Sound to Music

Sound to Music

Samuel Bird

Whether known when you are living them out or not, some memories have a weight and sheerness that finds them seared into one’s psyche to where you identity is inseparable from it. One moment so deeply etched in my mind, finds itself as present as my waking experience. The long-needle white pine to the west, diffused the late-april rays through its branches onto a small me, sitting against the house. In my hands was a hard earned prize; a cheap child’s guitar. This had been years of begging, pleading, and working, but she was now mine. I was now left to find rapturous melodies bleed from my fingers onto her chintzy fretboard. My long hair fluttered in the wind as I sat with her above my crossed legs. Copying the cowboys and songwriters I had seen photographs of, I placed my right hand over the body of the guitar, and with my left I held the neck. The guitar was horrendously out of tune, but that is no problem to someone who didn’t know what “tune” means. The anticipation took over as my right hand dragged itself across the strings making a torturous sound to passersby, and a beautiful sound to me as it came from my own hand. I did it again, and again, until the novelty wore off, and it was clear that making a sound was not that hard. Making one I wanted to hear again, now that was a challenge. I tried hitting just some strings, but it still sounded off. Finally, I hit one single string. It said so little, but it at least said it without the dissonance of non-complimentary notes. I hit it again to hear it ring out, and then again harder. This time, my little hands knew little control and had hit the string enough for it to break. I took a few moments to mourn, knowing my mother would see my disrespect of her sacrificed gift. I would then need a new series of begging and chores. Wait, there were still six other strings. Maybe that is why they had so many, as they sounded terrible together. I hit another string, but this one happened to sound different. Learning my lesson, I gently hit it. What about a beat? I began to gently pluck it back and forth, forgetting about the horror of the broken string. Then, as I did so much as a little boy, I began to whistle. The sound started in one pitch, but, trying to control my round cheeks, I began to shape the sound and pitch until it did something with the guitar that was unique. I then looked down at the string. Why did it make that sound? Well, when the string was struck, it seemed to shake from the striking until it could once again rest in still silence. Why was I hearing it? It was clear that it was shaking my small body and the air around me such that I could hear the vibrations with my ear. So fortunate was I to hear that sound. I forget why, but I stopped playing that guitar. Perhaps it was the tuning or maybe the broken string. However, I always had this dream of learning how to play the guitar. Six years later at the age of fourteen, I found my great-grandfather's guitar in the basement. I began to learn that if I pinched the strings, the shorter length, per the width of the string, made a higher pitched note. Also, of course, I learned about tuning. I fell in love with something that was simply good to me without malice or secret. I worked from four in the morning to well after dark, living in backyards and barns, saving up my one dollar an hour, and finally found a two hundred dollar guitar. It was the knock off version of the guitar of the musician I loved most. I would then spend every day I was not working, as I didn’t go to school, and poured myself into the instrument. My mind began to find patterns, shapes, connections, that I could not explain to you, but I found them there. Every note had a relationship to every other, and that other note had a reciprocal relationship to it. A third note could then have a unique relationship to both and its reciprocal to either. However, my guitar had twelve unique notes that then repeated in a higher octave. Every note had its relationship to every other, and every other had its relationship to it. I would spend multiple hours a day learning, practicing, and feeling. I now began to know who I was. I had found some distinctness in myself from my philosophizing and inventing as a child, but now I had something I could do to be someone. I was no longer just what I was: A dirty farm boy playing his six string way too loudly. I was a musical artist who serenaded my loving fans who I loved enough to forgive their not existing. I then worked harder, practiced, and learned. Almost every penny of my poverty wages from blue collar jobs went to near professional-grade musical equipment. The night of my writing this, I did an improv flamenco piece in A minor. If philosophy is confessions, let me be honest. I am not a story-teller, not truly a writer, and sometimes I wonder if my soul is that of a philosopher. I think I am a musician who figured out how to make the instrument out of a pen. You will note my precision is traded for some diminishing and crescendoing flow. I think I am a musician at heart and a philosopher by desperation. 

