Hmm… I’m not even sure if this is my first post on the subject.. but a while ago I started talking about the project of bringing lyrics to my music. 

I’ve been writing lyrics, at least, since I was in high school.. but have never done too much to bring them into my music.. or at least never felt terribly successful about it. At the moment.. it seems the tools I need to properly bring lyrics to my work is in the neighborhood of a few grand.. depending on how you want to slice it.. no puns intended.

One solution came out of an issue of electronic musician monthly.. which involved using a free open source voice synthesizer.. so I used it.. threw into it some lyrics.. rendered out the audio files.. processed the hell out of them.. started playing with them in Ableton Live.. and eventually just sorta left it on the back burner for a while. But then last weekend I bought a copy of ReCycle.. and started playing with them inside of a ReCycle / Reason kind of context.. 

My first little go at this is talked about here and here. The first “here” having, at least for a short time, a bit of audio that shows this first experiment. In that project I was playing with one of the lines to the songs I wrote as of that much older post.. some of the renderings out of the processed voice synth.

This brings us to the issue of musical linguistic adventures. 

Musical Linguistic Adventures 

Sometime ago I read a book of… well lectures given by Leonard Bernstein at Harvard.. which was…. largely on the subject of linguistics in music. There’s a series of ideas.. I believe Noam Chomsky is the guy responsible.. about an organic basis of language.. that its hard wired in our brains.. You see this in.. the names of “mommy” or “daddy,” that there’s melodic parallels in the words across languages.. as well as for water.. and it seems that childhood taunt songs.. and all the rest of it.. are pretty universal.. And on some level.. when we hear music, we do hear it the same..  Here’s a bit of Bernstein from those lectures:

Ok, so how about we now venture forth into an interview with Noam Chomsky, talking about lingusitics?

Danger Will Robinson, this one could be getting long… 

I want to break in here and bring up a couple of things..

1. There’s been huge break throughs in brain imagining since the time of this interview.. so now many of these investigations are a lot more feasible… so such things are, no doubt, being explored now.
2. The nature of the nature versus nurture thing.. a modern understanding of the subject is that its not really nature versus nurture but nurture via nature.. which is to say that our genetic make up defines to what degree nurture influences our development.
3. This issue with Kant.. the limitations of language.. did you catch Bernstein sorta talking about music speaking the unspeakable? I’ll try and get more deeply into this latter as.. this is really the heart of what I want this entry to be getting to.. and has everything to do with my aims.. but.. well.. I wont say much more about it other then to try and hold this in your mind as we venture further into this interview:

Ok, a few things I want to get to here…

1. I could defend Freud psychoanalysis here.. but it’s a little too complicated.. in that it would take us away from our main thread.. of what’s already looking like a long blog entry.. I will, towards the end.. talk about this stuff in Jungian terms.. which will go along way in answering this.. however I will go so far as to say that in the history of psychology.. there’s a trend where in people are very good about talking about there own stuff.. and not so good in there criticism of others in the field.
2. My impression is that Heidegger does a pretty good job of dismantling the sorta metaphysical presumptions that are at the foundations of cognitive psychology. Heidegger’s interest in language, I think, makes him of special interest to this subject.. but.. we’ll skip on over that for now.
3. I think the Kant stuff is pretty central in Jung’s psychology.. in a certain way.

So I had a rough time finding part 5.. but here we go.. 

Ok… so now we’ve gone a bit deeper into Chomsky and linguistics.. and the larger implications..

So to curve back into music.. and a kind of linguistic basis of it.. what I’m trying to point out is.. language.. verbal language.. has a musicality… timber, pitch.. repetition.. all the principles of musical composition are present in verbal language.. and so there’s a connection here.. 

Ok.. so how about a fun little user generated video.. playing with the Bernstein lectures? 

Sorta highlights the musicality of language, doesn’t it?

Ok, onto the psychedelic:

Linguistics, Neuroscience, Jungian Psychology, and the Psychedelics

I think it makes sense to start out here with a little Tom Wolfe.. In part because he wrote the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, in part because his notion of “New Journalism” in part influences how I think about new media, and in part because he’s dealing with many of the subjects we are on in this entry… 

There are two other parts to this interview.. which we can’t embed here.. can be found on the National Review website here, and then here. For the full take on this stuff you really want to view these videos.. 

There are huge areas in which I disagree with Tom Wolfe.. as it relates to this topic, but for our purposes lets jump into something I can’t find any videos on… which is his views on psychedelics, which he borrows from modern brain research.

As nearly as I can tell.. the theory works something like this.. under the influence of psychedelic drugs.. the brain is unable to attribute causality in the usual way.. and having a nature of always trying to attribute causal connections.. starts making them where..  from an empirical point of view.. there are no such connections to be made…

Err.. let me put this in plainer english.. psychedelics causes you to attribute cause and effects relationships to things where there are no such relationships.. from a factual point of view. Going this far, I do not disagree.. but Wolfe goes so far as to say “this proves you don’t get enlightenment from psychedelics,” in the “ultimatereality” sense.. that this mythology has grown up around psychedelics is.. really attribute able to this principles.. and to the brain’s functioning working on a very slow kind of less functional sorta way, while under the influence of psychedelics.

Well everything we’ve been talking about thus far leads up to my argument as to why Tom Wolfe is wrong… to say nothing of some of the psychologies / schools of thought he’s regarding in such high esteem.

How Psychedelic enlightenment works

Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious could be, kinda sorta, boiled down to… “its an expression of instinct.” Religion is an expression of instinct.. its more complex then that.. but its good enough for now..  And let us not forget here.. that in talking about linguistics.. from Chomsky to Wolfe.. we are talking about mental faculties.. not blank slates.. We are.. in fact, talking about instincts, are we not? Instincts by another name?

