An Interview with Psychologist Sven Hroar Klempe
Sven Hroar Klempe, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in Trondheim, Norway. He's an expert in the field of psychology and musicology.
Tori Steffen: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview series. I'm Tori Steffen, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We are a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders.
I'd like to welcome with us today psychologist Sven Hroar Klempe. Dr. Klempe is a Professor of Psychology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, in Trondheim, Norway. He's an expert in the field of psychology and musicology, and has written several publications on the topic, which includes the book Tracing the Emergence of Psychology, 1520-1750, as well as the book Sound and Reason, which focuses on the conceptualization of sound in a specific context or field.
So, before we get started, could you let us know a little bit more about yourself, Dr. Klempe, and what made you interested in studying both psychology and musicology?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah, that's a good question. The background is, I'm a very interdisciplinary person. When I was young, I was very into mathematics and physics, but also in music during my whole growing up. I think that the main question that I posed myself was, “How come that rational people are doing music? Why do we do music? Why do we sing, when we can talk?” That's the core question.
And therefore, I have since 1970s tried to figure out, to what extent do music communicate? And with this background, I went to Paris in the late '70s, just to investigate semiology and the French philosophy of structuralism, which very much focused on a kind of abstraction of language, by means of defining language in terms of science instead.
Tori Steffen: Great. Yeah, that seems like it would be really interesting to study the French perspective on music.
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, you have an American tradition as well when it comes to Charles Sanders Peirce and his pragmatics, which is also concentrated on semiotics, where he understand logic in terms of semiotics. So, there are two different traditions, in a way, but they merged very much, I would say, in the '80s, '90s.
Tori Steffen: Very interesting. Well, getting down to basics, could you explain for us how music is related to psychology?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah. This is a very intriguing question, especially because we have almost forgotten how interwoven they actually were in the late 19th century. But the best example would be Gestalt psychology.
When Gestalt psychology was established, especially Gestalt qualities from Christian von Ehrenfels, who published in 1890 his answer to that core question in the late 19th century Germany, especially, what is a melody?
And so, they had a lot of discussions about this. They focused very much on the musical aspects, and the answer that Christian von Ehrenfels came up with is very important. He says that if you transpose a melody from one key to another, as from C Major to D Major, then you replace every single pitch with a new one. That means that it cannot be the elements, the tones, that make the melody, because the sounds are the same melody, although you have replaced all the elements. So, what is the answer?
The answer is, quite simply, it is the relation between each tone that form the melody. And in musicology, we have names for this. We call this intervals. But on the other hand, an interval, what is it? It's a kind of empty space between the two tones. So, we fill the space with a relation, also the relation with one with the other. And this is the Gestalt thing. Not only the whole melody, but especially the relationship between each element.
And this is hard to grasp, because we are thinking about the elements all the time, and we think that everything is built up by elements, and we get a whole out of it. But, as a matter of fact, and this is also an important part of the perception and understanding that we are focusing on how they are placed in relation to each other. And this is the important thing, and that is also why the relationship is the most crucial aspect of the experience of things.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, it's definitely learning about the intervals with music. Music is almost its own language.
Sven Hroar Klempe: Definitely. Its own language. Another system, and quite different from language as well. But then, there is more when it comes to the relationship between music and psychology. So, if you take the whole German experimental psychology and look at that, they are focusing on music as main stimuli in their experiments.
Wundt for instance, Wilhelm Wundt, the one that is primarily related to experimental psychology, he had two laboratories, one acoustical and one visual. But in his papers, he primarily refers to the acoustical. And in this acoustical laboratory, he had about 300, 400 tune forks, like you tune the instruments with. And the reason is exactly that he wanted to investigate exactly the relationship between the different tones.
But this tradition goes further back. It was Fechner that started up and introduced the term music as the direct factor. With this, he means that also what experimental psychology wanted to focus on was exactly the relationship between what is out there, what do we perceive, and our ideas about what we perceive. Because those two things are quite different, very often.
And for instance, if I take this pencil, and I do it like this, I don't know if you see that it's both, but it's hard. So, the experience of the pencil was that it is soft, but it is, from a physical perspective, it is hard.
So, there is a difference between how the nature is out there, the physics, also the physical nature, is out there, and how we perceive it. So, in experimental psychology, the aim was justify the relationship between this.
And when it comes to this pencil, I have a term for it. And also, if I look at pictures and other things, I have terms for this. But what I want to focus on was, how they experience things without putting things into terms. And that is why music is the direct factor, the most important and most interesting, esteemly, because you cannot put music into words.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah. And what you said definitely seems to be related to one's cognition. Have you found any connections in your studies between music and cognition?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yes, absolutely. And we are back to this problem that psychology is maybe focusing too much on language. And especially after the Second World War. Almost all cognitive investigations have focused on language as the bottom line, so to speak, of rationality.
