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On the continuous roundtrip journey between Creation and Origin an adept cannot “see” in the darkness of the primordial Origin (hundun). Vision must be abandoned when returning to the Dao; any light seen is from the lower astral planes. The adept can only navigate this dark primal ocean with the faculty of inner hearing, using the Spirit of the Kidneys, the guardian of Primal Water that generates the fundamental tone within the body.
The internal alchemist does the same thing through a dynamic meditation process that attunes to many different “wave frequencies” or octaves in Nature....The non-tempered scale causes the listener to be musically more alive and alert to the shifting and sometimes disharmonious tonal force-reality about him. The listener must reconcile the dissonance internally, as if forced to bring the slight dissonance between the left brain and right
brain tones (that might be half a note off from each other) into balance in the center of their brain. That musical process is inherently alchemical in nature, in the sense of transmuting two disharmonious forces into a third tone-entity by internal centering.
There are numerous methods of Hindu meditation that focus on inner listening to the “shabd” or sound current, sometimes called Nada Brahma, the sound of the creator. One major difference between Daoist inner alchemy and these practices is that Daoists train to listen from the whole body, and especially from the low resonance centers of the belly or lower dantian. In the Daoist view, starting meditation from the upper dantian or third eye, as most Indian methods do, produces a kind of enlightenment but not immortality. For that, the listening must also occur at the mingmen, between the kidneys, where prime matter (yuan jing) is converted into the breath of life, qi and thence into spirit, shen.
The geometric shape of the vesica piscis, when transposed into musical ratios, creates a tonal ratio of 2:3, the width : height ratio of the oval of the mysterious female. This is again the ratio of the harmonic fifth used in China’s pentatonic scale. 2:3 is also the ratio used by Pythagoras to create a tonal zodiac of 12 notes spread out over seven octaves of “fifths”, and 2/3 is the only fraction for which the Egyptians had a glyph. (Schneider) The alchemical vesica piscis also embodies the holy Daoist trinity of Numbers, cited in verse 42 of the Daodejing, The One (fundamental tone1:1) generates the original Two female and Three male, that collectively birth the ten thousand things from the tonal womb of the mysterious female.
Multiple nested vesica piscis as series of 2:3 expanding harmonic ratios of pentatonic fifths. These fifths emanate from the 1:1 fundamental tone, creating an infinite number of possible other musical ratios. For example, a scale of rising perfect fifths can be notated by a mirror image scale of descending perfect fourths – the same notes, but placed on different rhythmic scales. (Source: Schneider, 1994)
Originally posted by fulllotusqigong
. . . produces a kind of enlightenment but not immortality.
Thanks for repeating it because what I wrote is what I meant.
Nice -- I would say the secret of that song is that the drum frequency is 7 hertz
The song evoked the 7 hertz drum frequency. That is the secret of that song.
Did the song literally have a 7 hertz drum? Probably not.
The frequency beat of 60 beats per minute music has been found beneficial to brain synchronization as the music assists the brain in going into the alpha wave state. Scientists have shown that increases in alpha brain waves precede peak performance.
All I can do is thank you for giving me the opportunity to present all those wonderful 7 hertz tribal drums.
The success of that Tool song imo is that it evokes the power of that low heart frequency as the heart-mind EEG frequency.
When in tachycardia - heart rate that exceeds the normal range for a resting heart rate -cardiac patients were able to reduce their heart rates to 50-60 beats per minute when listening to music that was exactly 50-60 beats a minute.
O.K. so it is the heart beat -- that's the same as pulse right -- yeah so that's what I was thinking.
I think you had wondered if it meant 240 hertz? So hopefully that clarifies things for you. haha.
As John Miller Chernoff writes, 'While in Western music, certain kinds of musical themes may suggest images or feelings, the astounding fact is that in traditional African music, the rhythms themselves are a specific text. When the earliest European travellers described drum-signalling between villages, they assumed that the beating was a kind of code. In reality, the drums actually speak the language of the tribe.' (Miller, 1979, 75) Read more at Suite101: Dagomba Drumming: Instrumentation |
Closing comments on the drummed proverbs Speech surrogate drumming in Dagbon has a rich history and a thriving present. An important part of the drummers' repertoire is the appellations for important people. These drummed proverbs teach truth to the community, focus public attention on particular patrons, and provide income for the drummers who are charged with remembering them all. At a market, the drummed proverbs are the means for a certain type of social interaction; at a dance they also provide some of the music necessary for the event to be successful. They are heard at all of the major events in the life cycle of the individual and annual cycle of the community. Life in Dagbon is really unthinkable without them. Each drummed proverb ties together linguistic, musical, personal, and metaphorical relations into a memorable sound pattern that is meant to move one's feet, one's mind, and one's wallet.
