Unfolding and Enfolding

This is a meditative improvisation which follows ideas about music which I've been exploring for some time. Basically I think that what we perceive as the unfolding of music over time is really an illusion. What I think happens is that the unfolding goes hand-in-hand with enfolding (to borrow David Bohm's terms for this process), and that the totality of music is ever-present. There's no time past or time future.. time itself is an illusion. Unfolding and enfolding doesn't occur in time but as an intrinsic set of dimensional relations. Just as moving through a sculpture creates the impression of a changing perception, but where actually nothing changes,  the form is ever present: the form of music is ever-present as dimensional relations. Just as the form of life - birth and death - is ever-present. 

Music Improvisation and Language

I had another post which I wanted to write today, but I'll save that for later. In the meantime, I've been doing some more wild improvising. I suppose what fascinates me is that any kind of music making like this is fundamentally technological. The piano is a technology. But in its use, it somehow fuses with my biology/psychology/physiology - all musical instruments are like that - to the point that it becomes an amplifier of emotion. In particular it is an amplifier of aspects of feeling which cannot be expressed in words. 

Some of this music feels agitated, some of it calm. But if I was to say "I'm agitated" or "calm" it would not represent what the music says. It's doesn't even say "I'm agitated and calm". It says something more like "my calmness and agitation are structured in particular ways such that I choose to express certain things in certain moments". Although even there, the language is deficient. 

 

Back to work...

After a nice week last week (almost a holiday in the Cotswolds if I didn't count the occasional meeting and a day at a conference), I'm back at work, phone back on, connected up again... A change is as good as a rest, as they say. 

I've made a discovery in relation to my AI work which I now need to pursue. Of course I can't turn off my brain, so this all bubbles up last week. 19th century philosophy and psychology, and the music of Clara and Robert Schumann, are pulling me in a direction which I hope is fruitful. 

Cotswolds to Oxford

Visiting the ANPA conference today which is taking place in Oxford. It's small...

Cotswolds

There's something beautiful about being in an ancient environment. What is that? Very little contact with modern communications does help a bit...

Has anyone seen my mojo?

I seem to have lost my mojo. I put it down somewhere a few weeks back and I can't remember where. Or if I can think of where I might have put it, somebody has moved the bloody thing. If you've seen my mojo, please get in touch. I quite miss it. It was a much-loved part of my personality. Without it I am a bit lost... fiddling around with stupid AI things, and feeling a bit depressed. Please help if you can...

...and beginning to get it back...

Stressed Squirrels

I am lacking energy in this muggy heat. I always find that pushing through things is usually worth it, but it is heavy-going. 

I managed to "push out" a paper on citizen science last week, and am quite pleased to have done that. It wasn't easy, but it is furnishing an argument which is common to almost everything I am doing at the moment. Other papers are ready to go too, and the acceptance of this one makes the others easier. 

I am also pushing out a response to a rather tortuous paper on cancel culture. Everything is tortuous there - that's the point of it I suspect. Nature isn't so tortuous however. If it was we wouldn't be here. That's interesting. How are we different? There is, as Bateson observed, a fundamental difference between the way people think and the way nature works.

Living and loving is a struggle. Is that a universal principle? Or is it only humans that make such heavy weather of existence? I don't see many stressed squirrels on my way to work.