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Artistic Approach to Knowledge through Music - Aurelio 27/10/07

Sharing from Aurelio at the UHU seminar on the Artistic Approach to Learning 27 October 2007

Excerpt from the presentation:

"Sound Knowledge – For the past fifteen years I have focused on listening or understanding through listening. Sound is also used to mean depth. Sound knowledge – depth, a receptive approach to the unknown… Working with sound is working with the unknown, ungraspable, unspeakable…we will focus today on what sound can bring us.

I will invoke the power of Saraswati, …in the Vedic image she is the river of inspiration descending from above…in later images she has a notebook and seems to stand out of the river and ask what it is. Just this image of descending energy in the form of a river or something flowing from above to below…(Flute tones played)…Descending, nourishing waters.

I am fortunate to have some tools with me, musical instruments to focus on hearing and listening. I will take you for a few minutes to focus on the primal perception in the uterine experience. Sound is the first sense fully developed in the 4-5^th month. With the palms of the hands calm the eyes, feel the comfort and relax the eyes, then cup your ears, hear the white noise, close and open, relax your hands, close your eyes in you want, and if possible imagine an inter-uterine fluid medium, like floating, the first sounds we hear are from the body of the mother, her voice, and different sounds from the environment …(Sounds played with different textures – tones, scrapes, knocks, vibes, crackles, jingles…). Imagine you spend five months in this state just listening. Then at some point we come out of liquid perception into air – with a cry. And we open our eyes in a new medium. …

Now the fun starts because I am not only receiving, I can respond. Listening is coupled with speaking. In sound research it has been shown that we can only produce the sounds that we hear. It’s the same with language development. … With sound we perceive the vibratory quality of existence. … (Chanting with tanpura) … The primal approach to sound is through magic. The Indian approach is through the mystery of life, the AUM is the unfolding of the immutable…it’s differentiated in three levels of vibration: waking, dream, meditation. Existence is an expression of sound = vibration.

I want to go into the Greek tradition. Pythagoras possibly touched into Summerian, Babylonian, Indian culture – there lots of legends how he healed with music and could hear the stars - he put his mind on differentiation of sound. He worked with a monochord and found the beautiful mathematical logic that the frequency of sound is inversely proportionate to the length of the string. …(tonal resonance played on string, harmonic overtones heard)… And they observed that half the length of the string gave double the frequency or octave. In Greek culture there was the great need to understand, and they discovered the law behind music – it related to numbers. There were then centuries of speculation on musical intervals…" - Aurelio

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