Amy Martin makes songs, stories and community with smart, sparky, creative people. Here is the full transcript of Amy’s TEDx Talk titled ‘Tuning In: Listening as a Survival Tool’ at TEDxUMontana conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Tuning In – Listening as a Survival Tool by Amy Martin at TEDxUMontana
TRANSCRIPT:
I think I learned the key to the survival of our species in 4th grade band. It started on that special night when we got to come into the band room and pick out which instruments we wanted to play. I was leaning toward the flute, but Mr. Becker, the band teacher, told me he thought I should try the trumpet.
When I asked him why, he said, “Well, you know, trumpets are loud, they’re right out front, they often carry the melody, trumpets are good for people who like to be heard, and I think you like to be heard.”
And I thought, this guy gets me.
So, I took his advice, and it turned out, he was right. Not only about the trumpet, which I loved, but about me. I do like to be heard. I went on to become a songwriter and a performer, getting myself heard on stages and recordings. Then I started a community music organization because I wanted other people to feel the power of getting their voices heard.
And now I’m working as a radio producer and a podcaster, and clearly, I like the microphone, I’m giving a TEDx talk, right?
I like to be heard. I need to be heard. And I think we all need to be heard. But here is the thing, back in 4th grade, Mr. Becker taught me that if I wanted to become a good trumpet player, I had to have more than a lot of wind and power. What was most important, he said, was to become an excellent listener.
You see, with brass instruments, tiny little movements in your lips change the pitch you’re producing. So he taught me to be constantly listening to myself and to the group. Attuning to them, and blending the sounds I was making with the sounds I was hearing. This lesson has been repeated in every ensemble I’ve been a part of since: formal choirs, and backyard jams, recording sessions, and band practices. We think of these as groups of people who are getting together to generate sound, and they are. But what might be harder to see is that they’re also communities of listeners. Because every sound we put out as musicians is completely intertwined with what we’re simultaneously taking in. In fact, output and input, are one dynamic process.
Or in other words, getting heard is about hearing. Language is about listening, and if I wanted to be part of the group, I had to tune into the group. That’s what I started to learn in 4th grade, and that’s the concept which I think might hold the key to our survival as a species.
Now, to get inside this idea, I want you to leap with me from 4th grade band to a slightly larger ensemble, the planet. And I want to ask you, how many sounds did you hear today which were made by something other than human beings? Did you hear the voices of any other creatures? Did you hear water or wind? The primary thing we listen to all day long is ourselves. And we think of this as normal these days, but it’s actually really strange.
Homo-sapiens have been walking around for about 200,000 years, but only in the last century or two, have we come to dominate the conversation so completely. If this planet were a jazz combo, we’d be the annoying saxophone player who won’t quit taking a solo. We’re ruining the gig, man.
And it’s not only annoying, it’s damaging. Scientists around the world have documented how everything, from whales, to bats, is suffering under our assault of noise. We know that we’re causing harm to other life forms, but we’re also endangering ourselves, because in this global orchestra, megalomaniacs are not tolerated. They get weeded out. It’s basic evolutionary biology.
When Darwin coined the term, survival of the fittest, he wasn’t saying that the biggest, meanest, loudest, species always wins. He was talking about fitting in. His insight was that the species which attuned themselves to their environments and pass on that attunement to their offspring, are the ones who survive, and those who go tone-deaf to their ecosystems, die.
So, we’re doomed, right? We’re the self-centered jerks of this ensemble, we might as well just resign ourselves to going down in a blaze of egomaniacal self-destruction. End of talk, thank you very much.
Not so fast. For one thing, there’s like 10 minutes left on the clock and I’m going to use it. And for another, I think our situation is actually much more hopeful than that because we never would have made it this far if good listening weren’t encoded into our genes. We’re meant to listen, not only to each other, but to the whole ensemble, the languages of other creatures, and the musics of our places. Listening always has been and still is, an essential survival tool, and today I’d like us to consider what might happen if we picked up that tool again, and used it, and honed it.
Let’s imagine a world in which we define ourselves not just as a speaking species, but a listening species, and let’s start with the immediate future, the next generation.
Right now, I’m developing a podcast called Learning Their Place, which involves talking to young people all over the country about their relationships with nature. This is the generation that often gets written off as self-centered, and tech-obsessed, but listen to these 11 and 12 year olds, who just got back from their first big, overnight, outdoor adventure.
[Audio: Nature has a calming effect on people and I think being out in nature also helps people open up more. You could hear the river going by and it was really peaceful. I want to move to a place with not many cars in it, because I don’t like waking up and hearing the cars, or trying to go to sleep, hearing the cars, probably like in the woods, where it’s silent, and only hearing nature around.]
Those are kids from Oakland and Seattle, and their comments are being echoed by almost every young person I’ve talked to.
Kids get it. Walking around, talking to ourselves all day, that’s a sign of mental illness. And they are relieved to step out of that anxious state, and to tune into something larger than themselves. The problem isn’t that our youth are self-absorbed. It’s that we, as a species, are self-absorbed, and we’re making a planet that is harder, that enhances the self-absorption because we’re making it harder, and harder, to hear the other members of our planetary chorus.
