Two kinds of attention

Since retiring, I have had more time to reflect on the way attention works. By and large these days, I am able to choose the objects of my attention. When I worked as an academic, my attention was shaped by tasks, in the form of emails to answer, documents to write, training to undertake, meetings to attend, deadlines to meet, and so on. This kind of attention is purposeful and directed, aiming to achieve things efficiently. You might call it business attention.

Nowadays the objects of my attention are mostly things that I consider particularly interesting. The aim is not so much efficiency as a mixture of creative expression and personal fulfilment. The latter includes a lot of engagement with causes such as aural diversity and autism and is not entirely self-centred. But even so, it emanates from a desire to attend to matters that I deem important, rather than what others deem necessary. 

This has led me to reflect on music, which requires a different kind of attention. In music, we allow time to unfold in a way that is slower, more receptive, less goal-directed. Instead of seeking outcomes, we notice relationships, colours, textures, movements. You might call this musical attention.

The challenging aspect of this while working in academic institutions is the frequent and rapid switching between these two modes, especially for an autistic person with monotropic attention tunnels. The times during my career when I wrote the most music were when (very infrequently!) I had a sabbatical. The creative energies during those periods were intense. During a six-month sabbatical in 1995, for example, I wrote Island Symphony (a 75-minute orchestral work), Les Origines humaines (a 40-minute choral piece), and several other compositions besides.

Most of the time, however, academic life involves moving rapidly between the two modes. One moment we are dealing with administrative systems, budgets, evaluation frameworks, or research metrics. The next we are expected to listen deeply, to think musically, and to imagine sound unfolding through time. We make constant cognitive gear changes: from business time to music time, and back again.

Limnodynastes dumerilii (Pobblebonk). Image © SunOfErat. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

I was reminded of this recently while presenting my project Frog Fizzles to a small group of academics and researchers. I invited them to try a very simple exercise: to notice one aspect of a particular frog (the wonderfully named Pobblebonk) and to respond to it silently for a few seconds. There was no need to make a sound; simply to give it attention.

For a brief while, everybody became very still, and afterwards there was a palpable sense of joy in the room. Nothing visible or audible had changed, yet the atmosphere had shifted. The moment had a distinctly musical quality.

That small experiment captures something important about the spirit of Frog Fizzles. The project invites participants to respond musically to the characteristics of different frog species, such as their colours, calls, habitats, and behaviours. But the responses are intentionally modest. A fizzle might last only a few seconds. It might involve a single gesture, or even a silent mental action. 

The idea of “fizzles” came from Samuel Beckett’s short prose pieces gathered under that title. These are texts that begin, but do not “ignite”. They flicker into existence and then disappear. In a similar spirit, a frog fizzle does not demand development or completion. It simply offers a moment of attention.

In a world increasingly organised around productivity, metrics, and outcomes, the idea that music might begin with something as simple as paying attention can seem quietly radical. Yet it may also be one of the most basic musical acts we possess. 

Sometimes music begins simply with attention.