment is musically generative,
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that it is generous, that it is fertile,
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that we are already immersed.
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Musician, music researcher, surgeon and human hearing expert Charles Limb
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is a professor at Johns Hopkins University
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and he studies music and the brain.
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And he has a theory
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that it is possible -- it is possible --
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that the human auditory system actually evolved to hear music,
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because it is so much more complex than it needs to be for language alone.
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And if that's true,
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it means that we're hard-wired for music,
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that we can find it anywhere,
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that there is no such thing as a musical desert,
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that we are permanently hanging out at the oasis,
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and that is marvelous.
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We can add to the soundtrack, but it's already playing.
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And it doesn't mean don't study music.
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Study music, trace your sonic lineages and enjoy that exploration.
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But there is a kind of sonic lineage to which we all belong.
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So the next time you are seeking percussion inspiration,
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look no further than your tires, as they roll over the unusual grooves
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of the freeway,
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or the top-right burner of your stove
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and that strange way that it clicks
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as it is preparing to light.
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When seeking melodic inspiration,
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look no further than dawn and dusk avian orchestras
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or to the natural lilt of emphatic language.
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We are the audience and we are the composers
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and we take from these pieces
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we are given.
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We make, we make, we make, we make,
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knowing that when it comes to nature or language or soundscape,
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there is no end to the inspiration --
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if we are listening.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)