Let us sit with a note and explore its properties. If you have an instrument at hand with sufficient sustain, pluck, bow, and breath that note into life. If not, imagine so. As the note rings out, identify what seems to be occurring within you from what seems to be happening without you. Sound, is oscillation in a medium. Unless your ear is pressed up against the instrument, it is the air that is the medium. Within its frequency of vibration within the parameter or bandwidths you are able to register. As an organism, we likely gained this sensation to identify threats, friends, and food. However, as the sound is carried to the portion of use that is extrareal, metaphysical, and supernatural, the oscillations in a medium as an object gains the qualities of seemingness to a subject, such that it is now available to be about more than it was initially and explicitly about. This is value. As a fact strikes the soul, we register our towardness to the thing at hand based on our seemingness. There are a variety of sounds that we may value. The lowing of the cattle on a family farm, the buzzing of a bee on the first noticeably spring morning, or the shrieking of the kettle, elucidating the readiness of your tea. However, we appreciate these sounds more for that thing we value that they refer to. There is another sort of sound we value much more for its own sake: music. Music is the seemingness of certain sorts of sounds to become narratives ripe for meaning, or at least a line of prose. You will note that sounds that are not explicitly musical can still have such a quality. Years working with heavy industrial machinery had me tapping my foot to cyclical bashing or whistling harmonies to the pitch of whining engines. So, music is then a certain series of seemingness to a subject. Sound only becomes music in the soul. You may then ask, if there is sound and no subject, could that possibly musical sound be music? According to my system, no. I then thank God for hearing all the birds, winds, and waves, making sure the rest of His marvelous world can be musical. I will be careful not to overstep and make a claim of what is claimed to be music, is music. Art in its more rebellious forms, seeks to push the case of its method. Could we make some line that past it is not music and just noise? Certainly, but we made that line, which is acceptable if we own it. Music is then literally subjective, but as with all values, certainly not in the modern sense of it being arbitrary. It is only in the human soul that music can be digested. However, not all sounds, given the essential and premeditated nature of that soul, are available for our honest appreciation. We can learn to love black coffee and discordant music, but drinking sand or having sand poured into our ears are less available for our natural evaluation. This is where the hubris of hating fate needs to be left undone. God made us as a certain thing with a bandwidth of given dynamic alteration. However, no man can step from himself to alter such. He will always be himself as he works with himself. It is then only the primal mind of God that can make man into His theosophic ends and any attempt to by our afterlords to make men home deus in his timing, will be another babel. You like what you like, because there is something it is like to be you. Go back to your note. What emotional experiences are you having as a consequence of its ringing out? Your emotions are the wisdom of the flesh, as humble and faulty as they are, to inform the soul of raw data for its evaluation. It is in the eyes you cry, but the soul that there is something that it is like for you to cry. Let us further explore this sound unto music. Let us do so by getting to the heart and yet breadth of music. 

I have before compared learning the guitar to the meaning of life, as neither has meaning until it is contextualized by our relative experience to it. It is only by sacrifice that we can find the exclusion and limitation, and therefore the unbound grandiosity in anything. Remember this when you curse God’s wise lot for you. When I play music, it is most often on the guitar. I choose a musical key, which I will explain soon, and then turn off the rational portion of my mind to let out what rests on me, via that improvisation in that key. In fact, I have only learned to play small moments of a handful of songs. Everything else I play is some songs I have written, and overwhelmingly, me speaking my mind via a language I embarrass myself less often with. People then hear this quality in the music they value, and their rational and materialistic minds then ask for me to teach it to them. They think what they heard was a mechanical effort on physical strings, and therefore reproducible by some string-pinching automaton. However, it is instead the bleeding of the soul in note. Though, I don’t need to be any more dramatic than I already am, so I keep it to myself. I then ask if they would really and truly be willing to learn to play music from me. They then swear they would do whatever it takes. I then share a short introduction into how I learned, and then ask them to do the same. They then nod profusely as they imagine the glory and respect they will get from playing with such technical talent. I then tell them that art is to have something to say, and a medium to say it beautifully. I then ask them if they have something to say. They nod, thinking they will put up with my philosophical ramblings to learn the secret. I then nod and hand them the guitar that was in my hand. I then give them a brief explanation of how to hold a guitar, fret it correctly, and then pluck. I will then remind them what I just said, as their nervousness and unfamiliarity with the instrument results in incorrect form. They will then ask what riff or lick I can teach them. I then tell them they need to learn how to play a single note perfectly. By this point, their face goes blank, and then frustrated. They will then note that my hands slipped up as I played with increasing tempo. I will then say while true, I know what I mean with the notes and words I stumble over. What does their note mean, no matter the count? I have had this exact conversation with no fewer than ten people, few of which made it this far, and none of which meant much further. I then point out that in a language, they have a word for something while another language calls it something else. Who is right? They will note both, in their language. I will then say, what if I called a cow, a cow, but was speaking Russian. They would note that would be incorrect. Like any language, there is a relativism of terms for an absolution of meaning. For example, it does not matter what note you start in, outside of physical resonance, only what the relative connection is to another note. If I play a piece exactly in one tuning, or tune it down just a tiny portion and play it the same, the song is still the song. I will then tell them the next secret in how I play music: I am paying attention to the relationships between