As a non-native English speaker who grew up in Switzerland, I have a difficult time understanding English lyrics in songs. To this day, unless it’s Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan, I rarely understand the lyrics correctly. Growing up, English was just another sound, for the greatest part, in music. This influenced how I came to look at art.

I’ve heard people actually complain that they can’t understand Michael Stipe of R.E.M. either because of his lack of supposed enunciation or his stream of non-sequiturs. To argue that he is a musical surrealist may be too much to ask. This only came as a surprise to me because I never actually expect to understand what is sung or to think of music as something other than surreal. One only has to think of Pink Floyd’s trip to the dark side of the moon. For me the human voice has merely represented another infinite variation of a musical score used to support the melody.

While I am a predominantly visual person, throughout the process of writing this book I’ve become more interested in words again. I’m constantly amazed at the way in which some words and phrases of the songs I listen to over and again are misheard. I think we all have this experience, often we feel incredulous when we find out what we should have heard. Listening to music and not hearing the words correctly suggests to me that this arguable deficit of understanding is not a deficit in the way we conventionally think of it.

This is where my interest in visual literacy intersects with linguistic literacy.

Where the musical voice ultimately transports me, is less connected to the actual words than to the feeling, the melody, and the tone. So often it is particularly the pathos of the song that transports me.

Where the visual voice ultimately takes me is equally less connected to the actual subject matter than to the feeling it elicits, the subtext, where I hope you will in your own way, intensely connect.

I hope the visual connection in the thirty-five preceding examples will help you to listen to your own voice and empower you to determine how you individually connect with what you visually encounter.

I am willing to bet that you already do this with music even when you understand the words perfectly. To read the lyrics is not the same as to hear them. To read the information in a photograph (or any other piece of art) is not the same as feeling how and where it moves you. To read a movie script is not the same as the intangible suspension of disbelief, resulting from a combination of great directing, acting, filming, and editing. Finishing a great book can be profoundly sad: we say goodbye to characters we imagined to be a certain way, and no two readers will ever have imagined the characters the same way. One of the reasons people who loved a book often don’t like the movie is because they feel the casting director miscast and misinterpreted “their” characters.

If you are still in doubt, think of an operatic performance. Even if you speak the language perfectly it can be impossible to understand what is sung. However, the sound can move us to tears.

With the foregoing in mind, I would like to thank a band called Florence + The Machine. I listened to their album, “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” over and over while writing this book. It created a tonal space of focus and creativity where I would no longer consciously hear the music but remained suspended in its embrace. Thank you Ms. Florence, Ms. Ester, and the band, for your songs and inspiration. Thank you also to those who are living with me for not freaking out upon hearing me repeat-play this album.

It is never the actual thing I see or hear, even if I understand it, but rather the inflection in how it is conveyed.