Music as Distraction: Pandemic Coping from Boccaccio to TikTok

If you think about it, pandemic music is not always about remembering. Sometimes it is about not remembering. Or at least not staring straight at the thing that threatens to take over the entire field of vision.

In my last post on pandemic music, I wrote about “We Don’t Talk About COVID” as cultural amnesia set to music: a funny song about the strange collective work of not talking about the very thing everyone was living through. This post sits beside that one, but I wanted to shift the emphasis from forgetting to distraction.

Distraction has a bad reputation. We tend to treat it as avoidance, superficiality, scattered attention, or moral failure. But in pandemic culture, distraction can also be care. It can create connection across distance. It can give people a way to process fear without naming fear directly. It can make time pass. It can keep the mind from circling endlessly around death, exposure, testing, transmission, quarantine, hospitalization, and all the ordinary logistics of trying to live through a crisis.

That does not mean distraction is innocent. It can help people survive. But on the flip side, it can also help societies stop noticing what they have decided not to change. That double function is what makes pandemic music interesting to me.

Humor is a way of making contact

One of the great early-pandemic genres was the parody song. Not polished comedy, exactly. More like: a familiar song, a shared situation, a webcam, a kitchen, a window, a joke about toilet paper or quarantine hair or the sudden weirdness of homebound life.

Chris Mann’s “Hello (from the Inside),” an Adele parody, is such a good example because its joke is structurally simple. Everyone already knows the emotional architecture of Adele’s “Hello”: distance, longing, melodrama, the impossible reach across separation. The parody barely needs to do anything before the old emotional machinery starts running in a new key. “Hello from the inside” is funny because it is obvious, and it is obvious because everyone suddenly understood the inside as a shared condition.

That kind of humor depends on recognizability. The viewer needs to know the original song, but also the situation: the isolation, the screen-mediated social life, the newly theatrical domestic interior. The window is not just scenery. It is the pandemic stage.

The Kiffness’s “Tequila,” redone by saying “Corona” instead, works differently. It is almost aggressively minimal. How little does a parody need in order to become funny? Apparently, not much. A single word-substitution can be enough when the cultural context does the rest of the work.

This is one of the strange efficiencies of pandemic humor. A song can be very small because the shared world is doing so much of the setup.

Thank you to my students for surfacing these particular examples, but as most of us remember, such parodies exist by the hundreds, and were broadly circulated, and “good ones” got hundreds of thousands of views, if not always the millions of Shirley Șerban or the Marsh family’s take on “One Day More.” “One more day all on my phone; one more selfie of me glaring.” Indeed.

Humor helps process fear, but it does not remove it

There is a reason so many of these songs hover near anxiety. “My Corona Home,” “Anti-bacterial Girl,” “Stayin’ Inside,” “Quarantine” parodies (like this or this or this), TikTok dances, handwashing songs, and endlessly circulated musical jokes all belong to a world in which people were trying to keep fear at a livable distance.

Humor did not mean people were not afraid. It meant fear had found a social form.

That distinction matters. In a crisis, funny songs are not just relief from seriousness. They are one way seriousness becomes shareable. A joke makes the feeling portable. A parody turns a private panic into something one can send to a friend. “This is us,” the link says. Or, “I hate that this is us.” Or, “I cannot believe this is us, but here we are.”

That is why pandemic humor often feels both silly and documentary. The joke records the room. The joke captures the mood of the room. Sometimes the joke is the room: the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the inside of a house suddenly forced to contain school, work, exercise, entertainment, worship, boredom, fear, family life, and the news.

Boccaccio already knew this

None of this is as new as it felt.

The Decameron is one of the great literary monuments to plague distraction. Its frame is familiar: seven young women and three young men flee plague-stricken Florence and pass the time with stories, songs, dances, conversation, gardens, meals, and a carefully organized social world. Boccaccio’s young people are not pretending plague does not exist. The frame depends on plague. But within that frame, they build a life where the mind can do something other than remain fixed on sickness and death.

What strikes me now is how musical that life is. The frame does not merely say, “They told stories.” It gives us a world of canzonets sung for delectation, dances after meals, songs with instruments, walking, gardens, games, and the rituals of taking turns. Music appears not as a decorative extra, but as part of the structure by which a small group preserves itself.

One could describe that as escapism. But that seems too thin. It is also social regulation. It is affective hygiene. It is time management. It is community-making. It is a way of keeping fear from becoming the only available form of attention.

Read carefully, the pattern hard to miss: in the Decameron, entertainments outnumber explicit disease references. There are songs, dances, walks, instruments, prayers, games, and repeated gestures of sociability; plague is the enclosing condition, but not always the named content. The disaster is everywhere, which is precisely why it does not have to be mentioned every minute.

Medieval doctors also knew this, which is frankly unnerving

Medieval and early modern plague advice often recommended what we might now call mood management. Don’t dwell on death. Avoid melancholy. Seek pleasant company. Hear pleasant things. Spend time in gardens. Use songs, stories, and delightful things that bring comfort.

That advice can sound absurd from a modern medical perspective. Songs do not stop Yersinia pestis. Pleasant stories do not replace public health. But the underlying observation is not foolish: fear is not neutral. Attention is not neutral. Sound is not neutral. A world saturated with death bells, offices for the dead, sickbed reports, rumors, and morbid talk can become its own kind of environment.