notes. This is where music becomes like math and logic, something that seems to have predated us as a perfectly organized system. No doubt Plato had it cross his mind when coming up with a more perfect world from which it was from. Like math and logic, by some definitions of real, such as material, it is not. By others of reproducibility, it is primally real, even over our world. The mind can then wander through the structure of music a priori and find it something more engagable than the world outside that mind. This is where I learned to structure my existential cries into thought. In music, the connections have connections, of which they then connect to new things, as well as the first. You will note that I am a system builder, and it is from the structure of music my mind developed the scaffolding. Ideas are then considered in terms of or contrast to other ideas. As no concept is known without a concept to sit on while you observe it, the note with none other is nothing more than the baseline for your mind to harmonize over. What does a note make you feel, versus a symphony? What does a fact mean, versus your breadth of facts and values? Rather than for music to take up limited space in my knowledge as storage and intellect as processing, music's rhythm and tones made philosophy for me. During the structuring of my most complex chapter outlines, I am tapping my foot and fingers. I hear the music and the flow in the ideas, though my execution in writing may lose that flow. This is likely associated with my synesthesia, which I will write on, but essentially, I find connection in non-literal or necessary mediums. I hear colors and see sounds. Music is then an exploration of more than what it is. It can then expound in complexity as there are frequencies between notes called microtonals or vibrato, which is an oscillation to the pattern of our oscillation. Once again, our note can start at anything hearable, but it must start at something. Let us now consider the idea of a key. The musical piece we play will have one core and primal note, of which, all the rest of the notes will then have qualities in terms of that note, and each other. That key note then sets a baseline. The reasoning here gets tricky. It is not meaningless what note you start out at, even with a consistent system afterward, though that system will still stand. So the root note may have been otherwise, but must have been. Consider Esse Maxim as an example. Is it meaningless which Esse Maxim or Root note we start with? Of course not. We need to make sure that note resonates with those players around us as well as the world and our nature. Notice the god-killing criteria here of self consistency, world consistency, and consistency with self. This is more than you bargained for, but there are musicians who try to pick root notes that allege to resonate with our nature such as the four-hundred and thirty-two hertz, as opposed to most western music's four-hundred and forty. These more mystic thinkers are searching for the correct God as the rest of us try to play our symphony with the one that we possess. What I can say of such, however, is that some notes will make tables, glass, and other objects shake. Why not resonances in the soul or body as well. These must be a given root, there is no obvious necessary root, there are a few humble hints at what it is. This is all I can say on absolute notation, and will now speak on music as the relationship between notes. That is to say, notes that have a given quality relative to other notes, at least to a subject. In music, there are two ways that notes can relate. The first is subsequent patterns like a melody, where each note is played after the other. Unlike chords, you can then play notes that would have sounded too discordant together, across time. When it comes to writing melodies, harmonies, and any other type of chord and tonal, or rhythmic progression, I have found something powerful to add to the emotional and narrative depth of the piece. You need to identify just how long you stay away from the sweet return of the note. Recall a beautiful song that on its last note, allows the root to ring out. This is to come back to yourself, but to be someone different. This is the return to the village, with the saved damsel. Your whole song is building up the tension and yet providing the release. People get weary of stories where the hero never conquers, and yet we would never pick up a book where he had nothing to conquer. We want to see him set out, and see the themes and stories come to a close. It does not have to be a happy ending, but with tragedies, you need to tie together the themes opened in the story. You must leave the root and must come back, but based on the emotional profile of the piece, you must ask yourself how long you keep the listener away from his sweet or tragic return. If you stay away from the return for too long, the hearer grows frustrated. If you come back too soon, the song is bland. You can use this to your advantage as pieces designed to cause conflict wait much longer, while pieces not meant for focused attention can spend less time getting to their return. There is a profound lesson here in training and behavior. If you give a horse a carrot after a few steps, it will not learn much. However, if you give it a small slice for nearly killing over in labor, it becomes resentful. When you lead and train, you need your people to exert force, see a commiserate outcome, and be hungry to work again after some rest. The hearer needs to be pulled from himself, kept for a deliberate season, then returned as himself anew. My society has not learned this. They will provide some with resources for no effort, while others pour out their soul to have a family, and fail to obtain. It then removes the association between action and outcome, of which makes a man feel helpless, and he collapses within himself in despair. Without eventual deliverance, a man grows bitter. With no time in his misery, man doesn’t become himself. Plan your melodies, harmonies, and progressions around the return of the man in your timing. Once again, we also have chords, which are multiple notes played at once. Finally, we have arpeggios, which are the notes of a chord played in a subsequent manner. We have so far explored the idea of how notes could in theory relate to each other, but I now seek to take you through each normative note and its relationship to a root note. You will note that in just two notes relationship, there is the root and the other note’s relationship. However, there is also the inverse and reciprocal relationship of the other note and the root’s relation to it. For example, I have recently been experimenting with chords, which are multiple notes played at once, where the root note, of at least the chord, is not the lowest note. Notes that have a given quality relative to other notes. Once again, the root is the primary note, and the key is the name of the selection of notes that go with it. But what notes can go with it? 

