Where is the Music?

[silent thunder]

Where is the music?
Where does it live?

in the instrument?
in the musician?
in the listener?
in the movements?
in the air?
in the ear?


drums felt in bones, need no ears to be heard.
is there still music there?

so what is music? where does it live?


where does music start?
in the mind of the musician?

or somewhere in the answers above?

if I think about music, only in my thoughts, is that still music?

is thinking music, music?

does music end?

just fade away beyond hearing and dissolve?

or is it endlessly resonant...  vibrating outward?

is it cyclically resonant, so long as it has something to bounce off of?


where does it live?


what is music?


who makes the music?


who's listening to the music?

 


Now, reread the above questions and trade the word music for Witness...

 

This rang my bell yesterday when someone asked in another thread where the witness resides... it is poignant and deeply resonant for me, so I share it.

[Kar3n]

Music becomes part of your soul when you can hear it, see it and feel it.

[silent thunder]

music is pervasive, saturating... subtley but deeply penetrating and expansive simultaneously...

it's much like my experience of the Witness

[silent thunder]

Tones, vibration, resonance, frequency. 

 

I had a waking vision once and in it, the Great Mother showed me the glyphs that represented every aspect of physical life that ever manifested in this Maya Dance.  Every being, every blade of grass, every animal, flower, insect and inanimate object.   She said to me, 'they all sing their life'.  And I understood that she was conveying to me, that the entirety of my manifestation, with all its thoughts, motions, sounds and stillness... all summed up into a frequency, a tone, that was unique to me.  And that I sang my existence through this and that my entire life was one note... one letter in the name of life.

 

All of us singing our life in the jazz riffs of the All in All.

[doc benway]

All existence is vibration. The fast cycles of matter, the middle cycles of our days and lives, and the slow cycles of the yugas. "They all sing their lives" - magnificent! We were meant to be dancing all along...

 

 

[voidisyinyang]

25 minutes ago, steve said:

All existence is vibration. The fast cycles of matter, the middle cycles of our days and lives, and the slow cycles of the yugas. "They all sing their lives" - magnificent! We were meant to be dancing all along...

 

 

 

Sorry but New Age b.s. about music vibrations. haha.

 

My free pdf goes into details on the music theory and music healing secrets of Taoism.

 

For example you said in an earlier post how time is subjective to humans and only "motion" is real.

 

Well - kind of true - "noncommutative phase" is the 5th dimension that is "time-like" - meaning it is motion but it also is time.

 

It's just that we can get precognition from the future - and we can reverse entropy and create new physical matter, etc.

 

But that doesn't mean time isn't real.

 

For example - when beating out a rhythm with your hands - the left hand is going to Keep the beat - i.e. keep the time.

 

Another example - neuroscience has proven that your left brain keeps the time while your right brain perceives frequency.

 

So people who study music training as kids have better language acquisition because they have more precise timing - and language relies on precise timing.

 

But this requires learning an instrument so there is body-mind coordination and if done so before age 7 - then the person gets an enlarged corpus callosum that connects the right and left brains - only music training (as far was Western culture) does this.

 

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/04/10/idiot-s-guide-to-taoist-alchemy/

 

In terms of music - all human cultures use the 1-4-5 music intervals and this is where Taoism comes from, along with the "three gunas" of India as the secret of Ohm.

 

Again the free pdf goes into the evidence for that.

 

But Western music uses logarithmic symmetric math - which means it's mass mind control with the 2 modes or scale types for two lower emotions - major mode is aggression/happy and minor mode is sadness. Well the tritone is fear.

 

This is proven to be transcultural - the emotions of music are based on the harmonics - and so Western music is "program" music in so much as it can mimic the main lower emotions and any culture, even if they have never heard western music before, will recognize the happy-aggression major mode, the sad minor mode and the scary fear tritone or diminished chords.

 

So I cite the research for this - I have another music article from my blog - http://ecoechoinvasives.blogspot.com/2017/05/my-last-blog-saved-by-ancient-knowledge.html

 

So there is a deeper power to music that the West doesn't know about. Gurdjieff tried to teach about this - and so I have articles about Gurdjieff and Taoist alchemy on my blog - the links on the side bar.

 

But I performed a classical piano music concert by memorizing a Bach concerto, Mozart sonata and Brahms, and my own compositions and John Cage avantgarde music - so then I also studied music on the university level - composition, orchestration, ear training, music theory - and I played in jazz, blues, country, reggae, punk-hardcore rock and singing in choirs.

 

So Western music is great but it doesn't tap into the secret of Taoist training from music theory - the pdf goes into more details.