When a fourteenth-century physician recommends songs and minstrelsy, he is not inventing Spotify’s “calm” playlists, exactly. But he is recognizing a problem modern listeners know very well: when the mind is trapped in a loop, sound can help change the loop.

During COVID, many people did something similar with the tools at hand. They made playlists for baking, cleaning, work-from-home, sleep, calm, sadness, and background companionship. They learned TikTok dances. They layered up sea shanties (or even better the Wellerman version with Kermit the Frog). They joined virtual ensembles. They watched people they did not know make music from bedrooms and kitchens and stairwells. The point was not always aesthetic excellence. Often the point was, simply, to make time habitable.

Distraction as musicking

Christopher Small’s idea of “musicking” is useful here because it shifts attention away from music as an object and toward music as relationship. Music is not only organized sound. It is also the people taking part, the social arrangements, the imagined relationships, the model of the world the performance proposes.

That helps explain why so many pandemic musical artifacts are not especially interesting if treated only as compositions. A TikTok dance with a parent in the kitchen is not analytically rich because of harmonic invention. Sea Shanty TikTok is not interesting only because of the tune. A virtual orchestra is not moving only because of repertoire.

They matter because of the relationships they stage.

A family learns a dance together. A stranger adds a bass line to another stranger’s melody. Cellists clap three times to synchronize their separate rooms into one performance. A parody singer turns isolation into a joke thousands of people recognize. A country singer names what it feels like to be “six feet apart.” A joke song about quarantine becomes a tiny public square.

Distraction, in this sense, is not solitary. Even when it happens alone, it imagines a set of relationships.

Comfort, memory, and the danger of moving on

But here is the problem: the same musical forms that help people endure crisis can also help them move past it too quickly.

That was the tension in “We Don’t Talk About COVID.” The song was funny because it captured exactly how adaptation felt from the inside. But it was unsettling because adaptation also meant normalization. Half the school has COVID, so pack the lunch. Guidelines changed, so keep moving. Exposure became ordinary. Confusion became ordinary. The song made that weirdness audible.

Distraction songs can do something similar. They help us survive the immediate moment, but they may also document the moment when survival quietly becomes “normal.” Baking playlists. Cleaning playlists. Work-from-home playlists. Family dances. Sea shanties. Quarantine parody. These are not trivial artifacts. They show how quickly people began building livable routines inside unlivable conditions.

That is not a criticism. It may even be the most human thing about them. I don’t know about you, but distraction songs were certainly part of my email economy during the height of “safer at home.” And I looked forward to them, and even contributed to a Pomona College glee-club reunion Danny Boy. (Nostalgia for Covid quarantine, now that’s a weirdness!)

But it is worth asking what happened to those routines afterward. Did they become memory? Nostalgia? Embarrassment? Digital clutter? Evidence? Did they help us process what we were living through, or did they help us defer processing it?

The joke is also an archive

One reason I keep circling pandemic humor is that it preserves things official records do not. Public health documents tell us about policies, recommendations, mortality, testing, quarantine, and institutional response. Parody songs tell us how those policies felt in the kitchen.

They record the absurdity of insufficient information. They record the pressure to remain cheerful. They record the mismatch between official guidance and lived reality. They record the shrinking of the world to a house, a screen, a delivery box, a phone notification, a playlist, a meme, a family video, a familiar song rewritten for unfamiliar circumstances.

This is also why pandemic humor should not be dismissed as mere distraction. “Mere” is doing too much work there. Distraction may be one of the ways in which a culture documents crisis without becoming overwhelmed by it. The joke allows us to approach the scary thing. The parody creates sufficient distance. The borrowed tune holds the feeling steady long enough to look at it.

Or, to put it another way: sometimes the way we avoid looking directly at something becomes the best evidence of what we could not bear to see.

What distraction knows

Pandemic distraction knows that fear is exhausting.

It knows that people need rhythm, repetition, jokes, songs, stories, dances, gardens, windows, screens, and other people.

It knows that the mind cannot live indefinitely at the pitch of emergency.

It knows that music is not always memorial, protest, worship, or art. Sometimes music is a pressure valve. Sometimes it is a bridge. Sometimes it is the thing you send to someone else because you cannot quite say, “I am scared,” but you can say, “This made me laugh.”

That does not make it less serious. It may make it more so.

Because in the end, pandemic music does not only show us what people remembered. It also shows us how they got through the long, liminal hours in the shade of crisis.

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Some examples of medieval medical advice in the face of plague:

• Listen to "songs, stories, and melodies" (Anon 5: 390)
• Listen to "comforting talk, pleasing songs, and sweetly harmonious sounds"; (Anon 6: 322, 336)
• “Hear pleasant things and attractive stories” (Giovanni di Donde, ca. 1350)
• “…make use of songs and minstrelsy and other pleasurable tales without tiring yourselves out, and all the delightful things that bring anyone comfort…” (Tommaso di Dino del Garbo, d. 1370)
• “Let us rejoice and delight in melodies, songs, stories and similar delights.“ (Salamanca, 1515)

What Does the Medieval Past Sound Like? Alfred Schnittke’s Minnesang (1981)

In our medievalism discussions this semester, we’ve often asked a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to “use” the medieval past? Sometimes the past is reconstructed. Sometimes it is stylized, or put to a political agenda.

And sometimes it becomes something stranger: a set of sonic materials that can be rearranged, fragmented, and reimagined.

