Rethinking sound: the nervous system, and how we perceive music from noise.
Neurons & Sound
In their paper, the Thermodynamics of General Anesthesia, (.pdf) Thomas Heimburg and Andrew D. Jackson explore the nature of our nervous system, and in particular the mechanism behind anesthetics. This article from Wired helps to explain:
According to their controversial theory, electricity is just a side effect of how nerves really operate: by conducting high-density waves of pressure that resemble sound reverberating through a pipe.
“Nerves are supposed to work like a series of electrical transistors,” said Andrew Jackson, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. “This picture is at best flawed.”
But Jackson and Heimburg say that the inability to explain how anesthesia works, combined with other counterintuitive aspects of the theory, mean that nerves don’t rely on electricity to carry messages.
The Soliton model is a means of explaining the transmission of signals through the nerves. As this is a relatively recent hypothesis, it has yet (as far as theAbysmal has been able to determine) been conclusively proven. Nevertheless, it is an interesting prospect.
Rethinking our Relationship with Sound, Hearing & Listening
Julian Treasure (how good a name is that?) is somewhat of a sound expert, and his lectures on the TED circuit are well worth a listen.
The 4 Ways Sound Affects Us
Shh! Sound Health in 8 Steps
5 Ways to Listen Better
Pitch? It’s all about Rhythm
Even the individual notes, which we differentiate by pitch, are vibrating at a different rate in terms of Hz (cycles per second). It’s the same idea as colour – red is the longest wavelength of light we can perceive, violet is the shortest, with a rainbow of colour in between. So too with sound and the ears. Humans can ideally hear between 60 Hz and 20,000 Hz, although the conditions, age and many other factors figure into the range for any given person.
So if we’re talking about the American Standard pitch, it tunes A to 440 Hz, the International Standard tunes it to 435 Hz. At any rate, the point of this is to state that pitch, the sound of notes relative to one another, is a matter of frequency (in terms of cycles per second) as much as the tempo and rhythm of the music is. Rhythm underlies the essence of music (timbre is another matter altogether).
So what does this all have to do with the Calendar?
Calendars? It’s all about the rhythm
The rhythm of the calendar is fundamental to our experience of time. The second has a frequency of 1 Hz (which we can equate with the heartbeat of an adult at rest, although your mileage may vary, especially if you don’t have a heartbeat). The day is 86,400 seconds. The difficulty comes with dividing the 365.2421897 days of the year into a regular rhythm. The Gregorian certainly has failed at this, although other calendar systems have done a far better job.
theAbysmal Calendar’s division of the year into 52 weeks +1 day (and the leap year) is one of the more regular means of dividing the year (and certainly not original by any stretch). The months are an even 28 days, or an even 4 weeks. The quarters are a full 91 days or 13 weeks. The year is an even 364 days or 52 weeks. So how do we account for the uneven 1.2421897 days that remain? In music, I believe this is called a rest.
theAbysmal’s New Year’s day (equivalent to December 21st) and Leap Year day (the day before, when there is one) are rest days. They sit outside the cycle of weekdays, which is of importance in terms of stepping out of the cycle of Saturday through Friday, and for keeping the rest of the year perpetual, and more user-friendly. It allows the year to be felt intuitively with some practice of living through it, just as the seven-day week is now. We have a feel for last tuesday, this thursday, next sunday, whereas we have less of a sense of october 3rd 2016 (it’s a monday). With theAbysmal calendar, each month has a regular rhythm (as does each quarter, and each year), which is arranged around the position of the sun, and the relative amount of sunlight (if you’re in a high latitude), and lends itself to an intuitive sense of calendar time. If you can sense the time of day based on the position or length of shadows on the ground, so too will you be able to sense the time of year.
Imagine listening to a piece of music with a regular beat. It creates a predictable rhythm to which we are quickly attuned. They’re easier to dance to. Irregular rhythms are much more difficult to predict (if they can be predicted at all), and make dancing a challenge, even for the cleverest of feet. So goes the calendar. A rhythm of 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 29, 31, 30… and so on in a pattern interwoven with the seven-day week that repeats itself every 400 years is quite irregular.
theAbysmal perpetual calendar repeats itself every year, all the better to dance to. To quote T.S. Eliot
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
Related articles
- Resolution for 2012: Find rhythm in life (chicagourbanite.wordpress.com)
- Brainwave Frequency Listing – Glossary (powersthatbeat.wordpress.com)
