In the innerdance process, we somehow begin to experience sound strangely, profoundly ... differently as we may have experienced it in years past. Described repeatedly by so many, suddenly, music is suddenly alive, what used to be a message is also a messenger of sorts. One that gives feedback.
We aren't just listening to it. Maybe it's listening to us, too.
Who is the Music?
Music undergoes transformations, even as our ability to listen to it is also changing. The very mediums that create, store and transmit music bears some responsibility as to how we relate to music now.
In the recent History of Music, there are many particular aspects that intensely affect the bodies, brains and spirits of human beings: diversity, synthesis and distortion.
1.) Diversity – The diverse playlist unto itself was not possible until mere decades ago. Prior to the cassette tape, genres and musical cultures are kept distinct by the basic long-playing records that could only be played one at a time. The overwhelming profusion of musical genres suddenly made available to massive audiences enabled the listeners themselves to affect their own brain processes, creating manipulable mood-altering processes previously unavailable to most human bodies.
2.) Synthesis – Through digitization, electronic technologies allowed music producers the ability to synthesize multiple sounds and noises, condensing a multiplicity of analog frequencies, bringing new layers and dimensions audible to the brain. Simultaneous sounds played at the same time extends the brain’s neural pathways, bringing right-hemisphere experiences to left-hemisphere dominant mental states.
3.) Distortion – Post-modern musical techniques uncovered ways of deconstructing music, even as music producers were learning to refine the fidelity in storing and transmitting its vibrations. Distortion unwires rigidly connected brain patterns, inhibiting rewards and guilt pathways in the nervous system that tender patterns of addiction, emotions, attention, motor functions and memory.
In complement to the African drumbeater’s toolkit, the modern music producer walks to the foreground, bringing diversity, synthesis and distortion as sharp fundamentals made possible by electronic technology. Inside small devices, sounds from China, the Himalayas, Egypt or Berlin channel cultures and histories, waiting to unleash time-bound memories of Earth’s infinite storage bank.
A music library is like a language lexicon. As any number of words usable to an eloquent speaker might convey meanings to listeners that understand them, so does a vocabulary of sounds send forth messages to the energies that resonate to a large spectrum of possibility.
Making preparations for the creation of a facilitator’s extensive soundscape is tantamount to organizing one’s Mind, if the mind was one’s bedroom or office space. One must both know what is inside the room, and where the numerous contents might be found.
The above tools are reflexively determined in a vast range of topics that can only be talked about in some focused discussions in the long-term:
The Intuitions in Song Selection and Combination Harmony: Breath in the axes of Rate and Depth Rhythm: Heart in the axes of SV and bpm Melody: Brain in the ranges between delta and gamma