Alfred Schnittke’s Minnesang (1981) belongs very much in that last category. Rather than reconstructing medieval song, Schnittke treats it almost like archaeological fragments – pieces of melody, pieces of language, pieces of texture that can be layered together into something new.

What he tells us is that the past can be fully present, and yet sound nothing like the past at all.

Before looking at how the piece works, it helps simply to hear it.

Stefan Parkman and the Danish National Symphony Choir ℗ 1992 Chandos Records

Alfred Schnittke and the Past

Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) was one of the most distinctive composers of the late Soviet period. His music is often associated with what he called polystylism. He enjoyed the mix-and-mingle of different genres’ conventions, with Renaissance and Romantic language butting up against popular music styles, in a vertiginous swirl of sound. As he put it,

“The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so.”

His life was complicated by the fractious and often oppressive cultural environment of the late Soviet Union. During the Brezhnev era (1964–1982), artistic life was shaped by political surveillance, ideological expectations, and a leadership culture that prized stability over reform. Schnittke himself experienced travel bans after abstaining from a Composers’ Union vote in 1980, and Minnesang was created at exactly that moment in his career. As a student of Shostakovich, the question of politics’ potential influence on his personal safety, let alone his musical reception, must surely have been on his mind.

At the same time, he cultivated an unusually deep relationship with the musical past. As a teenager studying in Vienna in 1946, he later recalled a key and abiding insight that was to influence his musical choices throughout his life:

“Every moment there was a link in the historical chain… the past represented a world of ever-present ghosts.”

That sense of the past as ever-present becomes crucial for our understanding of Minnesang.

The Piece: Minnesang (1981)

Schnittke wrote Minnesang for 52 vocal parts, dividing the choir at times into dozens of independent lines. The work draws on around twenty medieval German songs, including material by:

• Walther von der Vogelweide
• Neidhart von Reuental
• Wolfram von Eschenbach
• Heinrich von Meissen
• the Monk of Salzburg

Yet Schnittke insisted that he was not “composing” with these songs in the traditional sense. Rather, he took a mosaicist’s approach:

“I set the task to limit myself with only montage work without changing any note of these songs.” (Schnittke Program Notes, as quoted in Smirnov)

Even the texts themselves are treated differently than one might expect. The Middle High German language, largely opaque to modern listeners, becomes part of the sonic texture, transformed, as Schnittke claims, into simple phonemes which help to create a particular mood.

In other words, the medieval material becomes sound matter.

What Is Schnittke’s Medievalism Doing?

This piece belongs to a broader cluster of works in which Schnittke explored spirituality and historical memory, including:

• Requiem (1975)
• Der Sonnengesang des Franz von Assisi (1976)
• Symphony No. 2 “St. Florian” (1979)
• Minnesang (1981)
• Faust Cantata (1983)

Scholars sometimes frame this group as exploring tensions between intuition and rationality, or what Zhanna Lehmann calls gnosis – direct experiential insight rather than theoretical knowledge. All of the works have medieval(ist) themes, and all were written before his formal conversation in 1985. At one level, these could be seen as an exploration of faith. At another, they are also a dabbling in what history means to the present day.

That perspective matters for Minnesang, because the piece does not attempt to reconstruct medieval music historically. Instead, it asks what happens when medieval fragments become objects of contemplation.

Seeing the Music

Because the work involves so many voices and overlapping layers, it can be hard to hear the structure on first listening. This gave me a good excuse to learn a bit about spectrograms, which show sound visually:

• bright dense regions = many voices / louder passages
• thin bands = fewer voices or sustained tones
• vertical streaks = consonants, rhythmic entrances, or sudden dynamic changes

Spectrogram generated in Sonic Visualiser; max frequency set to 6000 Hz

The spectrogram makes the piece’s structure unusually easy to see: expansions appear as widening bands of color, while the exploratory passages show thinner textures in which individual melodic fragments briefly emerge.

Structural Overview of Schnittke’s Minnesang

I combined my assessment from Sonic Visualiser with my own close listening to generate the analysis provided here. (This assessment draws on acoustical markers, not score analysis.)

Time	Layer	Label
0:00	STRUCTURE	Intro w/canon
1:57	STRUCTURE	X (melodic/textural exploration)
1:57	EVENT	fragments of tunes
3:24	EVENT	contrary motion
3:42	STRUCTURE	first build
3:42	EVENT	sudden reduced texture
4:54	STRUCTURE	Y (melodic/textural exploration)
4:54	EVENT	rising
7:22	EVENT	unison
7:53	STRUCTURE	full texture
7:53	EVENT	blocks of sound
10:51	EVENT	pile up
11:39	STRUCTURE	climax
11:59	EVENT	start collapse
13:11	STRUCTURE	last build
13:11	EVENT	reduce then build
13:53	STRUCTURE	Z (melodic/textural exploration)
13:53	EVENT	fragments of tunes
15:20	STRUCTURE	END

An assessment of Schnittke’s structure

I. Introduction (0:00–1:57)

0:00 — Intro w/canon
1:56 — “X”

The opening establishes the material contrapuntally, with fragments surfacing within a relatively transparent texture. There is an emphasis on paired voices in canon, but in the context of a thick texture in which individual gestures retain attention only briefly before dissolving back into the mass of sound. If you look at just the first 90 seconds, you can see these canons clearly:

Short fragments will start in a lower voice, to be paired directly with a voice slightly higher in the texture. These two-voice groupings are more prominent than the (softer and higher) voices which sing aligned, also in a fragmented, disconnected smattering of phrase-fragments.