I am going to once again make up my own terminology for ease of explanation. Most music uses an eight note system with five halfsteps. If you see a piane, you will see the white and black keys in a repeated pattern. Once you get to the next iteration of the pattern, it is the same note in a different octave. I will not be using this language or the language of letters such as an A or C# note, as I am trying to illustrate the relationship connection of the notes. I will then take all twelve notes in the octave, and call the notes zero, one, two, three, and you can guess what would come next. If you are classically trained, once again, note that I am not using the names you are familiar with. We will call our starting note or root, “root zero.” Root zero is the note at hand, of which the rest of the notes will play out relative to it. We will explore the seemingness of that note to the others, but how does the note resonate with itself. When you play this zero note along with another zero note in the same octave, they play off each other, each resonating in the other’s instrument and adding together volume. They provide extremity, and pure harmony. The first notes relationship to the zero note is one of the most discordant. If you play both at once, the frequencies bash against each other make a hideous sound. This hideousness can be used carefully to make beauty, however. Most often the note is played not in chord but subsequently. If you do so, it sounds serious, stern, and angry. Combined with other minor notes, it sounds like pure rage. Combined with other major notes, it makes a complex emotion, similar to love, where frustration is met with passion. The second note relative to the root is often used, not as a note unto itself. It enhances the depth of the emotional experience of whatever else is played. It turns a major key from joyful to beautiful and a minor key from discontent to mournful. If you seek to accentuate the emotional experience of what you play, this note will do well. You will note the using of the terms “major,” and “minor” key. The third note is what makes it a minor key. Combined with the second, it becomes tragic. Combined without the second and with the sixth, it becomes confident and strong. However if used, it is for all unrageful seriousness. Whatever you feel from it, strength or sadness, it makes the root note feel heavy. The fourth note is what makes it a major key. It is jovial and wanting. Combined with the second, it is glorious and worshipful. Combined with the eighth, it becomes beautifully lamenting and romantic. The fifth note provides the sustain and anticipation to the root. When you hold it, it is the purest and least specifically emotional state of suspense. It awaits the return with greatest and yet least patience. I won’t go through each note’s reciprocal relationship to the root, but simple math could demonstrate such. However, I will say that the fifth’s seventh, is the root. So if you play the root and fifth, your mind will think the fifth is the root and the root accompanies it as the seventh, which provides magnanimity. That is, unless the song has strongly contextualized a sense of what the root is. The sixth is the most discordant of all the notes to the root. Also called tritonal, it is the only note whose reciprocal relationship to the root is the same as the root's relationship to itself (twelve divided by two gives us six). It can be used lightly with the third for a confident strength, or used in extremity for songs of evil and malice. When the instrument needs a hateful tone, the sixth is on its lips. As I said, the seventh adds power to the root. It is the most common note to be played in a chord for my music. It adds magnanimity and energy to the root. Whatever you play with it, will sound stronger. The eighth is the tragic note. With the fourth it sounds like romance in the midst of losing, and with the third, like lamenting. For a chord progression that is simple though tragic, go from a minor root chord to a major eighth. Nothing else feels pain as deeply as the eighth. The ninth has the least to say about it. With a third, it sounds adventurous and with the fourth, it sounds pleasant. It has its place, but not much to say. The tenth adds some more strong confidence to the key. With a third that has no second, it sounds charismatic and strong. It is the final note before the upward return. If you sustain it right before the root in the appropriate key, it is a good return home. The eleventh is the same, but more tender. If it is with a third, it sounds dark and mysterious. If it is with a fourth, graceful and hallowed. Finally, we have the twelfth, which is the root note occurring again in a new key. We have now explored each note's relationship to the rest. Some sorts of music, such as the kind at my church, use notes between these for increased complexity. There is also something to say for ascending or descending progressions. We are once again embarking and returning. We can ascend then descend, descend then ascend, or some pattern of either. However, each has its emotional experiences. To major keys, descendings feels like falling into a warm bed while ascending feels like being caught up into rapture. For a minor key, descending feels like falling into loss and apathy