Posted on

Sound

In his evocative science fiction novel Babel-17, author Samuel R. Delany has the protagonist, cosmic poetess and semanticist Rydra Wong, discerning various parts of the strange, synesthetic, song-like language, an erstwhile “menacing hum clogging up Alliance space communications” known as Babel-17, as she describes the room in which it overpowers her thought:

“She didn’t ‘look at the room’. She ‘something at the something’.

The first something was a tiny vocable that implied an immediate, but passive, perception that could be aural or olfactory as well as visual. The second something was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one, an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly twenty-five feet long and cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the walls – some blue metal – while the third was a placeholder for particles that should denote the room’s function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only the one symbol for as long as she needed. All four sounds took less time on her tongue and in her mind than one clumsy diphthong in ‘room’. Babel-17, she had felt it before with other languages, the opening, the widening, the mind forced to sudden growth. But this was like the sudden focusing of a lens blurry for years” (1963, p. 90).

Do we strive to derive deeper meaning from our words? Perhaps not unlike patterns of written music, linguist Benjamin Whorf sought profound denotation in the symbolic “root signs” of Hebrew letters to prefigure the phoneme, the basic sound unit of language (Rogers, 2021). Does the flowing calligraphy of Arabic text, with its interlinked characters, speak more generally to language’s melodic origins and the widening of communication capable, beyond its overt symbology? As nineteenth-century parapsychologist Edmund Gurney suggests, some subjectivity of interpretation in turn enables a widening of appreciation, as with music, and demands that we be less biased in our preferences, as

“wide tolerance to such variety is not so much charitable as scientific; it being a matter of simple observation that, under similar conditions of love and knowledge of the art, persons may present remarkable differences as to the specimens which they respectively find exceptionally impressive” (1881, p. 39).

If a definition of language can be broadened to include the sounds and song of nature to which we often find ourselves drawn, what insights might we glean about our own social ensembles from this perspective? Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause realized that discerning individual animal songs did not accurately represent them, as their acoustic habitats are marked rather by a deep intermingling of different sounds and signals, an ebb and flow from quiet moments to anthem-like choruses (July 2020). Can such music be an indicator of population health? From a community’s biophany, we listen to the “density and diversity and expression of the ways in which these sounds are communicated” and which allow us to compare its health over time (Interview with Bernie Krause, CBC Radio, January 14, 2022).

Computer scientists Janice Glasgow and Dimitris Papadias observe that perceptual mental imagery, regardless of sensory input, has both spatial and non-spatial characteristics. For example, objects and motion are spatial, while color is non-spatial (1998). What is the nature of sound under this distinction? According to music critic Paul Grabbe, it has both attributes, as displayed in impressionist composer DeBussy’s symphonic sketches of “La Mer”: “The Play of Waves pictures the sea now thoroughly awakened by the wind – its waves endlessly racing each other and tossing wet spray high in the air where it scatters in a thousand flakes of iridescent color” (1940, p. 75).

DeBussy, C. (1903) La Mer, Nocturnes – Prelude A L’Apres-Midi D’Un Faune, [Youtube audio] retrieved January 2022 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o8uUP0lS9c

Delany, S. R. (1966) Babel-17. New York, United States: Ace Books, Inc.

Fischer, T. (July 2020), Everything Is Wrong: Bernie Krause’s Concept of ‘Biophony’, in The MIT Press Reader. Cambridge, United States: The MIT Press, retrieved January 2022 from https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/everything-is-wrong-bernie-krauses-concept-of-biophony/

Glasgow, J., & Papadias, D. (1998), Computational Imagery, in Thagard, P. (Ed.) Mind Readings: Introductory Selections on Cognitive Science (pp. 157-205). Cambridge, United States: The MIT Press

Grabbe, P. (1940) The Story of One Hundred Symphonic Favorites. New York, United States: Grosset & Dunlap

Gurney, E. (January 1881), The Power of Sound, in The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 22, No. 455, pp. 38-39, retrieved January 2022 from https://ia800708.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22/items/crossref-pre-1909-scholarly-works/10.2307%252F3356039.zip&file=10.2307%252F3356593.pdf

Krause, B., & Armstrong, P., (January 14, 2022), Human-made Climate Change is Affecting the Sound of our Ecosystems, says Ecologist, on Day 6, CBC Radio, retrieved January 23, 2022 from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/human-made-climate-change-is-affecting-the-sound-of-our-ecosystems-says-ecologist-1.6314501

Rogers, A. (2021) Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. New York, United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Posted on

Asymmetry

“Asymmetry is the absence of, or a violation of, symmetry (the property of an object being invariant to a transformation, such as reflection). Symmetry is an important property of both physical and abstract systems and it may be displayed in precise terms or in more aesthetic terms. The absence of or violation of symmetry that are either expected or desired can have important consequences for a system” (Wikipedia, retrieved September 2021).