Gradually, the texture widens out – a pattern that will repeat twice more over the course of the piece – in order to set up a new section (“X”) devoted to exploration of fragments of the various Minnesang tunes.

Exploratory Cycle 1 (1:57–3:42)

1:57 — Section X: fragments of tune emerge
3:24 — contrary motion
3:42 — sudden reduced texture

Here the choir begins to play with melodic fragments more explicitly. Individual gestures emerge momentarily before giving way to others, producing a shifting field of brief melodic appearances rather than sustained thematic statements.

Exploratory Cycle 2 (3:42-7:22)

3:42 — texture widens out
4:54 — Section Y: exploration of melodies: rising melody at first, later “Ich habe” (5:26); and a dotted rhythm melody (6:26) each emerge briefly for attention

7:22 — unison reset

After this section’s expansion of tessitura, this cycle moves through a series of fragments, some with surprisingly clear profiles. It ends by drawing to a unison, which acts as a structural pivot, resetting the texture before a broader expansion.

Central Expansion and Climax (7:53-11:59)

7:53 — full texture, with blocks of sound
10:51 — accumulation begins

11:39 — climax
11:59 — start of collapse

From the unison, Schnittke quickly rebuilds the choral mass. The texture expands through alternating blocks of sound, shifting between low and high registers and increasing in dynamic intensity. The spectrum gradually widens – particularly upward – before the addition of a low pulsating foundation.

At 10:51 a more continuous accumulation begins, leading to a sustained and prolonged climax centered around 11:39. At this point the spectrogram shows the maximum spectral saturation of the entire piece: full tessitura with sustained soprano intensity.

Dissolution and reconfiguration (11:59-15:20)

11:59 — thinning / collapse
13:11 — reduction then renewed build-out of the texture

13:53 — Section Z: medieval lyrics re-emerge as a focus

After the climax the texture thins but retains strong harmonic bands. Rather than dissolving entirely, the music reorganizes itself, preparing one final gesture: a final rapid expansion of the texture leading into a renewed lyrical exploration of the Minnesang fragments.

This final cycle might perhaps be considered a coda, but to me it serves more as a reframing, turning back to those earlier exploratory sections, reconsidering what these medieval fragments can do for us as pieces of sound.

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Schnittke’s compositional process

Just a few observations, and those derived largely from listening rather than from such things as sketches and interviews:

CANON: First, several scholars, including Mark Jennings (2002), note that the work pays homage to the medieval period through canonic writing. Groups of voices enter one by one or in imitation; they often enter as voice groups. This mirrors medieval compositional practice, but here it becomes a generator of texture rather than counterpoint to be heard clearly. The example above shows how Schnittke deploys this writing, particularly in the introduction to the piece, orienting us to an imitative allusively "medieval" style, but not one which will drive the remainder of the piece. His primary technique, to my ear, is not so much canonic writing but rather that of textural design.

TEXTURAL DESIGN: The piece operates through repeated two-stage cycles:

1) There is a rapid expansion of the texture (shown on the spectrogram with those curving lines that show the basses expanding downward to claim a full tessitura).

2) We move to what I think of as exploratory play, with thinner textures revealing a variety of treatments of the fragments that Schnittke uses as mosaic tiles.

Each cycle increases the spectral density and register width until we come to the climactic plateau at 11:39, after which the texture dissolves and reforms for the final expansion.

If I am right, this assessment shows is that Schnittke’s form in Minnesang is governed primarily by textural dramaturgy rather than harmonic progression or melodic recognition.

FLICKERING: For a piece nominally “about” medieval tunes – and a whole host of those, at that – the presence of any one tune is remarkably fleeting. Melodies emerge briefly from the texture and then vanish. Or, in imitation passages (e.g. 4:54) we might have a cascade of rising lines as one voice, and then the next, and then the next take over our attention as they work through their canonic exposition. But these fragments operate at the level of the phrase, or even half-phrase. We never sit long enough to “have the tune.” For a piece designed around Minnesang, the fragments flicker, but do not linger long enough to become a focus:

a fragment appears
it dissolves
a new fragment appears

The past is never stabilized – it winks in and out.

What the Past Becomes

Taken together, these features – canonic writing, cycles of expansion and exploratory thinning, and the fleeting appearance of melodic fragments – shape the way the medieval material functions in Minnesang.

One of the most striking things about the piece is that it does not attempt to restore medieval song as something historically intact. The tunes themselves rarely stabilize long enough to become recognizable musical objects. Instead, they surface briefly within the texture and then dissolve again, reappearing later in altered contexts. It is the textures and treatments that guide our listening, not the tunes.

In this sense, the medieval songs operate less as themes than as sonic artifacts. They provide the raw material for canonic cascades, for textural expansions, and for the exploratory passages where fragments briefly step forward before yielding to the next gesture. What drives the listener’s experience of the piece is therefore not melodic recognition or harmonic progression, but the unfolding of textures and the shifting ways those fragments are deployed.

This distancing of the melodies is reinforced by the way the work treats its texts. The Middle High German texts are largely unintelligible to modern listeners, and Schnittke himself tells us that he treats them primarily as phonetic sound. The melodies appear only in fragments, rarely long enough to stabilize as recognizable tunes. Even the stylistic gestures – canon, imitation, layered voices – function less as historical reconstruction than as textural devices. The result is that none of the usual grounds for musical judgment quite apply. The text cannot quite be interpreted, the melodies never quite become themes, and the style never quite settles into historical pastiche.

