Hampshire College

• Listening and the Brain

• 'Adventures of a Kid'

• 'Greasy Rider — The Movie'

• Special Div III issue of college newsletter

 

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 Listening and the Brain 
 

 
In his first semester as a student at Hampshire College, Mark Blumberg had an experience that would ultimately shape his academic career. Suddenly, and without warning, Blumberg lost hearing in his left ear.

That would frighten anyone, but was perhaps even more disturbing for Blumberg, a vocalist who had transferred to Hampshire from Westminster Choir College. “All I could hear in my left ear was static and white noise,” he recalled. “It was absolutely terrifying.” Diagnosed with Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss, Blumberg took steroids to reduce cochlear inflammation and the condition cleared up. But Blumberg’s curiosity didn’t. He found books on the subject and became interested in hearing loss. “I was intrigued by how low levels of hearing perception can affect everything else in life,” he said. “It dawned on me that it might be a worthwhile thing to study.”

Blumberg had taken a class called Music, Brain, and Development with Neil Stillings, dean of the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire. In that class, students investigate how psychological processes involved in music perception and learning relate to activity in various areas of the brain.

“I was focusing at that point on how music is born in the brain,” Blumberg said. He came across a listserv of cochlear implant (CI) users and was intrigued by a submission from Ray Goldsworthy, a CI user and then-doctoral candidate at MIT and Harvard. Goldsworthy lost his hearing to meningitis at age 12, and a year later was fitted with a cochlear implant, a medical device that bypasses damaged structures in the inner ear and directly stimulates the auditory nerve, allowing some deaf people to learn to hear and interpret sounds and speech. An amateur musician, Goldsworthy had queried the listserv suggesting that music students make scales that could be more easily perceived by CI users, who have diminished capacity to recognize variations in tone and harmony.

Blumberg contacted Goldsworthy and together they hatched an idea for Blumberg’s Div III: a test that would assess whether music training helps CI users discriminate between frequencies of sound. Blumberg titled the project Music as a Rehabilitative Tool for Cochlear Implant Users.

He traveled to MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics each week for three months, where he taught two CI users how to play piano. Participants worked with a voice teacher weekly, studying Indian classical music, which has simpler melodies that are easier to comprehend, and one also played guitar. Blumberg administered monthly computerized psychoacoustic tests to determine whether the music training was improving the participants’ ability to decipher differences in pitch.

Professor Stillings agreed to chair Blumberg’s Division III faculty committee, which also included cognitive neuroscientist Jane Couperus and Goldsworthy. “It is a testimony to Hampshire's educational system that we turn out students like Mark, who, in order to do his project, had to get access to a high-powered research laboratory at MIT and work effectively among a group of graduate students and post-docs,” said Stillings. “At the beginning he didn't know very much about the nuts and bolts of the kind of psycho-acoustic testing that goes on in that lab, but he knew what his question was and how he wanted to pursue it. I think they must have figured out pretty quickly that he was for real and would be able to learn their techniques.”

CI technology has improved dramatically over the years, but still has its problems. “There are distinct limitations in the performance of many users,” Blumberg said. Some can speak on the phone while others comprehend very little and must rely on lip reading. “Part of this is due to the heavy reliance the implant has on the brain’s learning how to use it, a process greatly facilitated by training. Access to rehabilitation programs, which include training with speech and music, has been deemed crucial by many audiologists.” Music training seems to help CI users bridge the gaps in frequency perception.

One of the two participants in Blumberg’s study, who became deaf at a young age, but was implanted with the CI much later, did not perform well on the test. The other became deaf later in life and already had language ability. “His recognition of pure tone frequency improved, which is the recognition of one sine wave at a time,” Blumberg said. In that case, the CI user was playing guitar, and was able to discern notes played on one string, as opposed to differentiating from notes on a piano, which has multiple strings and is more difficult to comprehend. In both cases, however, the participant’s ability to play piano, and their perception of that ability, improved dramatically. Blumberg believes this supports the concept of neural plasticity, the propensity of the brain and parts of the nervous system to adapt to injury or new conditions, including new acoustic environments. He said music rehabilitation might be even more successful in improving hearing among CI users than speech therapy because “it is exercising something more direct” in the brain and doesn’t feel like treatment.

