Awhile back I
mentioned what I called big slinky. It
was an outgrowth of my research in music theory – not the conventional music
theory such as began with Rameau, and I suppose Piston is known in the US and Schoenberg, certainly and finally Schillinger in the 30’s and 40’s – although I
am familiar with them, mostly Schoenberg who’s theory such as it is theory is
simply a compendium of ways to modulate from one key to .
Schillinger, the master of Gerswhin,
Coppola, Miller, Levant and others has a
theory that touches upon Slinky theory
in that it encompasses disciplines beyond sound.
Notions of beauty such as
postulated by Plato and Edmund Burke were based on symmetry and consistency.
As the case may be however the adage
about truth and beauty being the same, put forth by John Keats is not exactly
true in the sense it once was.
(As an aside Keats fell in love with a
beautiful girl named I think Fanny, but he was not of the upper class and could
not convince her to take the step to marry.
He then took a walking tour of the north, cause cold and subsequently
died. Ain’t beauty a bitch? I mention this because I dare say had he
waited a while Dear Fannys looks would
have faded and he would not have had to die.)
Anyway the modern way of perceiving
beauty is as more of a process then an eternal state. Better a living woman
with zits then a corpse with perfect skin, but to each his own.
The most exciting thing about Zero Point
theory is that people, well smart people, are coming upon an understanding of
it from all directions. Not only that
but there’s a group of researchers who believe the essential concepts have been
around at times, in human history, for thousands of years. I personally try to
remain in the realm of the provable.
It’s just s theory though, It’s not
like quantum teleportation to the other side of the universe instantly. Then
again quantum information theory suggests that we can send a yes/no message,
like a telegraph - but I am meandering. Theories are like maps and as my old master
teacher Albert Jesson would say, “Maps were sent.”
Previously I only mentioned
Big Slinky in passing because I’m very sensitive to the notion of being thought
of as a “nutcase” or in the category of flying saucer abductees. This
can be thought of as an unfortunate legacy of growing up in a country
where intellectual efforts are considered proof of depravity.
Also the thing with “big slinky” is the more
one learns about it the crazier one sounds
and as well, there’s the classic objection to the advocate of new
ideas - if you’re so smart and the idea
is so good why hasn’t anyone else thought of it. This is actually a false argument. If someone else had thought of it it would
not be a new idea.
Scientists and the like,
intelligentsia, call this type of thinking “on the frontier”, or the border and
many a experimenter trades a life of
comparative luxury for the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of whatever
field they are engaged in.
Well I am happy to say that big
slinky has been discovered in many fields. I came upon it initially via, of all
people, Kepler. The early Moog model D’s
were bitches to play - they had no idea of what we call pitch - but on the
other hand they were marvelous instructional devices as per the overtone series
and anyway I had for a long time been interested in the idea of the scale
system that will follow the current tempered one.
It will happen that tones will
change via variation not of the overall pitch but rather of the partials , or
overtones. Notes will not leap, but rather morph and likewise the distinction
between partials, notes and chords will vanish.
This will take a deal of computation power and I am not sure we will see
it in our lifetimes.
The Dutch have done a lot of work on the
theoretical side and the French, eg IRCAM
have been focused on timbre
variation for awhile, but specifically since Debussy.
Getting back to Kepler though he apparently sought the infamous “music
of the spheres” which I never
understood. It is his laws of planetary motion however that have the most relevance
to the construction of musical scales.
(The first thing you learn in such
research is that scales are not musically perfect. And thus to create say a
tempered scale things have to be bent.
Of course if we could bend the universe to match our harps this problem
would not exist but the problems in doing such a thing I believe are obvious.)
And again the so called perfect
scales, early versions, did not allow for modulation, one was kept in limits of
mode for instance and this can be compared with the Ptolemaic Universe with its
various circles upon circles. The elliptical Universe of Kepler which is proven
beyond doubt both in theory and observation eliminates the superfluous math.
There’s an amusing story about him. He
had to halt his work in the middle of observations to go bail his mother out of
jail. Her crime? Well in the Europe
of the day a woman without a man who owned something that someone else wanted
was a certain target for the responsible members of society. Hence the accusation was witch craft and they
wanted to burn her at the stake but Johannes got her ass out of the sling.
I have visited the Hansel and
Gretel towns in Alsace
some of which are unchanged for centuries and there amid the picture book fairy
tale ambience is invariably the dungeons
and torture chambers where truth and falsehood, good and bad were ascertained.
The point about big slinky is that
one of Keplers laws is that planetary orbits are elliptical - it is because they are elliptical that
gravity can do it’s thing and planets continue to revolve around larger
gravitational masses, eg the sun. This was controversial, because in his way Kepler was also a
potential witch, or devil worshiper, because the circle is beloved of God.
Since God made the universe he must have made a lot of circles.
Circles, or in other words, the myth of
the eternal return, allow us to believe we are all geniuses.
