I've just turned off the water in the shower at the gym when I hear him scat singing. Sha doob da wah. Sha doob da wah-ee wah.
He has a casual authority with the phrasing; a little lilt, a little parodic grunt in the low end as he cruises through a blues scale. There's something in his phrasing that leads me to believe he thinks he's alone. So I stand very still, listening--eavesdropping--as he winds the melody up again and lets it unspool in the friendly acoustics of the tiled space. He's good, better than your average church choir soloist; like a master woodcarver idly whittling, there's something exquisite in those long shaved curling notes.
I've stood behind the plastic curtain long and quietly enough to make my emergence awkward; so I wait a few seconds until he glides out of the locker room. I hear a heavy door sigh open; I hear the smoke and silk voice trailing down the hall before being extinguished by the hydraulic closer seating the seal. Were I a better person I might hurry after him just to tell him how freaking beautiful he is, but guys don't do that, especially not in places where they go to sweat.
I'll catch him again, and smile and nod, and if I'm feeling bold ask him about his singing. But I probably won't, because if he sees me he probably won't sing. Still, I think there has to be a story behind that voice.
Only there doesn't, because we find genuinely great voices sprinkled here and there throughout our society. Every office I've ever worked in has had one or two.
Though I'm not sure I agree with the YouTube entrepreneurs who assure us that "anyone can sing," I do believe that most of us can, or could if we applied ourselves. While there are an increasing number of authorities who insist there's no such thing as true tone deafness, the consensus seems to be that a small percentage of the population, no more than 4 percent and probably a lot less--suffer from congenital amusia. There's nothing anyone can do about it. It's like being color-blind; some pieces were missing from the tool kit you were issued at birth.
Tone deafness obviously imposes certain parameters on one's experience of the world--it's a kind of blinkering--but all of us perceive the world in different ways. We're selective about the stumuli we react to; we're a product of our environment, our culture.
As a color-blind person I will tell you it has never stopped me from doing anything other than becoming a pilot. (I tried to bluff my way through a Civil Air Patrol exam where I had to distinguish between red and green flashing lights. It's probably a good thing that I couldn't.) It just doesn't come up all that often. Except when I forgot the pink pants I hadn't worn for years were pink pants and wore them again.
(I should donate them to Goodwill. Let some other color-blind person score a bargain.)
I wouldn't know I was color-blind if no one ever told me. In fact, I can almost disbelieve in my own color-blindness; I see the world just fine. But I remember long ago I took a physical where I was asked to divide a big pile of yarn into smaller red, green and brown piles. I shrugged, because every piece of yarn in the pile looked exactly the same to me. When I finished, the test administrator, who obviously was not overly concerned with my self-esteem, laughed and started calling his colleagues over to look at what I'd done.
Which is fine. We all need to know our limitations.
Still, I imagine being tone-deaf is like being color-blind in that the afflicted don't find their tone deafness frustrating--they're perfectly happy with the way they sound when they sing--it's the reactions of others that inform them of their limitations.
And sometimes that doesn't work. A movie was made about Florence Foster Jenkins; 15 years ago a UC Berkeley engineering student named William Hung enjoyed far more than 15 minutes of fame after being bluntly told he couldn't sing on a reality TV show. (While Hung's "stardom" seemed to be uncomfortably rooted in the unseemly enjoyment of the nerdy Asian stereotype he embodied--broad accent, indifference to rhythm or tone--he seemed like a nice man uncreased by cynicism.)
While it's always dangerous for creative people to pay much attention to the opinions of others, all of us have things we're good at, things we're bad at, and things we simply cannot do.
We can get better at things we're bad at; I'm a mediocre musician but have become a lot better over the past few years since I decided to practice and take a few lessons. And while I'll never get better at making the fine distinction between mauve and taupe (or red and green), that doesn't mean I'm immune to Turner and Delacroix.
So I wouldn't assume that a tone-deaf person couldn't take pleasure from the work of Igor Stravinsky or Joe Strummer. I think all of us have a capacity to enjoy music, whether or not we have developed the ability to accurately reproduce the pitches we hear. Music is more than sterile notes anyway; it's rhythm and lyrics and emotional dynamics. Deaf people can appreciate the vibrations. Just because you're not athletic doesn't mean you can't enjoy watching basketball.
Besides, they're probably not tone-deaf anyway, they've just diagnosed themselves as such because they've never trained to recognize intervals or pitches by name. They're not good singers because they don't sing, because they lack confidence, and because they haven't done the informed practice necessary to develop the skill.
It's hard for most people to do most things well. And some things are harder for some people to do than other people. But there's very little we can't be better at if we want to be better. Natural ability counts for a lot, but most things can be learned. If you have the necessary tools in your kit, you can learn to draw or play golf or make music.
You should do those things if you want to. If you don't want to, you should find something else you want to do. Find something you're average or even objectively bad at and get better.
Because, if nothing else, it'll help you appreciate those who are really good.
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Editorial on 08/25/2019