How I Learned to hear Tool
By FARHA GUERRERO
Some time ago, my family and I were driving home on the Sea to Sky Highway late at night. Our son was coming back from university for fall break. He wanted me to listen to a song from a band he had discovered. He handed me one of his earbuds and explained that their music was unique; it was built on mathematical ratios of time, odd time signatures, and long unfolding song structures.
My first exposure to Tool was through that single earbud, but I wasn’t initially drawn in. Music isn’t as much a part of my life as words are, and so I often associate music more with memory than with the listening experience.
My son's playing of Tool on subsequent drives also didn’t change much. In fact, the progressive rock band, to me, seemed elusive, and many songs later, the same feeling stayed.
But then, strangely, one day, something switched. We were on our way in the car to visit my father and about to turn off Highway 1, and this song, Invincible, felt as though it had finally pulled me in and under.
I remember saying to my son, “This feels so cinematic.” It felt like an experience more than a song.
There was something unique about this later listening, and I now know that its uniqueness might have had something to do with a musical phenomenon called polyrhythm and the intense rhythmic layering that often accompanies it.
A polyrhythm, in its plainest terms, can be seen in musical notation, but heard simply as two or more contrasting rhythmic patterns happening at the same time, each dividing time in a different way. So at first, one may not feel entirely comfortable, because there’s a sort of off-kilter, almost off-putting sound to them.
And yet, as time passed, as I experienced with Tool, one hears rhythms that seem almost to fuse and amalgamate as one.
The rhythmic nature of their music allows one's mind to drift inwards, and the effect is not dwelling within words, as many songs can be to a writer. There is almost this feeling of something transcendental happening inside oneself.
It was certainly a curious thing for me to have disliked a band, only to realize that with the passage of time and repetition of listening to these complex rhythms, I would be so fond of them.
This small chapter in my life certainly raised many questions, and one of them was trying to understand why. Were polyrhythms part of this effect?
I also have experimented with listening to Tool while riding my bike. Normally, the sound of my heartbeat and steady pulse are what I hear while climbing steep mountain roads. But with Tool, the sound of my heart is exchanged with contrasting rhythmic patterns.
And that effect is interesting because, if I am fatigued, the music often carries me forward.
Yesterday while on my bike, Tool gave me exactly what I needed, because a ride in the midday sun is tiring on a mountain climb.
The most interesting effect of their music was on the downhill, when one of their songs, Wings for Marie, had ended in a whispering-like sound — or maybe it was thunder. Because I was biking down at fast speed, the mountain wind was audible, and because the rhythms and beats had paused, the wind sound, at least to my ears, felt as if it was part of the music.
A beautiful layer of complexity that only nature could bring into a song.
For anyone interested in learning more about the complexity of polyrhythms, Ève Poudrier and Daniel Shanahan’s article The cognitive, affective, and motoric correlates of rhythmic complexity offers a scholarly entry point.