Forty-plus years ago, when I was in high school, the teacher doing chorus was crazy. Mostly for things not involving music, but there was this one time he pulled out new sheet music, told us we were going to learn it for some recital, and it was pictures of someone’s impressions of sound waves; literally, line drawings of what someone’s idea of that sound would be.

Not actual sine waves, artistic impressions of . . . something. Like, ten pages of little illustrations like nested circles or interlocking triangles that we were supposed to look at, understand by sight, and then reproduce vocally.

He then played a recording of this . . . work, and that left us all even more horrified than we were by the sheet music. I would not care to hear it again. An orchestra tuning would have had more structure and melody; this was like someone playing a busted theramin.

He tried and tried to get everyone excited and onboard with it, and honestly, we just didn’t get it. Mercifully, he gave up after a few days.

I actually saw a reference to it several years later, back in the 90s, so it wasn’t just something he pulled out of his ass (did I mention he was crazy?) but I couldn’t tell you the name of it, or what it was supposed to be; a musicologist could. It was like vocal exercises without any reference to musical notation.