Yesterday I attended an on line discussion on how to meditate our way into a better world. There was one part I want to comment about. Music. The idea was put forth that the human psyche is reached by energy and frequency. To me energy and frequency are part of a culture that is failing us. Failing because, while useful in themselves, leave out the richness of the biological and the human. To think that what one person is saying to another is energy or frequency leaves out the complexity of human presence and is lazy.
The note C, 261 per second, cycles per second, it never occurs in a pure form. A special machine called oscillator can produce a pure tone, a clean261, but then the machine is part of it.
In nature C, nor any other note, never appears by itself. Overtones and harmonics always come along, C plus its harmonics occur together. As a metaphor of human communication the pure tone just avoids all the interesting stuff we need to be more conscious of.
~
But there is so much more. If you play C you also get E and G, and spacing them out from their harmony gives you a melody. That melody must have been partially latent in C or it couldn’t emerge. What links two or three notes onto a melody is more than just the raw notes.
The point is that talk of energy or frequency is reductionistic. No mere energy nor vibration and convey the spirit of one person to another. But reduces human being to the vocabulary of a dead (lifeless) physics. One might even say physics is the language of the dead. Our vocabulary is not up to the job. The search for a better vocabulary is probably the wrong task. Poetry, always malleable, may be better at conveying the nuances and pregnancy of real lives in communication..
The Greeks explored this in detail, Music and its harmonies became the basis of Greek education, and from there up through Bach and Mozart we have a core part of our civilization - which we are forgetting, which Toynbee says is one of the causes of the collapse of a civilization - it forgets its own core.