Sonic Immersion Theory (SIT)
WORK IN PROGRESS…
“I think I think, I hear I am”
“We have fallen into the place where everything is music.”
(Jalalud’din Rumi)
Philosophy poses the questions, nature suggests the answers… all things vibrate, and might therefore be thought of in relation to sound. In this respect, music is the means by which we are transported (in all senses of the word), we are all Shaman, riding both the drum and it’s sonic properties. The premise here is that sound (music) is integral to a Theory of everything (TEO).
“If you want to know the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”… “Light cannot be anything else but a longitudinal disturbance in the ether, involving alternate compression’s and rarefaction’s. In other words, light can be nothing else than a sound wave in the ether…”
(Nikola Tesla).
Nothing Is Solid, Everything Is Energy
We can safely say that “all things vibrate” (a table and chairs appear solid due to the Pauli exclusion principle), and that all matter can exhibit wave-like behavior (central to which is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). “The uncertainty of energy is related to the uncertainty in time” (ocw.usu.edu). Wave-Theory describes the density of things, and the electromagnetic force gives matter the appearance of solidity. However, in the quantum realm, nothing is exactly “what” or “where” it appears to be. In a musical syntax, the notions of Superimposition and entanglement might be thought of as transpositions – write a C and the horn will play an F, play a C on a randomly alternating tuned/prepared keyboard and a range of possible notes might sound, a similar outcome to a non staved graphic score. In brief, physical findings provide unlimited potential for musical “source” material (patterns/proportions), not least with regard to time, gravity (the inverse of which is acceleration), linear expansion and increased entropy. Collapse theories such as the GRW theory discuss “the possibility of relating the suppression of coherence to gravitational effects” (Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber: 1986), as was suggested a while ago…
Monk: “What is the meaning of world?”
Buddha: “It is breaking up, it is disintegrating, therefore, it is called the world”
(http://bhavanasociety.org/resource/the_buddhist_concept_of_world/)
Everything is in a state of flux. Even dead things vibrate, all be it with a diminished auditory signature; the difference between tapping a recently chopped log and dead wood. Birth -> Death is the passing of us, our state of suffering is manifested and matured at adulthood, at the realization of our mortality. Our consciousness, our self awareness, beliefs and concepts, are all just thoughts. We talk about passing “the” time, time passing, & temporality. Yet, beyond our awareness of mortality/flux, time is an irrelevance (if not a red herring), it just “IS”. We don’t know ‘what’ it is, we only know that we have a limited amount ‘of’ it. We hear the zillions of air bubbles that constitute the sound of a flowing stream, watch, taste & touch the water as it passes by, smell the air, and mark or count time… yet we know little about it.
Life is defined by perception. The human nervous system is a physical system, an assemblage of particles. The observation/measurement problem arises through a combination of the tangibility of the measuring device, and the rate at which we observe. How can we measure anything within traditional scientific understanding when the synaptic firing rate is up to 200 per second, thus, our visualized/observed reality is represented by a collection of time “slices”, a standard movie plays at 24 frames (456 millimeters) per second, our life movies are playing at 200 frames per second. Speed of light = 186282 Miles per second. The auditory world is more representational (343 meters per second) and applicable as a momentary time slice simile.
The perception/reception of sound in shaping/defining our consciousness, and the role of consciousness in shaping the nature of physical reality takes us into the realm of Indirect realism. Recent studies in psycho-acoustics & neurobiology suggest that certain cerebral frequencies might be responsible for shaping consciousness (the manifestation of binaural beats for example – citation needed). The role of sound (& the interval) might thus provide insights and correlations towards the Buddhist “Two worlds” doctrine (and the Jungian collective unconsciousness), i.e., the inner reality of (for example) the pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans, who wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (R. C. Henry, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29, 2005), to Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) which suggests that “… our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure… there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans.” (Max Tegmark: MIT 2007).
For NOW, let’s deal with the moment and modular concepts of an infinite interval.
SIT 