[doc benway]

25 minutes ago, voidisyinyang said:

For example you said in an earlier post how time is subjective to humans and only "motion" is real.

 

Did I?

I may have commented on the subjectivity of time, but "only motion is real"?

Doesn't sound like something I would say, please show me where.

 

 

25 minutes ago, voidisyinyang said:

But I performed a classical piano music concert by memorizing a Bach concerto, Mozart sonata and Brahms, and my own compositions and John Cage avantgarde music - so then I also studied music on the university level - composition, orchestration, ear training, music theory - and I played in jazz, blues, country, reggae, punk-hardcore rock and singing in choirs.

 

I'm a musician as well. 

 

What precisely are you referring to as bullshit?

 

 

 

[Wu Ming Jen]

Im listening to music right now. It is making me want to play!!!!!

Edited July 30, 2017 by Wu Ming Jen

[Gerard]

No better music like the chirping of small birds in the forest during seated meditation!

[Wu Ming Jen]

For vaoidiswuchtaichi it its all new age bullshit, western music ruining everything, people are so deluded

 

Read my pdf I have laid it all out for you. All you have to do is endure the pain of reading it. No really it's good for you.

 

Read my pdf, read my pdf.  I forgot to mention read my pdf.

 

NOW wait a minute you have not read my pdf OR it would all make sense to you, I am sure of it because I am great HA HA HA!!!!!

[doc benway]

4 minutes ago, Gerard said:

No better music like the chirping of small birds in the forest during seated meditation!

 

The crows show up outside my window around 7am most mornings while I'm sitting.

<3

[doc benway]

21 hours ago, Wu Ming Jen said:

For vaoidiswuchtaichi it its all new age bullshit, western music ruining everything, people are so deluded

 

Read my pdf I have laid it all out for you. All you have to do is endure the pain of reading it. No really it's good for you.

 

Read my pdf, read my pdf.  I forgot to mention read my pdf.

 

NOW wait a minute you have not read my pdf OR it would all make sense to you, I am sure of it because I am great HA HA HA!!!!!

 

... I got it out of my system...

Edited July 30, 2017 by steve

[voidisyinyang]

3 hours ago, steve said:

 

Did I?

I may have commented on the subjectivity of time, but "only motion is real"?

Doesn't sound like something I would say, please show me where.

 

 

 

I'm a musician as well. 

 

What precisely are you referring to as bullshit?

 

 

 

Alan Watts:

Quote

"In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition, if that were so the best conductors would be the ones who were the fastest."

 

This is total b.s. - it is completely pointless.

 

It's just a sham.

 

It is a completely idiotic thing to say by someone who doesn't know anything real about music.

 

Quote

And there would be composers who only wrote finales! haha.

 

Again it's a stupid idiotic b.s. thing to say.
 

Quote

People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord! That's the end! Haha.

 

 

What a waste of anyone's time having to listen to Alan Watts just say three sentences that are completely worthless.

 

Quote

But we don't see that as something brought by our education, into our everyday conduct. We've got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression.

 

So now Alan Watts is talking about schooling - and comparing it to some completely idiotic point about music. Whatever.

 

It's not really about music is it?

 

I switched to double speed until he talks about music again.

 

So he says it is

Quote

"supposed to be a musical thing"

 

But guess what - that is exactly the problem.

 

Alan Watts doesn't realize that Western music is the problem.

 

Western music is the deepest form of mass mind control and people don't even realize it.

 

haha. Hilarious. Alan Watts - he says that Western music is not about the finale or else people would just write finales.

 

Why do you think Western music is structured around the "climax."?

 

Western music is all about dopamine bliss that ends in climax.

 

That is what defines WEstern civilization - ejaculation addiction. that's the original sin - it is structured into the music itself.

 

 

Quote

 

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674661966

Simon Frith - 1998 - ‎Music

Enter musicologists, who have long argued that to understand music is to interpret stylistic ... She notes the German encyclopedia definition of the sonata form: "Two basic ... theme "quash" the feminine theme in a moment of triumphant "climax. ... which culminates in a violent ejaculation, becomes virtually a convention of ...

 

 

So basically Alan Watts is projected his repressed ID onto everyone and no one even notices because they too are controlled by their Kundabuffer as Gurdjieff states.

 

 

Quote

 

I Wanna be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1566399033

Theodore Gracyk - 2001 - ‎Music

Rock Music and the Politics of Identity Theodore Gracyk ... ideas about sexual politics are deeply embedded in the musical structures of some popular music. ... in the listener an intense desire for a given event: the final tonic cadence . . . called 'the climax,' which is quite clearly to be experienced as metaphorical ejaculation.

