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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

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Semiotic

“Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the study of sign processes (semiosis), which are any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the sign’s interpreter” (Wikipedia, retrieved November 2021).

Philosopher John Searle sees semiotics as the study of human intentionality expressed through signs and symbols including language (2020). In an essay titled “The Power and Peril of Language”, philosopher Suzanne Langer differentiates between sign and symbol:

“The difference between a sign and a symbol is, in brief, that a sign causes us to think or act in face of the thing signified, whereas a symbol causes us to think about the thing symbolized. A symbol does not announce the presence of an object, but merely brings this thing to mind” (1944, p. 52).

Symbols are immensely powerful even when spoken about in “mere sentences”, according to Searle. In a paper titled “Semiotics as a Theory of Representation” (2020), he states that when a symbol is accepted in its full meaning, as in the case of a crucifix or a swastika, one is committed to a certain set of values, and uses it as an expression of this commitment. Does the symbol presuppose other forms of communication to enunciate its shared understanding? Did language evolve from the inadequacies of using discrete symbols as tools of expression? Suzanne Langer calls its birth “the dawn of humanity” (1944, p. 53), while author and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker suggests it emerged synergistically with other human traits:

“It is certainly one of the distinctive traits of Homo sapiens. But I don’t think language would have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with non-relatives. I think this triad – language, social cooperation, and technological know-how – is what makes humans unusual. And they probably evolved in tandem, each of them multiplying the value of the other two” (2010, p. 230).

The deriving of symbolic, representational meaning is a human-defining process of cognition, of conceiving and conveying an idea, according to Langer, who alludes to problems of interpretation:

“The process of symbolic transformation that all our experiences undergo is nothing more or less than the process of conception, which underlies the human faculties of abstraction and imagination, and in the course of manipulating symbols we inevitably distort the original experience” (1944, p. 53).

Langer, S. K. (January, 1944), The Power and Peril of Language, from “The Lord of Creation” in Fortune. New York, United States: Time Inc., reprinted in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 50-53). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Pinker, S. (2010), in Paulson, S. (Ed.) Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science (pp. 229-243). New York, United States: Oxford University Press

Searle, J. R. (2020), Semiotics as a Theory of Representation, in Mimesis Journals, Volume 1, Number 20, 2020 (pp. 49-57), DOI: 10.7413/19705476017 [PDF document] retrieved November 2021 from https://www.mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/tcrs/article/view/589

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Meaning

Meaning can refer to the representing of a concept, such as through language, and it can refer to the broader philosophical and psychological questions surrounding the existential nature of what it is to be human. Holocaust survivor, psychologist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, whose book “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946), saw that “the search for a meaning in life is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings” (Wikipedia, retrieved December 2020, after Frankl, 1946).

The ending of the Second World War ushered in a new era. The meaning of human civilization itself had a poignancy as massive population and economic growth stood in sharp juxtaposition to the sudden new ominous potential of “mutual assured destruction” brought about by the atomic bomb and the start of the Cold War.

In 1947 my father attended the World Council of Churches youth conference in Olso, Norway as a Canadian delegate. As part of this trip he traveled to the city of Bergen and, where standing on the threshold shore, described a similar juxtaposition: Around and across the water lay a splendid mountain vista rising up from the placid waters in display of the utter beauty of creation in nature, while directly behind him stood in sharp contrast the shattered and bombed-out remnants of post-war Bergen, eerily symbolic of humanity’s most destructive potential. One of his books titled “The Shaking of the Foundations” (1948), a collection of sermons by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich published around that time, has passages which continue to be meaningful:

“At the beginning of our period we decided for freedom. It was a right decision; it created something new and great in history. But in that decision we excluded the security, social and spiritual, without which man cannot live and grow. And now, in the old age of our period, the quest to sacrifice freedom for security splits every nation and the whole world with really daemonic power. We have decided for means to control nature and society. We have created them, and we have brought about something new and great in the history of all mankind. But we have excluded ends. We have never been ready to answer the question, “For what?”

And now, when we approach old age, the means claim to be the ends; our tools have become our masters, and the most powerful of them have become a threat to our very existence. We have decided for reason against outgrown traditions and honored superstitions. That was a great and courageous decision, and gave a new dignity to man. But we have, in that decision, excluded the soul, the ground and power of life. We have cut off our mind from our soul, and have suppressed and misrepresented the soul within us, in other men, and in nature” (1948, p. 179-180).

