“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Nikola Tesla
When I was growing up in Wisconsin, there was always a lot of music in our home. My Mom’s baby grand piano took up half the living room in our first house, and she was a pretty accomplished concert pianist. When she was frustrated, Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude would reverberate through our tiny saltbox home. My parents also loved other romantic classical music like that of Tchaikovsky, and they adored Broadway musicals, running out and buying the LP recording as soon as it came out. My sister and I memorized lyrics and music to all the hits: Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, Camelot, etc.
Then, when I was twelve, a violin arrived at our home, a gift from someone in the family. Of the three of us kids, I had already made my ambitions clear, and was chosen to learn to play it. That started me on a lifelong pursuit. Luckily, I was part of a fantastic music program in my suburb of Milwaukee, and we were playing real music, things like the Water Music by Handel, and Vivaldi violin concertos.
I was in heaven. Music meant so much to me, and I couldn’t believe I was actually in a real orchestra. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair, as I went on to play professionally, and ran a teaching studio and booking agency.
But I didn’t know why music was so important to me until I stopped playing and began to write.
If you’ve never seen Bobby McFerrin lead a whole auditorium full of people in an improvisational chant, then you need to go here to witness something remarkable. He gives the audience a couple of starting pitches, and simply by jumping around the stage, manages to get everyone to sing a piece of music together. Once they’re off and running, even when he jumps to introduce new material - they know what to do.
Go watch it…I'll wait.
He has also said in interviews that it doesn’t matter where in the world he tries this experiment, it could be wildly different cultures. It’s always the same - people know instinctively how to do it.
How is this possible?
It’s as if everyone in the audience was not only a musician, but also in on the process ahead of time. Except in many cases, they're not musicians, and it’s a brand new idea to all of them.
It turns out that McFerrin is using a scale (a group of notes) known to musicians as the “pentatonic” scale in his demonstration. And these notes in the pentatonic scale are also the exact overtones of musical notes we experience every day. (An easy way to figure out how to play a pentatonic scale is to only play the five black keys on the piano.) They are the pitches that we can’t “hear” that are above the pitches we do hear. Each pitch generates its own pentatonic overtone series. I put “hear” in quotes, because if someone plays a note on an instrument (like a piano, for instance) and asked us to sing any overtones we hear, we probably couldn’t - they’re subliminal, but nevertheless, they’re there.
And clearly, McFerrin’s experiment shows that we know they’re there.
When you look around in nature, the “harmonic series” shows up a lot. Just examining a basic conch shell tells us that the wave forms found in the harmonic series are also in nature. Even the human heart is structured like the harmonic series with its various chambers, which is why (in my opinion) we feel a tugging at our hearts when music touches us.
Our beating hearts sync up while we listen to or perform music together, and that becomes more pronounced the more emotional the musical meaning is. It’s why some people get “frisson”, or hair standing up, and why we all know when a performance is special. When we leap to our feet at the end of a great performance, feeling renewed, it’s because the music has literally touched our hearts. We may even think anything is possible after hearing a performance that inspires us. Tesla’s quote above supports this theory.
Music is also based on the Fibonacci sequence that is found everywhere in nature. In mathematics, the Fibonacci sequence is a sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones (1+2=3, 2+3=5 e.g.). When we listen to music, we must, on a subliminal level, realize that we are listening to the natural world, to our own nature. The magnetosphere, our own electromagnetic fields, hurricanes, the structure of plants, and many other naturally occurring phenomena all contain the Fibonacci sequence.
I don’t pretend to understand all of the numerical or scientific implications of something like the Fibonacci sequence, but there seems to be a meaningful correlation that I (at least) was never taught while I was a professional musician. As Tesla mentions in his quote, there’s a lot we don’t understand about our universe, but if we follow the clues, we may just end up solving a lot of things that continue to puzzle us, and discover our true nature.
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