To Be Confused III – Music($)

Music, as structure in time, is the opposite of confusion.

“Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.”
— Igor Stravinsky

I observe music as having similarities to brainwave training and these similarities offer insights important to your understanding of confusion.

Cycle

Why should my observations be important to your understanding? The difference between my understanding and your understanding is what each of us does about it: I speak and you listen. In order to complete this cycle and create understanding, you must speak and I must listen. With the completion of that cycle, a new structure can take form. Without that completion, these ideas fall on fallow ground.

Music manifests cycles. It also manifests in cycles but that is different. When I say, “music manifests cycles,” I mean it makes the cyclic nature of our being evident to us. To say that music manifests in cycles only means that you’ll find music within repeating structures, and that is almost trivial.

Experimental music that violates cycles exists to demonstrate the necessity of cycles. Without cycles sound can claim to be music only by the reputation of its composer, but is just noise.

Cycles have a scale. Patterns can be cyclic at some scales and not others. Animal songs only sound musical once their repeating pattern emerge. Until that happens, they may be harmonic but they’re not musical.

What makes sound music is its entrainment of human beingness. It is the effect music has on the working of our brains that makes music important. Of all the things that define our humanness it is amazing that we overlook music as part of our definition. We are virtually the only animal that is musical.

Tempo

"Drums are to be felt and not heard."
— Max Roach

Music and language share common elements, tempo being one. Language with tempo is said to be poetic, but tempo is an important part of all language.

Tempo is a form that encapsulates a structure, it is not a structure in itself. Tempo is the beat that is not heard that underlays music. A drum beat keeps tempo but tempo itself is not the beat.

The ideas contained ‌in the language are measured in the musical sense: they emerge with the beats. The lack of tempo in speech is a primary sign of disorganized thought. Tempo is a container of organization that says nothing of the structure it contains.

When you read a text your mind tries to recreate the tempo if the text has tempo. Texts that lack tempo lack an organized structure and are increasingly difficult not only to read but to comprehend. Tempo is an essential ingredient in what we call thought.