source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 1 Jan 1997 15:56:44 -0800 Subject: truth & beauty From: James Kukula It's one of the oldest and greatest mysteries: there's some kind of resonance between reality and our experience of it. Why do simple ratios sound nice? Perhaps at the core of our being we are actually mathematical, which might be the structure of truth. Perhaps we have just evolved together with the rest of the world, so our structure fits naturally with that of the world, and our mathematics is a cultural creation that fits in with everything else. That simple ratios match our sense of harmony might be no more surprising than that husband and wife wear the same brand of sneakers. No doubt music picks up much of the arbitrary nature of any human language. David Abram's book THE SPELL OF THE SENSOUS discusses the idea that our languages have non-arbitrary roots in the sounds of animals and nature at large. Certainly there is much arbitrariness. But over the millenia, as language evolves, that evolution is always against the constant background of natural sound. Often even a subtle cause, if constant, will eventually have a powerful effect. I'm looking forward to reading R. Murray Schafer's THE SOUNDSCAPE: OUR SONIC ENVIRONMENT AND THE TUNING OF THE WORLD - it's on the stack, I hope it surfaces before too long! Mathematics and aesthetics overlap in territory beyond tuning. In space and time, by eye and ear, we appreciate repetition and symmetry. Folks have also studied visual harmony, e.g. Le Corbusier. A couple more books of interest down this line, in case anyone has missed them: MEASURE FOR MEASURE: A MUSICAL HISTORY OF SCIENCE, Thomas Levenson HARMONIES OF HEAVEN AND EARTH: THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF MUSIC, Joscelyn Godwin Jim Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 2 Jan 1997 01:13 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA06527; Thu, 2 Jan 1997 01:16:24 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA06532 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id QAA00020; Wed, 1 Jan 1997 16:16:21 -0800 Date: Wed, 1 Jan 1997 16:16:21 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu