Lousy Gigs Teach You a Thing or Two

I've always been the musical type. It's a constant in a life of constant changes. However, I've never known quite well why this was the case. Music has always been a source of happiness (or extreme annoyance when it comes to bad music). Since I was very little, my father, who is another music enthusiast, has stimulated me with music and sound. We used to listen to classical music on the radio, and then he has taught me very early to recognize perfectly all the different orchestra music instruments. It was natural and easy for me.

Also, and I've never thought about that link either, I've learned how to read and write by myself, at the age of three. Letters are graphic elements, but what really fascinated and made a lot of sense for that 3 years old me was the logic tying letter combinations and sound. This Eureka moment has probably been the most incredible discover I've ever did.

As the years have passed, I've heard tons of music. The reason I love radio so much is that fact someone is always preparing a playlist for you. You can travel across these songs, enjoying them individually, but also the craftsmanship with which someone has created a specific sequence. Internet has really turned magic to me when it became an immediate source of endless streams of music of any kind. When living by myself in Denmark, I've discovered and loved Pandora. A simple idea of an algorithm that could present you with brand new but related songs to the ones you've pointed out has become an addiction, company, friendship. And in the meantime it has absurdly enlarged the number of songs in my memory. Songs that invariably when not playing in some device of mine are constantly being played in my mind.

Playing music instruments has always also been something I've loved. The discovery about instruments was that I've also have some special talent. I can reproduce any melody on any instrument by only hearing it once. So again, at a very young age, I was able to sit at the piano and play any song (as long as execution wasn't limited by motor coordination issues). But this ability has been both a blessing and a curse in my musical education. Because I've got a perfect relative ear, reading music has always felt like something unnecessary, boring and basically frustrating. It was like turning a beautiful, flowing and natural bike ride through a beautiful scenario into going down a the same road with massive traffic, when thinking about your relative position to the other drivers is annoyingly demanding and really takes all the experience flow away.

Of course a lot of practice  could actually make reading music a very valuable tool in my music skills. But music has become a sort of a holly ground or a temple, from which I didn't want to take the magic feel away. On the other hand, music is also social. It's about playing to others, providing them a fraction of your great experience producing music. Plus there's playing together, which can also provide the magic feeling of building something lovely out of thin air, together.

However, music as a social interaction shares a lot with all the other social interaction experiences. There has to be agreement about what and how music will be played. Tone is the common denominator for doing so. In these regards, sheet music is a great aid. It guarantees that with minimum instrument knowledge, it's possible to coordinate playing efforts, hopefully producing a pleasant finished product: the musical execution.

Not only it's possible, but it's actually very common, especially in popular music, that musicians are totally intuitive like myself, being able to play together by combining perceptions until they finally reach the common denominator, just by listening to each other. This isn't that difficult when it comes to acoustic instruments if people have the perception skills and are able to translate them into the instrument language.

But once electric/electronic instruments come to play, they usually bring along their speakers. These are great for letting music have increased reach. On the other hand, it will kill people's natural ability to hear each other, and even to hear what they are doing. There are many ways this shortcomings can be overcome. People can rehearse so much, that their own feedback becomes a bit less critical. They can also use auxiliar speakers that allow them to hear what they are playing, no matter how much noise there is around them. I've never had access to such a system that could be good enough for a clear self-perception.

For these reasons, playing at random gigs with friends has often being very frustrating. Because even if I knew the song by heart, and I've had some notion about what my band fellow players were doing, I'd have to stick to the programmed melody, because not having any self feedback, I'm not able to improvise, since my ability to make the notes fit is absolutely tied to hearing. And until yesterday, I've never seen any connection between how frustrating these experiences usually were, and how they were connected with disability matters.

Yesterday was different. We had not been rehearsing together for quite a while. Not only I couldn't remember the melodies we would usually play. I couldn't relearn them on the fly, which I can easely do when I can hear what I'm playing. Maybe awareness about all these issues has finally clicked because just before the gig I was playing at a friends place, with many of the same guys that now were at the stage with me. Half an hour early I was happily directing music where I wanted it to go. Not only the one that came out of my saxophone. I was also leading everybody else to collaborate to a melody that would perfectly fir the chords coming from a guitar (acoustic).