The medieval material is therefore present, but at a remove – circulating within the piece as sound rather than as historical artifact. Minnesang does not attempt to recover the medieval past so much as to place it into motion again. The old songs flicker through the texture, briefly audible before dissolving back into the larger choral complex. The past is not restored here. Instead, it is rearranged, reframed, and reimagined. What remains is not “pastness,” but sound itself: a field of textures through which the medieval fragments briefly pass. The medieval does not carry inherent meaning; we cannot quite hold it in the ear. Yet for Schnittke it becomes a palette of color, applied here and there until recognizable shapes and patterns emerge.

The result is a paradox that lies at the heart of Schnittke’s medievalism: the past may be fully present, even the sole source of melodic material, and yet sound nothing at all like the past we imagine.

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WORKS CONSULTED

• Mark D. Jennings, 2002. “Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Choir : musical analysis and historical perspectives.” PhD Diss, Florida State.

• Zhanna Lehmann, 2018. “Alfred Schnittke’s quest for a universal musical language in the Penitential Psalms (1987–88).” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• Dmitri Smirnov, 2002. Liner notes to Schnittke, A.: Choir Concerto / Minnesang / Voices of Nature (Holst Singers, Gledhill, Layton), Hyperion 00602448807229.

Your desert island symphony

In my Western Art Music seminar (a writing seminar, might I add), we started the term with the early symphony – a little Sammartini, a little Stamitz, some Martinez, a bit of Haydn. The focus was on social history. But to bring it forward in time, I’ve done three things, and it’s really paying off!

First, as an in-class short-writing exercise, I gave them a 3x5 card, and asked them what *later* symphony they’d take with them as their only music for three years on a desert island, and why. Then I let them add a second piece that they thought would impress their studio instructor or other faculty mentor. (This is how I take class roll; it’s also how I get them thinking about how things apply to their broader musical lives.)

The next day, I put them in small groups and reminded them of some of the “desert island” pieces they chose, then ask their groups to create a chronological timeline of TEN post-Haydn symphony composers, without computers and without phones. There was a good bit of laughter. Now who came before that? Who was that composer they played last semester? Did such-and-so count as a symphony? We put those lists on the board, and looked at commonalities across all the lists, and who was missing. It was interesting fodder for the “who decides” discussion:

We had read the Donne UK report (scroll past the proms report; the one on symphony repertoire is down below: Equality & Diversity in Global Repertoire, 2023/2024 Season) – so they’re definitely starting to see patterns in their world. So that discussion got rich and interesting.

And then the storm hit, and we’ve been out of classes for a week. So rather than have them go off and do something on Machaut with no context, no background, and no guiding framework, I canceled our Machaut assignment and moved them back to our desert island:

Okay, here we are in the world. Take 45 - 60 - 90 minutes and listen to one of those symphonies you mentioned as brilliant, desert-island, must-engage works. Voxer me with the three things that gave you shivers (or annoyed you) the most. Focus on the longer works: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Stravinsky, etcetera. How does your chosen work draw on things we saw with our "early symphony" exemplars? How does it take the basic symphonic ideas we saw in Sammartini, Haydn, and Martinez, and turn them into something bigger, stranger, or more intense?

The report-outs have been lovely. Several went for Tchaikovsky symphonies (which I think is weird, but I’m only the instructor), and most of them have spoken to the satisfaction of really listening to something they’ve wanted to get to know or to re-encounter. And the world is a better place when we stop and remind ourselves of what we love and what we came to do.

For me, that’s been the real gift of this little experiment: not the lists or the timelines, but watching students slow down long enough to hear why a piece mattered to them in the first place. In a semester full of deadlines and disruptions, that kind of listening feels quietly radical. Music makes our lives better; it’s nice to see them remember that.

So go and listen to whatever first drew you to music once upon a time. May it bring you comfort now.

Attention filtering – the voluntary earlid

An auditory distraction — a crying baby, a ringing phone — hits like a punch to the gut, instantly demanding our attention. But recent studies by Mandal and colleagues (2024) suggest that our minds may be better shielded than we think.

They introduce the idea of an “attentional earlid.” Just as eyelids can open and shut to regulate what reaches our eyes, our attention seems to have a mental earlid that blocks irrelevant sounds from interfering with other tasks.

To test this, Mandal’s team asked participants to do visual puzzles while irrelevant sounds — simple, pure sine-wave beeps — popped up in the background. These weren’t meaningful noises like a person’s name or an odd sound that stood out in context; they were deliberately boring. Surprisingly, the beeps didn’t slow people down or cause mistakes. In the face of noise, the earlid held.

But there was a catch. When the task included listening — for example, counting the number of time a particular sound occurred — the earlid opened, and the irrelevant beeps slipped in, pulling at attention. In other words, if your ears are already opened, stray noises evidently sneak through on the same pathway.

This fits with broader psychological findings: our brain has limited channels of processing, a bit like trying to carry too many grocery bags. Perceptual load theory (Lavie 1995 is the classic work) says we only have so much capacity. Mandal’s earlid idea adds another layer: when sound isn’t part of the job, our brains can shut the door on irrelevant auditory clutter altogether.

That has real consequences for musicological me. Much of my work relies on listening-as-study, but the background noise in our in-town property hovers around 70 dB. Out on the farm, on the other hand, it drops to the 30s or 40s (unless the turkeys are quarreling). Thus, in town, my earlids have to contend with a flood of competing input. At home, the quiet of the countryside acts like a protective layer, letting my attention settle on the music.

