2.1 Sounds and bio-oscillations
This is an exercise to use ears in addition to eyes, to discover the swing and beat of life. Lay aside your books and CD-ROM's of skeletons and other visual anatomy! Instead concentrate on the temporal aspects, the rhythmic changes and oscillations that characterise all phenomena of life. Not easy for those who lack discriminatory powers for sounds, durations, rhythms: easier for the musically gifted.
The composer Dusapin is fascinated by architecture, which he thinks has a relation with music. Constructing a building is like composing a piece of music: working with lines (spatial or temporal), proportions, tensions and forces in equilibrium.
While listening to an orchestra playing a symphony, some people with a sensitive imagination see scenes from their youth, a familiar living room, a play-garden, a loved corner in the wood. Their phantasy may take off, pillars of sound assuming the form of trees gradually changing into a palace. You may try to envision that building. Its foundations partly underground, main walls supporting the structure, inner walls with doors that divide and connect the rooms, ornaments on the outside, decoration inside. All this is evoked by the sound of music. The music has carried you away into an architectural structure and sets you off day dreaming about things that make you curious, happy or gloomy. Even if this has never happened to you, you may be assured that there are people who have experienced this. It is amazing that music can conjure up images and can influence one's thinking. Being under the spell of music engenders a free variety of associations. It feels like a dream but at the same time one is wide awake and intensely aware.
Music generates free floating ideas and liquefied thoughts which subsequently coagulate into memories of places and feelings similar to those that have been stored in one's brain long ago. In the life sciences there are many instances of spatial structures and temporal patterns being converted into one another. The time domain of phylogenetic history has left traces in the form of DNA sequences: that is time solidified into form and substance. Just as one's lymphoid system conserves all relevant antigen-encounters in its immune-network, thus memories of places and feelings have a material representation in the brain's cortex. According to N.L.Wallin (1991) music creates structures which develop and grow in a manner not unlike the growth of embryo's and other organisms. There is a synergy of the biological microsystems in the brain and the macrosystems of the social environment. A.L.Blumenthal (1977) has expressed a similar idea: '...the multilevel temporal patterning of music apparently throw the temporal pulses of central cognition into resonance with external stimuli. By inducing this entrainment of the central processes, music manipulates their very temporal existence. This leads to affective experiences of uncertainty, tension, arousal, expectation, surprise, resolution, delight and so on. In other words, music arouses the emotional reactivity of the central cognitive processes. Perhaps nothing shows the wonder and the subtlety of affective reactions more than these responses to music.' After having read Blumenthal's book on temporal integration and cognition, I felt that it provided a key to answer questions about the parallel between evolution and learning.
Music, that consists entirely of periodic events in time, can stimulate the mind to create pictures of material objects. After the music performance is over, it leaves no other trace but shared memories in some listeners. It illustrates that spatial structures and temporal patterns are converted into one another: think of a printed music score, a midi file or the perforated book of a barrel organ. These and other analogies can help us to realise that manifestations of life can be perceived in different modes: a temporal, functional or mental mode, and a static, spatial, material one. There are the well-known paradoxes "mind and matter" and "function and form" (3.1).The paradox separates two halves, each of which is an aspect of one undivided whole. One half cannot exist without the other. With the paradox solved, we can dismiss the idea that there is an immaterial part of life in the world, separate from matter upon which it can exert influence. Mind apart from matter was a traditional Platonic and Christian notion. In our philosophy a split is meaningless. In the processes of thinking and communicating there is always matter involved: in music, in voice, speech, language, even in thought (3.4).