All solid matter conducts sound. If we pass sound through a brick, its passing is observed as waves. We call these waves "phonons". Phonons have resonance modes, different configurations, notes, harmonics, and all the things you'd think of when you think about "sound".





Everything has a natural harmonic frequency. This is called its 'natural frequency'. You observe this effect for instance when armies march over certain bridges. If they march at the right pace (wrong for them!), they can shake the bridge so hard it collapses and kills them all. When something is hit with its resonant frequency, the phonons get amplified with a feedback loop, so little energy is lost. The butterfly effect creates a tornado instead of a vague movement of winds.



So if you pass sound through a brick, you'll get one kind of phonon, a standing wave. This is like an echo that resonates back and forth inside of the brick. The brick then produces
its own sound in response to make a remix.

If you pass sound through a piece of wood, same thing.
Through some water... same thing, and it looks really pretty to boot.
Through a metal bowl... same thing, and it sounds amazing when it's a particular shape (e.g. tibetan singing bowl)



Now think about a human brain. A human brain has no OFF switch. It is ON from the moment it is born till the moment it does. This is a particular type of matter.

When you pass sound through this block of matter, again, you get a standing wave. A phonon. It's a much more complex phonon shape than those previous examples.

In common perception we think of the human brain simply as taking in vibrations at the ear drum and "processing" them. We look at it clinically, our words giving no significance to the true beauty of what is actually happening: Your brain is dancing.

The brain does not "convert" sound into other things. The brain is ALREADY made of sound. What you are hearing is the phonon that passes through the ear drum, through the nerves connecting it to the brain and into the auditory cortex. At no point is this phonon destroyed. At no point does it lose its structure. Its structure IS the process of converting into "sound".


Because that's the standing wave that brain tissue resonates with.




In the same way that light refracts when it hits water, so do phonons refract and diffract through the human brain. The echo does come out. Just as you pass sound through a flute, it echoes through the hollow of the flute and comes out of the other end... thus do you pass sound into the ears of a human being and it comes out of many ends. Now what do you think about simple things such as having a conversation? Dancing? Chanting? Breathing?

When you reply to someone's words, the phonon enters through the ears, does a whole circuit round the body and comes out as your reply. Same phonon that came in, same phonon that came out. And off it goes into another person's ears.

What does this mean? As we see mighty trees around us of wood, there are trees we do not see. There are ancient primal trees, trees made of sound. They have roots in the distant past: an ancient mammal hits his head against a rock, "ugh" is the root. They have trunks, stems, branches, they have leaves that blow in the wind, dispersing pollen and resonating into eternity. We only observe them in one way: language. Truly music is the echo of the passing of time.



I hope this blew your mind the way it did my own.

Beautiful! It never ceases to amaze me how the ordinary, every day things in life that we take for granted can be filled with so much magic and mind blowing complexity.

I saw this within myself today after playing binaural beats and music at the same time (android app: Binaural Beats Therapy; "LSD" pattern. This is the song: Macca ft Amelia - Crossroads)

I had already been thinking: what is it that gives continuity to music? We hear the instantaneous result of eardrum resonations. But in my head there is clearly more than that. Much more than that. It is not a frozen slice of ice sliding forward along an orderly queue. It is a running stream inside my head. I can clearly behold the last few seconds of each song, how else am I hearing it flow? Our auditory system is nuts. It works directly here and now yet it's actually a smear of consciousness spread between the very present moment to about 3 seconds ago.



While playing, I noticed that the binaural beats danced with the music. Another set of subtle undertones came forth, with each hit of the bass pedal in the song.

They lasted on the order of 50ms, and there was a good delay between when they should have arisen, and when they actually did - some 20-50ms. Hopefully my internal clock is accurate, hehe. They should have arisen at the point of simultaneous binaural-beat + music pulsing. But they had a little time delay.

Then it hit me.

This. shit. is. echoing. around. inside. my. head. The echos hit the echos that were still there from before, creating a secondary sound that did not exist outside the confines of my skull!

Thus for the first time I truly beheld with a clear eye, the sound of the inner hall of sacred resonance.

..i once listened to a recording of 2 different channels of 'purple noise' ('pink noise' which has been lo pass filtered) in headphones, as recommended by a friend..
so, in other words, 2 different channels of total randomness in each ear..

after about 10 minutes, it did have a noticeable effect..i felt more coherent, meditative, started to get mild geometric visions in my minds' eye..
with no pattern of any kind to hold on to, the brain begins to create order out of 'chaos'..
or so it seemed..

i would like to try this again..

nada brahma

Mind=Blown=Doing the Fandango...

Cheers for that..

..yeah, was beautiful..

most instrument makers say 'it's in the wood, in the grain'..

growth structure, and record of time


..music is the artform of time..

I think this over-simplifies things (in a rather pleasant, romantic way, it must be said!).

Sound waves are funnelled by the pinna of the ear, enter the external auditory canal, hit the ear drum, and via a system of hinges made of 3 small bones are amplified by being concentrated in a smaller space (lumen of the stapes) from which they set up a pressure-wave in fluid called endolymph.This fluid is enclosed in a bony cavity and transmits the pressure wave to perilymph fluid which causes swaying of fine hair-like cells in the spiral organ of Corti which leads to voltage-gated ion channels opening, which then cause an action potential in adjoining nerves which lead to the brainstem, part of the thalamus and then to the auditory cortex.

The appreciation of the frequency of any sound is determined by which hairs are maximally vibrated in the spiral organ which rather resembles a snails shell from the outside.

Exactly, whatts even more extraordinary is that the hairs inside are split in frequency bands, or so to say. Every band of hair cells is responsible for different set of frequencies. And the cells responsible for high frequencies are lined on the outside of the snail shell, so they are more stress sensitive, and is the reason why old people are loosing the ability to hear hi pitched sounds.