So here’s my observation: if the earlid is about shutting a door and closing off the sound entirely, then quiet spaces might work more like sound-glasses: they cut the glare of unwanted noise so my ears can adjust to what matters most. That may explain why listening at home, in relative silence, always seems to lead to better prep for the deeper analysis and meaning-making than the work I do later on campus. (Huh. I’d always just chalked it up to the distractions of a peopled landscape once I got to my office.)

I’ll have to think about this more; I’ve mentioned in other earlid posts that in my own musical-listening practice, I see a linkage of left-brain intellectual processing and right-brain beauty-finding as a strong sound filtering mechanism. The rest of the world can fall away when I’m working in my musico-analytical space, and even Mandal’s content disruption – my name – can miss my attention on-ramp. (Sorry, kids!) I’m not yet sure whether I think that’s an “attentional earlid” or a “sound-glasses” type phenomenon – or a third thing altogether.

At any rate, today’s browsing in the literature was a bit dismaying to my prejudices. Maybe, just maybe, those noise-canceling headphones y’all carry around are actually important as tools to help manage both attention earlids and sound-glasses. If so, they could be essential, if unstylish, accessories for those thinking tasks that occupy my days.

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REFERENCES:

• Cyrus, Cynthia. “I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds, 15 Nov 2024, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/11/i-am-not-crocodile-earlids-and-thinking.html.
• Lavie, N. 1995: Lavie, Nilli. “Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21/3 (1995): 451–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.21.3.451
• Mandal 2024a: Mandal, A., Liesefeld, A. M., & Liesefeld, H. R. “The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50/1 (2024): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001168
• Mandal 2024b: Mandal, Ananya, Jan Philipp Röer, and Heinrich R. Liesefeld. “Auditory Distractors Are Processed but Do Not Interfere with Visual Search of Any Difficulty When Sound Is Irrelevant.” Visual Cognition 32/9–10 (2024): 1067–83. doi:10.1080/13506285.2024.2397825.

  
  

Listening to the Birds

Tufted titmouse with a call-out saying tweetle tweetle tweetle

In What the Robin Knows, Jon Young suggests that we all follow the practice of sitting and actively listening to birds. He observes that the world birds share with us – that we share with the birds – can be understood through the acoustical signals they send. There’s a background level of noise that is standard, the so-called baseline, and there are the alarm calls and sudden silences that tell us about the “happenings” that the birds are experiencing – ones we can share if we’re paying full attention to their signals. Is that alarm call about us, walking obliviously through the woods, or is it about the nearby fox that we won’t see unless we pay attention?

Paying attention is a challenge, of course. He talks about beginning listeners, and the differences between their experience of soundscape (my word, not his) versus those of more experienced attendees. A bit of explanation first: he uses the term “sit spot” to characterize a place outdoors where one goes to meditate listen repeatedly over time. He recommends these be convenient to the household to encourage frequent practice. 

To get at the idea of what listening is, he first gives instructions, and then contrasts two listeners. The task is a simple one: “Listen to the silence and hear all the sounds around you. There will be many in your sit spot.” The results are quite varied:

I always find it instructive to ask new people how many airplanes they heard while sitting in their sit spots. “Three?” one might say hesitantly, after a pause. I may have asked a more experienced individual with a nearby sit spot to be sure to pick up the planes. I turn to her and say, “How many?” “Seven,” she replies. “No way! I can hear a plane. There were three,” the new student argues. “No, there were seven.” The next day, I put that same student in charge of counting planes in his sit spot, and his count goes up. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

Young’s point is that listening isn’t passive—it’s a skill developed over time. Noticing all the layers of sound, even silence, is part of the task:

I like differentiating between the sounds made by the wind as it flows through the branches, the shrubs, the grass – all of them different… Even in the bedroom in the dead of night, there’s plenty to hear. Silence itself has a sound, and listening to it is good practice for picking up the junco’s tiny tunes and alarms. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

He calls for us to adopt what he characterizes as the “Routine of Invisibility,” using an observer’s amble rather than the destination-focused stride of the hiker. This, he argues, will give us more grounding in what is happening within our sphere of observation, since we will avoid becoming that obnoxious thing, the “bird plow” that drives the birds upward toward safety as we move forward into their space. He also makes a strong case for the “interspecies alarm system,” where the listening birds will respond differently (as a group) to the tense, stressed coyote needing to feed its young than to the more relaxed coyote out on an amble – and where the signal that one group of listening birds sets off will be picked up by altogether different species in ways that tend to make all the song-bird species safer. (Unless, of course, there’s a “wake hunter,” the raptor coming along to pick off one of the disturbed birds while it’s distracted. It’s a jungle out there.)

In all, I enjoyed the book, but as my dad says, Young’s notion of the sit spot is not a practice that I’m likely to adopt. My precious outdoor minutes are probably better spent on the walking that keeps me healthy than on the listening stance, if only because it encourages an outdoor stillness that too closely reflects the indoor stillness of the writer’s daily life. But I’ll certainly use Young’s idea of the variability in bird calls – the companion check versus the song vs the adolescent “feed me” demands – as well as his idea of tending to the baseline sounds as part of my outdoor practice. 

