Your Affection in Every Sound Projection

This is the English translation of my Japanese article to appear in Nikkan San on January 9th, 2022, as a part of my bi-weekly column, “The Way of the Pianist.”

I imagine that most readers of this paper have had some experience struggling with language barriers. I am no exception. When I first came to the States as a thirteen-year-old, I only knew two sentences I could utter with any semblance of confidence: “Where is the bathroom?” and “I am hungry.” And as an adult, my struggles with language barriers continued as my concert tours took me to places in the world where English speakers were the minority: Macedonia, Bolivia, Hungary, Korea, etc. The need to communicate with someone I do not share a common language comes up periodically. With wide open eyes, exaggerated vocal inflections, hand gestures, and over-pronunciations, more often than not, we end with some degree of understanding, shared smiles and a great sense of comradery. These make up some of the best memories from my world travels.

If you said “kiki” was the sharp shape to the left, and “bouba” was the rounder shape to the right, you are with over 95% of the world population, including pre-lingual babies. According to CalTech Professor Shinsuke (Shin) Shimojo’s book “Subliminal Impact (Available only in Japanese under the title サブリミナル・インパクト：情動と潜在認知の現在)” (2008), similar observations can be made about our natural languages, too. For example, we open our mouth to say “large (grande, in French)” and close to say “small (petite).” As a summation of many other similar observations, he concludes that languages are outcomes of emotive exclamations. He posits that that probably was the shared root for both language and music.

So, I posit that you can put as much feelings into the words you pronounce as the feelings you put into the fingers on your instrument. That may be the key to transcending our barriers and gaps, lingual and others. Project your affections onto your good mornings, thanks, and how are yous. That would lead to more smiles worldwide!