In addition to the testing at MIT, Blumberg visited a kindergarten music class at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, where many students are CI users. Blumberg hopes his project will prompt further study of music rehabilitation among cochlear implant users.

He has presented his research on numerous occasions, including at the Music and Mind Symposium at Harvard University, a conference of the Consortium of Innovative Environments in Learning (CIEL), and as a Div III presentation on the Hampshire campus.

“In spite of my confidence in Mark, I have to admit that I got a little worried when he was invited to speak this spring at a conference featuring many of the top people in auditory and music perception,” said Stillings. “But, of course, he rose to that occasion as well. What still mystifies me is where he found the time to rehearse for a complete performance of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, given on the day he passed his Division III. That's a solid hour of singing, in German, from memory.”

Blumberg followed diverse interests while at Hampshire, including voice training, philosophy, theater, film, music, and ultimately, neuroscience and cognitive science, first exploring neuroaesthetics before engaging in more empirical study. “I came to Hampshire because I was looking for a dynamic creative atmosphere, a place that really engages students from the get-go,” he said.

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"...when imagination and reality were seamless."
On the outside, Freddie may look like “a dumpy little kid in a hoodie, shorts, and sneakers,” as her creator describes her. Inside, she teems with ideas and imagination: Observing the world around her—grownups fighting, schoolmates playing, city streets, museums—she blends it with fantastical animals and forms—mammoths, dinosaurs, manta rays, surrealistic creatures—into her own unique internal reality.

Hampshire College alum Melissa Mendes, who graduated May 20, brought Freddie to life in her Division III (senior project), a graphic novel titled Adventures of a Kid. Through the character Mendes explores her own ideas about childhood. Without ever uttering a word, Freddie gives the “reader” a child’s eye view of such overwhelming topics as divorce, isolation, and wonder.

Hancock, Massachusetts, native Mendes understands Freddie as her “embodied childhood, the kid inside of me who never grew up and is still exploring and living in a fantasy world. I keep in touch with that child by drawing.” But Freddie is also every child: “She’s me, in a way, but she’s also anyone else who’s ever been a kid,” said Mendes.    
Education and linguistics were Mendes’s areas of concentration in Division II. After spending a semester of field study last year at Massachusetts College of Art and interning last summer at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, she chose to use the Division III to create a narrative in pictures presented in book form. She also wanted the opportunity to explore her own creative process while working on a long-term independent project.

Freddie first emerged in drawings and collages Mendes created for courses she was taking in Figuring Abstraction and in Dada and Surrealist Visions. The character then drove the narrative.

Among influences Mendes cites are children’s book author Maurice Sendak, illustrators Rockwell Kent and Edward Gorey, comics from Peanuts to Love & Rockets, and etchings by artists such as Albrecht Durer.

Bill Brayton, dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College, said that Mendes’s rigorous studio practice, powerful imagery, and creation of the student-run Hampshire Comics Collective effectively reshaped how comic book art is perceived at Hampshire. “She fused the intertwined histories and creative opportunities of drawing and comic book art into a visually rich personal landscape of characters and environments,” Brayton explained. “Her wordless stories disarm the viewer with ideas and emotions and take us all back to a time when imagination and reality were seamless.”

Art professors Brayton and Thom Haxo (chair) served as Mendes’s faculty committee for the Division III. During her four years at Hampshire, she also took courses at all the other Five College schools (Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts).    
For her Division III art show in the college gallery in late April, Mendes created a series of larger wall pieces from the smaller pen-and-ink drawings in The adventures of a Kid, and wrote a retrospective analysis of her creative process and growth during the project.

“In the end, constantly drawing and creating was more important to me than having the final product of a distributable book,” she wrote. She plans an Adventures of a Kid series. “Through the Div III process I grew more confident in my abilities as an artist, and in my commitment to the comic art world. I’ve come to look at my Div III as less of a culmination of my studies at Hampshire and more as a starting point for the rest of my life.”  

 
Mendes will work this summer in nearby Northampton at Mirage Studios, creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, and is applying for a grant to make and distribute copies of Adventures of a Kid.

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