A Product of the Human Mind
This short piece explores the view of music as a product of the human mind.
Why couldn't Ramanujan hold an ordinary job in 1913?
Because he was secretly a mathematical genius.
While navigating around family pressures and battling sickness for years, Ramanujan dove into the depths of mathematical reality both in his journals and in his dreams. At the encouragement of his friends, Ramanujan sent his original work to G. H. Hardy, a British mathematician at Cambridge University. Hardy was so impressed by his work that he arranged transportation for Ramanujan from where he resided in Madras on the eastern shore of India to Cambridge, to have him formally trained in mathematics.
The traditionalists at Cambridge could not contain Ramanujan's genius. No one, not even Ramanujan, could fully explain how he got to his remarkable results. Undoubtedly, he was able to see patterns that went far beyond logical and rationalist ways of thinking. His dreams were signals from an embodied source of mathematical knowledge, accessed through multiple ways of knowing that involved his intuition, insight, and the participation, willingly or not, of the core of his being.
Graphic by Sunny Labh.
Take a look at this. This is just one of Ramanujan's magnificent formulas for pi. Honestly, how does one discover this? Such insight on an incredible fact of the universe. Pi—an unchanging property of a flat circle, a number that cannot be expressed by a ratio of two whole numbers, a number whose decimal digits go on forever—finds itself contained and expressed by this surprising equation. Like, how? To this day it remains unclear how he came up with the numbers 9801 and 1103.
Formulas for pi and the nature of number belong very clearly to the realm of the human mind, but even so, there are clear benefits to navigating this mental realm by switching to employ the felt, intuitive wisdom of the body. Even after being grilled at Cambridge by Hardy and others, Ramanujan could not put into words how he made the connections that ultimately allowed him to peer deeper into reality than any one of his colleagues could, around his time and for decades to come.
Is Music Theory Psychological?
Few things are more difficult to put into words than the transcendent and miraculous experience of music. It's such a difficult subject to talk about, some philosophers have simply claimed: music is ineffable. But that hasn't stopped generations of thinkers to try and make sense of it. By tracing a brief overview, we can come to an understanding of why the field of "music theory" is in general the way it is today.
Present in the writings from ancient Greece is a schism. Since at least the age of Pythagoras, people have tried explaining music with mathematics. The work of Pythagoras links music with the Divine ordering of the cosmos, in an idea we now call music of the spheres. A few generations later, the work of Aristoxenus maps musical structures back to the human sensory world. Guess who's ideas ended up having more influence? You got it. Pythagoras. For hundreds of years, theorists have been seduced by mathematical thought to understand musical harmony because it was cleaner, and simultaneously elevated music to celestial heights. The world of human emotions is messy and complex, and eliminating subjective experience makes for a much simpler subject.
We can see evidence of this line of thinking from Pythagoras all the way to some 21st century music theorists, who view music as an abstract set of principles. Musicologists, on the other hand, see music as a product of human culture. And then, we have music psychology and the view that music is a product of the human mind. Psychology has several tools that it developed which allows for the study of our experiences without people having to actually report or describe something in words.
Learning about music psychology lately has been fascinating because its fundamental contribution and main triumph has been the placement of the listener and music maker back at the center of inquiry. And that is great news to us. As we’ve seen, the whole point of theories of harmony is to bring us closer to music.
The deepest understanding of musical study is to view the machinery of music—the dotted rhythms, the perfect authentic cadences, the sonata-allegro forms—as a description of the poetry that exists between our mind and body.
Transcendence is one of many poems.
The greatest experiences are beyond our words. Words are arrows that point us to the real thing. When a musician turns off rationalist thought and simply allows their body and mind to open to the music in their lives, only they can see what happens. (The trick is to let go into the sensation of hearing and the perception of sound. But when it happens, and when a unity is felt, that's how we transcend, both as individuals and as a collective.)
You have to let yourself feel the music you create in order to transcend thought and enter into pure meaning.
No matter how we think about music, as long as we consider the phenomena outside of ourselves, we can never come to a satisfactory answer. No matter how many questions you ask, the answers will never be outside of you.
Music is you.
Bibliography
Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. Psychology of Music. Oxford University Press, 2018.