while ascending feels like mounting tension and possible rage. You will note that I am taking these oscillation patterns in a medium, and attributing titles of values. Once again, this is due to the seemingness moving these from sounds to music. I have now given you each normative note and its relationship to each other. However, songs rarely use all notes, and if so accentuate some and disregard others. Most often, a selection of notes are chosen for their emotive profile as a key. All the normative modes have eight such notes. They start with the following pattern zero, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, and then twelfth. This makes up the major or Ionian key. What they will then do for different emotional profiles is take each note in this initial key, and make it the root, while keeping the absolute relationships the same. The Dorian keeps the same other notes, but makes the second the root, Phrygian the fourth, Lydian the fifth, Mixolodian the seventh, Aelion the ninth, and Locrian the eleventh. Each has an emotional profile, though I won’t bore you with an exploration, but these are the normative modes. However, once you identify what notes bring about what emotions, you can then add them to your key or subtract them as desired. There are rules in music, so you know what to break. However, you must be cautious to certify that the new notes don’t just result in the emotion to the root that you desire, but that they also fit well with all the other notes, and the totality of the new key. If it doesn't work with the rest of the system, it must go, no matter the emotional experience from the root. It would be wonderful to have a song that made you feel everything, but to try to do so by playing every note and thinking it would result in all emotions, would be to ignore the issue of the singularity of human attention. To mean something, you must not mean something else. A song is as much all the notes you do not play. However, even if you build a key, perhaps you will have one or two notes outside of that key to add surprise and intrigue. Due to knowing the structure we have talked about, we can often infer the emotional experience of a certain idea, but due to multiplicity and seemingness, sometimes things sound different than you would have thought. Adding an evil note to a sad key makes a smooth confident key, for some reason. Once you learn the notes and modes, I recommend learning to make your own keys, and with them chord progressions and unique melodies. We always think we have written all the music that can be, until someone sees music with new eyes. The note we start from matters, but where we go with that note is much more due to our labor rather than our fortune. This is where epistemic theories come to mind. Foundationalism is one supreme truth being the basis for truth. Coherentism is a system of truth built together. Esse Maxim and music are both neither and both. We start from our departure of faith and then build out a system from it. However, the initiation of the system is of our own imagining and though needed for the very real and consistent new system at hand. There is one root that we play the rest of the song to. We choose this note, but not all notes are eligible. Perhaps we anxiously played it ourselves, perhaps we heard its mystical pitch on the wind. While the world offers so many options of what the note could be, our nature narrows it down. Start to hum, now. What pitch did you choose? What note was on your mind? What frequency most naturally and unforced, flowed from your breath? The world doesn’t tell us what key to play in, but it also doesn’t care that we play a song either. Within us is God’s gift of a singing voice made to sing some notes more naturally than others, enjoy some notes rather than others, and hear some notes better than others. Will we betray the music in our head for discounting the sound in our ears as nothing more than the shaking of reeds and metal strings? What discount to the human spirit and his exploration I want no part with. If there is no soul, wherein do I sit when I hear these sounds? Where does it become music? Where does it mean something other than more about which it was about? Let us hear music, and hear it well. To enhance the beauty and the total meaning of art, we must know where to place its ugliness. Without discordant escapes from transcendent chords, we would be bored of the beautiful chord that we awaited its return to. It is the return we wait for and the hope that the chord is there. The longer I can put off getting to the return, as long as I don’t lose hope in it, the more I build up this sense of longing and for that reason, when I deliver it is all the more transcendent. The doxis of music is its theory, the praxis is its playing, but what is the telos or wisdom of music? To leave a better silence than that which preceded it. I am not a philosopher but a musician whose instrument is the pen and whose lyrics point back to you. Man is he who can witness sounds becoming music. This art is the soul bleeding. Art is seemingness where there isn’t explicit isness, though some art like music has a less explicit object for its subject. Art is the extended hand from the invisible self, of which for me, my hand reaches from within, to God and to you.