Work Text:
Branch location: Usher Foundation St. Paul, 470 Western Ave N.
Instance reported by: Karlos Montalban
Reporter initial and date: KTM 5/28/2007
Witness: Celia Grant ID#: 00808
Witness initial and date: CG 2007/05/28
Incident summary: Loss of verbal processing ability in connection with a musical dream.
Description of incident: (attached)
[Transcript begins]
KTM: I’m not going to lie to you. It started out with a dream, but I do genuinely… hear it, while I’m awake.
CG: As long as it wasn’t only a dream, there’s no problem. Please continue.
KTM: Um… I’m going to assume that was you giving me the okay? If you could maybe… give me a thumbs up for yes? Okay. Yeah. Thanks. So, I’ll explain. I’m a musician. It’s sort of a part-time thing, I have a day job that keeps the electricity on but music is really what I live for. So I spend a lot of my free time composing. I have a pretty big following on Soundcloud, you know, so I think I’m pretty good. I mostly do electronic, since recording in my apartment would not be easy—it just has really thin walls and it would annoy my roommates. So I just compose on my headphones and use a lot of synth. Sorry, you look kind of impatient, but this is relevant. The, um, the other thing I want to say is about Giuseppe Tartini.
Yeah, I know, weird, an electronic musician who’s into Baroque music. But, um, he has this really famous sonata called the Devil’s Trill. The story he told is that the devil came to him in a dream and played him the most incredible music. When he woke up he rushed to try to write it down but it kept slipping through his fingers. He did eventually write this fifteen-minute sonata that he claimed was what the devil played him, as close as he could get it. I don’t know if… I don’t know if what I dreamed of was “the devil” or whatever, but it did play music. It played this—
CG: Can you describe what it looked like, in the dream?
KTM: I still can’t understand you.
CG: Sorry. One moment. I’ll write it out.
[a pause of about 15 seconds]
KTM: Oh! Um, I’ll try, but I don’t really know if it did look like anything? It gave this sort of impression of being a, well, a being, like it sort of had a shape, but it was more like it was made of music. Physically made of music. And it… spoke to me. The sound wasn’t like anything I’ve ever heard, it wasn’t like a voice and it wasn’t quite like any one instrument. There’s literally no way I could describe it in words.
CG: What did it—right.
[a pause of about 10 seconds]
KTM: I don’t know exactly what it said, like, it doesn’t translate into words. It’s more like the way I hear you, where I can kind of tell the emotion that you’re trying to communicate. It was, uh, a complicated emotion. Like it was… offering me something? Or it wanted something from me? It seemed like it was trying to be friendly, but it was actually a little unsettling. It’s always going to be unsettling when your entire understanding of the world is getting rearranged, even if you’re asleep. But the sounds it was making were like sunrise breaking in my brain, like this whole new universe of possibilities I’d never even imagined for music. I woke up and I knew I had to capture it, I had to figure out how to make those sounds before they drained out of my brain like water through a sieve. And it was hard. It’s not like the important part was the melody, which, I could have at least hummed that and recorded it on my phone. I had to try to make those noises with my mouth, which really didn’t work. But it turned out I had a harder time forgetting those noises than I thought I would. They’ve stayed clear in my mind ever since four months ago. So clear that I’m sure I’m remembering them perfectly, but that only makes it more frustrating that I can’t recreate them in reality.
That first day was a weekend, thankfully, and since I’m, well, I was a programmer, I didn’t have to work on weekends, and I could spend all day trying to bring that music into the waking world. One of my roommates genuinely thought I wasn’t home at all, and I don’t think I ate that day. There were a lot of days when I didn’t eat. I still made myself go to work, but I was distracted a lot and I would leave as soon as I possibly could to go back to working on the dream music. The more I worked on it the closer I got, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I started sampling other kinds of sounds, like creaking metal, wine corks, even eventually human voices. The more things I could layer over each other the more it sounded right. The weird side effect was that I started to hear things, uh, mostly I heard them as their part in the music. It’s hard to describe. But I would hear someone open a door and I would immediately be trying to map where that sound fit into the music. I would hear people talking and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what they were saying because I was trying to map where it would fit into the music. I bet you can see where this is going.