All right.. so if we are attributing cause and effect relationships to things that do not factually have cause and effect relationships to them.. on what bases are we making them? Well.. on the basis of the structure of the faculty / instinct…..  We are moving from objective truth to subjective truth.. from object to subject.. from the external material world to the internal psychological world.. and so the truths we discover are true in a “psychological sense.” In essence.. what I’m arguing is that psychedelics bring about a “meta cognitive experience.”

So.. if mystical / religious / ultimate reality.. is an expression of instinct.. and a meta cognitive experience is one that’s essential an experience of cognition its self…  that it brings us into contact with “the experience of experience,” to put it a certain way..  and if we understand that.. subjective truth is a kind of truth.. and that we are now moving beyond the Kantian limitations.. well, now we are in the world of what Jung calls “the transcendent instinct.”

It speaking about.. that which is unnameable… that which is beyond our Kantian categories..  we are in fact talking about God.. for God, by definition, is a symbol of the mystery which holds up the world of the known.. it is the ultimate context of the world of the known.. which, as it turns out.. is the subject of both my most recent release.. and the music I’m working on now.

Aesthetic Implications

So in essence what we are saying.. if we complicate the attribution of causal relationships.. we will create something like a mystical experience? So with this.. lets move onto a short film.. that explores the concept of the cut up.. something we find in the work of William Burroughs.. where we see our linguistic faculties making these connections.. in the world of film grammar.. as well as on the literary level.

We of course see these kinds of ideas in dada and surrealism.. so how about a little film made with Marcel Duchamp.. Man Ray adding something here.. and of course a John Cage Score (what could be more perfect?)

How this relates on a process level to my work

On a kind of core foundational level to my thinking and process is this idea of aesthetic experience is a cognitive event.. having something to do with how we perceive and process experience. In earlier stages of my artistic and musical development my work was very often a kind of critique of this process.. It was very much dealing with the problems of Immanuel Kant and the transcendent.. and very similar, in someways, to what Chomsky is talking about..

In any event.. my work was in someway about this process.. and played with the process.. if we are now saying that mystical experience has something to with the challenges to cognition.. you can see how this could be central to my work.

Some of it is as simple as how you recognize patterns.. classic IQ test stuff, right? If you work in web usability you’ll no doubt recognize an early problem with game theory as a tool for understanding human behavior.. which is to say we don’t operate from a rational perspective so much as we muddle around with incomplete information..

What I say in relationship to patterns is that…  you have two distinct things going on “the pattern its self” and “the pattern recognition.” In any pattern, lets call them patterns of cause and effect.. there are infinite possible ways of understanding the pattern.. of seeing patterns in it: if you see a series of numbers, and are asked “what’s the next number going to be” your job is to understand organizing principles of the pattern before you.. and you will start out with the most simplistic possibilities.. going out to more complex ones.. what I’m saying is that.. in the deep end of complexity..  you have that infinite possibility, that we never see, because of how we approach the problem…. kind of how we are wired.

So.. if our process is impaired.. we are going to go into the deep end of that complexity.. or to put it another way.. that’s what mystical experience is…

Without digging much further into this stuff.. I would just say there’s a range in my work.. of simple to complex patterns.. to even chance and chaos.. and effort to make a continuity between the extremes.. I mean its interesting that if you look at serial atonalism… It can seem as if we need a mathematical PHD in order to appreciate the organization.. and somehow the results are very similar to that of John Cage.. who’s music is the product of chance.. 

Here’s a clip of Leonard Bernstein talking, among other things.. about the beauty of ambiguity in music.. where we see chromaticism (which is basically what serial atonalism is all about) inside of a diatonic framework… He talks about music theory which.. if you’re not already aquatinted with.. might likely be a little above your head.. but basically we are talking about organizational principles in music.. which has to do with harmony and counter point.. which is pitch relationships.. which have to do with the physics of sound.. and perhaps psycho acoustics fits in here somewhere as well.

Ok, now I wanted to dig in deeper into the process of what I’m doing right now in my sound work.. the project I’m on right now.. but it seems that the underlying theory and ideas.. have taken up all our space.. so I’ll have to get to that next time.. what I want to leave on is.. a little more on how this stuff relates to the philosophy of religion..

Philosophy of religion and other connections 

In the history of Christian theology there is this kind of.. well an idea that is perhaps not as well known as it should be.. which is to say the Bible is God’s second book… the creation his first. If we look at the philosophy of science at, around, perhaps before.. the American Civil war.. there is this idea that creation.. or the universe we live in.. is custom made to our minds.. sciences exploration of the universe is in fact an exploration of God.. There is also these ideas of natural and.. I want to say divine.. revelation.. The law we find Moses bringing down, the commandments, is said to be imprinted on the inside of our skin.. or to put it another way.. it is expressed in our biology.. which of course accords well with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious… and these ideas of there being faculties, as Chomsky is saying.. that are built right into our biology. If we look to eastern philosophy and religion.. God is often thought of in a rather unipersonal sorta way.. God is a kind of personification of the forces of the universe.. and.. if we look at the various strands of Buddhism and Zen.. where the inward mystery of our beings is explored in great depth.. how we “really are,” which is something different then who we usually identify our selves with as.. is in fact… the universe.. as the mystic saying goes “I and the maker are one.”I wont go any deeper into this here..,.. but I hope you can see how this is interesting to contemplate in light of the ideas presented in this post. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under Ableton Live, Music Production, Reason and ReCycle, arts, musical composition, philosophy, psychology, spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.