I suppose it started with one of our early ancestors finding that he could produce his own noises to mimic those beautiful noises in nature. Maybe as he began to speak and exercise reason and become self-aware, he realized he could tailor his own sounds and create. Maybe he started whacking something with a stick, producing rhythms, and began vocalizing simple melodies. Eventually someone figured out that vibrating a string made a pretty cool noise, and then look: the string produces different tones depending on how much length the string has to vibrate. And then they began to systematize it, master it with mathematics, and well this tonal range is structured, it has rules just like everything else. Frets can modify the length of the string by depressing it into a groove. Then the melodies became more varied, creative. You can take a simple concept or idea and apply it and derive and derive and soon enough you've got a whole branching, flowering structure of variances, of something searching and reaching for the light so to speak. Like a great tree growing out of its seed. Its blueprint. And then woah, these tones can form into clusters and you've got harmonics. I'm guessing harmonics came after the melody, but I really have no idea. Now what's going on here is essentially wave manipulation. The vibration of the string is displacing the air around it ever so slightly, and energy is transferred over all the adjacent particles in the sonic shape of the vibrating string, the frequency of which produces a certain tone when it vibrates those little hairs in our ear, after finally reaching it. This wave of energy emenates out until it disperses and to such a minute amount that it cannot be picked up; but out it goes somewhere...where nothing is wasted. There are different dynamics going on with an electric guitar, where the pickups and an amplifier are doing the work to get the sound out, as opposed to a hollow body that bounces the sound and amplifies it that way. But in the end it is the same basic principle.
And here we are going around generating strange topographies in the ocean around us. In the end we are still fish, just swimming around in a less dense ocean. It is still all connected.
These topographies can be comprehended, and not just in a linear fashion. It seems we do listen to something beginning to end, but we must take into account different instruments, and so in addition to an X axis and Y axis there is a Z axis, and we are given a sensation of being in a space over time, made even more vivid with deeper textures. Beat, melody, harmony...primitive rhythm and intricately weaved textures. These landscapes each say something of their own. Some take the time to say something new and exciting, while others are simply banalities: regurgitations, nothing more than echoes of something else. We construct these things to search for meaning. Because meaning functions similarly to a physical house, for our minds. To build a symphony is to build a certain structure to be lived in, to shield us from that terrible, alien, raw existence. We use a certain set of tools and principles to build these structures, in accordance with physics and syntactical laws of understanding. We pick up tools from others, what others have done before, in following a branch of an ancient train of thought set into motion long ago. It is cyclical, but seems to move in a progression, like a slinky.
It seems we can imbue these collections of notes with our own emotions. Our fingers move a certain way, in a certain fashion, and this effects the note spacing and intensity and all the sort, and it translates to emotion that we can pick up on. Nothing is wasted. Everything is connected. A good theme to remember. And there are plenty of modes of interpretation too. All the great works offer an infinite collection of interpretations, so that each man can live in his own private sanctuary of meaning when listening. And a collection of men can agree on a certain meaning and it becomes a discourse. Maybe eventually an institution. A larger, more potent statement of meaning, amplified even more with more voices.
And all these disturbances of the air we can alter in so many ways. Tone, noise distortion, instrument variance, bass, treble, middle, and so much more. It is a good time to live, to have inherited this monstrous chain of events.
I haven't written in a long time. I suppose the longer one waits, the longer things build up and the more one has to say when they finally do say something. These ideas are constructions in themselves. A different kind of symphony. It is still a structure, a structure I have made physical with these words. I have used tools and concepts that have slowly become available to me, all in a framework made up by the current age I live in. These ideas are truth insofar as they at least resemble what is really there. But in the end it is me just trying to say something, making an argument, exercising my ego. I'm trying to make something physical so that I can look over and decide whether these principles and concepts are things I want governing my thoughts. I suppose I'm ok with it for now. I suppose I'm not yet going mad. Madness is a collapse of a crucial structure of meaning, of the faculty to correctly make structures. And I seem to be making them still, along with everyone else. I think.
Whatever the case, it felt good.