 

 

 

[voidisyinyang]

https://books.google.com/books?id=By-EAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq='climax+principle'+in+music+mcclary&source=bl&ots=dGfLXKRiwV&sig=xI3MPC6jmUrG4psk2kCIBAgOdzw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjE56Oy_q_VAhXFjVQKHQIOCAAQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q='climax principle' in music mcclary&f=false

 

https://books.google.com/books?id=KUOEDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq='climax+principle'+in+music+mcclary&source=bl&ots=kHwQuWHCHX&sig=k2Z4eGeAhhNaF5HvOCdvekxaXm4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjE56Oy_q_VAhXFjVQKHQIOCAAQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q='climax principle' in music mcclary&f=false

 

If you dudes don't want to read the links - I'll just quote from them later. haha.

 

Quote

McClary suggests that sonata form may be interpreted as sexist or misogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself – with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax – is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." She interprets the sonata procedure for its constructions of gender and sexual identity. The primary, "masculine" key (or first subject group) represents the male self, while the allegedly the secondary, "feminine" key (or second subject group), represents the other, a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.

 

haha. Alan Watts.

Edited July 30, 2017 by voidisyinyang

[Kar3n]

Just now, voidisyinyang said:

https://books.google.com/books?id=By-EAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq='climax+principle'+in+music+mcclary&source=bl&ots=dGfLXKRiwV&sig=xI3MPC6jmUrG4psk2kCIBAgOdzw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjE56Oy_q_VAhXFjVQKHQIOCAAQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q='climax principle' in music mcclary&f=false

 

https://books.google.com/books?id=KUOEDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq='climax+principle'+in+music+mcclary&source=bl&ots=kHwQuWHCHX&sig=k2Z4eGeAhhNaF5HvOCdvekxaXm4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjE56Oy_q_VAhXFjVQKHQIOCAAQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q='climax principle' in music mcclary&f=false

 

If you dudes don't want to read the links - I'll just quote from them later. haha.

 

 

It would be nice to hear your words, Drew. 

 

You post a lot of quotes and links...

[voidisyinyang]

56 minutes ago, Kar3n said:

It would be nice to hear your words, Drew. 

 

You post a lot of quotes and links...

 

Actually all those Alan Watts "quotes" I didn't just post.

 

I transcribed them!

 

So in this thread I have

 

844 words that I typed out myself.

 

Now how many words from quotes that I posted?

 

213 words.

 

So I typed out 4 times more words than I posted.

 

Now whether commenting on my own transcriptions is not proper? I think it is as someone else posted that vid and then asked me what was B.S. about it.

 

So yes I was answering his question with all those quotes - that I transcribed from the vid.

 

haha.

 

You definitely heard from me in this thread. The question is, did you listen or just complain that I didn't type out enough in my own words? haha. Hilarious.

 

4 times more of words that I personally typed out than what I quoted.

 

Now can we get back to the topic at hand?

 

 

[Marblehead]

Back to the topic.  Where is the music?  It is in the instrument; it is in the voice of humans; it is in the branches of the trees; it is in the air; it is in the ear of the listener; it is in the mind of the listener as well as in the mind of the performer.

 

Can we hear it or are we blind of hearing?

 

Chuang Tzu criticized the evolution of music of his day but it is the evolution of Dao that caused the evolution of music.

 

Music, in the most part is a reflection of the present, past and future.  And this is especially true of the nature and evolution of man.

 

[doc benway]

I think Watts made a cogent and salient point in that excerpt.

If you don't get it or don't agree with it, that's fine.

I agree, let's let that go and get back to the point.

 

[Wu Ming Jen]

Sound comes from silence. it is the lack of sound that creates silence it is the lack of silence that creates sound. When playing or recording music there is only so much room for sound. No sound is as important as sound.

 

The wind and hollows of the trees make music.....that's an awesome wind instrument 

 

one night sitting in the living room with some musicians. (not in the studio downstairs) joined by a famous songwriter (we have all heard these songs) we have an amazing improv session.

 

A conversation breaks out about digital vs analog recording with analog, tones we can not hear are present. With digital the music is compressed to the human range of sound.so not as warm. 

 

 the live performance if recorded would  not be able to capture the feeling of the room.

[Marblehead]

55 minutes ago, Wu Ming Jen said:

A conversation breaks out about digital vs analog recording with analog, tones we can not hear are present. With digital the music is compressed to the human range of sound.so not as warm. 

