Music and this guy called 'McGurk'

The McGurk effect. That's what it's called.

You may not have heard of it, but if you have good use of both your sight and your hearing, you will be affected by it. Was sitting in the 'Introduction to Psychology' tutorial today and we discussed the McGurk effect. The tutor first let us watch a video where there was a man who started repeating a sound over and over again. The man was mouthing 'ga' but the sound that was played to us was 'ba' and the result we were supposed to get was 'da' as the brain tries to resolve how someone can say 'ba' while mouthing 'ga'.

The tutor explained that most of the time, as a time-saving measure, the brain tries to shortcut by picking up cues from multiple senses simultaneously. The McGurk effect is simply an illustration of how the brain, receiving audio input but at the same time receiving conflicting visual cues, can be misled into thinking a sound is different from what it really is.

That got me thinking about performing and live performances. As any good musician knows, the performance is not just about the sound, but also the gestures. That expression on your face just before you start, or the contortion of the face while you try to express the pain in the music... It all adds up. Musicianship isn't only about sound. A large component is also about being an actor, of sorts, at least. The music itself cannot always speak, but with these additional visual cues, can send a message more powerful than just with the sound itself.

Why is a live performance almost always better than a CD recording? Other than the general atmosphere, the better acoustics... I think this is definitely a contributing factor. One of my teachers, once talked about a percussionist from the MPO. He said that for this percussionist, when he is about to play, his body language when he is about to hit the timpani, or simply his expression... You can just know that the sound is going to be big, or small, as the case may be. Maybe it's like someone telling you that a sound should be big, that when you actually hear the sound, even though it's not really big, you think it is.

Obviously it's not just percussionists which make use of this, because many other instruments use it too. For harpists, we definitely use it. The other time when Marie-Pierre Langlamet gave a masterclass she talked a lot about the whole sound concept, since we have so much trouble with it. Harps have so much sustain that we are not always able to stop when we want it to. On the other hand, when we do want to sustain something, like a chord, we can't sustain it for as along as the string, wind and brass instruments. So, we cheat. It's not just the expression on our face, but the way in which we extend out our arm in an arc after playing a note... These are all gestures which all add up, leading audiences to think that a certain sound is different from what they actually hear. Harpsichordists probably rely most on the McGurk effect, since they have the toughest life of all. Their instrument is mostly incapable of sustain, and the range of their dynamics is severely limited. However, their performances are anything but unmusical. You see, they have so many thousand tricks up their sleeve that it would be too much to list them all down here. Anyway I think you get the point by now.