What is called music?

[tripleblessed]

"Musick hath Charms to soothe a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks and bend a knotted Oak" Congreve

Your opening premise, Colin, starts from the etymology. For the Greeks, and most cultures since, and in many ways, particularly in indigenous cultures around the world, music is simply NOT a sonic event involving rhythm, time, and listeners. A central element for these people is that it must be leading to harmony within, or healing, and/or bringing the listener/s closer to the Divine
(you mentioned ecstasis). Thereby, much of what is CALLED music actually isn't music, it's sound and rhythm arranged through time. Maybe fun, maybe not, but not music by their definition. My check for running the universe is a little late getting here, so I'm not at this juncture willing to make a ruling. Check back with me when my salary is current.

In many indigenous societies, picking up a drum and playing it could get you shunned or banned. Recognizing it's power for entrainment, it was regarded as the territory of the shaman or priest, and required years of training and spiritual cleansing work before being allowed to play under close supervision.

You ask about a source for the eight second guideline. I began teaching meditation in 1979, an American system built on research of one of my favorite teachers. He designed the circuitry used in most bio-feedback equipment. I hung out with him when I could, got to be part of a 20-year mounting of symposia on healing, science, and spirituality, and their overlying territories. I was a caretaker of and provider to the presenters, so I had converse with well-known, unknown and little available teachers and researchers. Some of what I reference is literally recalled conversations, and I wasn't writing college papers. Some was said in confidence, some was pretty weird, and I won't be bothered to educate the willfully ignorant or pooh-poohers in this or any other arena. For the eager, my door is open. Actually, I will be bothered, but I willingly do it, this isn't the venue.

The amount of research available is astonishing, and it begs the question of what is real and who we are and who is not us. Colin, am sending you a PM link to someone who can probably give you citations. Anyone else, feel free to PM me, or start a thread on related subject.

On binaural beats, the concept arises out the study of ting-shas, the small Tibetan cymbals on a leather string. They have for at least a thousand years been cast from multi-metal alloys in slightly different sizes, creating a difference of approximately 4Hz in resonant frequency. The ear hears both, but fabricates the difference. The resulting "shimmer" in the sound leads us into deep theta. Playing one frequency in one ear and another in the other creates an enhanced version of the ting-sha effect, and with a
4-cycle difference creates that frequency of neuron activity in the brain of the listener.

On third thought, a guy I know in San Francisco, David Gibson, could probably provide citations.

http://www.soundhealingcenter.com/

If it's still there. I haven't spoken with him in awhile. Not one of my teachers, but serious. And, for what it's worth, my teaching partner's doctoral work at Rutgers was cutting-edge research on how the brain processes, stores and retrieves information. He came up with answers to questions his professors seriously thought could not be answered. He and the aforementioned researchers have consistently felt that I can hold my own in their discussions, though admittedly I don't have their credentials.

[Bugbear]

I had wanted to mention but forgot: binaural beats are used extensively for entrainment (e.g. The Monroe Institute) just as drums are used for shamanic 'work' (e.g. Michael Harner).

caveat: I know nothing of these institutions beyond having heard of them from others and offer them only as starting points for inquiry.

Ok, I looked at one of the thinguses I wrote and am paraphrasing. Michael Harner, in The Way of the Shaman: Tenth Anniversary Edition, says there is an ordinary and a shamanic state of consciousness, shamans being mainly healers working within the mind. He goes on to say the shamanic experience could be entirely in the mind, but is as valid a reality as the external world to a shaman and the shaman's people (18-22).
It is a very subtle point. I specify that both are models of the world in the mind. Kind of a William James type of view... I suppose part of this could be built into the architecture of the human brain, but I steer clear of Lamarckian genetic memory.; thinking more along the lines of coevolution in very early human culture over thousands of years.

Somewhere around here I think I have a news article about monkey apes using log beating to communicate, so drumming as a deeper or older form of communication in the brain might be part of the mix.

[tripleblessed]

Weird. This thing re-formats my posts frequently and deleted David Gibson's name from my previous post. Good thing we can edit.