 

 

All of the music in my collection is still in .WAV format which is as close as one can get to analog.  I have noticed that analog and vinyl are making a come-back.  

[Aletheia]

In Western logic something is "sound" when it's both valid, which is to say the conclusion logically follows from the premises, and true, which is to say the propositions which comprise the premises are correct.

 

Where is the sound it that because there is none? I wonder why it's said to be sound in the first place. I was thinking about that the other day and guess it comes from an earlier substrata of thinking prior to the logos mutating in to the form of logic??

 

[silent thunder]

music is as alive to me as my body is...

 

To illustrate this I want to divert real quick and share a  stunning moment I experienced recently.

 

I recall watching an episode of Chef's Table on Netflix.  Season 3 Episode 1 I recommend as a study in mindfulness.  It features a Buddhist Nun, Jeong Kwan whose process of growing and preparing food is imbued in her mindfulness practice.  Her food, prepared in such a way has now started drawing the attention of some of the world's most accomplished chefs and so she has on occasion received visitors to come and experience for themselves, her process.

 

Bear with me, the point is coming. 

 

She grows and tends the food in their garden and with presence and awareness, prepares ordinary meals that are meant to foster mindfulness and allow the process of eating and preparing food to seamlessly integrate mindfulness and the buddha nature. 

 

The reason I bring this up is at one point, the Western Chef who had been invited to attend the monestary relates this story to the camera.  (paraphrasing) I was standing with her and she, without speaking, took me by the hand and led out of the building, down a path to a spot by the garden where a stream flows by.

 

She looked at me and held a finger to her mouth, (shhh style) ... listen. 

 

They listened for a couple of minutes and then to him, in english she said one word... "orchestra"... and walked away.

 

He was left stunned. 

 

Music is alive to me.  and I suspect there is no boundary to it, even though a song may seem to start and end.  The flow of vibrations... does the music stop because I no longer perceive it?  Is silence not music?

 

It's coming around that I, like music seem to have no end, even though there are tips to my fingers.  Where can I distinguish clearly that the affect of my fingers motions on the conditions of life around me, stop...  I have touched so many things that continue to vibrate long after my fingers leave their surface.  And those vibrations, cause others to also sympathetically respond and so the flow continues, all one in the end, all connected.

 

One great song life seems to me now.  All our motions, pauses and touches, thoughts, words and deeds and indeed mostly our silence and the pauses too... all part of the song that is our life.  Our entire life, one letter in the name of LIFE.

 

 

We all seem to seamlessly merge into one another in endless flow of the unity of all. 

 

Patterns may seem to appear to my perceptions as individual things, arpeggios, clusters may give rise to the appearance of a separate song... but where does the music live?  Do the vibrations die?  Are they born?  Or do they rise and fall from the silence as the seasons...

 

I dunno.   blissfully, I don't grasp much at the answer, but the question keeps returning unbidden but welcome... it seems to remind me of something beyond the grasp of the thinking mind... and brings me a deep, pleasant vibration near the spine and below the heart... a twinge of blissful suspicion that my intellectual mind can't put into words, yet my presence and awareness can saturate itself in bliss with... like a warm oil filling my awareness with calm acceptance and releasing loveness.

 

guess that's enough rambling for now.

 

I'm deeply grateful for the words and intentions shared by you all here. 

 

 

Edited July 30, 2017 by silent thunder
missed part of a sentence in my excitement to get all the words out...

[silent thunder]

and as for the end of songs... and vibration.

 

The American Navy has a log of old radio broadcasts that their submarine listeners will encounter from time to time as they pass through the oceans.

 

Seems that there are still broadcasts of Churchill in WW2 bouncing between our bedrock and the Ionosphere, still vibrating.

 

That always reminds me that I could probably put more awareness into what words I choose to speak and even what thoughts I allow myself to pursue, as I suspect there is no real end to the vibrations of such...

 

 

[doc benway]

Where Everything Is Music
by Jelaluddin Rumi

Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirit fly in and out.

[voidisyinyang]

Quote

I have touched so many things that continue to vibrate long after my fingers leave their surface.

 

This is how psychometry works.

 

For example when I lived in the city and I was meditating all the time - I would get a card in the mail but just touching the envelop all of a sudden caused a lower emotional vibration to emanate from the envelope!

 

So I did not want to open the envelop since I already knew the energy was low frequency. I would let the envelop sit so that the energy frequency of the psychometric vibrations would dissipate.

