I wish I wrote a book. A book of all the things I have to do to make others feel the things I want them to feel.
It’s a highly complex procedure, feelings. Feelings are finicky to manipulate with words and phrases. Different circumstances call for vastly different sentences to be used. The same sentence can result in different responses, depending on prior circumstances. Even different iterations of the same sentence and intonation, controlling for all other factors, can result in different responses by the listener.
There should be a book. A guide, so to speak, on how to feel. A list of sentences to induce a particular emotion in a listener. It’s difficult for me to commit all this to memory, despite the fact that my mental faculties are far superior to other foals my age. I excel in mathematics and logical reasoning. I can beat ponies three times my age at a game of chess. Regular school was easy. Any algebra test they threw at me, I could complete perfectly. The teachers used to use my test paper as the answer key.
So, when Ma and Pa sent me off to live at the School of Friendship, I thought it was going to be easy. But it’s not.
“Golly, I really like your mane.” I said this to my classmate, Hyper Sonic, the other day. 31 characters of information required to induce a temporary feeling of “liking” in a peer. This could be simplified into a template sentence, “[Interjection], I [superlative] like your [object],” thereby creating a simpler data structure.
But then there’s the intonation, the speed of dialog, all of which aren’t even standardized. I must create my own standards and tolerances. This takes up additional memory. For example, excitement should be around 150 words per minute, plus or minus 10. Sadness for others' misfortune is around 100 words per minute, with seconds-long pauses after “I’m sorry.” Slightly slower if their misfortune is a death in the family.
Words, sentences, flowcharts, intonation…they take up a lot of space. When it comes to the lexicon of emotion, there’s only so many bits of memory my brain can store, large as it is.
Singing is much simpler than speaking. I realized this in my music classes at the School of Friendship. Love, or even just the subcategory of childlike love to one’s mother, requires at least 7000 words’ worth of sentences to fully explicate, with at least 16384 possible permutations.
On the contrary, with a written song, there is only a single permutation. There is only one correct sequence of notes. Repeats are marked. The rhythm and intonation are all notated, rather than implied. Making it much easier to learn and memorize.
Some choose to write sheet music on that cumbersome musical staff, but I prefer writing them as individual character “bytes.” A note can be represented in a “byte” of just 5 characters. The first character being the note duration, the next 2 characters the pitch, and the last 1 or 2 characters being the volume. (Chord notation is even more compact, but hardly useful for a vocal performer such as myself.)
For example, if we assume common time:
4C4mp 4e4p
This is a minor third interval. A middle C quarter note to an E flat half note (the lowercase indicates a flat, capital letter indicates a natural. Any sharped note can be expressed as the flat of the next note. This maximizes the compactness of the information). A minor third causes the listener to feel a sense of fear, or impending evil. The gradual decrescendo from mezzo piano (mp) to piano (p), combined with the rising pitch, adds a layer of suspense, or mystery. All these emotions, at least three, can be covered by only 10 characters, much less than 31.
Now consider this:
4C4mp 4E4mf
This is a major third interval, from middle C to E natural. Contrary to the minor third, the major third induces happiness, or optimism in the listener. The crescendo to mezzo forte adds to this effect. Two small changes results in two entirely different emotions being induced. All within 11 characters, also much less than 31.
I’m fortunate to be blessed with a beautiful soprano voice, that’s drawn the attention of all the professors at the School of Friendship. In addition to attending music classes with my peers, I perform solo recitals, of classical operas in Old Ponish.
Every time I go up on that stage at the school assembly, it’s as if all my past sins are forgiven. They all listen silently in their seats, rapt with attention. A perfect execution of a sequence of notes, without unpredicted feedback or interruptions. Sometimes, even Ma and Pa come from back home to see me perform. Ma cries when I make her cry. Pa swells with pride when I make him swell. And the whole school applauds and cheers when I make them applaud and cheer, when I hit that climactic 1d6ff at the end of the last aria.
Music is, by far, the superior way of inducing emotion. I induce emotion with words if I have to, of course. But words, in comparison to music, seem to be a grossly inefficient use of mental power.
Emotion is much simpler in song. Much more compact. A pony’s entire lifetime of emotions: of curiosity, wonder, lust, love, sorrow, mortality…all conveyed in no more than a few pages worth of music notes. The sadness of the loss of one’s child to a long illness, easily expressed by a sixteenth “grace note” at the end of measure 35. 16a4p.
Emotion can be expressed, in its purest form, as nothing more than bytecode on paper. There’s something so beautiful about that.
I don’t know how those other ponies remember all the right words and sentences to say. Last week during Professor Rarity’s sewing class, I accidentally pricked my partner’s hoof with a needle, and I cried for her, said sorry, and I even offered to take her to the nurse’s office.
Even when she threw a curve ball at me and claimed I did it on purpose (I didn’t!), I knew what to do. I had that eventuality mapped out in my mental flowchart. I said to her, with an intonation of sadness,
“How could you think that? I’m your friend! I swear, it was an accident! Please please forgive me! I want us to stay friends!”
124 characters. And she responded as desired. She apologized for not trusting me. She nodded, and smiled gently, and we trotted together to the nurse’s office. And I smiled a gentle smile too.
That was probably the hardest thing I had ever done.
(Ma and Pa didn’t come to congratulate me.)
How do all the other common ponies reason over such complex emotional problems on the fly? It’s just instinctual, they say. It’s “just natural” to know how to respond to one’s emotions. They just know what intonation to use. What speed to speak at. What words to say. How do they remember all that!?
It’s because those ponies have magic. It must be. Their magic compensates for their inferior brain power, three or four times over. Thereby making them able to emotionally reason with comparatively little effort.
It’s not fair.
Maybe if I had magic, feelings would be natural to me too.
Just before the end of the school year, when we were all supposed to go home to our families for summer break, me and another filly my age were supposed to perform a duet at the final school assembly. Rainbow Harmony was the filly's name. That’s the same filly that got pricked with the sewing needle. She’s probably the second best singer in the School of Friendship.
For most of the song, I sang the soprano melody, and she sang the alto harmony. She’s got a deeper voice than me. And after she got pricked with the needle, she decided not to audition to sing the melody.
I wanted to sing the melody.
For one part of the song, though, the last seven measures before the coda, she and I sang the exact same notes. Not just the same pitches. I heard her sing the exact same intonation, the same dynamic, the same cutoffs as me. Like she’d copied the notes onto a bytecode sheet, and memorized every note’s properties exactly. To create the perfect Harmony.
And that’s when I realized she was just like me. And that I was not alone.
Author's Note
Tangentially related note. As someone with perfect pitch, I memorize songs by their absolute pitches, not by their relative tune. So if you ask me to sing a song in another key, I couldn't do without carefully transposing every single note in my head. It just doesn't come natural to me.
