From Cosmology to Neuroscience to Rock Music and back

piero scaruffi

Jan 2015

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The Universe

• Einstein: matter distribution determines spacetime geometry that determines the motion of matter

• Schroedinger: the total energy of a system determines the probability of its position at any given time

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The Universe

• Entropy: Entropy can never decrease

• Indeterminacy: The more precise, the less precise

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The Planet

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The Brain

• Problems

– How to survive in a nonlinear(chaotic) world

– How to process an infinite amount of information

• Solution

– An organ to simulate the nonlinear world

– Memory (which is NOT storage)

Regulated By biorhythms

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The Brain

• A tool to find regularities in nature (that actually don’t exist: no two seasons are identical, no two rocks are identical)

• A tool to predict the future

• A tool to turn the incomprehensible into mathematics

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Non-human civilizations

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Human Civilization

• Actually, mammals are not that good at civilization

• Anyway…

Human civilization over the millennia www.scaruffi.com

Human Civilization

• Three stages of brain development

– Child: helpless, selfish, dumb

– Young person: rebellious, violent, reckless, immature

– Adult: a computer (symbol processor)

• Simulation

• Theory of mind

• Planning

• Communication

• Cooperation

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Human Civilization

• Note: In prehistory most brains never made it to the adult stage

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Human Civilization

• Cave art • Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Vedic, Greek deities • Monumental architecture • Monotheism: Mazdaism, Judaism, Christianity,

Islam • Philosophy: Upanishad, Greeks, Qiu Kong, Lao-

tsu • Math: Babylonia, Pythagoras, India • Literature: Gilgamesh, Sinuhe, Homer • Science: Archimedes • And, above all, warfare

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Human Civilization

• Mysteries, theater, dance, music

• Poetry rhymes = rhythm

• Singing poetry: a tool to memorize long epics

Symposium scene

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Greek Tragedy

• Theater (550BC)

– "Theatron" = "seeing place", the place where the audience sat

– "Tragedia" = "goat-song" (goat skins of the chorus)

– "Chorus" = "dance"

– Theater began as a religious ceremony

– The Anthenian theatre focused on Dionysus, god of fertility, wine, sexuality, agriculture

– Yearly Dionysian fertility festival in March, including

• one week of public wine drinking

• phallus-worshiping orgy

• dithyrambos (dance and chant to the god)

– The dithyrambos evolves into tragedy www.scaruffi.com

Greek Tragedy

• Theater (550BC)

– The first plays were transcriptions in verse form of

these religious rites

– The first playwrights were poets and the first plays

were mostly recited (or sung) and danced by the

chorus

– Contests and competition like in athletic games

– The chorus danced in front of the stages ("orchestra”)

– A play included loud music, bright colors, spectacular

dancing

– The performance took place in an open-air theater

– The audience was 15-17,000 people

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The Birth of Reading

• First popular literature: inscribed epigrams (especially in sanctuaries) since 7th c BC

• The Attic tragedies were the first books (for the purpose of documenting how to produce the play)

• Then people started reading them for entertainment

• Communal reading (aloud)

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The Birth of Reading

• Aristophanes’ “Frogs” (405 BC) mentions the reader Dyonisos

• Logographers (e.g. Lysias, 5th BC) • Book market (book exported from

Athens as far as the Black Sea, Socrates mentions that a book by Anaxagoras costs one drachma)

• Child literacy (Herodotus: in 495BC in Chios 120 schoolchildren died in an accident while learning how to read and write)

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The Birth of Reading

• Douris

Douris, 5th c www.scaruffi.com

The Birth of Composition?

• Written text: removal of enaction, the text has to be emotionally self-contained

• Did the same happen to music?

• Advantage of music: no need for glasses or lighting!

• Disadvantage: no recording medium

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The Birth of Composition

• The Seikilos epitaph (1st c AD) is the oldest surviving musical composition

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Music as Religious Power

• Schola Cantorum (5th c, Rome): a place for training ecclesiastical singers (future popes Sergius I, Sergius II, Gregory II, Stephen III, Paul I trained there)

• Gregorian monody (7th c until the 15th century)

• The original metrical performance of Gregorian monody disappears by 1050

• Secular monody (12th c, e.g. troubadours in France)

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Music as Religious Power

• Ars Nova (John XXII complains in 1324 against the risks of secularising sacred music)

• Avignon pomp (especially Clement VI from 1342)