 

And so in the West we think of music as the limitation of hearing - but it's now proven that the highest pitch we hear externally actually resonates our brain as ultrasound.

 

So logically if we listen to this highest pitch that is always there, then we also resonate our brains into ultrasound.

 

And this is also proven by science - that the ear works as an active amplifier. It does not "passively" hear things like a hole in our head. haha.

 

So it is also proven by science that if we "flex" our middle ear muscle then we can hear the higher frequencies better - this is used by Dr. Stephen Porges to treat autism - because when we "flex" the middle ear muscle then we activate the vagus nerve for deeper relaxation.

 

Marilyn Monroe said she loved listening to Rachmaninoff because she got goosebumps all over. I thought only I knew about how Rachmaninoff created frisson. I used to have Rachmaninoff Concerto's on audio cassette and I would listen to them on headphones - when I was in high school.

 

I thought it was my secret treasure of music as I knew of know one else listening to Rachmaninoff but now I know it was also Marilyn Monroe who knew this secret of Rachmaninoff.

 

Actually I also performed a Rachmaninoff Prelude in my church service - it was kind of subversive as I would think he was probably not a church goer. The Scriabin especially was subversive.

 

But the goosebump skin orgasm frisson is just the beginning of music's potential.

 

 

So as I stated in the censored forum - this is how music is the Tai Chi.

 

And those natural resonance harmonics are actually infinite - and so the above Tai Chi is empirically this truth - not "theory" mind you - but actual empirically true time-frequency energy as complementary opposites:

 

 

So the Taoists knew this as the secret of the Tai Chi - my free pdf gives the citations of this from Taoism.

 

In the West ever since Plato and Archytas this truth has been cut off and instead we learn music as irrational magnitude of symmetric math.

 

So even "analog" recordings rely on symmetric math ratios - just as digital sampling does.

 

So it is natural harmonics were you get the "hypersonic effect" - this is documented in Gamelan music for example - where you have gongs that create feedback with the ultrasound - so you get ELF harmonics that are subharmonics along with ultrasound harmonics.

 

The effect is strong right brain visualization for memorization - called the Mozart Effect - as alpha brain waves but in fact the heart is being activated - as the Mozart Effect is from 1 beat per second resonating the heart beat (60 bpm resting state).

 

 

So this is Western music tuning but it's also the secret basis for Western symmetric mathematics!

 

And so this closes off the infinite energy of sound that turns into complementary opposites of being in two places at the same time!

 

In other words when we seek the origin of sound we discover that it is nonlocal as the 5th dimension that is time-like - called noncommutative phase.

 

So in music theory if C is 1, then C is 2 as the octave while F is 2/3 as the Perfect Fifth subharmonic with G as 3/2 the Perfect Fifth overtone harmonic.

 

Now in the West this noncommutative phase as complementary opposites was concealed - so that F as 2/3 Perfect Fifth was not allowed. But in reality the F=3=G is at the same time - in two places at the same time. That is noncommutative phase as the secret of the Tai Chi.

 

 

So we can see that the tritone - as F# is actually the secret origin of the square root of two, that every one learns in 10th grade math class, etc.

 

But for that equation to work - (arithmetic mean x harmonic mean = geometric mean squared) then F has to be the Perfect fourth as 4/3 and F can not be the Perfect Fifth as 2/3.

 

Yet F really also is the Perfect Fifth as 2/3, the same time that G is also 3/2 as the Perfect Fifth. It was covered up in order to create the symmetric quadratic equations, using zero, as a "contained" negative infinity of materialistic geometry, for irrational magnitude.

 

Math professor Luigi Borzacchini calls this cover up of the secret music origins of Western math to be "really astonishing" and "shocking" and says it creates a "deep pre-established disharmony" for Western science - that is the secret guiding evolutive principle of Western science.

 

This is also called the "music logarithmic spiral" of Western science.

 

But it's not really a spiral since it supposedly "contains" infinity by concealing and converting the inherent complementary opposites of reality into symmetric logarithms.

 

 

So this often gets promoted as Pythagorean harmonics when in fact it is the empirically wrong symmetric math harmonics from Plato and Archytas - the basis for Western equal-tempered tuning as mass mind control music that goes against Taoism.

 

Certainly in India the equal-tempered scale was included as part of the larger OHM scales based on the infinite Perfect Fifth/fourth/octave - but the equal-tempered scale was called the scale of materialism.

 

So practically all of the Western New Age occult propaganda just promotes Platonic Western equal-tempered tuning that is really not complementary opposites!

 

 

People eat this B.S. up because they don't know the secret of real music tuning that is empirically true!!