Minimal illumination

I went to another event in the Adventures in Consciousness Season, entitled 'Your brain on music' - what happens to our brains when we listen to and experience music? Can we relearn how to experience music and sound for deeper connection? Including a talk from academic and composer Professor Milton Mermikides and a sensory based workshop from renowned arts company Bittersuite.

Right up my street... except not.

Mermikides's talk assumed a lot of previous knowledge and the powerpoint slides were too crammed to be readable or comprehensible. Actually I'm not sure what it was about at all as it was accompanied by the same quiet electronic music as the previous event I went to and I could not concentrate on the words against it. I do realise that this is a consequence of my Sensory Processing 'Disorder' (so-called) and I was going to walk out and leave the others to it but when Bittersuite took over, I asked them to switch it off and they did.

The most interesting part of their presentation was to ask us to keep our eyes closed and call out our answers to their questions. 'What pitch is a lemon: low, medium or high?' Everyone called out 'high'. 'What colour are the curtains in this room?' Various answers. 'How many windows are there in this room?' Various answers. What we could have observed, some of us hadn't. But we were all agreed on a 'nonsensical' question. Interesting.

But then they played five minutes of electronic floaty music before asking us how it made us think and feel. Everyone who responded had been in the sky, or bathing their soul in light, or by the sea, or sensing pulsating colours, or feeling the heartbeat of the universe. I wondered whether there was anyone in the room like me, without a soul, without any ethereal connection to oneness, sitting there feeing irritated and impatient.

I really should have left then but I stayed for a music theory analysis of Beatles songs. I have grade 5 music theory - far, far more than most people, so I thought I'd be OK, but this talk again assumed much more knowledge than I have.

Before the whole thing started I'd been chatting to the woman sitting next to me who'd said she couldn't sing. Now, my hypothesis is that if you can talk you are capable of singing and can almost certainly be taught to sing more or less in tune, and that what blocks people, as with maths, or art, or anything, is being told very young that they are no good. She then disclosed that her mother had said to her, 'If you must play that recorder go and play it in the garden.' So although her daughter is an enthusiastic musician, she has not studied music. And she understood even less than I did of the music theory talk. In fact, nothing.

It's fine to do a lecture targeted at university-level music students, but just tell us before we sign up. Please?