Manfred Stahnke: Infinite Meloharmonies - Speculations about the Wind

We build little houses for ourselves to live in - the philosopher Sloterdijk calls them 'spheres' - protection against the wind. Only by biding our time in these weather-proof shelters can we construct our castles in the air, our speculations about the wind, and assess the many things outside. We construct our houses to prevent ourselves being swept away by the wind.

Of course we can always become political, each loudly claiming that our particular home - our castle - is the only viable one. There were plenty of noises to that effect in the cruel 20th century, and in music in the 1950s (some are still to be heard), when the so-called New Music was postulated. This vividly reflects our yearning for protection (which we of course cannot escape since we carry our own houses with us, inside the walls of our skin). But we would be better advised to search for 'second degree protection' by focusing on all the various mental constructs available to us, imagining them brought together in a pluralistic 'mind city'. Then we would properly see the small amount of freedom that we have been granted: it is plural, yet it never rejects, and can never reject our predisposition to castellated thinking, in order not to be carried away on the wind. But at least we can think the word freedom. So let us begin with another castellation - constellation:

Preface: Let us lean back a little in time. From the moment the cell encases itself in a membrane, the die is cast. And within its membranous borders the cell, linking up with others, forms ever larger, plural membranous structures, a union of cells that develops ever new 'theories' (going beyond the initial membrane) - theories about the outside world (for ever since the membrane came into being there has also been an 'outside world').

Leaning back a little more: Membranes as bridges between inward and outward ... Vibrating membranes everywhere. Sound everywhere. Partly audible to us. Organs other than our ears could register the whole polyphony (legend has it that Dufay could still hear the celestial harmonies - haha, a good joke, please no metapysics).

Stop Preface, stop leaning back. Let's leave aside the vibrations in the subatomic region, the vibrations of the atom, and of the molecules in the water and the wind, and of the thin membranes of lumps of stone circulating around the sun. Let's leave aside the vibrating galaxies and turn to the middle range, which is all we can cope with:

There's a thin layer, a vibrating membrane on the surface of the earth: the biosphere, reacting on the sun and the solid ground, forming living beings - like constructing a theory of the sun and the solid maybe, not knowing what theory is... Next (very recent in this theory), as a part of the 'human', comes that layer across the surface of the earth, with a new quality, the 'semiosphere': Via a multitude of mouths it sets the air vibrating in a completely different way than animal throats: it forms of its own accord an interacting with the being that is using it, reflecting its reactions to the world around it. And, indefinably related to 'language', similarly encompassing the globe, there is a resonant layer, which I would like to call the 'musicosphere'. It is constantly being rebuilt like language. This most dreamlike of all the spheres is split like language into local forms, and is coherent, like language, by virtue of structures in the brain, and also by virtue of the limitations and specificity of our inner ear. 'Music' is so closely connected to cultural forms that many forms of music are scarcely capable of crossing from one culture to another. And yet we cannot help noticing that there is something universal, which can utterly sweep us away and can drag us up out of the mire of backward cultural narrowmindedness: there is an earth-encircling universal part of the 'musicosphere', beyond all local relativities, also beyond the art cathedrals of Europe. Seen in this light Europe becomes just one ethnic group amongst many. And I say that in full awareness of the present situation where Western concert music as well as pop music is swamping ever greater stretches of the earth and stifling the indigineous music in its path. It remains to be seen whether the local can hold its own against the 'West'.

The point here is not some wishful brotherhood of 'world music' but to emphasize an unending element that is intrinsic to music and which we must reclaim. It is not a matter of amalgamating different ethnic musical forms, but about ways of seeking out the immanent infinity of music via the recognition of our strange but wonderful hearing system. And for our purposes here I will - very eerily and too shortly, I fear - concentrate on certain predispositions of our sense of hearing which allow us to pour this unending element into forms that lie far beyond our old notions of intervals or of twelve tone scales. Let's start here by looking at the way we hear difference tones and at a world of meloharmony that could ensue from this.

Our hearing is in no way just passive, not in the inner ear, not in the brain coping with the sound signals. Maybe the sound-producing ability of the inner ear came into being because of the incomplete or distorted sound signals in the open water or air. The mutilation of the sounds by the wind is well recalculated by the tectorial and basilar membranes in the ear. The brain is then able to speculate about what could actually be meant: the auditory membranes are an active wind interpreter and amplifier ('cochlear amplifier'). The auditory membranes can re-create parts of the sound that have become lost, be these deeper or higher registers of partial tones. Even our amphibious brothers and sisters are capable of this. Maybe the active sound producing of the inner ear started even earlier, and hearing was sound creating from the beginning? Maybe we create all the time, and the signals of the outer world give us just pathways for this?

My concern is: how can we, as sound-builders or, more specific: composers (since we all seem to be sound-builders...), respond adequately to the intrinsic activities of the ear? Is it possible to develop meloharmonies which will exploit the specifics of the sound processing that takes place in the ear? I use the term 'meloharmony' in order to emphasize the close affinity of linear and vertical tonal developments.

If two primary tones - one of frequency f1 and a second, lower tone of frequency f2 - sound together in the inner ear, these then spontaneously produce additional 'difference' tones (or combination tones), which are not part of the original signal. Of these combination tones, we will focus here only on two distinct kinds of difference tones, the most prominent ones. The so-called 'quadratic' difference tone is the best known: it results when f2 is subtracted from f1. The so-called 'cubic' difference tone is the result of 2 x f2 - f1. Where the primary tones are only a small distance apart, the cubic difference tone is much more prominent than the quadratic. The perceptibility of the cubic difference tone quickly reduces when the distance between the primary tones increases. Meanwhile the quadratic difference tone is always dependent on the primary tones being really quite powerful in terms of volume. The interesting and important distinction between quadratic and cubic difference tones is the fact that the quadratic is only a single virtual tone, whereas the cubic initiates additional difference tones, in fact a cascade of virtual tones. This is the reason why we hear a "male" voice on the phone, though only higher partials of this voice are transmitted.

Now think of intervals unlike our old thirds (in Just Intonation thinking this could be 5/4, or 24/19, being close to our tempered third), or fifths (3/2). Let us think of unknown intervals with no home in our tempered system. Let us take one example, 21/16, a very narrow "fourth". Speaking in interval proportions, the inner ear would create additional "difference tones" 11 and 6 (cubic) and 5 (quadratic). Hearing this chord of the proportions 5/6/11/16/21, we immediately feel a new quality of coherent harmony. Let us consider possible linear transformations of this interval: Via glissando of the "primary" tones 21 and 16 towards a fourth 4/3, each of the additionally heard tones 5, 6, 11 would slowly go to 2 and 1 (cubic) and also 1 (quadratic) finally. But: think of all the intervals in between! Here is what could be a part of my idea "Meloharmony": Being extremely complex (in terms of number ratios), the vertical would be explained by the linear and vice versa, and, what is more, it would be deeply connected by the activity of the membranes that explain to us the sound we listen to. Via this type of "morphing" the vertical and the horizontal (linear) are closely linked, and unheard-of chords and intervals in a virtually limitless (infinite) world of pitches is possible.

I stop here, you go on with music ...