 |
| Image of a crocodile in lights from ZooLights at Lincoln Park Zoo |
Earlids, or rather their absence, are a common trope of Soundscape literature. The idea is a stand-in for sound’s penetrative abilities; without earlids, the narrative goes, we cannot block noise.
The idea takes shape in its modern iteration from R Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1977/r1994, p. 11):
The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last door to close and it is also the first to open when we awaken. These facts have prompted McLuhan to write: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society for in it everything affects everything all the time.” The ear’s only protection is an elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering out undesirable sound in order to concentrate on what is desirable….
While it is Schafer who is most often quoted, McLuhan and Fiore had introduced the image a decade previous in The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001 p. 111): “We can’t shut out sound automatically. We are simply not equipped with earlids.” (Emphasis mine).
Neither “willful” closing of the ear (Schafer) nor an “automatic” closing (McLuhan) being allowable by virtue of our biology as humans, we moderns must inevitably be bathed in the surround-sound of the world around us. Or so we have come to assert.
Well, crocodiles do have earlids. This somewhat (to me) astonishing revelation has been widely discussed since the mid-nineteenth century. Crocodiles, Wever determined in 1971 (PNAS), have excellent hearing, which is best in the midrange and drops off strongly in the lower register. The tympanic membrane or “round window membrane,” he points out, is protected by the earlids that shape out the crocodile’s head. Likewise, Montefeltro, Andrade and Larsson in 2106 pursued a comparative study (J of Anatomy 2016) in multiple species in the crocodilian group in which they investigate the “Large meatal chamber concealed by a pair of muscular earlids that shape a large air-filled middle ear chamber.”
Earlids as muscular tools, protective of excellent hearing: I didn’t know that I secretly wanted to be a crocodile.
Or maybe I already am.
Let me back up. One of the other commonalities of the “earlid” discussion is the notion that the hearing-impaired might have the human equivalent in their hearing aid devices (for example, Myers 2000, p. 13). I know how that works from my sister (who is legally deaf). She used to talk about reaching up to click off all the classroom noise during exams. (She may also have confessed to clicking off a scolding or two as well, ahem.) She wound up valedictorian, so there might be some use to that strategy.
But I’m not that person. Rather, I have the Schafer form of “earlid,” that focused intensity that slams shut the world around us. I “go deaf to the world” when reading a particularly good novel, for instance (T. Kingfisher, George Eliot, Nicola Griffith, Kelly Barnhill, Casual Farmer, Jane Austen, S.A. Chakraborty…. And whatever else floats past my event horizon on the book front). The same zoning out practice happens when I pick up my scholarly projects. I have “come to” with (adult) children standing patiently in front of me holding paper signs saying “Mom?” (Okay, it was funny, but it happened more than once, eek).
The interesting thing about this kind of concentration is that I do obviously process sound at some level. “Were you talking to me?” and “Was that a siren?” and “Do we need to take cover from the storm?” are a few of the questions I’ve had on my lips as I’ve emerged from my stupor.
The sound was there. My brain took it in. But the slammed-down wall of concentration didn’t let any of those sounds penetrate my concentration. The earlids of the mind are clearly located somewhere between one’s ear drum and one’s consciousness, and they work even better than eyelids, which leak light. The time delay for even urgent sounds to penetrate can be 90 seconds or so -- all my sound questions are justifiably phrased in the past tense. A flash of lightning can grab me out of the concentration space; the rumble of thunder is less likely to do so.
This experience of closed earlids is, at least for me, separable from flow. Flow can happen with or without the earlids closed. I frequently encounter flow while on the trail, for instance, but part of that flow is processing the forest sounds and leaning into the acoustics of the landscape. Flow is also enjoyable in music – whether I’m listening to a recording or attending a concert, following a score or recreating the music in my head. There are lots of details of the work to which I am listening coming in on that emotional-analytical channel, but I can do it with earlids open or earlids closed. More often, music is an earlids open kind of experience for me; I am in the music but I am reachable (sometimes frustratingly so – sorry, family!).
But sometimes the music is earlids closed; only the music is in the brain’s consciousness, and it is all-consuming, fully occupying all attention and setting up for the delivery of those perfect moments that are the “reason” for the passage, the movement, the symphony as a whole; the coloratura run, the swell on the held note, the fade into ineffable beauty.
Earlids closed happens most naturally with music I know and love, but it can sometimes happen with music I am hearing for the first time, and even with music I don’t like. Working on developing an interpretive understanding of the music seems one trigger; following the “idiom” of the music as if it were another dialect and I was straining to follow its vocabulary is another. Both include an intellectual component, so maybe that’s part of the earlid mechanism – a left-brain kind of processing. And maybe there’s an intellectual component to loving that Brahms moment too: I am following the music in the moment, but also projecting the familiar music’s future, so that I am having a multi-temporal appreciation of the particular moment, and surely that must have a left-brain “understanding” component as well as the right-brain “O what beauty!” element.
Bringing it back to that book-reading, I suspect that there’s both an element of analytical and appreciative activity that plays into the earlid function. I follow the story, imagine its world, and revel in its revelations. Busy brain, busy brain, no room for distracting thing like conversations about what we should do for dinner or whether the computers should be unplugged in advance of the storm. The emergency isn’t here yet; my brain has its earlids tightly closed.
These three cases, then, seem to suggest that flow – that highest form of concentration – is distinct from the earlid function. Sometimes flow is *about* sound, either at large (hiking) or in selective part (music). Sometimes earlids are open (hiking and music) and sometimes they are closed (music and some of the best reading). I can read in a flow state that is interruptable (if with some irritation), or in a flow state that is not, except through touch or patience. The earlids are a different KIND of concentration from “flow,” I suspect, and bicameral in its function. (I’m betting it involves both left and right brain – and those both as cause of earlid clamping and as effect.)
What am I arguing? I believe that like a crocodile swimming in the ocean, or like my sister shutting off her devices, my brain can use its muscles to shut out the unnecessary distractions.
Whether my family agrees with my brain’s judgment about what qualifies as “unnecessary” (and thus when my earlids can be shut) is another question entirely!
* * * * * * * * * *
Soundscape Readings on Earlids:
- McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
- Myers,
David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000) - on earlids, p. 13.
- Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.
Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:
- Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
- Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
- Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.
