Musician in mind

When we first hear our recorded voice played back, often we feel uncomfortable. The source of this discomfort lies in a duality of mind and physical matter. We think that we are producing one sound, yet the reality tells us something else. And we experience cognitive dissonance, a sensation caused by the mismatch between what we expect and what we perceive.

Beyond the environmental factors affecting the two sounds -- the acoustic qualities inside our heads that influence how we hear our voices internally and the surrounding acoustics that generate resonances that the microphone picks up along with our voices -- we hear the two sounds differently because we are not aware of the gap between what we think we're doing and what we actually are doing.

A simple example. A mythical musician holds his instrument with intention. He puts the recorder to his mouth and begins to play. We turn off our ears and watch the performance. The seriousness on the player's face, the dramatic physical gestures with the swinging arms, the furrowed then lifted eyebrows: we are viewing a magnificent performance. Now we turn our ears back on. The sound is dreadful, the intonation is out, there is no sense of rhythm. This extreme example is only a short distance from the reality of many musicians. Unless we are very careful, there will always be a mismatch between our musical hopes and the actual physical product emanating from our instruments.

The solution to the implied problem is simple to state. However, the realisation of our musical imagination in actual sound is a far distant dream. And to make our dreams come true, we must traverse a path that simultaneously demands us to be highly self-critical and intensely self-aware. The journey promises to be challenging, depressing even, and yet fulfilling by requiring us to open our minds to our own creativity.