The “road” or orbital path, can be
compared to the variations of PI the strange attractor takes as it traverses
the eternal path to infinity. Thus, in
the same way Einstein revealed that mass
and energy were variations of a continuum one can suggest that mass and nothingness are variations along a
continuum. Think Fractals. And it’s all
done with math.
This theory does not so much tell
us why things come into being as how.
If you have a cookie cutter pattern it will tell you the shape of the
cookie but not, of course, the substance.
I wouldn’t dare mention this
stuff in polite conversation where it to exist only in my head, but fortunately
other people have come up with the same idea, or the same idea fixee. As
well they have even begun to research the history of this idea , as
evidence by astrological monuments throughout the world.
Fortunately we don’t need alien visitations to
make the idea work. While language continues to expand, human computational and
observational ability has been much the same
for awhile, from, in fact, long before the advent of spoken language. I
am suggesting this on the basis of the
total period of evolution.
The usual name for what I’ve called big
slinky is Zero Point Theory. It has even made it to the TV sci-fi shows in the
form of the Zero point module on the Stargate Atlantis program.
So you can google it.
This ridiculously long intro was inspired by , yes , the blues
project.
I don’t know how valid the
complaint against the music industry is.
One is they are greedy, but that is part of the greater corporate
greediness picture. The other is they are superficial and that too is part of a
greater picture.
I am happy to say that these issues
stand a good chance of heralding the collapse of western society and the
end of humankind as we know it.
It serves the bastards right. Fuck
Caligula, Fuck Nero, Fuck the whole lot of them.
Actually I have known young
actors, well , and they are basically the kids in high school that were into
English class, and the debate society.
It’s not that exciting a life, especially if you don’t like getting up
at six in the morning.
And the peeps on Good morning America
etc, with their plastic surgery and their beta blockers and their mood
elevators can have their humanity justly questioned. It’s not just the music
industry then. It’s society. We like pretty people, we like happy people, yadda
yadda.
I went through that intro on Zero
point theory because it’s important to understand that often new ideas and good
ideas hurt our preconceived notions - notions such as “I am going to live
forever”
In a way dialectical thinking is
linear - it says, she loves me, she loves me not, and so on. But that’s not
necessarily reality. No love is all love.
In other words love requires us to keep in mind tow opposite thoughts at
the same time.
Some people in the music industry
tend I think to try to be overly cynical, but by and large one thing they tend
to agree on is that the ones who make it are, for lack of a better word,
motivated. They feel they have
something to say.
I can’t count the number of really
talented people who just did not want to
be performers - and I can understand it .
The other thing is quite pragmatic.
It is a working knowledge of a wide spectrum of the styles of the field. That,
in a nutshell, is what made the Beatles great.
And ironically it means you don’t
have to be the absolute best in any genre.
Okay so now I am going to repeat what I
just said. In an ordinary dialect, such as the yin/yang symbol or the
thing and no-thing he two opposites are presumed to be about eual, only different in composition. In
some ways E=Mcsqared is easy to comprehend because we can imagine a mass like a
log of wood, being set alight and there you have it - wood turns to heat.
As I understand it, Zero point
theory is a little different. Imagine a dot, or point, and a plane. Let’s, for
the ase of visualization imagine a small rubber ball and a piece of paper.
Angle the paper downwards and the ball will roll down the hill, propelled by
our old friend gravity. Now imagine the
sheet of a paper is a cone, or better yet a mobius strip - and the ball has a
long way to fall, forever in fact. The ball is the strange attractor, the paper
is pi and the variance from pi, both positive and negative is the known time
space continuum. The variance appears in orbits and in fractal shaping of land
masses, as well as in living things such as ourselves.
What set it in motion is a difficult
question and probably not one we ought ask because motion, in this sense, does
not exist. It is a little like the difference between becoming and being. The
designated differences are illusion,
Another way to look at it is as a coloring book where the outline has
been drawn in black ink and the flat spaces are gradually filled in by colors.
So simple a child could do it! And we
call the child God.
Part b-
It is not uncommon in the music industry to come across people who have been at it for awhile
declaring that the crucial difference between those making it and those who don’t
is “having something to say.” This sounds a little idiotic but it is not that
far off base.
In some cases the artist may be motivated by the need to forget about
some pain or another. One the pain, of adolescence for instance is gone the
artistic urge follows soon after. I’ve
been at this awhile now I’ve probably done as much hammering out of words and
meaning as your average supreme court judge
In one of my many bands the drummer told
the story of a group where the lead singer would regularly drink a bottle of
liquor and pass out on the stage. “Horrified
was my reply but he informed us that “the audience loved it.”
I tell this story to suggest thst not only
are performers maladjusted by audiences are as well.
Consider this thought experiment
which I have used many times, Ordinarily I use the statement as an example of
something that would creep a listener out, but aft a few yeares I realize that
it was not only the message the singer was sending but the message the audience
was sending to the performer.
It is “I guess I just want you to
like.love me more then I like myself.”
That is what the performer is often thinking
In short we are not always as
pathetic as we act.
Frog shell pig flip gold fish
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