Brain Music

No, not the kind that is based on your EEG recordings and puts you to sleep or wakes you up depending on what you need, but the very reason that music appeals to us at all.

In it's gigantic list of all semi-interesting findings from 2007, number 74 is the attempt of a Duke University neuroscientist to understand why tones appeal to us at all. He postulates that we humans - especially our vowels - make very similar sounds to the music we manufacture and that is the reason that it has appealed to us all throughout history.

I have to wonder, though, how well this applies to the different types of music that sound nothing like the typical chromatic scales that Westerners like... are those tones also replicated in our vowels? And what about the vowels whose sounds vary wildly across the world. Does this say anything about people who would prefer to listen to the beat than the melody?

From Les Miserables

Who says that the Far East owns the chi?

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the _I_ on high is God.