At that stage I felt disabled for a second time. It's funny how neatly the experiences have connected, making total sense. As with the other of my life, there's always been this very fragile balance between what I could do and how and what the abled bodied people around would think about what they would perceive compared to their expectations.

I was exposed on that stage. The ones that go on stage usually know what they are doing (at least they think they do). And the audience expect them to know their think, and produce music which is compatible to their expectations. It's funny that most people are not particularly musical or gifted for that although it's really rare to meet people that are indifferent to music, or that don't have a pretty large amount of music in their lives. That truth creates information asymmetry between the musicians and most of their audience. People have a vague perception about the quality of the music they hear but they usually don't know the basic elements behind this perception of quality, or the root causes of problems with that perceived quality.

So crappy played usually doesn't go unnoticed. It creates a feeling of annoyance. But usually the people that get more bothered about bad playing are the musicians themselves. Up that stage I've felt disabled and I knew that playing anything just for the sake of it was going to further disable the band. My other musical instruments, other than the sax, the flute and the clarinet is the piano. The piano has a great advantage when playing in deaf mode. It's a very visual instruments, and even if you're not hearing that much, you can still play with these visual cues.

I was standing there in front of the crowd and I didn't know what else to do. I'd look at my fellow players for some sort of emotional comfort. I think they knew what was going on to a certain extent. Especially the ones that had seen me playing simple but coherent stuff a short while before. I was kind of shamed, although I knew it wasn't my fault, just like with disability. My ability to play had just vanished when I wasn't able to hear myself. It was simple as that. But I was actually concerned with others perception, exactly like it has happened so many times when I'd have to do something in front of strangers that would make my physical disability even more obvious. And like with the concert audience, although everyone is able to tell I'm not moving as everybody else, people who know the real causes for that are really hard (usually restricted to my existing friends and doctors).

But as with real life, I didn't wanna just leave and let the rest of the band in the middle of the gig. So I stood there, trying sometimes to play louder, hoping that this would make me hear, and show everyone I wasn't a drunk, or a moron, or deaf. Again, just like I've always tried to do using my intellect to circumvent people wrong perceptions about myself. At some level I wanted to please them. And I wanted them to love me for that. To love despite the fact I'm disabled. To accept me just as I am. That would mean I've made it. It would mean disability didn't take away the best out of my life experience.

I felt a quick and enourmous relief when for some reason we've switched to a song I could sing instead of playing. I haven't thought about that up to that moment, but when you sing you can hear your voice through the vibration of your skull. All of a sudden, I wasn't disabled anymore. My old great ear would lead me to produce something beautiful and harmonic. My voice isn't itself that great, but with a flawless ear at least I can be sure I'm not ruining anyone's music experience with it.

Music magic was back for a brief moment. A really pretty girl with curly hair and black eyes just like mine came from the audience and we've started making a duo. Maybe it wasn't as fantastic as I felt at the moment. But looking deep into her black eyes, hearing her voice, seeing her lips move and being able to sing something that perfectly fit her voice and the rest of the band was the best thing that could have happened to me. Everything was in the proper place and disability was gone.

The whole experience was truly exhausting. Driving back home from the gig I've spoken a lot, as usual. But I can't remember what I talked about for more than half an hour. My mind was still on the stage. A voice would repeat, over and over, that I shouldn't have gone up the stage to play in those conditions. It was harshly condemning myself for exposing me in that utterly disabled way. But today it has just become clear that as well as with the physical part of my disability, not being disabled is not a choice for me. So writing this text I'm doing what I've learn is my best. I may not be able to make that choice that would definitely change my life in the most profound way. But I can make a sense of this non-choice and in doing so I can lead again. And feeling secure about being the lead and knowing where you're going is the exact opposite feeling of being disabled.