For the Dagbamba drummer, it takes equal parts of "what you know" and "who you know" to be successful. The drummer must not only memorize the drum patterns and verbal bases for many proverbs, he must also be able to use them correctly to get his tips, or "dash." This expertise depends on his recognition of many people in his area of Dagbon. People's faces and who they are related to must be memorized just as much as the tonal-rhythmic patterns and underlying texts.
Many African societies have a special word for this concept of poise and an inner silent space within the general hustle-and-bustle of everyday life. The Yoruba refer to it as Itutu, the Akanas Bokoor, the Ga as Bleoo, the Dagomba as Baalim, the Ewe as Dododo, the Mandinke as Suma, the Tiv as Kundu-Kundu, and the Mbuti Pygmies as Ekimi. African American jazz musicians know it as “Daddy Cool”. Almost invariably there is a word for its opposite. Yirin for the Dagombas, Basa-Basa for the Akan,Gidi-Gidi for the Ga people and Gonni for the Mandinka; all of which imply becoming obsessed with and fired up by the ever-changing material world: or what the Mbuti pygmies call “akami” (noise) and Ghanaians the “skin-pain” of inter-personal friction. In this distracted state one becomes disoriented and unable to react thoughtfully to any given situation. To prevent this one has to cultivate emptiness and “cool the heart” as the American musicologist John Chernoff (1979) was told by his Dagomba drum teacher Alhaji Ibrahim Abdulai
The dynamic impulse provided by irregularity is actuallydepicted in some African and other ancient circular mandalas,for it is their very lopsidedness that represents propulsive drive.One example is the Chinese Yin and Yang sign in which the twopolar principles are not quite exact mirror-images of each other,because of their infinitely receding dots within dots within dots.Another is the left-handed spin of the ancient Tibetan Swastika(which Hitler turned clockwise). African instances include theanti-clockwise spin of the Akan Gye Nyame design and Foncelestial serpent Ayido Hwedo depicted earlier. Another is theparticular handedness of the corkscrew motion of the doubleentwined snakes on Zulu staffs.
Originally posted by fulllotusqigong
The song evoked the 7 hertz drum frequency. That is the secret of that song.
There is the spiral of fifths scale long before Pythagoras but the Brahmins and Zoroastrians used it as a "divide and average" system that contained infinity through materialist geometry.
My music-math research was originally inspired by musicologist Ernest McClain who focused on the secret role of Pythagorean music ratios in Platonic philosophy. In his “Music Theory and Ancient Cosmology” article McClain states that “The spiral of fifths (and derivative fourths) is the most widely known tuning order documented to old Babylon (c. 1800 to 1600 BC).”198
Assistant Professor John Curtis Franklin, in response to my email, has clarified this ancient origin of the Pythagorean tuning stating that the Pythagorean tuning based on the 4ths and 5ths, almost certainly, goes back to at least 2100 BCE, based on the Sumerian musical terms of some of the cuneiform texts.200
198 “For Plato’s influence on Pythagoreanism, Burkert 1972. Despite my best attempts to follow McClain 1976, there appears to me still no conclusive evidence for the musical ratios in cuneiform sources – although I would be hardly surprised if it emerges.” Professor John Curtis Franklin, “The Wisdom of the Lyre: Soundings in Ancient Greece, Cyprus and the Near East,” 2000, Symposium on the International Study Group on Music Archaeology. Footnote 10.
200 John Curtis Franklin, email communication, April 12, 2011.
Indeed the Pythagorean music interval “spiral of fifths” scale has now been documented to an even much older date out of China: Regardless of the antiquity of these nine-thousand-year-old instruments, tonal tests indicate that they can play pitches that coincide closely with those of the modern musical scale. Comparing the notes of a twelve-tone scale in equal temperament with those produced by the bone flutes, one finds that the discrepancies are minor. That is to say, if one were to use the bone flutes to play modern music, the audience might not be able to detect the difference....Tonal tests indicate that the intervals are approximately 100 cents in size, that is a semitone relationship between neighboring holes....This discovery endorses the idea that the people in the Huai river valley had developed a cognitive system of music no later than the sixth millenium BC.203
This period of Gods as ratios is the transition to phonetic writing for Solar Dynasties since accounting for the difference between the Sun and Moon calendar (365-354) is tedious using right-brain ideograms.
The 60-based number system was originally tied to rightbrain ideograms (and the harp lyre as a memory recording device), relying on the ritual sacrifice shaman-priests.
However, you know there is one kind of chord that works at any distortion level: exactly, the powerchord. And here's why:
In a perfect fifth, the frequencies have a ratio of 2:3. So if you play a two-stringed† powerchord, you have those frequencies in the original signal:...You see what's going on here: we're getting components with half the original fundamental frequency! Subharmonics. And those are in fact the reason why powerchords sound so fat.