Ted, on the shamanic mindset, the Tibetans said that the Mongolian shamans
they met (shaman being a Siberian word) opened doorways into other dimensions using vocally produced overtones. There they solicited assistance
for those in need in this dimension, and received it. I've often said I don't know for sure if that's true, but it works for them. And since it does work, it's as real as it needs to be. May be only in their minds, or maybe a willingness to share a crazy notion makes it possible.

When I sing overtones, I'm not aware of crossing dimensional lines, but interesting stuff does happen and is observable by others within hearing. On occasion, instant healing of conditions in listeners of which I had no conscious awareness and no conscious intent to address. Sometimes, not much seems to go on. While I do have access to quite a collection of facts, I make no claims of knowing much, and admit understanding less.

[Bugbear]

tripleblessed, in my writings, which are probably a little on the pittly side, I take the view that, yes it is a possibility that there are other dimensions in which parts of us may dwell, but prefer to think of those other dimensions being in our brains and even unconscious cultural networks of brains, and not necessarily "out side" of us. as we tend to interpret it. Perhaps too easily "mistaking the maps for the territory," and we really don't know for sure what "out there" really is.

In other words, our heads have created simulated dimensions in which we, as in our sense of selves, exist. Since we really do unconsciously communicate through body language and who knows what else like music and so on, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were other simulated dimensions in groups of people that are very different from every day life. Keep in mind I was responding to a kind of New Age-ish minister who ask me to write down what I thought.

And there is way too much to go into here.

[tripleblessed]

Quite a few years back, a researcher named Cannon put a fellow in a room in his lab. In two other rooms, he had a man and a woman who claimed to be adept at astral projection. At an agreed upon time, they both projected into the room, having been told nothing of what they might find, if anything, and neither knew the other would also be attempting to project and detect.
The man reported that in the room he saw a man and a woman, the woman that she saw two men. I can't swear it proves anything, but it's interesting.

A teacher of mine had two students, both boys about the same age, let's say 8 and 9 or so. Both had been told that in their minds they could build a laboratory in which they could solve problems, and where they could invite friends to help them. He asked one of them, in a room away from the other, to go into this mental lab and do something of his choosing, and to write down what it was, with drawings if appropriate. In the other room, he asked the second boy to go to the first boy's lab and report back on what he was doing. Their descriptions of the construction of a toy truck built mentally only were identical, including the paint colors of the body and wheels.

All this relates to the nature of music and harmony and how it affects us, by the way, so it's not as off-track as it might appear to be.

[Chirs]

"Musick hath Charms to soothe a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks and bend a knotted Oak" Congreve

<snip>

On third thought, a guy I know in San Francisco, David Gibson, could probably provide citations.

http://www.soundhealingcenter.com/

If it's still there. I haven't spoken with him in awhile. <snip>

It appears to be there still. The link takes us to an active web page that has upcoming events.

[CMcG]

It's at the end of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin.
<snip>

I would need to look at the Merleau-Ponty argument, thanks for the lead, but I absolutely disagree with the last statement you made, "While this facticity might be a limited model, it is always in relationship with everything else and not purely constructed in the mind. This has been scientifically disproved, and I refer to several of the sources I cite in the link to my post I gave. Crick for example. Your brain is quite able of creating a whole world, and a sense of reality that has nothing to do with external stimuli... though I suppose it could be argued that it would still be influenced by one's life experiences. I have a book on "DMT" somewhere around here that also discusses this. If he is saying the brain is part of the world, made of the same stuff as the world, so the simulation the brain is generating is also part of the world, I don't have an issue with that.

Led Zepplin?!?! Nice.

I see it more like your last sentence that I quoted above. While the brain is capable of constructing entire worlds without external stimuli, this is generally found in non-standard cases like insanity. Similar things could be said to occur in dreams or perhaps in memory. For most people, in the waking ordinary world, the things given to our awareness are actually occurring objects. Peoples brains might do all kinds of funny things with the simulation thereof but that doesn't make the world a pure mental construct. In this way, the world is the brain's experience of the factical earth, but cannot be said to be separate from it because they are indeed made of the same stuff.