This past year, despite its challenges, has provided a useful opportunity to continue and deepen my own quest for meaning, and I am looking forward to carrying it on into 2021. To end 2020 on a positive note, I will share another quote from one of my father’s books, titled “The Clown and the Crocodile” (1970), by a friend and colleague of his named Joseph C. McLelland:

“Because of life’s contradictions; because man experiences both darkness and light; because the contest is a dance and the dance a glory… therefore celebration is always in order. The truly human life is an act of celebration” (1970, p. 152).

Frankl, V. (1946) Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, United States: Beacon Press (2014 ed.)

McLelland, J. C. (1970) The Clown and the Crocodile. Richmond, United States: John Knox Press

Tillich, P. (1948) The Shaking of the Foundations. New York, United States: Charles Scribner’s Sons

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Language

Language is a coded system of information transmission whose specific origins are a mystery, according to author and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. It is a root example of representation, expressed both symbolically as various alphabets, as well as aurally via the myriad complex vocalizations used to similarly communicate ideas and emotions. Pinker colleague and noted linguist Noam Chomsky highlighted language’s important attribute of malleability, making it a creative tool of expression and understanding.

“Thought cannot go where the roads of language have not been built”, declared psychedelic philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, in one of his many insightful, wide-ranging rambles. In some abstract manner it must therefore form the bedrock of what we perceive as reality. Could this be part of the reason why we can have such a difficult time grasping complex ideas? Some of which, despite the descriptive latitude afforded by language and the visualization power of our imaginations, seem to simply escape understanding. In such cases, must conceptual understandings only exist in the realms of mathematics and binary code?

Language evolves not so much as a result of prescriptive top-down norms, but rather from the ground-up, often due to socio-cultural forces. What role does language play in the recent advent of the information age, where these coded systems of information transmission appear to be under some form of change, evolution, or as some argue, siege? How influential is the wider context of this rapidly shifting socio-cultural landscape in which we, or rather “for me”, are immersed on, “like, u know, r “ language and thought? To use his apt metaphors, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett calls language “the software we run on our neck-top” where “words are virtual machines designed by cultural natural selection”.

While presenting themselves with both transcendentally uniting and knowledge-sharing capabilities, as well as newly-evident narrowing and fracturing tendencies, have our new language and communication technologies leapt too quickly out of Pandora’s Box, before our being able to understand their full potentials? If this is the case, how can the negative potential be attenuated, so the positive attributes can be fully realized? The issue is vast, and central to it is language, which Pinker asserts is itself at the very nexus of thought, biology, social relationships, and human evolution.

Our current socio-cultural landscape is further complicated by philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s significant notion that “the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (1964, p. 24).

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, United States: McGraw-Hill

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Deep Design

From the perspective of an artist or designer, deep design can have several, similarly-aligned meanings. Successful pieces of art, to use one of many subjective metrics to define success in this context, are popular, and often so because the audience sees in them some common, underlying aesthetic or informational aspect which is pleasing. Perhaps this is a result of mathematical symmetry or asymmetry, or that the piece in question somehow resonates in a particular way with their emotions, or their perception of reality.

An artwork may even go so far as to solve or reify some belief because viewing, reading, hearing, or participating in it evokes a particular memory or feeling. Author Tim Parks (2019) describes “Manzotti’s Spread Mind Theory” of consciousness, wherein images, and other sense gate throughput, don’t get stored in the brain, but instead create an impression upon initial exposure, which thereafter gets called up and compared with the subject’s live sensory experience, as a key trying to fit a lock. There are no vast libraries of images, sounds, or smells filed away up there, nor are there images or other sense data being found in any meaningful neurological sense in the grey matter, apart from correlated flashes of neural activity. Does such a view support the case of an artwork whose idiosyncratic qualities elicit a particular response, often among many people, and perhaps in a manner similar to Jung’s patients identifying common archetypes in their recounted dreams? Does deep design in this sense become a question of intention on the part of the artist, or does it have to do with perception, on the part of the viewer?