But by focusing on music, we will go beyond language. And what we find immediately, when it comes to music, is that polyphony is a very basic aspect of music. Polyphony means that different tones are sounding at the same time. And this is a quite crucial thing, because in language, there is a kind of mutual exclusion between the words. If I choose one word, I cannot at the same time articulate another word. But if I take the guitar, for instance, I can very easily play two tones at the same time. And the music is based on this. The chords presuppose, so to speak, that I articulate different tones at the same time.
So, we have the capacity of putting things together at the same time. And there are some psychologists that have focused on this. And one is especially Vygotsky, the Russian, Lev Vygotsky. In his thesis on speech and thinking, he demonstrates, very convincingly, how separated thinking and language actually are. In the sense that, well, that the egocentric speech of the child is a kind of preparation for thinking.
It is the same kind of speech that goes into the thinking process. But the thinking process goes in further, in the sense that it focuses on thinking without words, so to speak. So, in our heads, when I'm talking now, I'm trying to take one word at a time and have one point at a time, the one after the other. Whereas in music, we have the capacity of putting things much more together.
Tori Steffen: Yeah. It sounds almost like a subjective point of view. And I was reading your book, Sound and Reason, and you noted that music can have sort of a subjective impact on the listener. Could you explain a little bit about that for our audience?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah, sure. Yeah. And what you are focusing on now is the privacy of music and aesthetic experiences in general.
And it's the same when it comes to music as it is with sexuality, for instance. It is very intimate, private, but also directed towards something different from yourself, also pointing towards the other. And especially when it comes to sound, it goes so deep. So, when you have heard some certain melodies in crucial parts of your life, for instance, when you are a small child, or in the teens, when you are a teenager, you remember these melodies very intensely.
And I remember when David Bowie died six years ago, I think it was, about, and the newspapers in Norway were full of people that wrote about how they mourned so much. But I'm a bit older, so for me, David Bowie was not a big issue for me. So, in my perspective, it was a bit funny to see how a whole generation of journalists and also mourned about this, about David Bowie who passed away.
So, this is for all of us. I have other things in my background that comes up with very intense feelings, back to the early teenager, and also when I was a small child.
And some sound goes so deeply into our memories that this is the core aspect, so to speak, when it comes to memories. But it's not only sound. Also, smell and taste and colors, all the statical impressions that we get, they go so deep into us that we have to deal with this later on during life.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, it makes sense, definitely, that it would have a lasting impact on your memory/cognition, especially from a young age, listening to music.
Sven Hroar Klempe: And this is also an important aspect of... When you look at psychoanalysis, for instance, as Freud started up focusing very much on concepts, the bird representation should reflect a kind of content that was related to your experiences in childhood.
But this is something that Jacques Lacan, for instance, brings a step further, as he makes a very clear distinction between the sound of the word and the content of the word. And this is part of this French structuralistic way of thinking based on Ferdinand De Saussure's, thesis of the arbitrary sign, in the sense that content is completely separated from the sound, so to speak. So, when it comes to how to deal with a neurosis, or also Lacan is more focusing on psychosis, and things like that, the sound of the terms are more important than the content.
Tori Steffen: Yeah. So, we've covered how it could impact one's cognition. Do you think that there's a connection there with music and mental health, and if it might have a role, music in therapy?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think this is a very important thing to pursue, in a sense, especially from this perspective. When focusing on the sum of the word is not just related to mental disorders, but also a part of our everyday use of language. Whenever we talk, we do not complete the sentences always. And the reason is, quite simply, that we want to express different things at the same time.
And, of course, sometimes this makes meaning. Especially when you read poetry, for instance. Also, poetry is characterized especially by exactly this echovocality, that you have the ambiguous aspect of the terms. So, the good poetry, they tell, very often, at least two stories, even three different stories at the same time, by the use of the terms. So, this is a part of our normal life, so to speak, and we enjoy it as well, like we enjoy music and the polyphony in music.
When it comes to different types of disorders, especially the psychosis, it is very much the same, specifically that they are expressing different things at the same time, but they are not able to see exactly the distinction between the different things. So, in that sense, I think it's very important to see how gradually the line between a disorder and an order actually is.
So, in that sense, I think it's very important to, and we have very good experiences, when it comes to how to use music, when it comes for aphasic person, for instance, in the upper CI, if they have a letter on the left hemisphere, for instance, where lose the language, then it's very easy to get in touch by music.
And of course, as the newer scientists say, that the brain is very flexible. You can build up something, but you had to start with something. And then it can build up also the functions in the left hemisphere by activating the right hemisphere by means of music.
