Quantum Ears

It seems obvious to say that music starts at time a and finishes at time b, and in between goes on a journey. But I'm beginning to hear it differently. I don't think there is a time a and a time b: they are constructed as part of our sense-making about what happens to us when we listen or play. Importantly, our sense-making must omit certain key aspects of making music. The principal dimension that I think is omitted is noise, or the energy that is continually shaking our senses and causing our physiology to find new ways of organising itself. 

If we consider what noise does, then the journey of music over what is perceived as time is entirely co-present at any "now". Music is a more like a space to explore than a path to follow. From the very moment that we both make and don't make a sound, the whole space is there, existing in the dynamic between physiology and the universe. 

Harrison Birtwistle seems to have heard music like this, and his thought has had a big influence on me. I was particularly struck by Birtwistle's appreciation of Paul Klee - particularly Klee's pedagogical sketchbooks. Birtwistle says:

Like Paul Klee, I'm taking a line for a walk. But the lines Klee draws are pure continuum, they look like a map of a walk or a journey. And this is how we usually think of journeys - fluid things which are uninterrupted. But when you're in the process of journeying, you perceive them differently. You don't look straight ahead, you look to the right and then to the left. And when you turn to the left you fail to take in the events on the right and vice-versa. In retrospect you think of the journey as being a logical progression from one thing to another, but in actual fact it consists of a series of unrelated things, which means that you're simply making choices all the time, choices about where to look. It's to do with discontinuity. You have a continuum, but you're cutting things out of it while you look the other way.

Music is discontinuous in essence. The "continuity" is something that perception imposes on us, making us ignorant of the dynamics that drive its discontinuities. Deep down, what we perceive in Mozart or Bach (and in Birtwistle) is coherence, which is not the same thing as continuity. 

Coherence does not need time as we understand it. It represents the deep symmetry of nature, in which what we call time is a parameter. In quantum mechanics, this deep symmetry is what balances out local (physically proximate) phenomena with non-local (physically distant) phenomena. For there to be "spooky action at a distance" (which there appears to be), then there must be some underlying balancing that goes on between what happens locally and something happening non-locally. All matter, including our physiology - and our ears - will partake in this universal symmetry.

Because of this complex symmetrical mechanism, the energy of the quantum world is always buzzing and interfering with our physiological substrates. To deal with this, all life needs to construct niches. The space of music is its niche. To be entranced by music is to be drawn into its niche, and then (in the case of Western classical music) to be convinced of music's "journeying". But the journey is an illusion. Music immediately presents a multiplicity of the same thing. Heterophony is the closest we get to this kind of thing. 

Taking time and continuity out of the music equation carries important lessons for other aspects of life. Learning, like music, is discontinuous, but learners and teachers are forced to deny this by the expedience of institutions who must regiment educational practice. Equally, the climate emergency is often portrayed as a "race against time" - but rather like the pathology of education, the more we impose a linear model on what is essentially a discontinuous system, we become (despite the good intentions of activists) more denatured, not less. The same is true in politics: our only understanding of a regulatory system is one which works in a linear continuous fashion, and which in operation creates more alienation.