But what if we made a conscious choice to reverse this trend? What if we surrounded our schools with native plants, which attracted native animals, which created soundscapes that every young person walked through, and played in, and listened to all day long? What if the common core included two weeks of outdoor immersion learning for every student in the nation, guaranteeing that no one graduated high school without having gone on a backpacking trip, or worked on a farm, or help to restore a watershed? Just two weeks out of 18 years, we can do that, right?
And if you think it’s too hard, I invite you to talk to some of the teachers of the kids you just heard, because they’re making it happen in districts where more than 70% of the families are living below the poverty line, and they could tell you how just a few nights in a quiet place can change a kid’s life forever.
Our young people are ready and willing to help us become a species of smart, sensitive, listeners, if we give them the chance. Some of them might follow in the footsteps of people like Dr. Denise Herzing. She works with a pod of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the open ocean, recording them, and decoding their expressions, and she’s learned the signature whistles for different individual dolphins.
What’s a signature whistle? It’s a name. Not Flipper, but… yeah, that was it. That’s actually a dolphin introducing herself. Dr. Herzing sent me that recording for this talk. We’ve never done this before. We’ve never known what a creature calls itself in its own language, and consider the profound difference between naming something, and calling someone by name. If I name you, I assume you don’t have a name for yourself, or if you do, I don’t care. My voice is the only one that matters to me, but if I strive to learn your name, to identify you as you identify yourself, I recognize that you have a voice, and I want to hear it. I’m showing up as a listener.
I see this paradigm shift in the work of another scientist, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who’s broken new ground in her efforts to communicate with some of our closest relatives, the bonobos. She too, seems to have started from a listening place, willing to consider that these big-brained primates just might have something to say, and then she spent 30 years building channels through which language could flow both ways.
These are just two of the amazing pioneers in this new world of inter-species communication. Who knows how far we could go if we funded and celebrated our listeners as much or more than, our speech makers? I mean, maybe someday, we’ll be able to call a bonobo on the telephone and have a real time conversation, with interpreters like they do at the UN, you know. In fact, maybe we can get the bonobos to consult at the UN. Or better, Congress.
Maybe someday, we’ll all have apps that we carry around that translate from whale or elephant to raven language, incorporating their languages and their worldviews into our daily lives, and animals are just the beginning. Other scientists are learning how to listen to plants and oceans, and ice, and stars. We could be at the dawn of a new era, like the people in Galileo’s time. In 400 years we could look back and be amazed at what we didn’t know, simply because we hadn’t yet learned how to listen well enough. We might laugh at the idea that we ever thought that we were ever at the center of the linguistic universe, and we might shudder at our ignorance, and our arrogance, and its consequences.
Let’s not wait until it’s too late before we realize that our voices aren’t the only important ones in the room, or the forest. Let’s make listening our future because it certainly is our past. When we’re tuning into a redwood tree or a rhinoceros, or a red-spotted toad, it’s not just some fun little diversion or the polite way to be, we’re doing important work that our species has been doing for millenia.
This might seem counter-intuitive because we tend to think of our hominid ancestors as these selfish, combative, brutes, not wonderful listeners, but primatologist Frans de Waal, says the real story is actually much more nuanced. He spent decades researching chimps and bonobos, and he’s observed that their abilities to connect, and collaborate, and feel empathy, are just as important, if not more important than their chest-beating, ego-centric tendencies. He points out that humans and most other great apes, are social and in order to get anything done, we need to be able to work in a team. And in his beautifully titled book, The Age of Empathy, he writes “effective cooperation requires being exquisitely in tune with the emotional states and goals of others.” He’s talking about listening. Whether we’re rearing our young, or bringing down prey, or sealing a deal, effective cooperation requires being exquisitely in tune. Our receptive powers and expressive abilities have to evolve together. We can’t develop one side of that equation, and ignore the other.
You know, back in 4th grade, it was so exciting when I started to get this. All I had to do was listen, and suddenly I was valuable, I could contribute, I belonged. There was nothing wrong with that desire I had to get myself heard, as long as it was matched by an equal desire to listen. Listening was this magic key that allowed me to make music, instead of just making noise, and we have that power as a species. We can bring ourselves into harmony with this planet, if we decide to.
Unfortunately, right now we really do seem to think that the whole gig is about us. In fact, we think of ourselves in one category, and everything else, we call, the natural world. But, there is no human world and natural world. There’s just the world, and listening to it is our birthright.
What might our future be like if we defined ourselves as a listening species? Well, our children are telling us, it would calm us down, and animals are showing us how it could wake us up. Evolutionary biologists are telling us that it would return us to something essential in our nature. And maybe that’s why it just feels so good. Deep listening is deeply satisfying because it’s who we are. This is called a rest.
When you see it on a musical score, it just says, hush. You’re still important, you’ll get another turn! But for right now, just rest and listen. I wonder if we could do that as a species. I wonder if we could do it right now in this room. Let’s just take a few seconds to rest and listen.
[Nature sounds]
That was less than 30 seconds. I challenge you and myself to find just 30 seconds, every day, to tune into this amazing ensemble that we’re so lucky to be born into. I believe that that one, simple act has the power to enhance our individual well-being and improve our chances for collective survival.
Thank you.
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