**Links to**: [[Language-modulating]], [[Meta-language]], [[Modulations]], [[Pronoun]], [[Metalearning]], [[Neologistics]], [[Dialove]], [[Dialogics]], [[E Pointing]], [[Reference]], [[Self-reference]], [[03 Semantic noise]], [[Collective Echo Chamber]].
### [[Postulate]]: Throughout history chanting; repetitive prayer; singing; dancing; spinning; have been the vortex into the universal consciousness. Modulation of the frequency and amplitude of standing waves is all we do. Understanding language as music leads to the possibility of [[Music as permanent revolution]], and to [[Song]].
>“[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. **It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody.** And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.” McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 216, our emphasis.
>“A r u l e o f these conversation s : t h e longer a paragraph, the
more i t is suited to being read very quickly. And the re
petitions ought to function as accelerations . Certain examples
will recur constantly : WAS P and ORC H I D , or HORSE and
STI RRU P. One might put forward many others, but re
turning to the same example should lead to acceleration, even
at the risk of wearying the reader. A ritornello? All music, all
writing takes that course. It is the conversation itself which
will be a ritornello.” Parnet/Deleuze *Dialogues II*, p. 54, copy-paste errors intended.
This is yet to be compiled from a bunch of notes, but in essence, in this text we will move through the following explorations:
- By understanding language as music, we better understand how to modulate it. Examples of these modulations are explored in[[Language-modulating]] and [[Modulations]]. Ian Cross on music as the best (evolutionary) thing we ever did. Open w/ Nietzsche saying Birth of Tragedy should have been sung, perhaps, instead. In the second edition, new introduction to the work. Interest in music because of collective intentionality. If prediction can be distributed, externalized and downloaded to the group, musicking in groups is one thing which enables this that greatly satisfies the effect of reducing group uncertainty.
- Speech as music, music as speech; talking as _singing_, essentially, and music as _permanent revolution_. Cadence/tone and how this has a huge influence on how we interpret + (dis)trust the speaker (Cross, Harris and Da Silva articles);
- Listening as a profoundly creative act, which swings as a pendulum between “exploring the new” (seeking novelty, producing creatively) and “exploiting the old” (hearing what you want to hear) (Friston article).
- The loopy pragmatic implications of all this (Diana Deutsch article).
- Novelty as rhythm-interruption and rhythm-creation. McLuhan on this.
- Read this with a robot voice in your head. See?^[“See” is a joke, “robot” is a joke, “voice” is a joke. See?]
%%
In (ancient) Chinese, context was podcast Erica Brindley on Chinese philosophy, the word/concept for one who is very close, like a true good friend, is one who knows your sound. Ask Yuk. Ju-in-jia, also:
Maybe use for information and computation course, about sound and patterning https://www.jstor.org/stable/4529022?seq=43:
![[music patterning Erica Brindley.png]]
also for metaphors in general and food, social synthesis
![[harmony patterning social Erica Brindley food metaphor.png]]
![[pattern erica brindley information and computation.png]]
and
![[erica brindley music harmony attunement.png]]
___
Wittgenstein once quipped that philosophy should be written like poetry. Does he himself follow this imperative? Given that he describes his aim in philosophy as “show[ing] the fly a way out of the fly-bottle” (PI, §309), that is, as a method of “showing” rather than “saying” (TLP, 4.1212), one may hypothesize that he perhaps did. When Wittgenstein in the _Philosophical Investigations_ recounts the experience of captivity in the fly-bottle, he sometimes dissociates by writing about “the author of the _Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus_.” Now, the author of _TLP_ is obviously the same empirical and juridical person as the author of _PI_, Ludwig Wittgenstein, born on 26 April 1889, in Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire. But if we, at least for the sake of experiment, take this person’s quip about writing philosophy like poetry seriously, then the author writing the _PI_ and “the author of the _Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus_” can be read as different characters. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who was born only one year before Wittgenstein, explored intensely this poetic method of self-othering. During his brief life, he produced more than seventy such poetic characters. To emphasize the authorial status of these characters, their independent intellectual life and unique perspective, he did not call them pseudonyms but heteronyms. One of the most famous of these heteronyms is Álvaro de Campos. He was born one year after Wittgenstein. Like Wittgenstein, he studied engineering in Great Britain and wanted to become a philosopher. Unlike Wittgenstein he failed, and instead, mirroring Wittgenstein’s quip, tried to write poetry like philosophy.
