Their abilities to fundamentally understand how to emotionally connect with other humans through anticipation, tension, resolution, all the “stupid human tricks” that require setting and subverting expectation.
If there are tuning variances to create interest and dis-ease, those are willful affects to distinguish themselves and their process.
But, these tricks that play not just on our animal/lizard brains but our capacity for structure, reminiscing over memories and works of the past (or whatever Proustian Madeleine), our love of puzzles and wonder may not have anything direct to do with any resonant frequencies of the universe so much as whatever innate understanding of human-ing.
Eh, the vestiges of it have been mostly in people aping the aesthetic and “rationalist” bro mindsets, the collapse of the “Skeptic community” was due to people fronting a lot behind the idea that they were “enlightened” and a lot of podcasts and formerly AM radio style cranks love posing as if they were the embodiment of pure intellect when they advocate for “Western Culture”.
Which sort of ties back to the supremacy of absolute tuning! The New Religious Movement style woo and the “rationalist” poseur gurus both seek to appeal to human design patterns, but towards semi-different aesthetics
I guess both are very fond of psychedelics and self-help jargon?
don’t forget Pythagoras of Samos that dude was full of religious/ideological/clout/financial benefit hot takes. all kinds of Mysticism, and music scales and stuff, i tell ya’ll what
Interesting.
I can’t find any source for this, nor if it was introduced before or after the classical music era, but it’s something worth digging deeper.
I reckon that it is undoubtedly true that certain frequencies of sound can indeed affect biological responses, although the problem lies in separating fact from fiction, and finding actual accurate information involves wading through too much BS.
Still, anyone with synths can experiment for themselves, it would be interesting to note any responses, but how to account for bias and numerous other factors, such as environment, mood, physical and mental variability, time of day etc etc would likely render no such universal but rather an individual response.
Alain Daniélou wrote about this. His writing shows its age and he really was quite upset and disgusted with the imperialist tendencies that he perceived in western music theory/academia — so it‘s not an easy recommendation, but if you want to dive deeper, his books are a good - albeit somewhat polemic - starting point.