Graphic artist and author Allen Hurlburt observes our interest in design, symmetry, and perfection in nature:

“Just as mathematics began with the measurement of objects and space, design began with the arrangement of objects in harmonious relationship to each other and to the space they occupied. The linkage of mathematical systems and design can be traced to the earliest cultures and science and art have frequently found a common denominator in the search for perfect form throughout history” (1978, p. 9).

“The history of the universe is a succession of shapes, and these shapes and the relationships between them are what give us ‘duration’ and our sense of time”, states physicist Julian Barbour. This evolution can be viewed as increasing complexity from uniformly disordered origins, and revealed in the ratios, hence geometry, of these shapes and their spacetime structures (2020). The golden ratio portrayed by the golden rectangle presented an aesthetic perspective on the symmetry found in nature when author and art instructor Jay Hambidge visually connected it to the logarithmic spirals found in plants, seashells, and perhaps even galaxies, in his book “The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry” (1920) :

“Dynamic symmetry in nature is the type of orderly arrangement of members of an organism such as we find in a shell or the adjustment of leaves on a plant. There is a great difference between this and the static type. The dynamic is a symmetry suggestive of life and movement” (1920, p. 13).

Does nature’s dynamic symmetry, “suggestive of life and movement”, speak to something still deeper, perhaps as some imprint of time, or traces of agency, projected from its structure? In an essay titled “Imageless Beauty : An Inquiry into the Prosody of Meanings” (1925), philosopher and professor of art Helen Huss Parkhurst takes the broader view that dynamical symmetry extends beyond surface appearance or projection, and does itself have a generative, creative character:

“In the temporal arts, blended symmetry and a-symmetry of formal structure — masses, curves, colors, figures, echoing and re-echoing but generating always new and unanticipated departures from the norm of the invariable ; in the temporal arts, the regular qualified everywhere by the irregular — variation of beat, of interval, of rhyme, of harmony, breaking constantly in upon uniformities, and creating an ascending hierarchy of modulations” (1925, p. 94).

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Sikhism:
“As thou deemest thyself, so deem others; then shalt thou become a partner in heaven” (1946, p. 310).

Barbour, J. & Kuhn, R. L. (December 1, 2020), Time, the Universe, and Reality on Closer to Truth [Youtube video] retrieved September 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYio-_cmb4

Hambidge, J. (1920) The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry. New York, United States: Dover Publications Inc. [PDF document] retrieved September 2021 from https://aapor.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/elements_of_dynamic_symmetry_hambidge.pdf

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Hurlburt, A. (1978) The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newspapers, Magazines, and Books. New York, United States: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.

Parkhurst, H. H. (1925) Imageless Beauty : An Inquiry into the Prosody of Meanings in The Open Court: Volume 1925: Issue 2, Article 3 (pp. 86 – 97). New York, United States: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [PDF document] retrieved September 2021 from https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3789&context=ocj

Posted on

Unity 3

Valence, a term commonly used to describe the relative attraction of particles to one another in the atomic context, also finds use in describing the qualitative nature of our subjective conscious experience, whether its seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, or touching and feeling. The attraction to, or repulsion from these experiences, and whether they present a pleasant or unpleasant quality, appears to not only have biological, but also quantum-mechanical roots. Microbes and bacteria and their effects on our physical and mental well-being as they relate to our environments, our social interactions, our diets, and the air we breathe, capture this notion on one level. Do the very waves or particles and the fundamental nature of such sensory sources and our complex interactions with them, also play important roles in determining the qualitative character, or qualia, of our experience? Deeper, beneath this layer of analysis, what is the nature of the electrical and neuro-chemical activity in our brains while we have experiences more generally?

