We seem to think naturally of musical pitches as bearing spatial relations to each other, and of music reflecting movement within that space — we speak of notes neighboring one another, of being higher or lower than one another, of scales ascending or descending, and so on. Why is this? It’s true that “high” notes reflect higher frequencies, but people who don’t know this still tend to use these terms. Why don’t we call “high” notes “hot” or “deep”?

In summarizing several cross-cultural studies, Stephen Davis concluded that music’s being “heard in spatial terms would appear to be more or less universal.” The notes that Westerners call “high” some other cultures call small, weak, sharp, or white, while “low” notes are big, strong, flat, heavy, or black. But Davies finds these are all terms for spatial concepts and found no reversals of these “synaesthetic equations” (no cultures in which “high” notes are low, big, or heavy, for example).

Trinity University philosopher Andrew Kania writes, “[F]undamental though the phenomenon seems to be to our experience of music, it can be quite baffling to consider what we could be hearing moving in the music, and what space such movement could be located in.”

(Andrew Kania, Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction, 2020.)

This gruesome portrait illustrates an unconfirmed story: It’s said that in the 16th century a Hungarian nobleman named Gregor Baci survived for a year after being impaled through the head during a joust.

Did this really happen? We don’t know, but in 2010 surgeon Martin Missmann and his colleagues showed that it could have.

They had been presented with a craftsman whose head was transfixed by a metal bar that had fallen from a height of 14 meters. After two surgeries and a year of headaches and double vision, they said, the patient was symptom-free.

“This case shows that even severe penetrating traumas of the head and neck can be survived without sequelae of serious physiological dysfunction,” they wrote.

Qui bibit, dormit; qui dormit, non peccat; qui non peccat, sanctus est; ergo: qui bibit, sanctus est.

He who drinks sleeps; he who sleeps does not sin; he who does not sin is holy; therefore he who drinks is holy.

In an article on secret hiding places in the Strand, December 1894, James Scott describes an ingenious refuge in the space between two matched flights of stairs. The functional set of risers on top can be raised to reveal a false set below, and the fugitive can take his place in the space between the two. When the door is closed again, searchers see only an ordinary staircase, and if they examine the empty cupboard beneath they’ll see only the apparent undersides of the risers above, which match them in number and size. There’s no perspective from which they can view the purported single stair from both above and below, and thus no reason to imagine that it might be double.

“Tapping upon what they believed to be the underside of the proper stairs would produce a hollow sound; but as a similar response must be expected when legitimate stairs are tapped, that point would not be considered a valuable clue,” Scott writes. “The quarters would be truly uncomfortable, as the necessities of the position would demand that the prisoner should lie at full length in the cavity. Perhaps, however, some provision was made whereby slight relief was afforded.”