And as a musicologist, I firmly agree with his ideas that we should all listen to ALL the sounds that we find ourselves immersed in. Awareness, self-discipline, and attentive practice shape how we hear the world. And that’s a takeaway I can get behind.

Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Mariner Books, 2012/r2013.

Margery Kempe Listens (1/19/25)

 

Image of female pilgrim with "sounds," "melodies," and "Hallucinations" as responding themes

"Sum-tyme sche herd wyth hir bodily erys sweche sowndys & melodies that sche myth not wel heryn what a man seyd to hir in that tyme less he spoke the lowder."

Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies that she might not hear effectively what a man said to her at that time unless he spoke louder.

Here we see attention as commodity in the Book of Margery Kempe, that most idiosyncratic of medieval mystics.

Richard Lawes (2000) shows that Margery distinguished between the inner sound of visions (“hire gostly undirstondyng” (her ghostly understanding) and the external ear-based sounds. He believes that her passing experience (Sum-tyme) betokens an “auditory hallucination.” This, to him, is a signal of brain misfirings, and an acoustical experience generated from an interior rather than exterior source.

I wonder, however, if she describes here instead a kind of gendered listening. Margery describes herself as hearing those details of the surrounding landscape, attending to the “trivial” sounds of background noise, instead of to the details of the in-person conversation to which she, particular as a woman, is supposed to be attending. Just as parents yell, ahem, increase their volume to garner the attention of their inattentive offspring, so too Margery’s interlocutor increases his volume to drown out the distracting if more distant noises. Is the story, then, about a mystical vision? A medical moment? Or an (admittedly difficult) woman defying expectation? We should pause and consider context, I think, before deciding that she’s just hallucinating.

Similarly, Lawes names the “rushing sounds, likened to a bellows” that are one-sided, present only in her right ear. As a long-term sufferer of tinnitus, I suspect that she’s just describing the distracting internal ear noise to which all such sufferers might be vulnerable. Again, there are gendered implications; Margery is letting her experience of self dominate her perceptive world. Would a man, describing a “rushing like unto a river” be chided for the experience? Or might it more be wrapped up in assumptions of memory and experiential displacement?

That is not to say that Lawes was intending ill by Margery. Rather, I find him an empathetic reader, if a bit over-fond of his own temporal lobe epilepsy diagnosis that he believes to be her underlying medical condition. Still, his assessment and the care he gives to her sensory details did, IMHO, help to move forward the field of interpretive writing about her experiences. It’s just that we all come to our reading with the cultural habits of thought and unconscious biases of our own generation. And here, picking apart these examples a bit further does, I think, have something to tell us about the sound experiences of an important late-medieval laywoman.

Ultimately, Margery Kempe’s auditory experiences—whether mystical, medical, or mundane—make me, at least, want to reconsider how we approach sensory perception and identity in the medieval world. Margery’s “bodily ears” and their contested sounds challenge us to think about how gender, culture, and personal experience shape not only what we hear but also how we interpret it. Was Margery’s listening “misdirected,” as her contemporaries might have thought, or was it reflective of a richer and more complex sensory engagement with her world? Was she, in other words, simply hyper-aware of the world around her—and if so, shouldn’t we prize that?

RESPONDING TO:

Richard Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, edited by Denis Renevey and Christiana Whitehead (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000): 217-243.

19th Century poetic earlids and the Ovid rumor-mill (11/26/24)

 

Image of James Henry, poet of Menippea (1866)

Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213

If one is to spend time on earlids -- and evidently that’s on the current docket, as my previous posts show (see here and here) – one could do worse than to spend time with doctor-and-poet James Henry. His not-particularly-well-known poetry collection Menippea is a staunchly 19th-century product, and one of the untitled poems from the middle of the collection spends 54 lines considering earlids and their absence. 

I quote it here in its entirety:

…. “Nullis inclusit limina portis. Nocte dieque patent… Nulla quies intus, nullaque silentia parte.”

[There is no closing the thresholds of the gates. They are open day and night... There is no peace within, and no silence outside. -- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk 12, ll. 45-50]

Is it just in Heaven to favor so the eyes
With lids to keep out dust and glare and flies,
And leave the poor ears open, night and day,
To all each chattering fool may choose to say,
To all assaults of sturdy hurdygurd,                                          5
And grand-piano octave, chord, and third,
And rapid volley of well-quavered note,
Out of wide gaping, husband-seeking throat,
And fiddle squeak, and railway whistle shrill,
Big drum and little drum and beetling mill,                            10
Trumpet and fife, triangle and trombone,
And hiss and shout and scream and grunt and groan?
Be gracious, Heaven! And, if no law forbid,
Grant the distracted ear such share of lid
That we may sometimes soundly sleep at night,                    15
Not kept awake until the dawning light,
By rattling window-sash, or miauling cat,
Or howling dog, or nibbling mouse or rat,
Or cooped-up capon fain like cock to crow,
Or carts that down the paved street clattering go,                  20
Or nurse, in the next room, and sickly child,
Warbling by turns their native woodnotes wild.
Judge us not by thyself, who darest not sleep,
But open always, day and night, must keep
Both eye and ear, to see and hear how go                              25
All things above the clouds, and all below;
Lids for thine ears, as for thine eyes, were worse
Than useless, an impediment and curse;
We, with less care, our eyes are free to close
At night, or for an after-dinner doze,                                      30
And for this purpose thou hast kindly given,
And with a bounty worthy of high Heaven,
Each eye a pair of lids. One lid might do
For each ear, if thou wilt not hear of two,
One large; well fitting lid; and night and day,                        35
As bound in duty, we will ever pray;
And thou with satisfaction shalt behold
Our ears no less protected from the cold
Than our dear eyes, and never more need’st fear
That to thy word we turn a hard, deaf ear;                              40
Never more fear that discord should arise
And jealous bickerings between ears and eyes,
Both members of one body corporate,
Both loyal subjects of one church and state;
Never more see us, on a frosty day                                         45
Stuffing in cotton, or hear caviller say:
“I’d like to know why fallen less happy lot
On ear than on snuffbox and mustardpot;
What is it ever ear thought or ear did,
To disentitle it to its share of lid?”                                          50 
Earlids, kind Heaven, or who knows what --?? But no!
Silence, rebellious tongue, and let ear go
And plead its own case. Lidless, Heaven’s own ear,
And, whether it will or not, must always hear.

