Quality – consisting of the contours of expressive vocal and body gesture, shaping our felt sense of time in movement. These contours can consist of psychoacoustic attributes of vocalizations – timbre, pitch, volume – or attributes of direction and intensity of the moving body perceived in any modality. Pulse – a regular succession through time of discrete movements (which may, for example, be used to create sound for music, or to create movement with music – dance) using our felt sense of acting which enables the ‘future-creating’ predictive process by which a person may anticipate or create what happens next and when.
In opposition to the “implicit philosophical presuppositions inherited from the canon of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, e.g., that consciousness is self-reflective, passive, and timeless,” she proposes a natural science view. The infant is born ready to interact and discover her musical culture. Hearing responds to musical https://www.wikipedia.org/ sounds from the third trimester of pregnancy (Busnel et al., 1992), and infants can recognize music they heard before birth . They recognize musical contours and rhythmic patterns , and ‘dance’ to music before they are one year old (Zentner et al., 2010). Infant-inclusive singing is preferred, like infant-inclusive speaking1.
A comparable inhibitory effect of conventions of schooling has been recorded on the spontaneous expression of religious feelings and spirituality in the early years . These innate sources of human imagining in collaborative, moral ways give value and meaning https://www.artmindfestival.com/ to the later cultivation of advanced cultural ideas and skills (Valiente et al., 2012). Although blind, Maria knows the feelings of anticipated movement of her hand, and uses them to sense and share the human vitality dynamics in her mother’s voice.
This kinematic sensibility was identified by Olga Maratos in her pioneering research in imitation as foundational for the ability of a young infant to reproduce another person’s expression seen or heard . Indeed, vocal perception, detecting the modulation of pitch and timing in an adult’s voice sounds, develops much faster than vocal production. The infant may be tracking sound with reference to the kinesics of the fastest and most complex gestural movements of her hands.
“I hope we can all start to actively tackle the climate and nature crisis together,” she says. Ludovico Einaudi’s new album Underwater is released on Friday 21st January 2022. His compilation album Cinema, which includes tracks from Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe winners Nomadland and The Father is out now. You have to play the music as if you are performing to a friend but instead establish it with three thousand people. This is the complexity involved with how to actually perform it – you do have to solve that little problem but, I will find a way. I started performing again recently and it truly is beautiful to feel the audience and to establish this moment of timelessness, almost, within people.
‘Language of nature’ we equate with our embodied moving consciousness – our communicative musicality. An excess of ‘artificial signs,’ perhaps aimed at increasing productivity, leads to loneliness and ruthless rationality. However, the cultivation of our communicative musicality, in ourselves and others, through playful music, dance, ritual and sympathetic companionship, makes our communal life of shared work of the body and mind creative in more hopeful ways. It restores our common humanity and our connection with all living things. As Daniel Stern has written , the human body has a rich range of gestural ‘forms of vitality’ – we move in musical ways.
Infants are ready for human cultural invention and collaboration as newly hatched birds are ready for flying – within ‘the biology of love’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980; Maturana and Verden-Zoller, 2008). All organisms reach out in time and space to make use of the ‘affordances’ for thought and action . The ability to create meaning with others through wordless structured gestural narratives, that is, our communicative musicality, emerges from before birth and in infancy. From this innate musicality come the various cultural forms of music. Consciousness is created as the ongoing sense of self-in-movement with which we experience and manipulate the world around us. Its origin is in our evolutionary animal past, evolved for new collaborative, creative projects, regulated between us by affective expressions of feelings of vitality from within our bodies (Sherrington, 1955; Panksepp, 1998; Damasio, 2003; Mithen, 2005; Stern, 2010; Eisenberg and Sulik, 2012).
The common element is an individual who is highly skilled in attuning to nuances of interpersonal timing and gesture, and who aims to lead back to health another whose personal mindedness of time-in-the-body has become compromised through hardship, suffering, or biological disruption, perhaps leading to a sense of isolation and misunderstanding . The therapist joins with the person who needs help, leading them back to health and wellbeing through their own therapeutic sense of the ‘minute particulars’ in that moment of meeting . More recognizable musical forms grow with the spontaneous singing of young children as they play alone or with others , practicing their musical craft. The Norwegian musicologist Jon-Roar Bjørkvold collected and studied the songs of 4–7-year-olds in three kindergartens in Oslo. He observed how they gave voice to emotion, conveyed information, and established relationships through learning and creating their own children’s musical culture.
This wish to learn the forms of culture, our ‘conformal motive’ , comes to life within an environment where we sense our communicative gestures are being valued by another or others through the creation of shared narratives of vitality forms . We feel ourselves to be both a companion in our shared narrative of communicative embodied gestures and a companion in a particular shared cultural collaboration. It is within this dual companionship that our deep yearning to belong is met and satisfied, and where healing can occur. When taking part in a nursery song, infants demonstrate sensitivity for melodic phrase structure, attending to the rhyming vowels at the ends of lines, and by 5 months the infant can vocalize a matching vowel in synchrony with the mother .
For me, winter is beautiful but I would ask to make it a bit shorter. I feel that February and March are a bit too long, and I very much enjoy it when the days become longer and I start to see the movement of nature waking up after winter. I knew I wanted music to become my world because it allowed me to feel the most beautiful emotions. It gave me a lot of joy, sadness – all the most beautiful human emotions you could think of. I was a little kid, when my mother used to play the piano at home. For years at the beginning, I didn’t actually have a teacher that I loved.