**Links to**: [[Song]], [[Wreading and riting]], [[Read-write]], [[Musical notation]], [[Music as permanent revolution]], [[Repetition]], [[Imitation and adaptation]], [[Collective intentionality]], [[Double articulation]], [[Semantic attractor]], [[Evolution]], [[Degeneracy]], [[Redundancy]], [[Modulations]], [[Social Dissonance]], [[Buccal polycomputing]]. (Unfinished entry, please return later). As Ian Cross notes (citing A. Seeger’s work in _Why Suyá sing: a musical anthropology of an Amazonian people_, 1987) there are plenty of musicolinguistic phenomena “where it is not easy—nor even desirable—to draw a distinction between music and speech.” (year, #todo). As covered in [[Song]]: we all sing, all the time. The rampant commodification of things like music and text, has, in a lot of senses, produced reduced versions of these generatively ambiguous, group-dynamics-amplifying events. In order to recover some of that amplification and generativity, which led to music perhaps being “the best thing we ever did”[^1] (Cross, year #todo), we should modulate and reinterpret what it would mean to _sing our texts_ (like Nietzsche said). Continue reading: [[Song]] and [[Music as permanent revolution]]. %% “This hominid baseline was expanded with mimetic evolution of song, dance and enactment. Psychedelic substances stimulate innate cognitive dispositions manifested in shamanism such as the human-like qualities of spirits, animal identities and other spiritual and mystical experiences. These structural features of consciousness are stimulated by mimetic performances with song, dancing, and drumming; painful and exhausting austerities; and psychedelic substances.” Dance and Music as Evolved Capacities for Ritual The use of song and dance exemplify mimetic expression and fundamental elements of the shamanic ritual. Humans evolved dancing and singing as bonding mechanisms when increases in human group sizes exceeded the time necessary for grooming for purposes of interpersonal and group bonding (Dunbar, 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014). Human evolution selected for rhythmic activities such as music and drumming because of their effects in enhancing the endogenous opioid system responses that increased social bonding (Dunbar, 2023; Launay et al., 2016). Music enhances social bonding through stimulating the release of the endogenous opioids and stimulation of dopamine and norepinephrine neurotransmitter systems (Tarr et al., 2014). Communal music elicits oxytocin which enhances bonding, trust, cooperation, and positive emotional states (Chanda & Levitin, 2013) through increases in beta-endorphin levels from stimulating opioid receptors (Launay et al., 2016). Rhythmic sound enhances synchrony in behavior and produces experiences of self–other merging. Synchronized group movement, with increases in mimicry from positive feedback loops, make people feel increasingly close socially, enhancing cooperation and prosocial behaviors that augment interpersonal and social bonding by stimulating the release of endorphins, inducing social bonding effects (Tarr et al., 2016). Singing and dancing provided mechanisms for large-scale bonding and producing positive emotions. This “musicking” (Tarr et al., 2016) was a bio-cultural adaptation for enhancing social integration by enhancing bonding through effects on the endogenous opioid system. Diverse shamanic practices also directly and indirectly stimulate dopamine (Winkelman, 2017b). Music is an evolved extension of primate vocalization systems exemplified by group chorusing (Merker 2009) that expanded the expressive capacities of hominins by providing a medium for affective semantics (Cross & Morley, 2009). This communicative dynamic enhanced coordination of larger groups (Panksepp & Trevarthen, 2009). Music synchronizes movement, engaging interpersonal entrainment, and producing group integration, emotional bonding, and unifying experiences enhanced by endogenous hormone release (Panksepp & Trevarthen, 2009). Music has innate capacities to affect emotions, an intrinsic reward system that enhances social functionality (Hauser & McDermott, 2003). Music engages an innate primal biological function of primates—the ability to express emotions through vocalizations. Effects of tone and sound on emotions allow music to enhance the natural balance and harmony in our emotional systems. Music also enhances a variety of healing mechanisms (Crowe, 2004). Honing and Ploeger (2012) integrate interdisciplinary evidence to support an evolutionary hypothesis of musicality as a cognitive adaptation, a “music as cognition” hypothesis which indicates its origins in specific cognitive functions. They identify some of the fundamental components (relative pitch, tonal encoding, beat induction, and metrical encoding of rhythm) that constitute the cognitive traits manifested in music which show evidence for adaptations. Honing and Ploeger (2012) review evidence supporting the hypothesis that musicality constitutes an adaptation, including evidence for its innateness, the species specificity of its cognitive components, its use in mood regulation, and other evidence indicating that musicality has a long evolutionary history. Whether the adaptive mechanisms of music are seen as involving play, mate attraction, social cohesion, and emotional bonding, or other interpersonal dynamics, the cognitive functions fundamental to musicality includes the basic cognitive mechanism of “beat induction” which permits perception of a regular pulse that allows for synchronization of people. Mimesis It is mimetic synchronization which permits cooperative dance and