Exploring Mystery

I was listening to a trombone recording with a musician friend. It ended with an impressively high note, and we argued about which note, exactly, it was.

It was the recording below. The note, FYI, was a high F# - not one you hear much on trombone, and revealing that it's likely they cheated, recording a bit slower to make the technically impossible passages merely technically difficult.

Neither of us has "perfect pitch" - the ability to instantly identify a given note. So we tried to approach it intellectually, eliminating possibilities that would be much higher or lower than the one we'd just heard. It was likely between a high F and a high A.

There was no piano nearby, so I went into the next room to grab my trombone to fish around for the note. But no fishing was necessary. The moment I picked up my horn, I knew. The mere act of holding a trombone revealed the note. I reported this to my friend, who wasn't the least bit surprised. This was a normal sort of musicianly ju-ju.

Here's my explanation: it's not that picking up the horn revealed truth via trippy telepathic channels. I knew all along, unconsciously, but had suppressed the knowledge. Handling the trombone released the inhibition. It's more credible to see this as a simple case of disinhibition than a wondrous case of revelation. Occam's Razor says to go with the former.

Most mysteeeeeerious stuff - maybe all of it - can be explained with this sort of framing flip. I always flip my perspective to examine the vice versa (there are myriad examples within this Slog...it's one of the thick-headed magic tricks allowing me to project a false impression of intelligence). Go to the converse. The other side of the flapjack. The negative space. Very often, there's useful stuff there (though seldom what you're expecting). Everything might be this or that, but, having grown accustomed to focusing on "that", we often completely miss "this".

My friend Elliot changed my life a little when he taught me that an overly tannic wine might either be overly tannic or else underly everything else. If there's little fruit or acid, normal tannins stick out and seem excessive. That's it. So simple!

I had experimented a bit with this framing trick as a kid. In fact, it was one of the "postcards" I sent forward to my adult self, and I wrote about it here.


That said, there's still one weird area of mystery - unexplainable by science and hidden in plain sight - that I've never been able to explain. I'll write about it later this week.


How did I "inhibit" myself from identifying the note? And how had touching a trombone removed that inhibitian? It was most likely a combination of two things:

1. My acceptance of my limitation of not having perfect pitch ("acceptance of limitation" sounds like a passive thing, but it can change outcomes, as has been pointed out for time immemorial), and...

2. Micro-cues from the physical handling of an object that's spent >20,000 hours in my hands lightly pushed me off the knowing/not-knowing border, or (more likely) physicalized a mental quandary, allowing access to more useful and concrete pathways of knowledge. Sitting at a table thinking about something is a very different thing than picking up a tool and even just starting to take physical action. You're almost another person.

But I knew from the start. I just didn't know that I knew. I didn't receive new information from touching the horn, I just more confidently accessed preexisting information. 

Physicality is a whole other realm. I'm too lazy to dig up the link, but a study once showed that you will be much more trusting of a stranger's words if your hand is warmed while he speaks, by, say, a coffee cup. Those Persian rug dealers knew what they were doing!