Scientists including Andrés Gómez Emilsson at the Qualia Research Institute, theorize that the neural activity in our brains form a particular geometric pattern as we have conscious experience. The shapes and characteristics of these patterns are said to be isomorphic to, or mirror in a representational manner, the nature of the experience itself. When these experiences are described as pleasant, the patterns are observed to manifest as geometrically symmetrical traces and shapes when imaged. Does this phenomenon describe why our experiences of symmetry, synchrony, harmony, and thus unity, are generally described as being pleasant ones? Does this activity in our brains created by our perceptions make the experiences pleasant, or does the “pleasantness” exist outside our brains, attached to the experience itself?

Such conceptions describe a broader range of human consciousness from the perspective of chemical interactions in our bodies to the electrical activity occurring within our minds as they interface with the very molecular or subatomic nature of the environments and contexts in which we are enmeshed. Can such speculation point to even more fascinating revelations about the nature of consciousness and of reality itself?

According to philosopher Nick Bostrom, given statistical probabilities, chances are high that we are all really avatars in an extremely complex simulation. If this is the case and science proves that there is thus solid evidence for some higher order of being or intelligence, perhaps even outside our idea of space and time, would this not unite science and religion? Importantly, how might such revelation impact how we choose to live, and whether we even have choice in the matter?

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Christianity:
“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law of the prophets” (1946, p. 310).  [Matthew 7:12]

Bostrum, N., & Fridman, L. (2020, March 25). Simulation and Superintelligence. Lex Fridman Podcast [Youtube interview] retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfKiTGj-zeQ

Gómez-Emilsson, A., & Nelson, A. D. (2020, August 7). Consciousness, Psychedelics, and Panpsychism. Waking Cosmos [sound-only Youtube interview] retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CV-LUrlC7k

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Johnson, M. E. (N.D.) Principia Qualia: Blueprint for a New Science (pp. 1-84) [pdf document]. Qualia Institute. Retrieved March 2021.

Posted on

Unity 2

Throughout history humans have sought meaning in the skies. The planets, stars, and constellations were signposts, talismans, and pictures forming the heavens above that carried significant meaning for life down on earth; after which they became our final, unifying destination.

According to science author Jo Marchant in her book “The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars” (2020), ancient Egyptians worshipping the rising and falling of the sun saw its movement as symbolic of the departure and subsequent return each night of the Pharoah’s soul, underscoring their connection to the heavens. Alexander the Great’s tutor Aristotle formalized such a merging by describing the heavens as a set of nested, concentric shells, each representing the orbit of one of the several prominent celestial bodies; while Constantine united the Christians and Pagans in worship on Sunday through similarly recognizing the divine nature of Sol. Mathematician and astronomer Ptolmey with his “Geographica“, by drawing lines of latitude and longitude which mirrored our conception of the skies onto the planet, moved our cosmological understanding from one of myth and lore to one of science and measurement.

Our quest for unity in the heavens was also given to prayer; its sky-marked timing both on the calendar and throughout the day. Moreover, unity was echoed in the chant and song itself; synchronized, harmonious, and pleasing to the ear. Worship and communion with the spiritual thus became associated with sound, and the marking of time:

“That duty revolved around the daily cycle of collective prayer, which was marked by the sound of bells. It was crucial to be on time, to avoid cutting short the worship and to ensure that everyone’s prayers could be synchronized; chanting and loud, together, was thought to make the efforts more powerful. Good timekeeping, then, was more important than even life and death. The spiritual salvation of humanity depended on it” (2020, p. 100).

If sound is so critical to our spiritual salvation or psychological well-being, does it not follow that the nature of the sound itself is important? Harmonious sound transcends the very capability of language, as composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote:

“It is exactly at the moment when language is unable to voice the expression of the soul that the vocation of music is opened to us; if all that passes in us were capable of expression in words, I should write no more music” (1940, p. 72).

The notions of melody, harmony, synchrony, symmetry; the unity of our being drawn to pleasant sensory experiences more generally, according to recent research, plays out in fascinating ways as electrical and chemical activity within our bodies and minds.

Grabbe, P. (1940) The Story of One Hundred Symphonic Favorites. New York, United States: Grosset & Dunlap

Marchant, J. (2020) The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars. New York, United States: Dutton, Penguin Random House