In the poem “Tabacaria” (_The Tobacconist’s Shop_, 1928), Pessoa stages Campos behind a window looking across a Lisbon street at the Tobacconist’s on the opposite side. Like “the author of the _Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus_,” Campos experiences an existential captivity behind a glass: a state of seeing everything with “absolute clarity” yet unable to get at life, to touch, smell, manipulate the things. Towards the end of the poem, he says to himself, in a language reminiscent of the turn Wittgenstein would take one year after _Tabacaria_, that “metaphysics is a consequence of feeling sick.” This talk will be devoted to a comparative reading of the poetic method of heteronym and the poetic topos of a life behind a glass in Pessoa’s _Tabacaria_ and Wittgenstein’s _PI_. The hypothesis is that Wittgenstein and Pessoa use similar yet different poetic methods that, however, appear as philosophically significant. And they do this in an attempt to alienate themselves in order to alienate the reader from an alienating form of life.
_Article 1_: Predictive processing and music [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661318302547](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661318302547) – I would be interested in considering some of the missing elements in this account of music, from various perspectives.
_Article 2_: Diana Deutch (OG of music psychology and master of auditory illusions)[https://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/Enc_Perception_Vol1_2009_160-164.pdf](https://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/Enc_Perception_Vol1_2009_160-164.pdf) – her findings/questions can ground a lot of what we talk about in the concrete experiments she did and what she discovered.
_Articles 3 + 4_: William J. Harris on Amiri Baraka and "HOW YOU SOUND": [https://www.jazzstudiesonline.org/files/jso/resources/pdf/HARRIS--How%20You%20Sound.pdf](https://www.jazzstudiesonline.org/files/jso/resources/pdf/HARRIS--How%20You%20Sound.pdf) – N.B.: this article I prefer that we read but **do not refer to.** The reason for this is that, depending on who listens to the interview, it might be interpreted as a case of bored white academics incorporating (i.e.: mining and chugging) black study materials to look cool or sound contemporary. I want to avoid that at all costs. I want us to read it, study it, because the things mentioned here are fundamental, but I do not want to actively access the material during the interview. Yes: the content, no: the context. In terms of context I would like to take the conclusions/learnings drawn here towards a possible conversation about Ney Matogrosso, one of my childhood and adulthood heroes. The article we can talk about, which I attach, can be a concrete point of reference. In this case, I would like to, should we have to, refer to gender-representation fluidity, and not "race," again, for the aforementioned reasons. He was an inspiration in my life to not feel "gender confused" and just run with whatever, and it all happened through music, which is one of the important points I would like to talk about, as mentioned above.
In terms of bits and pieces you can already check for sounds we may use: Diana Deutsch's website is full of auditory illusions you can explore, and look up "sine-wave speech" and Shepard's tone on YT. The rest (my own experiments, etc.) I can provide after we record, right? In order to put something together. In terms of music you can check out Ney Matogrosso's band (performances are really cool): _Secos e Molhados_, and if you want, the duo album Ney Matogrosso w/ guitarist Rafael Rabello: _A Flor da Pele_.
By the way, in all therapeutic psychedelic experiments there is music played to the test subject (says [[Carhart-Harris]]). Colleagues and friends Jamie and Ryan: “Or, as Laclau (2005; p.231) puts it more poetically: **the name can become the ground**.” (p. 6 my emphasis). And this is why repetitive chanting is the thing that makes something real.
%%
</br>
</br>
# Qué novedad... [[Novelty]] --> insert below in novelty
Too much novelty can sometimes be no good. Think of the many creators who could not be appreciated “in their time” (or only by a few). It takes time to challenge and change one’s predictive models; to encompass others’ models; to envision larger, collective models.
Think of Marshall McLuhan. In the introduction to “Understanding Media” he reflects on how one of his editors “noted in dismay that “seventy-five percent of your material is new. A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten percent new.”” (1964, p. 5). **10%**, what a number. But, thinking about how we parse new information, it seems fair to estimate that that’s what people can digest. See notes on this in [[05 Prediction]].
McLuhan goes on to remark that “Such a risk seems quite worth taking at the present time when the stakes are very high, and the need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour.” (ibid.). While we agree that these risks are often worth taking (the present project is evidence to this claim), one risks being misunderstood, forgotten or otherwise ignored. Which is completely fine, but not when one seeks to hamonize and collectivize with others. Not when one is a radically social creature that seeks new cultural bonds, new means of expression, new collective futures that strengthen the voices and the diversity of the whole.
This relates to the idea that while we have some common semantic ground, we should never forget that this is _only_ some. In order to be _relatively_ intelligible to each other we need to really continually treasure **and** test this _apparently_ common understanding, but not overwhelm it. Too much risk, risks overwhelming.