James’ use of Ovid as epigraph is only that of metaphor; Ovid doesn’t call to “earlids” specifically, but he does explore the realm of rumor. Rumor is available night and day, says Ovid; there’s no threshold closure to keep rumor out. Indeed, such murmurings amplify as we attend to them (as we must). In other words, gossip will have its sneaky way with folks.

Ovid, Metamorphoses Book XII [= Ovid on Rumor]

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque
40 caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi;
unde quod est usquam, quamvis regionibus absit,
inspicitur, penetratque cavas vox omnis ad aures:
Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce,
innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis
45 addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis;
nocte dieque patet; tota est ex aere sonanti,
tota fremit vocesque refert iteratque quod audit;
nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte,
nec tamen est clamor, sed parvae murmura vocis,
50 qualia de pelagi, siquis procul audiat, undis
esse solent, qualemve sonum, cum Iuppiter atras
increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt.
Atria turba tenet: veniunt, leve vulgus, euntque
mixtaque cum veris passim commenta vagantur
55 milia rumorum confusaque verba volutant;
e quibus hi vacuas inplent semonibus aures,
hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti
crescit, et auditis aliquid novus adicit auctor.
Illic Credulitas, illic temerarius Error
60 vanaque Laetitia est consternatique Timores
Seditioque recens dubioque auctore Susurri;
ipsa, quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur
et tellure, videt totumque inquirit in orbem.

There is a place in the middle of the world, ’twixt land and sea and sky, the meeting-point of the threefold universe. From this place, whatever is, however far away, is seen, and every word penetrates to these hollow ears. Rumour dwells here, having chosen her house upon a high mountain-top; and she gave the house countless entrances, a thousand apertures, but with no doors to close them. Night and day the house stands open. It is built all of echoing brass. The whole place is full of noises, repeats all words and doubles what it hears. There is no quiet, no silence anywhere within. And yet there is no loud clamour, but only the subdued murmur of voices, like the murmur of the waves of the sea if you listen afar off, or like the last rumblings of thunder when Jove has made the dark clouds crash together. Crowds fill the hall, shifting throngs come and go, and everywhere wander thousands of rumours, falsehoods mingled with the truth, and confused reports flit about. Some of these fill their idle ears with talk, and others go and tell elsewhere what they have heard; while the story grows in size, and each new teller makes contribution to what he has heard. Here is Credulity, here is heedless Error, unfounded Joy and panic Fear; here is sudden Sedition and unauthentic Whisperings. Rumour herself beholds all that is done in heaven, on sea and land, and searches throughout the world for news.

Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library  (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

ANALYSIS:

James Henry may have been inspired by Ovid, but he goes his own way in the poem. He considers in the beginning the difference between eyes (with lids) and ears (without), and alludes to Ovid’s chattering fools who amplify rumors in so many difficult ways, but he moves quickly (lines 5-12) to the music that might be blocked out – the hurdygurdy, the piano and its chords, the voice and its ornamental runs (sung by a young lady to impress the men). Fiddles, percussion, brass band, and an array of other noises (“hiss and shout and scream and grunt and groan”) assault the ear.

He turns (lines 13-22) to thinking of the earlid, which could help us sleep by protecting us from household and neighborhood noises (blowing windows, cats and dogs, vermin, the neighbors chickens, night-time carts, and children – the urban equivalents through sheer pervasiveness of woodland sounds). We are not like God (lines 23-33), who needs to be always available and is omniscient; we’re able to tune out, to drop our attention and ignore the world around us. Even a single lid would be better for us, and we’d give thanks through prayer for having such a tool (lines 34-40). This happy circumstance would let us treat sight and hearing in parallel, both with the option of closing down at need. Thus, if snuffboxes and mustardpots warrant lids, don’t we humans too? (lines 41-50). But no, the poet concludes, we should be satisfied as-is; lidless ears we have, always open to the world around us – for good or for ill (51-54).

Earlids here are functioning as a poetic meditation on human vulnerability and connection. They start as a whimsical notion – a solution to the cacophony of life – but evolve into a reflection on how we stay open to the world around us. Henry’s playful logic – his comparisons to mustardpots and snuffboxes – underscores the absurdity of wishing away our inherent human-shaped design. Instead, the poem turns our "deficiency" into a virtue: our lidless ears remind us of our shared humanity. Because of their absence, we are (happily) unable to fully shield ourselves from the beauty and the clamor of existence. In a world of noise, our earlidless status keeps us tethered to both the chaos and the harmony around us. We are always listening, always, therefore, alive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

• Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213

• Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.