Lois Svard

Author: Lois Svard

  • Are you listening to the music – or watching the performer?

    Imagine being Brahms in 1889 and being the first composer/performer to be able to hear a recording of your own playing, as well as hearing your own voice.  Granted, the quality of the wax cylinder was terrible, but hearing a piano performance coming from a machine, rather than producing it yourself or seeing it being produced by…

  • Triple axels and the piano

    A few years ago, a composer who was writing a piece for me commented at one of our rehearsals that he wanted the audience to breathe the same collective “Aah!” at the end of the work as they do when a figure skater lands a flawless triple axel.  We were in the middle of the…

  • Music makes you smarter – or maybe not

    Twenty years ago, the press had a field day with a small study published by a California researcher, much to the surprise of the author.   The public’s imagination was caught by headlines that proclaimed “Listening to Mozart Makes You Smarter,”  or “Music Makes You Smart.”  An entire industry grew from the idea that listening to…

  • Want perfect pitch? Maybe you can take a pill

    If you’re like I am, you may have thought half-heartedly about making a New Year’s resolution or two.  But one New Year’s resolution that wouldn’t occur to most musicians is to resolve to acquire perfect (absolute) pitch – if we don’t already have it.  There are no documented cases of an adult ever being able to…

  • Seeing sounds, hearing colors, part IV

    We are in a holiday season during which many of us will eat too much, so I have been quite delighted to discover that for one synesthete, a major sixth tastes like low-fat cream – as opposed to a minor sixth that tastes like regular cream, or a major third that tastes sweet.  Don’t you…

  • Seeing sounds, hearing colors, part III

    Tom tells me that my voice is yellow when he speaks to me in person, but is a bright green on the phone.  I’m not sure what I think about having a yellow voice, or even a bright green one.  While I hear voices as lighter or darker, throaty, wispy, husky, gravelly, etc., and I…