The point of no return, as it were, was about two weeks ago. I was hanging out with my roommate Dan and his girlfriend. At that point I’d been having more and more trouble being normal. Like everyone could tell I was distracted, that I was having to concentrate really hard to tell what people were saying. I was trying not to let it show, but I used to talk a lot and now it was taking more and more effort to process anything in time to say something relevant. They were talking about a video game they wanted me to play, it was a, um, a first person shooter they were into, and I think they were trying to be nice to me by acting like nothing was wrong with me. Dan’s girlfriend was describing one of her favorite missions and I really was trying to pay attention. But it was like her words were coming in and out of focus. I’d miss whole sentences because the music would kind of come up and overwhelm them. And then it would fade out and I could hear her talking about something clever she did with the cover mechanic. And then it would fade back up and I was watching her lips move and shaping these incredible sounds that, in that moment, they were completely alien to me, like I was hearing them for the first time. My whole body kept breaking out in a cold sweat like waves of hot and cold were washing over me. And then… the music didn’t fade out. I was still staring at Lina but I couldn’t get anything except excitement, self-satisfaction. And slowly I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to understand words ever again.
I think I had a panic attack. Like my eyes started burning and my breathing started doing this bizarre wheezing thing and all I could think was about the rhythm of my breathing, and how interesting it was that breathing never usually sounded like this. I was freaking out but my brain kept overriding itself to only hear the music so I was in this weird state of half-panicking, half-composing. I don’t remember very much of that day. Only that I’ve stopped being able to hear anything and think of it as… not being the music. The music contains every possible sound in it, even if it’s just a tiny, tiny bit. It’s infinite. And everything I hear is just a part of it. Everything I hear… is music. Of course that’s not great for my job. I stopped being able to understand what my boss was asking me to do unless he emailed me. He thought I was going deaf. And sure, that’s not insurmountable, deaf people can be programmers. Technically I guess I’m on medical leave right now, but it’s not like any doctor is going to be able to understand this. They all just think I’m having some kind of extreme synesthaesia and keep referring me to more and more specialized specialists. I can’t talk to anyone, really, and it’s isolating. It’s made me a freak, which when I can bring myself to care is really scary. I think my roommates are talking about kicking me out. Their conversations kind of have this tone like they’re looking at me, or thinking about me, and they don’t want me to know. This musical devil has completely ruined my life.
But I still can’t regret it. Because I’m surrounded by music 24/7. It’s everywhere—it’s everything. Nobody else could possibly understand that. I just wish… hell, I wish we had to learn ASL in school, you know? Even if I learned it now, nobody else would, so I wouldn’t be able to talk to them anyway. And nobody wants to take the time to type so I can understand them. I just… it’s frustrating. Terrifying, sometimes, that I’ll never be able to understand spoken language again. But I wouldn’t trade it. If I’d never heard the music, what would I be? My existence would be completely pointless. Hollow. Maybe I don’t need to talk to anyone. Maybe I can just keep getting closer and closer to bringing the music here into the world, and then when I finally have it…
[a pause of about 15 seconds]
KTM: Yeah. I bring it with me everywhere. I have the current draft on my phone, although the speakers aren’t great. Let me pull it up.
[a pause of about 15 seconds. The music plays for 50 seconds before CG speaks, and continues until the end of the recording.]
CG: What the fuck. What the fuck. What the hell.
KTM: I know, right?
CG: No, no, this is—please turn it off. [sounds of a chair being knocked over, a struggle] Please, please, turn it off. Stop it!
[Transcript ends]
Followup:
The tape containing the full audio of this interview has been put in the locked storage, since it has the potential to be dangerous to anyone who listens to it. Researchers should be granted access only if they can prove they have never been a musical composer, audio engineer, or related work, and only if they have a compelling reason. Interviews with Montalban’s roommates confirm that he began to have difficulty understanding spoken language around mid-April and went on medical leave the week of May 14th. Other than that, this report is difficult to corroborate because so much of it is subjective experience.
Recommendation: keep. There’s something unexplainable about the recording and its effect on anyone who listens to it.
A.J.M. 2007/06/04