Replies to Dan, Bruce

Dan: I was being more than a little facetious, a sin of mine, when
I made the remarks about Western art music being anomalous. Still,
I don't know of any 12-tone serial Mbira players....

The details of the various "unsingable" traditions are fascinating.
Thanks for bringing them to my attention.

I believe the vocal scales of Indonesian soloists are quite different
from the slendro and pelog tunings of the accompanying gamelan and
have 9 or 10 tones rather than 5. I have read that Thai singers deviate
markedly from 7-tet as well. While not quite on topic, it is another
example of the differences between vocal and instrumental pitch
structures.

With respect to Ferneyhough and the "new complexity," I really don't
knowvery much. Jon Fonville thinks Ferneyhough's music both playable and
beautiful, but I think he's dropped off the list at the moment, or
he could answer your question. I once asked Arditti in Houston (Da Camera
series) about Ferneyhough's scores and he said that they were very
definitely playable and not as difficult as some by other composers the
quartet had played. I don't know exactly what his means, but I imagine
Brian F. expects his music to be played as written.

BTW, F used 1/4-tones in Intermedio and I believe in other compositions
as well.

By "unnatural pitches," I meant 12-tet, not literally,
of course.

Bruce: I followed the literature on electromagnetic effects back
in the 60's and 70's, when most of your references were written, and I
just don't think there is a reliable body of data supporting dramatic
effects of small to moderate fields on humans or animals, in or ex vivo.
Large inhomogeneous or fluctuating magnetic fields may have effects,
but frankly, bioelectromagnetics has been pretty much of a disappointment
to researchers hoping for big breakthoughs in biophysics, cancer
research, etc.

I was at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the early 70's
and never heard of a Department of Paraphysics and Parapsychology.
Are you sure of the domicile? UW is a large, prestigious state
university with a world class genetics department, med school, etc.
I can enquire of friends in the area. UW did have a student-run
alternative college when I was there and I did sit in on some "courses,"
but while I recall a certain amount of woo-woo newagery, I don't
remember there being a formal department.

As for the monographs you list, I can only say that such effects
are unknown to neuroscientists and biophysicists. There is no physical
evidence for "auras" though bodies do have electromagnetic fields
and can modify those of other objects they approach. The "body capacitance"
effect is even exploited commercially. However, no spectrophotometer
will detect color in these "fields."

The fields associated with "brain waves," muscles, and other organs are
extremely weak and require very sensitive equipment and adequate shielding
to be studied. They are virtually undectable a few millimeters or
centimeters from the body.

Electric fish do much better, but water is conductive and their muscles
are adapted to generating currents.

Inflamed areas of the body or those with altered circulation will be
detectable by their temperatures. Liquid crystal creams or IR sensitive
instruments may detect them, but this effect has nothing to do with
energy fields, rather with blood flow. To this extent, your reference
is correct, but for the wrong reason.

Since a human body is more than 90% water and most proteins, DNA,
salt, sugars, amino acids, etc. are soluble, it is not surprising that
the physical state is like a liquid. This insight is well-known to
biochemists and biophysicists.

The nervous system is electrochemical. It is also well insulated from
the rest of the body and the outside. When the insulation breaks down,
as in MS, the nervous system quits working and paralysis, uncordination
dementia, and death result. I don't see how these data support the
energy field concept. MS is the result of immune system attack on
the myelin sheaths of nerves. Myelin is a mixture of fats and protein
and acts as insulation, though nerve conduction is not strictly
electrical, but driven by ion currents, chiefly sodium and potassium.

There is absolutely no physical evidence that the electric
fields in the body can exist independently of the precise physical
structures of the body or can continue without metabolism. Death
is definable as cessation of brain electrical activity, though
individual cells may live for hours (sperm are motile, for example).

Humans are not photosynthetic in any sense. It is true that our
circadian rhythms may be entrained by the day-night cycle, that
vitamin D is made from cholesterol in our skin by UV, that too much
sunlight ages skin and causes skin cancer, etc. But this is not
evidence for direct nourishment of our body by the sun or artificial
light. There is also no correlation between the amount of skin melanin
and neuromelanin, which is generated by a different biochemical
pathway. Melanin in the skin does protect agains UV damage, but also
inhibits the synthesis of vitamin D. This may be one of the reasons
why most populations at high latitudes are paler than those in
the tropics (but the Tasmanians were heavily melanized).

Taoist concepts of immortality led to poisonous elixirs which killed
even emperors. Alas, metals such as gold, silver and mercury are
toxic, not life-giving.

Joseph Needham wrote a good article on Elixir Poisoning in his monumental
study of Science and Technology in China.

Anyway, let's move this topic off-list before we drive away
the musicians...

--John



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> Well no, mysticism can very well be the subject of scientific research.
> ...
> He argues this on the basis of the following two recommendations:
> 1. Determine if everything that appears to be meaningful, is meaningful.
> 2. Analyse not only what is meaningful, but also what is not meaningful,
> therefore everything.

Hmmm...

Well, if you're investigating the meaningfulness of a scientific
conclusion, you would use scientific rather than mystical means. If you're
investigating the meaningfulness of a mystical conclusion, then you would
have to investigate them through mystical means rather than scientific.

In that latter scenario, neither the premise nor the conclusion, both
mystical, would be measurable (if they were then the question would be a
scientific one rather than a mystical one). So scientific principles would
be of no value, because they only operate on measurable quantities.

Now I suppose one could investigate a scientific question through
mystical means if they feel so inclined, but from a scientific perspective
it would be pointless, because the only a subsequent proof would carry any
scientific interest. And the mystical evaluation of what is
well-understood scientifically is of marginal interest mystically speaking.


As an example of that, one might ask about the mystical meaning of why a
basketball's speed increases 9.8 meter per second per second when you drop
it. That's a boring question mystically speaking, because the answer is
completely unmysterious: That's how fast objects fall when attracted by an
object the size and mass of the Earth.

Now on the other hand, I can see plenty of mystical value in posing the
question of why the Universe should have a force of gravity at all, or why
it should behave such that objects fall at that rate. That's a perfectly
good mystery. One could pose all kinds of suggestions for that. Perhaps
one my propose, for example, that it is a means of testing the human will
to build tall buildings or to fly. Or perhaps, from a very different
perspective, one might propose that it is impossible for a universe to even
exist without a force with the qualities gravity has. That latter one
could possibly even blossom into a scientific theory, but for now it's
intriguing mysticism.

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