On a Tapestry of Sound

Despite the chill I feel at my desk, the heater roars, ineffectually, but steadily—mere white noise that I generally endeavor to ignore.  In quiet, thoughtful moments, it returns to my awareness, and in an odd twist of perception, it seems as if someone were playing with its volume as my attention meanders to and away from it.  Reflecting on that noise, I expand my awareness, considering the other oft-ignored stimuli in my ears—the tapestry of sound hanging in the background while I work.

By Luis Lima89989, via Wikimedia Commons

I hear my own keyboard clacking faintly as my fingers slide here and there, pressing keys.  Farther afield, in various unseen corners of the large space in which I sit, chairs momentarily creak or roll.  Someone taps papers together.

To my right, a printer revs up with a whirr, and I hear it churning out documents, each page landing with a gentle tick.  Moments after it finishes, some unidentifiable machine in the coffee shop’s corner starts grinding away.  Before my muscles can start to ache with tension against the unpleasantness, the clamor stops, replaced after a while by the musical clinking of glasses being jostled together.

A soft creak emerges on my left as a student opens the nearer door leading to the vestibule, followed moments later by a louder “swoom,” like a great inhalation, as another student broaches the door on the far end of the same area.  My opposite ear hears a metallic click and snick, then a more generic thunk as some sneaky person uses the stapler at the front desk and sets it down, then departs with nary a tramp of a foot or a swish of clothing.

Through this mesh of sounds occasionally comes the scrape of shoes passing over the carpet by the doors, as well as the tapping—near and distant—of footsteps on waxed tile, varied with the intermittent squeak of tennis shoes or the slide of a foot—a susurrus like someone practicing soft-shoe. These are joined in some cases by the jingling of keys with each step, by the hum of a briefcase or bookbag rolling on wheels, or by the high-pitched “cling” of something metal striking the barricade around the atrium overlooking the library.  

A regular, percussive rhythm enters the room, joined shortly by a set of footsteps and the harsh, staticy jangle of indistinct music pouring from poorly insulated earbuds.  I give the student a minute to settle in, a chance for him to do the considerate thing and drop the volume.  Under the “music,” I listen to his steps, the roll of a chair, the plunky-creak of him sitting.  Moments later, the metallic beats fade away, leaving only the usual ambient sounds.

A woosh accompanies a small group of people who slowly tap their way into the room, one voice chattering above the rest as a student ambassador guides the prospective student’s family around the building.  Above the ambassador’s voice, and above the sharp, steady ripping of paper from a notebook, the familiar tones of an instructor carries from the far corner of the room where she conducts her class. Elsewhere, someone’s foot drums a quick rhythm, then stops just as suddenly as it began.

After the tour group passes, quiet voices continue to murmur here and there.  A laugh rises momentarily like birdsong above the forest.  For a moment, all fades to unexpected silence…

Then, a pair of coughs.  The symphony of sound resumes: The sibilant slide of a coat sloughed off of shoulders.  The quiet thump of a book set on a counter.  A ringtone, sharply cut off.  Approaching treads followed by the grinding of the pencil sharpener just yards away.  A high-pitched thrum, signaling that someone has activated the automatic door.  It admits quick, clicking footsteps and the faint whizzing of a bookcase wheeled along behind.

All the various sounds weave together, creating a tapestry of space and activity almost as clear as sight.  And through it all, though I still sometimes tune it out, the heater’s fan roars on like the din of a distant waterfall.

On Relating to Other Intelligences, or On Numbers

It's common knowledge that people's minds tend to be inclined toward different sorts of knowledge and understanding: musical, mathematical, linguistic, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, and so forth.  While people can generally function in the other areas, they are typically less proficient than other people so inclined.  Unfortunately, we often forget to account for this difference in understanding when we communicate.  The result (aside from poor communication) may be impatience or scorn on the part of the speaker—and confusion, frustration, or anxiety on the part of the listener.  How, then, does one develop a sensitivity—or might we say bilingualism—for other intelligences? 

I would venture that the first step to improving communication requires basic empathy—insight into the other person's struggles.  Part of this requires acknowledging intellectual differences as, well, differences rather than a sign of stupidity.  Empathy may not help much with the nitty-gritty of how to explain ideas better, but it can improve one's patience with the effort of communicating and thus ease some of the listener's stress.

First, an important note on what not to do: When conversing with a person weak in one's favored area, one ought not think that speaking with this person is akin to speaking with a child.  Yes, one needs to simplify concepts and word choices or to try different approaches, but this perspective tends to make one's tone come across as condescending.  The parallel is also imperfect because a child's mental processes differ from an adult's beyond a mere difference in areas of intellectual strength; young children, for instance, cannot grasp figurative language or abstract concepts well.  But that topic is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Instead, a more accurate analogy is conversing with a non-native speaker—something to which most people can likely relate in some way.  For the other person, one's jargon and assumptions of basic knowledge may be unfamiliar or may take extra time to process.  