music. Shamanic ritual engages this innate mimetic capacity for imitation, singing, and dancing. Gardner called this innate capacity the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (see Garrels, 2005, 2011 for review of mimesis research). Mimesis is a pre-verbal communication medium manifested in affective expressions in sounds, song, emotions, gestures, and rhythmic movements. Mimesis permits the entrainment of the body with external rhythms, expressed in drumming, dancing, singing, and music (Donald, 2006). Mimesis engages processes operating without conscious awareness in implicit communicative exchanges in social behaviors. Mimetic expressions are grasped at intuitive levels, providing processes fundamental to psychosocial functioning and interpersonal relations. Mimesis involves a behavioral production of meaning through body metaphors, analogical reasoning processes involving the body (Winkelman, 2021c). Mimesis creates metaphor through imitation, gesture, and enactment, creating an imagined scene by the body’s actions that produce both somatic meanings and symbolic expressions of reality. The capacities of mimesis are based in hardwired processes of mirror neurons which function as both motor and sensory neurons. Mirror neurons possess the property of activation by both behavior and perception, stimulated when one performs an intentional goal-directed behavior, as well as by the perception of another person engaging in that same intentional movement. Mirror neurons permit inference of others’ intentions because of a common neural basis for both processing observation of a behavior and performing the actions producing the same behavior. The activation of motor neurons creates a shared experience for actor and observer mediated by common neural firing patterns. It is the ability to communicate through behavior that enables the shaman to dramatically engage the community with a supernatural dimension. The dramatic enactments of animal powers and struggles with spirits and the natural and supernatural forces presented dilemmas of life that the shaman conveys through song, vocal imitation, and enactive dance performance. This system of mimetic meaning evolved more than a million years ago at the foundations of the Homo genus and the emergence of their new tool-making conventions based on the imitation of behavior (Donald, 1991). Donald shows how these behaviors provided the basis for collective traditions of early cultural life. Winkelman Shamanism and Psychedelic, religious Chanda, M. L., & Levitin, D. J. (2013). The neurochemistry of music. Trends in Cognitive Science, 17(4), 179–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.02.007 Panksepp, J., & Trevarthen, C. (2009). The neuroscience of emotion and music. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Communicative musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship (105–146). Oxford University Press _____ https://www.syncsci.com/journal/IJAH/article/view/IJAH.2021.01.002 https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/15/writers-on-music/ _________ [[Schopenhauer]] "Music … stands quite apart from all the [other arts]. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that *exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi* [“an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting”] which Leibniz took it to be… We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self." [[World as Will and Representation]] https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/28/schopenhauer-on-the-power-of-music/ __________ Susan kozak music as torture ____ [[Nietzsche]] Music and Words ______ [[Dionysus]], [[Rhythm]], [[Music]]: the privileged art, the musicality of tones of pleasure and pain is the "universal substratum" that gave rise to language. "Therefore written language is even more limited in its power of expression than language spoken aloud, where the 'intervals, the rhythms, the pace and the stress are symbolic of the emotional content which is to be expressed'. So music is a necessary 'supplement' to words, which are 'the most defective signs there are', allowing them to express feelings." (p. 7, [[Sarah Kofman]] in [[Nietzsche and Metaphor]] about Nietzsche's "Über Musik und Wort".) [[Intelligence]], [[Music]], [[Listening]], [[Bootstrapping]] "Far from making music 'intelligible', images can only obscure it. For the votary of Dionysus--for him and his peers--music is intelligible by itself: thus it is 'an essential feature of Dionysian art that it takes no account of the listener'." (p. 9 [[Sarah Kofman]] in [[Nietzsche and Metaphor]]) Kofman continues, on p. 10: "To bring about this inversion in the hierarchy between the different symbolic spheres, making the sound a metaphor for the image, is to make bad music, like in opera: it is a downright abuse of power, 'as if one were trying to raise oneself by one's own bootstraps' ... This is what [[Nietzsche]] will later condemn in the music of [[Wagner]]: as a musician he was a rhetorician, making the music serve the text and seeking above all to be 'expressive', to give commentary on an idea using a thousand symbols, to stimulate the senses like a veritable Circe. Whereas 'good' music--Dionysian music--must make one dance, Wagmer's music seeks to make one swim and hover, shattering all unity of time and force (cf. CW 8; NCW, 'Wagner as Danger', 1). This musical rhetoric is no more a caricature of Dionysianism, a counterfeit, a piece of play-acting." %% ### Footnotes [^1]: Very indebted to Inigo Wilkins for first having pointed me to this particular work by Ian Cross, and very indebted to Cross for having produced it.