So, in that sense, music, not only when it comes to aphasics and psychotics, but everywhere, we use music to get in touch with each other, and that's the point.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, definitely. What you were saying about poetry and music, it's a way to bring different perspectives on topics, and that's very interesting that it might differ between cultures. Do you think music can impact cognition? How might it impact cognition on an intercultural level, would you say?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah, that's an intriguing question. And I think there are two answers that I can come up with. One is that it is very important. First time I was in China, I had a meeting with the Chinese, and we ended up singing folk tunes to each other, my Norwegian and their Chinese folk tunes.
But that was a situation where they knew Chinese folk tunes that followed more or less the same type of tonal systems as I'm familiar with from Norway. But when it comes to music around the world, we'll find very many different systems as well. And one example is for the Lappish people in Norway. So, the traditional music they are singing, when we go 100 years back... How it is today I don't know exactly, but transcriptions 100 years ago, they demonstrated very well how difficult it was to make phrases in this music.
And that is the difference between the western music, which is very exact when it comes to phrasing, that you have a phrase that stops, and it continues with a new one, and so forth. But in the Lappish music, all these phrases, they are going into each other, so to speak. So, they overlap. And that is a kind of implicit polyphony, that you have different phrases that are articulated at the same time.
Like we do in language, in abbreviations, for instance, when we shorten everything, but also blendings: edutainment. Education-entertainment. Edutainment, for instance. And that is exactly what also happens in music. And in music, it's much more natural to do this, that you have these overlaps. It's a part of the system, so to speak, especially because music is polyphonic.
And among the Inuits, for instance, they have a tendency to sing in one beat, let's say 60 beats per minute, or 100 beats per minute, and then they can drum in 91 beats per minute. Also a kind of polyphony that is impossible for me to perform.
So, we have a lot of old cultures that have very intricate musical systems. And this is also an important aspect of the African music, as well, which is very polyphonic.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah. That reminds me of the idea of Structure of Sound. Your book actually pointed out an interesting perspective on that, so I'm going to quote you really quick. "An identifiable structure is a prerequisite for us to be able to experience sound as meaningful." So, how might that idea relate to our topic of cognition or psychology?
Sven Hroar Klempe: This is at a core, in the sense that we have different systems, and that's the point. And we can operate with different systems as well, when it comes to both the way we use language, the way we use music, and whatever. But we have to be familiar with the systems.
So, I had a very interesting situation with my granddaughter, she is three years old, and her elder brother plays chess, and she wanted to play chess. But she wanted to define the system. She didn't know the rules, of course. So, she just put the pieces in a certain order that she found meaningful.
Tori Steffen: Interesting.
Sven Hroar Klempe: And it was very meaningful in that situation. So, we played chess on her premises in this way. I had to adapt.
So, the point is that we have to be very open to very many different types of systems. And this is a challenge for especially the western culture, because they think that our language system, musical system, and whatever, are at the top. The end of the development of human beings, so to speak. But it's not. It's not at all.
And when we look at this complicated ethnomusic, they are even more complex and subtle, I think. So, the point is, yes, as long as we understand the system, then there is a meaning.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah. That's such an interesting story about your granddaughter, and creating her own meaning. That's very interesting.
Well, Dr. Klempe, do you have any final words of advice or anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners today?
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah. Maybe this main message of trying to take a step back, to see how we focus on language as the core of rationality, because it's not there. Because if we say that language is the center of rationality, then we underestimate pre-verbal children and their personality. And I have to tell a story at the end, if I may.
Tori Steffen: Absolutely. Yeah.
Sven Hroar Klempe: Yeah. It's a book I heard about where the father let the small child write about their conflict in the family, so to speak. And one interesting thing was that the child blame her father to take the wrong toothpaste every day. The toothpaste. Because the little child... They obviously had different toothpaste for each one, and all the toothpaste, they have different colors, different pattern, and so forth.
The point is that this child was very rational when it comes to how to differentiate between the different toothpaste tubes, whereas the father didn't think too much about this. And this is the distinction between how the child categorize the world in terms of colors, sound, smell, taste, and so forth, before they have a language. And they know exactly where is what, and what belongs to who, and so on. So they categorize. They are very rational without language.
Tori Steffen: Yeah. It's kind of like creating your own meaning, going back to the story about your granddaughter, and then this story seems to also kind of paint that picture of building your own structures and language, especially with the senses. So, yeah, that's very, very interesting stuff, Dr. Klempe. So, thank you so much for contributing to our interview series. It's been great speaking with you today.
Sven Hroar Klempe: Thank you for inviting me.
Tori Steffen: Absolutely. Well, I hope you have a great rest of your day, and thank you again.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.