The Music Listener Aspires to Creative Stability
The Music Lover Becomes a Teacher of Man
The Inner Field of Gaining Knowledge in Music
The Outer and the Inner Musical Hearing
The Path of Information from the Musical Sound-Space to the Finer Tools of
Cognition
The Inner Musical Understanding
The Cognitive Forces of Feeling and Understanding Jointly in Action
The Tools of Cognition Filtering the Musical Information
The Natural Limit of the Organ of Hearing
Quality of Function of the Neurophysiology
Transfer Losses Due to Complexity
The Organs of Cognition in the Process of Gaining Knowledge
in Music
Once the listener knows the natural musical experience of a music creator, then it is his desire to stabilize this world of experience within himself, too.
Only
after having adopted this inner art of self-knowledge, learning the outer
craft of music makes sense to him.
Then he can assume the responsibility to inspire others for higher knowledge,
indeed, for the supreme self-cognition with which he has now become familiar
himself.
Music
knows the indirect as well as the direct way of gaining knowledge.
Relating both to our tools of cognition, we find very different circumstances
resulting from the indirectness or the directness of our gaining knowledge.
Our
outer ear, for example, perceives the tone directly in the acoustic space
and transmits the information of the tone structure to our mind. The mind
creates a reflection of this tone, and our inner sense of hearing perceives
this reflection of tone.
While our outer ear perceives the tone in the acoustic space directly, our
inner ear recognizes this tone only indirectly through its replica in our
mind.
Our inner organ of hearing conveys the information of the sound to our intellect, and our understanding infers the parameters which determine the tone structure – for example, the pitch, the proportion of the overtones, the volume and with it the volume of the individual overtones, the duration of the individual overtones, and so on.
From our inner sense of hearing our feeling gathers the information as to the degree of density of the information, and of the warmth that is present in the sounding event – and thus, also of the malleability of the sound.
Our
understanding and our feeling evaluate the information on the sound quality
which flows to them from our sense of hearing, and these tools of cognition,
too, receive this knowledge about the sound only indirectly – in the
fourth degree, while the inner sense of hearing still received a third-degree
information from the mind.
(Our outer organ of hearing, our ear, gathered a first-degree information
of the sound from the acoustic space; our mind gathered a second-degree sound-information
from the neuro-physiology of the ear; our inner sense of hearing gathered
a third-degree sound-information from our mind, and now our feeling and understanding
gather from our inner sense of hearing a
fourth-degree information.)
Our
intellect hands over to our self-consciousness the information that flows
to it through feeling and understanding along with the results of its examinations.
At every step of this flow of information through our tools of cognition,
through our intellect – through our mind, through our inner sense of
hearing, and through feeling and understanding – to our self-awareness,
the information about the tone is subjected to change, or to a filtering.
Our outer organ of hearing draws from the sound, that reverberates in the acoustic space, only as much information as it is capable of perceiving, and here the threshold of hearing represents its natural limit.
Our mind, in turn, represents only as much of the acoustic event as it is capable of representing, and the accuracy of its representation depends on the operational quality of the neurophysiology – i.e. on the degree of our neurophysiological integration.
If the sound, which reverberates in the acoustic space and which is transmitted via our outer organ of hearing to our mind, is very complex, and if its parameters change in a very subtle manner, then it may well happen that our mind does not produce a replica of a sound equally subtly structured, because our neurophysiology cannot transmit to our mind fast enough all the manifold elements of the tonal structural change as it evolves.
In
such a case, only a quasi similar tone is generated in our mind, a sound with
a simplified pattern, which has abandoned many individual components of the
sound – fine nuances of its shape.
Thus, the sound which reverberates in all its diversity in the acoustic space,
does not really reach our mind.
© AAR EDITION INTERNATIONAL 1982