Music thankfully reminds us again and again that we have even more compressed models of "diagramming" time and space, and, most importantly, music reminds us that ours is a shared space. Musical practice and the lightning-like computations we experience in medium of sound have been explored in disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology, neuromarketing, psychoacoustics, Nada Yoga, and philosophy, to name a few. “Real movement” Bergson (1911) says, is rather the transferrance of a state than of a thing” (Matter and Memory p. 267). Here, as in the infodynamic space where writers and audiences merge, we are not transferring or moving “things” or “files,” rather, we are sharing states of mind. A similar figure of compression also frames Bergson's famous thought experiment concerning the communication of color, whereby 250 centuries would be required to even describe what our spheres of perception immediately recognize as “red.” Interestingly, both Bergson's understanding of both "real movement" and "sensation" mine the logics of the smallest interval, a ubiquitous commonplace in the history of technology. Essentially, “sensations” on the one hand, “escape measurement,” while “movements, always divisible, are distinguished by calculable differences of direction and velocity” (Bergson, p. 267). Bergson, philosophizing as on a veena tuned to the microtonalities of the shruti scale, admits that by formulating propositions on duration, he has “in reality, only been progressively narrowing the interval between the two terms which it is usual to oppose to each other,— qualities or sensations, and movements” (p. 267). Somehow, though, our consciousness translates movements into sensations. The premise here is that movement takes place outside our consciousness, and it is this problematic that produces a seeming paradox (a trope of dissonance), or as Bergson puts it, “the miracle of communication.” Our consciousness, according to this model,

"by a mysterious process, is said to translate movements into sensations , which afterwards project themselves into space and come to overlie, we know not how, the movements they translate. Hence the two different worlds, incapable of communicating otherwise than by a miracle (pp. 267-268)

So, in Matter and Memory, Bergson affirms and minds a certain gap, and warns that we must not confound the data of the senses, which perceive the movement, with the artifice of the mind, which recomposes it. Although Bergson allows for a generative "artifice of the mind," the Indian theory of the elements, bhuta, presupposes and emphasizes the primary, creative and shared aspects of Mind; the "elements" of this theory are translated by musicologist Alain Danielou (link to pdf here 1967) as the "spheres of perception." Bergson's "miraculaous" transference of a state, under the lens provided by bhuta theory of the elements, which privileges the function of sound, becomes the unfolding+of+an+implicate+order|unfolding of an implicate order. Working with this different set of asumptions, both Bergson and Daneliou both allow for the evolutionary plasticity of perception and anticipate cybernetics. And while Danielou is more emphatic about the generative and creative force of perception, his medium is sound, where perception is receptivity: listening. "Although those pure, absolute sounds that kabir calls 'inaudible music' cannot be perceived by our rudimentary ears they may be perceptible for more delicate instruments, and the perception of such sounds is one of the stages in the practice of yoga" (Danielou 4). The shared, distributed perceptual space that music makes so palpable offers a way to play between the notes together and find modes of being and inquiry that do not reduce the impulse of the commons and activity between intervals (large or small) to particular models, rational or irrational.

When music reminds us that space is shared already, it also calls to mind the interconnectivity of the web. If we must necessarily build our digital collectives in spaces measured in files, bits, bytes or any other infinitesimally small rational "cut," we must balance this approach with experimentation based on musical practices that create shared spaces of resonance where complex ideas and patterns can be communicated instantaneously. This directs our attention to boundaries--self/other, inside/outside--and dissolves them. In their classic work on emergent systems, Prigogine and Stengers (Order out of Chaos 1984) have argued that Bergson's insights regarding the pitfalls reductionism warrant revisiting because they anticipate the way that far-from-equilibrium research programs of all kinds smear the boundary between reductionist and antireductionist strands of scientific inquiry. "In biology, the conflict between reductionists and antireductionists has often appeared as a conflict between the assertion off an external and an internal purpose" (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984, p. 174). Information society has amplified our collective attention on inside/outside distinctions, creating new rhetorical spaces of "exproprioception."

In networked information ecologies, the difference that makes a difference, the clarity and simplicity that distinguishes information from noise, in a flash, increasingly can only arrive at an angle, as an effect. The indirect communication of stigmergy provides another way to understand the stochastic dimension inherent to the depatterning/patterning and distribution of what Brian Rotman calls "the monoid self" into what Merlin Donald calls the "hybrid mind," our collective consciousness. Donald argues that rhythm is basically the most compressed of all perceptual templates, and, as such, is the most immediate, lightining-like transmission of togetherness we have.

When mind sciences like neurobiology incorporate tropes of rhythm, vibration and resonance into an explanatory framework, research renders causal claims unburdened by the reductionist/antireductionist debates diagrammed in Prigogine and Stenger's classic text on emergent systems, "Order out of Chaos." Perhaps Bergson's insights are best understood in terms of his treatment of the fundamentally rhythmic and vibratory category of duration.

A neourobiological understanding of rhetorical and communicative principles like kairos and pathos can be be heard in current research into the multimodal functionality of mirror neurons. Kohler et al recently reported that "many object-related actions can be recognized by their sound" (p. 846). These researchers "found neurons in monkey premotor cortex that discharge when the animal performs a specific action and when it hears the related sound. Most of the neurons also discharge when the monkey observes the same action. These audiovisual mirror neurons code actions independently of whether these actions are performed, heard, or seen. This discovery in the monkey homolog of Broca’s area might shed light on the origin of language: audiovisual mirror neurons code abstract contents—the meaning of actions—and have the auditory access typical of human language to these contents" (p. 846). These claims about the origin and evolution of language, bold as they are, seem to share premises with Donald's kinematic imagination and with the science of Nada Yoga, first described in the Vedas and later mapped in the Upanishads. Recall how musicologist Alain Danielou (1943) posits the auditory realm of vibration as an important scene of transduction between subtle inner vibrations and external patterns. Attending to this osmosis, according to Danielou, produces order in the form of imagery. "We may nonetheless be able to produce corresponding sounds within the range of vibrations we can perceive. We can establish relations between these partial sounds similar to the subtle relations of nature. They will be only gross relations, but they may approach the subtle relations of nature sufficiently to evoke images in our mind." Here, where neurobiology meets acoustics meets nadaloka, the non-visual nature of these "images" becomes apparent. cf amplifcation via simplification.

shoring up the connection, the neurobiologists conclude that "area F5 contains a population of neurons—-audio-visual mirror neurons—-that discharge not just to the execution or observation of a specific action but also when this action can only be heard. Multimodal neurons" that respond to movement, location, and direction "have been described in several cortical areas and subcortical centers," but the F5 mirror neurons difference "do not code space, or some spatial characteristics of stimuli, but actions when they are only heard." (Kohler et al 2002).

Furthermore, because "audiovisual mirror neurons also discharge during execution of specific motor actions," they "could be used, therefore, to plan/execute actions (as in our motor conditions) and to recognize the actions of others (as in our sensory conditions), even if only heard, by evoking motor ideas," and therefore attract the attention of researchers in the field of kinesics under the influence of "decryption" and similar topoi of hci, embodied rhetorics, and security (themes ushered into mainstream science by molecular biology during the last century), as a "key to gestural communication."

next, connect sound technologies to information technologies like the polygraph

Infodynamics of Sound

ShareRiff

Kohler, E., et al. (2002, August). Hearing sounds, understanding actions: Action representation in mirror neurons. Science, 297, pp. 846-8477.

Wow, that's intense and intriguing. Look now! A diversion of otical interest

The Sounds of the Sounds of Science

The Love Life of the Octopus

jess