Harmonies of Heaven and Earth

Godwin, Joscelyn

doi:10.2307/1578582

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Suggested mechanisms to account for common associations between chords and C/D (variously understood as stability, pleasantness, etc. ), have arisen from quite different theoretical perspectives, ancient and modern: mystical/numerological [18,19], psychoacoustical [14,[20][21][22][23][24], neurobiological [25,26], or via iconic signification whereby the auditory stimulus resembles, perhaps cross-modally [27], the affect it signifies [28][29][30][31]; see also [32] for a recent review of proposed mechanisms for C/D. All the above putative mechanisms are non-cultural and hence universal because they apply similarly to any human, regardless of their cultural background, and result in non-arbitrary associations between audio features and affect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

Milne,

Smit,

Sarvasy

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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We provide evidence that the roughness of chords—a psychoacoustic property resulting from unresolved frequency components—is associated with perceived musical stability (operationalized as finishedness) in participants with differing levels and types of exposure to Western or Western-like music. Three groups of participants were tested in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and two groups in Sydney, Australia (musicians and non-musicians). Unlike prominent prior studies of consonance/dissonance across cultures, we framed the concept of consonance as stability rather than as pleasantness. We find a negative relationship between roughness and musical stability in every group including the PNG community with minimal experience of musical harmony. The effect of roughness is stronger for the Sydney participants, particularly musicians. We find an effect of harmonicity—a psychoacoustic property resulting from chords having a spectral structure resembling a single pitched tone (such as produced by human vowel sounds)—only in the Sydney musician group, which indicates this feature’s effect is mediated via a culture-dependent mechanism. In sum, these results underline the importance of both universal and cultural mechanisms in music cognition, and they suggest powerful implications for understanding the origin of pitch structures in Western tonal music as well as on possibilities for new musical forms that align with humans’ perceptual and cognitive biases. They also highlight the importance of how consonance/dissonance is operationalized and explained to participants—particularly those with minimal prior exposure to musical harmony.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

Milne,

Smit,

Sarvasy

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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“…Jocelyn Godwin, discussing magic in music, before going on to laud the potentially positive aspects of popular music explicitly referencing ‘New Age’ spiritual culture, also mentions alchemy in discussing aspects of rock which were amplified in metal: [a] concentration on the outcast, the misfit and pervert, the harshness and violence of life […] What we have here is the very stuff of the alchemical Nigredo : the Putrefaction, the journey through the Inferno where one must behold Man's every sin without which the Work cannot proceed with its purgative process and its paradisal conclusion. (Godwin 1987, p. 114) Black metal in particular has been described as fulfilling this nigredo role (Thacker 2012, p. 111), with the key object of this purification through degradation being the individual (Coggins 2014).…”

Section: The Dirty the Soothing And The Secret In Constructing ‘Magic’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[a] concentration on the outcast, the misfit and pervert, the harshness and violence of life […] What we have here is the very stuff of the alchemical Nigredo : the Putrefaction, the journey through the Inferno where one must behold Man's every sin without which the Work cannot proceed with its purgative process and its paradisal conclusion. (Godwin 1987, p. 114)…”

Section: The Dirty the Soothing And The Secret In Constructing ‘Magic’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dirty, soothing, secret magic: individualism and spirituality in New Age and extreme metal music cultures

Coggins¹

2019

Pop. Mus.

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Taking inspiration from a press article comparing doom metal and New Age music, I explore individualism and magic in these musical cultures, reflecting on the ‘dirty, soothing secret’ suggested in that article's title. I trace the loosely defined characteristics of New Age music in the limited academic research on the topic, before situating the music in the wider New Age milieu which centres around the epistemological authority of the seeking self among diverse spiritual resources. Then, I examine the claims made about metal in the news article, drawing out themes which also relate to individualism and magic. Finally, I return to the concepts of the dirty, the soothing and the secret, arguing that these are not merely incidental aspects of the mainstream reception of New Age and metal music, but in fact can be understood as contributing to the magical potential of such music for listeners.

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“…He also derived an eight-octave planetary scale from the Moon to the Fixed Stars from the periods of the planets' rotation around the Earth, breaking the bounds of contemporary musical practice (all music lay within a threeoctave limit). 19 It is, however, only with his younger Spanish contemporary, Ramos de Pareja, that we find the beginnings of esoteric philosophy applied to music in the operative sense. In Ramos' Musica practica of 1482, this is achieved through the original move of attributing the Church modes to the planets, and so connecting ethos to planet through practical music.…”

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confidence: 97%

The Music of the Spheres: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance harmonia

Voss¹

1998

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Most people are familiar with the exquisite painting by Botticelli known as the Primavera. But perhaps it is not so widely known that the programme of its enigmatic symbolism was inspired by the Neoplatonic notion of the harmony of creation, reflected in the correspondences of the mythological characters to both the eight planetary spheres and the eight tones of the musical octave. 1 It is probably even less appreciated that Botticelli's visual metaphor for the harmony of the spheres was inspired by the work of one man, Marsilio Ficino of Florence (1433-99), whose desire to unite heaven and earth in the soul of the human being found its precedent in the writings of the Platonic tradition. In restoring 'the divine Plato' to Renaissance Florence Ficino set out to 'redeem holy religion' from the 'abominable ignorance' of secular philosophy. 2 My intention in this paper is to illustrate how music theory and performance became part of a programme of spiritual development stemming directly from a symbolic understanding of the cosmos which transcended, and yet embraced, all quantitative modes of thinking. Such a mode of 'knowing' was conveyed by Ficino in the Latin word notio (from which our word 'notion' is derived) in the course of his translation of the Neoplatonist Iamblichus' treatise on divination, De mysteriis. Iamblichus asserts:'Contact with divinity is not knowledge. For knowledge is in a certain respect separated from its object by otherness. But prior to knowledge -as one things knows another -is the uniform connection with divinity, which is suspended from the gods, and is spontaneous and inseparable from them.' 3 In Iamblichus' explanation of unitive thought Ficino recognised the ground of both philosophical speculation and religious piety, without which 'knowledge' becomes dissociated from the primary reality of the world and thus can be of little meaning. I believe Ficino's articulation of this insight to be the creative impulse behind the immense flowering of

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Harmonies of Heaven and Earth

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

Dirty, soothing, secret magic: individualism and spirituality in New Age and extreme metal music cultures

The Music of the Spheres: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance harmonia

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