Letter to the editor: Of bones, Beethoven, and baritone
What’s common to music aficionado and composer extraordinaire Ludwig von Beethoven and a premium avant-garde set of headphones? Besides music, of course, they both relied on the queer phenomenon of bone conduction. The illustrious virtuoso’s artistic tour-de-force compositions crescendoed in critical appeal and magnificence as his hearing progressively deteriorated. With his (conventional) auditory faculties compromised, he composed his ninth symphony, oft held to be his piece de resistance. It’s unimaginable to draft one’s musical magnum opus whilst being practically deaf. The botched up feedback mechanism is itself enough to impair one’s musical sense. Then how did the virtuoso-grande manage to surmount the feat in spite of his usurped senses?
As it turns out, modern evidence, directed towards another field, is inadvertently establishing Beethoven relying on a previously suspected, ulterior medium and mode of “hearing” that bypasses the organic external ear.
After the better part of his auditory faculties were compromised, von Beethoven was documented to have employed a short stick to comprehend and enact a feedback loop whilst composing in order to relay vibrations to comprehend the notes being conveyed via tremors traversing his skeletal system, beginning at the ultrasensitive pores of the digits and through the forelimb bones, upper vertebrae and maxilla to the ear ossicles. The trembling of the bones introduces a minor but significant selective filtration of frequencies, a further testament to Beethoven’s genius.
Interestingly, as an unrelated sidenote, the typical baritone reduction that is often a source of stigma or jest, depending on who you ask, upon recording and playing back one’s own voice is because whilst speaking we rely on a feedback mechanism, and we all perceive our own respective voices to be heavier (lower-pitched) than they actually are because the skull has a preferential selectivism in conducting frequencies at the lower end of the distribution as compared to air. Hence our own voice, whilst speaking in situ, is “heard” in our ears as “heavier” than in playback (what it actually is) because the skull intervenes in the former. But perhaps it’s all down to classical masculine aesthetics and an unacknowledged pang of subconscious male essentialism, if not supremacism.
That concludes my composition.
Pitamber Kaushik
Bokaro Steel City, India
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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