The linguistic landscape dictates the rhythms of its semantics. Words repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, insisting on a collective rhythm. When we mutate them: they can still reppreat and repeet adn repete und ripit, but this can have a rhythm-breaking effect. It can be great: new polyrhythms, syncopated madness, wonderful creativity. But too much and we soon lose our sense of orientation. This is why we refer to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a mule, in [[05 Prediction]]. And this is why predicates are _pre_-dicates ([[Predicate]]). They are predictated by a given rhythm which we _must_ coordinate with, to lesser or greater extents.
McLuhan: “We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.” (ibid., p. 6). Many have said this, and all are right: our carnal evolution is way slower than our mechanical or electric one. We are outphasing ourselves, it is no wonder we seek to externalize ourselves into new electric dimensions, such as “AI”.
In the same bit cited, McLuhan also reflects on how a certain aspect of _detachment_ plays an important role in Western tech-literacy, he refers to this as “the power to act without reacting.” (ibid.). We would frame this, in terms of prediction, as having a very specialized modular-model for operating with a high degree of accuracy. This model is so specific that it is blind to everything else. “The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate with in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement.” (ibid.). Indeed, or: how to write for everyone at once? Impossible. Undesirable?
%%
[[Diana Deutsch]] on looping and how that turns language into music.
Mark Tuttremo neurologist Harvard
Anne Fernolds deep universal music inside language, Infant studies
Talk about language as music, how many things language can be, in terms of "polycomputing and perspectivism"
Use Gabriel: synthetizing Kant with Spinoza is possible because they are not options: transcendental idealism and immanent materialism are perspectives capable of/disemboguing in polycomputing.
![[PXL_20230909_073218219.jpg]]
Cox 2001: “Music has long eluded analysis in terms of representation and signification and, as a result, has been considered to be purely formal and abstract. However, the most significant sound art work of the past half-century – the work of Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier, Christina Kubisch, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolai, Francisco Lopez, and Toshiya Tsunoda, for example – has explored the _materiality_ of sound: its texture and temporal flow, its palpable effect on, and affection by the materials through and against which it is transmitted. What these works reveal, I think, is that the sonic arts are not more _abstract_ than the visual but rather more _concrete_, and that they require not a _formalist_ analysis but a _materialist_ one.”
From [[PhD applications Christoph, Rosalba, Sjoerd, Feb 2024]]: In Fred Moten's In the Break, lies a great indagation regarding a
Billie Holiday’s song:
“What does it mean to surrender to the lyric? It’s not only an abstract reaching, this going for,
this willingness to fail. Something is reached for, an unprecedented communication (cuts
literature, literature is cut and cuts) possible only when language is not reducible to a means of
communication, when the sounded word is not reducible to linguistic meaning. " MOTEN, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, University of Minnesota
Press, (2003), p.30.
“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under
his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients
himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a
calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Per-
haps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself
is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos
and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority
in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus. ...A child hums to summon the strength for the
schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the
radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and televi
sion sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories
(the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the
foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or bet
ter yet walks in a circle as in a children's dance, combining rhythmic vowels
and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the
differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or har
mony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of
chaos, destroying both creator and creation.” p. 311, opening words in _Of the refrain_, ATP, D&G.
modulation (n.)
late 14c., modulacioun, "act of singing or making music, harmony," from Old French modulation "act of making music" (14c.) and directly from Latin modulationem (nominative modulatio) "rhythmical measure, singing and playing, melody," noun of action from past-participle stem of modulari "regulate, measure off properly, measure rhythmically; play, play upon," from modulus "small measure," diminutive of modus "measure, manner" (from PIE root *med- "take appropriate measures"). Meaning "act of regulating according to measure or proportion" is from 1530s. Musical sense of "action or process of changing from one key to another" is by 1690s.
modulate (v.)
1610s, in music, "vary or inflect the sound of," especially to give expressiveness, "vary the pitch of," back-formation from modulation, or else from Latin modulatus, past participle of modulari "regulate, measure off properly, measure rhythmically; play, play upon," from modulus "small measure," diminutive of modus "measure, manner" (from PIE root *med- "take appropriate measures").
General sense of "modify, adjust, adapt, regulate in measure or proportion" is from 1620s. The intransitive musical sense of "pass from one key to another, or between major and minor" is attested by 1721. In telecommunications from 1908. Meaning "exert a controlling influence on, regulate" is by 1964. Related: Modulated; modulating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation
Alice Coltrane.
If language is not property^[Language being a common domain (_Sense and Reference_), as proposed by Frege, is a different proposal. See our notes on this “commonality” in the section on “novelty” in [[Language is music]].] (and in copyright, which is despised: the conclusion is always all the same, so we will not even go there), then nothing language-touching can be thought of as property. Nothing at all, thus.