Regardless of how the brain constructs experience, it always consciousness OF something. In the specific case of music, I don't think a mental construct is sufficient. The physical impact of sound waves on the body is necessary for a resonant musical experience.

Your opening premise, Colin, starts from the etymology. For the Greeks, and most cultures since, and in many ways, particularly in indigenous cultures around the world, music is simply NOT a sonic event involving rhythm, time, and listeners. A central element for these people is that it must be leading to harmony within, or healing, and/or bringing the listener/s closer to the Divine
(you mentioned ecstasis). Thereby, much of what is CALLED music actually isn't music, it's sound and rhythm arranged through time. Maybe fun, maybe not, but not music by their definition.

<snip>

You ask about a source for the eight second guideline.

<snip>

He and the aforementioned researchers have consistently felt that I can hold my own in their discussions, though admittedly I don't have their credentials.

Judging by your posts, you can definitely hold your own in discussions of this type Thanks for the suggestions about places to find entrainment citations. Academia is pretty sticky about that kind of stuff

I completely agree that music is NOT just a sonic event involving sound, time, and listeners. That is only the starting place for a phenomenological description. My theory is that the experience of music usually involves ecstasis, which is what leads to the harmonizing of the self with others, the universe, the divine, etc. These days, perhaps unfortunately, a lot of what is called music uses that effect for other purposes... selling beer, for example.

[Bugbear]

Ya... the more I think about it there has to always be some context of having already experienced something to then generate the brain simulation. That might even just be a neuron firing to make that weird color the hippie saw only once at the Zeppelin concert in seventy-two, but it's still an experience of something that happened in the physical brain creating the information. I am quite sure people who have gone completely deaf sometimes have music playing in their brains, and seemingly out of their conscious control, but that is coming from the experience of having heard music before deafness. I can personally attest to being blind and still able to create new images, in some cases from sound stimuli, in my mind; I wrote it is like having a world of scrapbook images around me, though I'm discussing spirituality in science more than philosophy in all of what I wrote. * and I do gripe that, coming from all directions including scientist, there is a subtle, underlying hint of the view or feeling that humans are not part of nature and the life of Earth. I reject that in full.*

Still looking into Merleau-Ponty, haven't found anything by him at the library I use, but the books that reference his work look extremely interesting. Thanks for this discussion, CMcG, it's given me some new things to ponder.

[tripleblessed]

This gets us into nebulous territory (what? we weren't there already?). Resonance is a factor in music, but is it the basis of it? And is it necessary to have the physical pressure of the wave? Having run follow spot for LL Cool J and Dougie Fresh, I can vouch for physical pressure in sound waves. Was that music? I have my own opinion. During the progression of Beethoven's deafness, he was no longer hearing the music, but could still feel the music well enough to conduct. He was, however, still writing beautiful music which he heard either from the universe or some internal construct of his experience built from prior experience with orchestration. Which, we have no way of proving at this time.

Harold Saxton Burr, the Hunt Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Yale, while researching the electrical fields the body generates with cell activity, found a commonality in the menstrual cycles of the women living in close quarters, the so-called "dormitory effect". Resonance, for sure, but music? This, of course, connects us to Christian Huygens and a roomful of pendulums
(pendula?) The periodicity of the pendulums is variously measurable, and observably different. That they alter said periodicities to synchronicity has been shown repeatedly. Is it some function of resonance related to the observation of Pythagoras? That the universe appears to like harmony and resonance?

In describing the experience he and others had with DMT, Terence McKenna said that for many, every experience was the same. Finding themselves in an unknown place, proceeding through that world in a certain way, and a feeling of "rightness" there. Some described similar worlds. Resonance? Maybe. With what? The frequency of the drug? The frequency of each other? The frequency of the engendered brain activity? Being in resonance with another dimension and experiencing that reality? Einstein thought that possible, but was frightened by it. If it's an ectasis , a shared drawing together out of the norm, does that alone make beautiful music together?

[Bugbear]

Ah ha! I found my copy of the DMT book, DMT : The Spirit Molecule : A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-death and Mystical Experiences, by Rick Strassman, 2001. * The studies were at U of NM school of medicine.

I'll look over it later, but I'm in the middle of looking over a different book right now.