On justice, meritocracy, abuse and stability

Discrimination sometimes feels illogical. Especially considering many of its forms are collectively rejected in terms of validity. Why doesn't it disappear?
My hypothesis ties it closely to meritocracy.

Any living system, be it a cell, an animal or society, has mechanisms for self preservation (homeostasis). The meaning of term in English and Greek describes a conservation of internal environment conditions despite external pressures to change them.

In social systems, this selects general principles that minimize dangerous instabilities. For instance, the establishment of trust among people lowers the collective sum of individual transaction costs, making the whole society more stable.

Abusers usually function like free riders, reaping extra individual surplus from interactions by visibly signalling compliance to social rules and breaking them in hidden mode. The reason they are socially allowed to do that is they are relatively few, thus having a parasite sort of role without compromising social stability.

Which lead me back to meritocracy. It's the basic mechanism that ties individual life meaning and survival strategy to social stability and preservation. In other words, it brings an appearance of justice to current inequalities.

The trick is that current inequalities are not neutral to the rules of the social game, meaning they allow some to systematically play with better cards. But poker is a great analogy in the sense winning can be the product of luck, skill or both. And this uncertainty condition keeps the game stable nature. Players accept this condition and maintain engagement, basically because all of them believe they can win. More than that, they mentally maximize the potential contributions of their efforts over luck because that feels much better than being stuck with random fate. Freedom is sweet, not necessarily true.

Discrimination is a wake up call. It shows the system isn't fair. But as long as that is kept at levels that don't threat the collective weighted illusion of merit and meaning, people will stay engaged and discriminated groups will be treated as acceptable collateral damage for the sake of common good, also known as social stability.

That's why social change such as the rise of women in power requires coordinated group efforts to create social instability and force the system to a new equilibrium point (when rules gradually adapt to accommodate this new state of affairs). Again, this must incorporate a collective sense of merit, otherwise balance won't be achieved. And this is how discrimination and meritocracy relate to each other. They are skill and luck in poker, producing winners and losers in a proportion that won't make too many fall in disbelief and leave the table. Until that happens and the rules are slightly changed for people to come back. And the casino keeps going. Since centuries ago. No predictable end at sight.

Disability matters and the sanity challenge - my tribute to human endless capacity to be unfair

For a long time now, this blog has been a testimonial of growing clarity, serenity and self-awareness. There's absolutely no doubt about the path that has eventually brought me to this new position. However, I feel the pressing need to call the attention to draw backs in that virtuous cycle: It's the power of reality shock. No matter how determined we are or how well supported are our opinions and what we want to do about them, there's always the bitter matter of reality as is.

Maybe that statement will sound insane, but I think that's exactly the point here. We are all used to taking reality as if it was some sort of standard for what is correct. It's quite compelling, natural. For instance, if I say that in the US (or Brazil), the probability of randomly selecting a black person with higher education is much lower than a white one, I'll just be describing reality. The issue is that when one says that, he/she ends up justifying prejudice with the facts of life (thus converting a prejudice into an actual judgement). Same thing applies to disabled people, and all the social groups that are subjected to some sort of exclusion process.

By analogy, the mechanism adopted with the so-called "outliers" by recognizing countless cumulative advantages they've always had as merit has exactly the same nature. In the end, reality will prove they are the best of the best (which will be true for activities like sports, law, corporate stuff, politics, etc). And history will be re-written having that in mind.

Then I have to ask myself with brutal honesty and with no neutral ground to support the weight of doubt: am I crazy for disagreeing with reality. Am I stupid for seeing things differently, not because I want to benefit from bias, but because the world is and has always been trully biased?

The correct answer for that is "yes and no". But reality will give me the treatment it always does to the crazy, the freaks, the outsiders and the crips. And I'll take it, because that's the best for me to do. At the same time there's doubt, there's fire, there's disapointment and desperation. But I need to leave all of them behind, and as society and reality always do I must ignore what I don't want to see. And move on.