patterns in trees, everything is fractals to me
--Blowing Numbers, Algorhythms EP
Akshara is the basis of creation. It's not the letters, it's the syllables. That might sound simple and shallow, but it also implies that your lyrics have a visceral effect beneath their semantic meaning. We creative types like to think we're quite clever, but we barely know what we're really broadcasting.
Rapping has made this phenomenon a lot more obvious in the past few decades, making it clear that Wordsound Have Power is just as true when the actual content is meaningless bullshit. Anyone with a compelling flow and a great voice can grab the listener. That's a beautiful thing -- and it's also a big problem.
There is a whole separate language of sound and form, one we're only beginning to understand as human beings here on Earth. We use it instinctively -- although musical talent may not be common, musical hearing is a fairly universal human trait. When the bass player hits a dead note, the whole room can can hear it...and feel it.
Synesthesia, like most technological advances and adaptive mutations, is a blessing and a curse. (Or at least, a cure and a disease.) Our five senses make it easy to forget the fundamental unity of the electromagnetic spectrum, the continuous flow that our limited perceptual hardware only shows us a tiny fraction of. We interact with it, though, and the Chaos is most definitely interacting with us, too...although on most days, it feels like "Fucking With Us" might be the more accurate description.
"What we usually perceive as "empty" space, is in multidimensional reality, full of patterns, proto-patterns, standing waves, toroids, interference patterns, resonances, overtones."
--Jagadish Bose
We live, breathe, play, work, sleep, speak and sing in a liquid medium. Common sense lies to us about most things, right? We think space is empty, we think oceans are water (nope, much more interesting), we think Out is up and In is down because we think our spherical floor is actually a flat surface. Space and zero-gravity evolution will demand a New Language, a more accurate orientation for homo sapiens caeli to make their way through this Universe like the New Gods we've always been.
A Cymatic Vocabulary
It doesn't get discussed much, but hip hop completely destroyed Western tonality without anybody noticing. Most critics never looked past the funk and soul samples, but the Bomb Squad knew exactly what they were doing. Hip hop production is micro-tonal and xenharmonic...and it doesn't care about either of those concepts. Samples get time-stretched, forced out of key, and rebuilt into harmonies that have no place in chromatic scales, and no precedent in Dead White Music Theory. That's a good thing. If homo sapiens caeli is going to create a new language, it can only come from new music.
Cymatics is more than pretty pictures -- it's a working vocabulary for an actual physics of sound. Music Theory in it's current form is a tiny little sandbox, an embarrassment to the same subject it claims to study. The most notable exception being the recent work of Dmitri Tymoczko on a more geometric approach to analyzing tonality, chord changes and harmony.
What will Led Zeppelin sound like in outer space? Does music even exist in the vast inky void?
2 comments:
If, at its most basic perceivable level, matter breaks down into a waveform, the concept of manipulating reality with sound isn't just plausible, but probable. Cymatics on a grander, subtler scale. The ancient mystics and shaman used chants and incantations to work magick and spellcraft -- but it wasn't about the words, so much as the sound itself; the vibration; creating literal harmony or dissonance by adding specific frequencies into the complex diffraction pattern we experience as reality. One need look no further than the Om, the first note.
nerds yo
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