• Polyphony

– Cathedrals: choir and/or organ

– Vast majority of places: improvisation “Cantus super ltbrum” (13th c)

• Splendor and might Giovanni Battista Facchetti’s organ (Piacenza, 1544)

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Music as Political Power

• 14th th: Princes’ private chapels are redesigned for polyphonic music

• Princes become patrons and practitioners of music (French king Charles the Bald of 9th c. was a harp player)

• Courts compete for music and musicians

• Guillaume Dufay (15th c, Burgundian school), Josquin Desprez (15thc, Franco-Flemish School), etc

• Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (1486)

Quaternionenadler by Hans Burgkmair (1510)

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Western Music

• Folk music: stories and sex • Meistersinger (14th-16th c) • Frottola (Italy, 16th c) • Opera (Jacopo Peri's “Daphne” in 1597; Venice’s opera house of

1637) • Instruments: harpsichord, lute, violin, contrabass, viola, cello, harp,

trombone, trumpet, guitar, flute, pipe organ • Freedom to improvise • Symphony • Ballet • Classical music for both God and the King • The piano (Bartolomeo Cristofori , 1709) • Romanticism to Wagner: love, death • Music is the ultimate, “total” art • Formal dance

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Western Music

• Music magazines

• Musical Times (England, 1844)

• Billboard (USA, 1894)

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Western Music

• The 19th century for the middle class

– Industrialization

– Lighting

– Tourism

– Phonograph

– Urbanization

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The 20th Century

• The century of the avant-garde (1908-52, Cubism to Cage)

• The century of women

• The century of the young generations

• The century of democracy

• The century of globalization

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• Electricity • Regriferator • Automobile • Airlane • Telegraph • Telephone • Phonograph • Camera • Cinema • Radio • Typewriter • Calculator • Skyscraper • Plastic

The 1910s

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The 1910s • Futurism (1909): machines and noise • Carl Jung (1912): the collective subconscious • Alfred North Whitehead’s and Bertrand Russell’s

“Principia Mathematica” (1913): math logic • Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia (1915) • Franz Kafka’s "The Trial" (1915) • Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

(1915) • Dadaism (1916): chance, irrationality • Jazz (1917): improvisation • World War I (1914-18)

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The 1910s • The 1910s set the stage for a confrontation

between the extremely rational and the extremely irrational

EINSTEIN RUSSELL

DADA JAZZ KAFKA

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You are a formula Everything

is relative

You are and you are not

You are just a reflex

You are a probability

Everything is uncertain

Everything is moving away from you

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The emancipation of the dissonance

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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There will always be something you cannot prove

Your mind creates reality

Truth is an opinion

Life and machines obey the same laws of nature

Everything is information

Everything comes from just one point

Mind is a symbol processor

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The post-Newtonian world

• The mind is a symbol processor

• Living beings are machines

• The universe is evolving

• New frontiers in the conquest of nature (electronics, nuclear energy, space)

• There is a limit to scientific knowledge

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The 1940s

• World War II

• The Holocaust

• Hiroshima

• Disintegration of the British Empire

• Rise of the USA and Soviet Union

• The computer

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The 1940s

• Existentialism (Sartre, Camus, …)

• Abstract painting (Pollock, Kooning, …)

• Electronic music (Cage, Darmstadt school, Schaeffer)

• Bebop

• 1949: George Orwell’s “1984"

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What the Mid-century inherited

• Nonconformism

• Anxiety

• Chance

• Freedom Salvador Dali

Charlie Chaplin John Cage

Charlie Parker

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Music after WWII

• Noise

• Free jazz

• Psychedelic rock

• Ambient music Karlheinz Stockhausen

Brian Eno John Coltrane

Velvet Underground www.scaruffi.com

Popular Music of the 20th century

• Storytelling and protest

– Blues

– Singer-songwriters

– Rock

– Rappers

• Dance

– Jazz

– Dance crazes (charleston to twist)

– Rock

– Techno/house/etc

• Love/sex

• Soul

• Rock

• Pop

• Soundscape

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BRAIN OF THE

IMMATURE YOUNG

ADULT

Popular Music of the 20th century

• Instruments

– Electric guitar

– Electronic keyboard

Jimi Hendrix Klaus Schulze

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Rock music = neuroscience

Sex Dance (rhythm)

Stories (language) Rebellion

Innovation

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Rock music = neuroscience

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Rock music = neuroscience = cosmology

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“The best way to predict your future is to create it” –Peter Drucker

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