Artists and designers often approach a creative undertaking as a problem that demands a solution or some form of reconciliation. On one level, a designer might identify such a problem as finding an appropriate “look and feel”, however socio-culturally defined, which will help achieve the aim of attracting attention, clarifying information, educating someone, or marketing a product or service. Design in such cases might not only seek to achieve such an aesthetic benchmark, but also to convey messages beyond the overt. For example, Google is noted for their various interfaces’ clean, uncluttered design, and judicious use of white space to help steer and focus users’ attention. The hierarchies, menus, buttons, the geometry of the layout and other virtual affordances, all combine in a gestalt manner to enable information coherence. Not only does design support the key function of helping such data assimilation, it performs an additional, deeper function; embedding in the user’s mind the sense of an efficient, precise, perhaps even trustworthy organization. This is translated into, for example, the obtained service or commodity being perceived as pertinent and up-to-date. The simple, colourful treatment of Google’s wordmark brand performs a similar deep purpose; namely, conveying a sensation of broadly appealing approachability. One may even be moved to feel that this is an organization they want to interact with, despite it being merely an algorithm. Deep layers of meaning can therefore be embedded or projected in a variety of ways using design.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek similarly states that the structure of reality is far richer than its surface appearances, and that this underlying order itself may be regarded as exemplary of deep design. He points to the analogy of using visual perspective in art, where it’s applied to create an illusion of space. A flat, two-dimensional portrayal springs to life in illusory three-dimensions with careful attention to drawn perspective. Using mathematics, such an approach can be applied even more deeply, as in the case of projective geometry, where specific math is applied to create the appearance of a measured reality. One example are the various mathematical formulae used to create geographic maps. As an artist or draftsperson uses perspective to reduce a scene’s three-dimensional appearance to two-dimensions, a cartographer would employ a map projection, created using geodetic datums, to reduce the three-dimensional nature of the earth’s surface down to an appearance in two-dimensions, and enable the precise transposition of different measures from a curved, irregular surface onto the projected two-dimensional plane. Math imparts a deep, meaningful design to the projection, and the resulting map.

Taking these ideas a step further, if the reality that we inhabit, or perhaps more appropriately, if the appearance of a reality that we experience is in fact a projected, unfolded space-time construction, what does the original source look like, or where does it exist?

One of David Bohm’s thought experiments used to help illustrate his theory of the invisible, implicate order that underlies reality, involves inserting one hollow, clear plexiglass cylinder inside a similar, wider one. The space between them, wide enough to allow rotation, is filled with a viscous, translucent substance such as glycerine. A drop of black ink is inserted into this medium and the outer cylinder is then rotated against the inner one in a given direction so that the ink droplet stretches to become a thin line coiling around the inner cylinder with each successive turn. In theory, the cylinder could continue to be turned until the line winds up disappearing from sight, creating the illusion of having completely vanished, and becoming enfolded within the otherwise clear viscous medium between the nested cylinders. Due to this viscous nature though, a careful rewinding of the outer cylinder back in the opposite direction causes the line to recompose and reconstitute as its original particle-like droplet.

In a slight variation, rotate the cylinder just a quarter turn after inserting the first droplet, and insert a second droplet immediately adjacent along its axis to where the first had been inserted. Rotate it another quarter turn, insert a third droplet, and continue this pattern up and down its entire length. Now, as the cylinder is rotated, there appears a sole particle moving along it’s axis as each wave-like coil of ink briefly manifests its droplet in succession (1987, p. 172).

In such a manner, can some tangible aspect of our perceived reality be reverse distilled, its projection run backwards, and its higher-order essence revealed or modeled in some way?

Is the ultimate essence simply math and binary code? If artistic beauty, for example, can be boiled down to such a fundamental level, does it not still speak to the need for there to be some underlying impetus driving the whole affair? Does the framework of Panpsychism, where some form of consciousness, and thus intention, inhabits everything in the universe, offer a reasonable explanation? Does physicist Frank Wilczek’s phrase “Nature’s Deep Design” evoke the notion of an artist, designer, or some other pre-ordained intentionality that’s currently beyond our grasp? Importantly, if we are part of a projection that has been created in a manner metaphorically similar to that of an artwork or a map, is this resulting construct which we have come to know as reality therefore completely illusory, in some grander context?

Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London, United Kingdom: Routledge

Bohm, D., & Peat, F. D. (1987) Science, Order, and Creativity. London, United Kingdom: Routledge

Parks, T. (2019) Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness. New York Review of Books: New York, United States