To illustrate this, I can only draw upon my own experiences as an example.  As I do so, I hope the reader will keep in mind that this illustration could be applied to any other area of intelligence, as well.

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For me, numbers are a kind of foreign language, one I’m only partially familiar with.  As with a foreign language, I understand some words automatically; I can immediately grasp numbers one through five, for instance, as easily as I understand “¿Cómo estás?” and “adios.”  I can quickly regurgitate memorized answers to basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division questions involving numbers under 12.  Given time and perhaps paper, I can answer more complicated questions of the same.  Patterns are also easy to recognize when they’re ascending or descending in ones, twos, fives, tens...  But everything else?  Foreign.

Let's give this some context.  I’ve been studying Spanish off and on for some time.  Perhaps I hear or read a sentence, such as Sus ojos son azules y su pelo es marrón.  My thought process goes something like this: “Okay, azules--that’s blue.  Ojos… ojos… that’s either eyes or ears.  Must be eyes, if they’re blue.  Sus--well, without context, it could mean ‘your’ or ‘his’ or ‘hers.’  Anyway, somebody’s eyes are blue.  And… pelo, marrón… I should know those words… oh, hair!  Marrón… it doesn’t mean blond—that’s rubio.  Must be brown.”   There--translation more-or-less complete… but several seconds have gone by, and if other things have been said in the interim, I either missed them or, by hearing them, didn’t finish translating that first sentence. 

This example mirrors my thought process with numbers—particularly numbers I hear, but also with those that I see.

When I first glance at a page of numbers, it’s gibberish—a foreign alphabet.  As I study individual components, I recognize the “language” as one might recognize Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, or Russian text.  In the same way, I may identify the "language" of dates, times, recipe amounts, temperature, tech specs, construction dimensions, addresses, phone numbers, statistics—and the language of basic math, fractions, decimals, percents, algebra, geometry.  Higher levels of algebra, as well as calc and trig, look more like French or Italian to me—languages I've never studied, but whose cognates and Latin derivations make parts of some sentences recognizable.  

If I care to put in the energy, I may then “translate” the numbers and find their significance or the answer.  I may have to re-read some numbers multiple times so I can remember them well enough to compare them with another set of numbers elsewhere, as when I check out our finances or try to understand a news report that's loaded with comparative statistics.  

With spoken numbers, I have to process each one first into its physical, written shape, then into a sense (like a blurred picture) of the amount—accompanied by a judgement of whether that amount is high or low for the given things to which it is applied.  This judgement is complicated by a certain amount of number confusion.  When translating, I often mix up the words "thousand" and "hundred," so when I hear "twenty-five hundred dollars," I have to think about where the comma would go to get an idea of the amount, whether $25,000 or $2,500.  When given a second number, I often can't recall the first well enough to compare the difference unless they're both rounded or smallish numbers, or unless they're written down and I have a moment to compare the two side-by-side.

Thus, written or spoken, this processing of numerical information takes more time for me than it seems to for others.  Moreover, when time is pressed (as on timed tests or when others wait for me to reply or to finish my turn on a board game), it creates emotional stress—as when a foreign language student faces an onslaught of information in a poorly-understood language.  Self-consciousness makes it all worse; I think of myself as being relatively intelligent, so I hate feeling judged for my slowness—my apparently stupidity.  In consequence, when feeling pressed, I will more likely rush and make mistakes or have frantically muddled thinking that slows me further.  I become tense and irritable and more prone to angry outbursts.

To cope—and preserve my sanity and relationships—when I don’t have to process a difficult number, I don’t bother.  So when Joel rattles off the “really cool” statistics for his latest D&D character, describing stacking bonuses to AC, hit, or damage—or when a student talks about statistics for his research paper—I react based on the context or the person's tone because the numbers don’t register quickly enough in my brain for me to make sense of them.  Unfortunately, when the context doesn’t tell me what importance the numbers hold, I must ask the other person to slow down, repeat, explain their significance... or I change the subject. Again, I imagine foreign language students do much the same thing when they don’t understand a word or words.

    
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I hope that this parallel helps readers have a little more patience and understanding with people who become stressed whenever numbers (or musical terms or emotions or other aspects of the various intelligences) come up in conversation.  The speaker would do well to slow down or explain it in alternate ways, and the other party will keep up a lot more cheerfully.

Readers, do you experience the same difficulty processing numbers? Following "easy" dance steps? Understanding music? Something else? Share it in the comments below.