The danger of language-modelling is that someone might have the sick thought to privatize this (does this sound familiar at all, in the context of LLMs?).
The diachronic approach of the so-called continental philosophies, and the synchronic approach of the analytic philosophies, whether either of them know it or not, they are singing like venteveos.^[Synchrony and diachrony in linguistics analysis are almost the same.]
___________
instead of language modelling: _modulation_. See what Peli has on this in that piece.
language modulating is poetry. Poetry of all. Dada, Benjamin, Inca/maya/aztec music, [[Comte de Lautréamont]], murga, Kwodo Eshun’s jazz fission,
If language is music (Deutsch, and others in RADIOLAB episode), let us all sing.
Poet-engineer of Reza:
“**...every form of making a world through our encounters with things is fully multi-modal. It is principally a mixture of modes of know-how (_technê_) and modes of know-what _(epistêmê)_ with more complex combinations of the two wherein the hard distinction between technique and episteme collapses.** Yet, the mixture of _technê_ and _epistêmê_ can also contain _atechnos_ or nontechnical components which are routines or formulaic skills acquired through experience or _empeiria_ which can be compressed into what can be called iterative recipes such as when the ingredient X reaches the temperature _tempa_, add the ingredient Y, let the mixture boil for t minutes, then reduce the temperature to _tempb_ and add ingredient Z… (something like a cooking recipe). The nontechnicals, in this sense, primarily deal with skills or modes of learning by rote. As forms of rote learning, in their simplest forms they can merely involve repetition and recall, but in more advanced forms they incorporate record keeping of past procedures, inputs and outputs. Every new input or ouput will then be compared to the history kept and will be counted as an update of the record and a correction. An example of this update function will be something like dead reckoning navigation where every step will be counted as an update or rectification of an already formulaic or mechanical procedure of path finding.
Such routines or formulaic instructions that for instance go into algorithmic processes such as the annealing of a piece of metal in order to create a blade by the combination of hammering and changing the temperature in reiterating steps is an example of _atechnos_. If the techne is already a form of knowledge, _atechnos_ does not intimate the lack of technê or know-how, but rather an epistemologically blind technique which is oblivious and imperceptive to its origin. Hence, _atechnos_ or the formulaic instruction is not a primary ingredient of _poesis_ or mixture qua the combination of arts and techniques of knowing (theoretical and practical). It is formal only by virtue of what we already know about the so- called techniques of nature (e.g., how such and such routines or algorithmic changes in temperature, pressure and cooling time produce this sort of rock rather than another). In so far as it is primarily based on what is being instructed rather than what is known or what is identified as a know-how that requires a justification by way of practical reasoning, _atechnos_ in its essence is a non-technical—in a deep sense of technicity—ingredient of the mixture. ” https://miguelabreugallery.com/the-poet-engineers-reader/#rezanegarestani
What Negarestani calls atechnos is what I call modulation.
and later: “So to answer the question of what the mixture as a product looks like: It is a multi-scalar or multi-model level of reality. What is important here is to understand that the talk of scales or levels in poesis- engineering and the production of mixtures do not imply an ontological commitment of the sort espoused by the Aristotelian’s order of beings. Far from assuming that levels or scales are intrinsic features of nature, the multi-scalar model expands on and experiments with the concept level on epistemological, compositional and technical contexts. For example, specifying and distinguishing levels can be based on the criteria of compositionality, for example, how upper-level objects and processes are composed of lower-level objects and processes. Or they can be based on the sort of interactions existing among elements, processes and mechanisms, or how, for example, different theories, techniques and instruments can detect or intervene with certain sorts of relations and patterns, and not others.”
yes indeed, so these are constraints, not attractors.
see also notes in [[Concept]] from DR
______
# Language-modulating proposals
Name all proposals.
One of the proposals, or postulates, suggested here is to change pronouns to become more amenable to the idea of the transindividual (Simondon), beyond the concept of the (in)dividual (cf. Deleuze) altogether:
Maybe by removing pronouns or renaming them.
Another proposal is the introduction of an exclamation sign that adds emphasis without this feeling! Rekindling Herve Bazin’s ideas on punctuation marks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herv%C3%A9_Bazin).
The proposal is to use these:
Another proposal is to pay closer attention to the conceptual depths of every single word and expression, this was mostly done by women:
Dorothy Wordsworth (what’s in a name...) “The soulful scene, Wordsworth said, magically contained “that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature”. It was the first time, according to the OED, that the words ‘visionariness’ and ‘unworldliness’ are known to have been used.” (BBC culture article). Zf: essentially: everything becomes a possible concept.
Same for Jane Austen: “To demonstrate the profound depths of one’s connection with a place or feeling, simply fastening an ‘-r’ or an ‘-er’ to the end of a noun can confer a new existential title. No one remembers now who claimed for himself the broad domain of a ‘forest’ to become the original ‘forester’, or who it was that first bestowed the modest grandeur of ‘dweller’ onto an inhabitant of a simple ‘dwelling’. But as far as we are aware, it was Jane Austen who, in a letter she wrote in 1800, seized upon the alienness of a group of random gamblers who had gathered around a casino table, none belonging to the place itself and all having come from an undefined ‘outside’, to christen all such future strangers as ‘outsiders’. Such sympathy with social misfits was characteristic of Austen’s generous spirit. Sixteen years later, while writing her novel Emma, she turned the word ‘sympathy’ into ‘sympathiser’ – the first recorded use of that word. Who knows how the irrepressible Austen (as it happens, she introduced the word ‘irrepressible’ too, in 1811, when writing her novel Sense and Sensibility) would have described the congregants of our bizarre new world: Zoomers and Couchers? Thresholders and Rainbowers? We do know what she would likely have made of conspiratorial theories for the virus’s origins peddled by charlatans – ‘pseudophilosophy’, a word she is credited with coining in her unfinished novel Sanditon, on which she was working when she died, aged 41, in 1817. ... Another way to reinvigorate a lacklustre lexicon is to pull together words that have never been tethered before – a little like constructing an impromptu meal from random reached-for tins dragged to light from the fumbled darkness of a kitchen cupboard. (Chutney pasta anyone? Anyone?) Charlotte Brontë was a genius of such curiously compelling compounds. To her it is likely we owe the origin of ‘self-doubt’ and ‘Wild-West’ as well as that activity to which many of us have found ourselves suddenly engaging with obsessive vigour: ‘spring-clean’, which Brontë niftily neologised in a letter she wrote in April 1848. There is no quicker way to elevate a word into grandiloquence than to stick on to the end of it the suffix ‘-ism’, three small letters that can canonise seemingly throwaway syllables and transport them into the realm of respectable doctrine, system, or movement. The novelist George Eliot (she who fashioned ‘frustrating’ for us) is also credited with formulating, in a letter she wrote in 1885, something rather less negative in its outlook and attitude: the term ‘meliorism’, or the belief that the world’s suffering is healable if we all work together for that end. ” (ibid)
and Nathalie Sarraute: NATHALIE SARRAUTE:
TROPISMS AND THE
DRAMA OF LOGOS1
Nipaporn Tirasait --> look up this person’s contact, wrote a thesis about her work
__________
The modulation herein proposed is not like the MODULATION of labour in
Pasquinelli general intellect pp. 46-7:
"“Marx’sinterpretationofBabbage
‘The workshops of [England] contain within them arich mine of knowledge,too generally neglected by the
wealthier classes’,Babbage advised his fellow industrial-ists in 1832.
26
Following the invitation to the industrial
workshops as‘mundane places of intelligence’,the his-torian of science,Simon Schaffer,nds that‘Babbage’s
most penetrating London reader’was Marx.
27
Marx had
already quoted Babbage in
The Poverty of Philosophy
dur-ing his exile in Brussels in 1847 and,since then,adopted
two analytical principles that were to become pivotal in
Capital
in drawing a robust theory of the machine and in
grounding the theory of relative surplus value.
The first is what could be defined as‘the labour the-
ory of the machine’, which states that a new machinecomes to imitate and replace a previous division of la-
bour. This is an idea already formulated by Adam Smith,
but better articulated by Babbage due to his greater tech-
46
nical experience.
The second analytical principle is usually called the
‘Babbage principle’and is here renamed‘the principle of
surplus labour modulation’
.
It states that the organisa-tion of a production process in small tasks (division of
labour)allowsexactlythenecessaryquantityoflabourto
be purchased for each task (division of value). In this re-
spect the division of labour provides not only the designofmachinerybutalsoaneconomiccongurationtocalib-
rate and calculate surplus labour extraction. In complex
formsof management suchas Taylorism,theprincipleof
surplus labour modulation opens onto a clockwork view
of labour, which can be further subdivided and recom-posed into algorithmic assemblages. The synthesis of
both analytical principles ideally describes the machineas an apparatus that actively projects back a new articu-
lation and metrics of labour. In the pages of
Capital
theindustrial machine appears to be not just a regulator todiscipline labour but also a calculator to measure relat-ive surplus value, echoing the numerical exactitude of
Babbage’s calculating engines ”” "
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%%
# Footnotes