My intention is to challenge your conception of Music. I will first point out how proximally close Music is to us all and our 'Worldhood' and then I will show you the ways in which you and Music may be a total stranger. 

This is not a new 'science'. Musical Cosmology, or the 'Harmony of the Spheres', has been studied across cultures and epochs of history. Celestial and mathematical awareness of Music is now a rare tradition, hidden from 'arms reach' of pop culture. 

Music is the sound track to your daily lives, I don't need to emphasize it, because it already follows you everywhere. You LOVE music, for the most part and as often as possible. Musicians study music as notes on a page, flowing through measured time and tempered scales, but do they truly know Music, as such? We play our 440 Hz linear compression 'tunes' and convert our sacred frequencies to MIDI code and 1's and 0's, but can we still say we KNOW Music, as such? 

Some days, I prefer to fall in line with the great poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who said that Music is simply, 'uninhabitable', a true 'stranger'. Could it be that one of the prize experiences and achievements of our late capitalist society, has been ontologically and existentially lost to Time itself?

We know that certain frequencies, harmonies, chord progressions, melodic distances, each and all have differing effects on our brain. Music has been used for centuries for Church and State alike, to curate the moods of it's people. Pop music, I can tell you first hand, is an engineered science of music making that caters for specific moods also. We often incorporate the rules of symmetry and harmony found in the sacred geometric shapes known as the 'Platonic Solids'.

If you will come with me on a journey to question Music some more, then please read on. Here is an excerpt of my forthcoming self-published work, 'The Eighth Octave' for you to enjoy. Of course, music was played by our ancestors for generations before the Greeks, however, Pythagoras was the first to recognize the geometric order and harmony inherent in music, as a language and science. Like many mystics, the realization hit him like a flash. I will briefly tell you the story now. 

"This book opened my mind to the myriad of ways that Music has been thought of in the past. What struck me at that moment, my dear, was how inextricably linked music is with life itself and yet how far we have come from that kind of understanding. Let me keep it really simple. Who discovered music, as we know it

Music, in the Western tradition, was discovered by Pythagoras. ‘Pythagoras of Samos’, was born in about 570 BC and died about 495 BC. He was a great mind and perhaps a clairaudient, which means he could hear frequencies of sound in a much larger spectrum than others. It is thought that Pythagoras received his transmission of sacred knowledge from the Egyptian priest Oenuphis of Heliopolis. According to Sufi legend, Pythagoras was said to have been initiated by Hermes, who is also known as the Egyptian god ‘Thoth’ and the arch angel ‘Metatron’. Aristotle was to later claim that he had the ability to travel through space-time, and to communicate with the animal and plant kingdom.

One day, Pythagoras was on a walk, thinking and burning new ideas in his mind. He happened to walk past a blacksmith, or so the story goes, and heard the clanging of the hammers striking the anvil and perceived what he heard to be perfected consonances of the ‘octave’, the ‘fifth’ and the ‘fourth’. 

He concluded that the sound interval between the fourth and the fifth was dissonant and at the same time complimentary to the higher of the other two consonances. He came into the blacksmith to take careful measurements of the hammers and the force behind the sounds. Back home, he hammered a nail into the angle formed by adjacent walls. From this nail he evenly hung four strings of the same material and fixed a different-sized weight at the end of each to keep them tightened at the same length. When he plucked two strings at a time, he would hear the consonances that he heard just an hour or so before. The string held down by the greatest weight played against that held down by the smallest sounded out an octave. The heaviest string paired with the second heaviest sounded out the fifth. He then played this with the next most heavily-weighted string and discovered the fourth. It was the discovery of Music as we know it, in the mathematical system of twelve units of force. Music is a physical language, my dear, expressing the harmonic principles of the third dimension of time and space.

By dividing a string with a bridge he mad it so that the two resultant lengths were in the simple ratios of 2:1, 3:2, 4:3. Today, we call these intervals the octave, the fifth, and the fourth. The first relates to the geometry of the circle, the second ratio relates to the triangle and the third relates to the square. The major or minor ‘third’ was not seen by Pythagoras as a perfect consonance and so was not featured in the Pythagorean scale.

Seeing the cosmos as finding form in number, Pythagoras was particularly drawn to the mysterious ‘Phi’ ratio or ‘Golden Section’. This magical proportion he found by dividing a line at a particular point to yield two unequal sections, where the smaller one is proportionate to the larger one as the larger one is to the entire line. It is easy to produce this ratio geometrically. In any case, this ratio created is always 1.618 = ‘Phi’. One of many ways to create this ratio is with the five-pointed star, as drawn within a pentagon. Every outside line on the pentagon is in a phi ratio to any line of the star. Also, every line on the star has 3 segments. One side segment is in a ratio of 1:1.618 to the rest of that line. For this reason, Pythagoras thought that the entire cosmos was derived from the twelve pentagram sided ‘Dodecahedron’ and believed that music was to be played in perfect consonances in a cycle of ‘perfect fifths’. He wasn’t wrong!

Pythagoras based his tuning only on the perfect consonances, the perfect octave, perfect fifth, and perfect fourth. For him, all pitches are generated from a series of perfect fifths, each with a ratio of 3 to 2. Now, there is a small difference between the Pythagorean scale and the Western scale we use today. This small difference is called a ‘Pythagorean comma’. What I am trying to tell you, Max, is that in Western music, 12 perfect fifths and seven octaves are treated as the same interval, but in reality they are actually 23.46 cents apart. The music governed by the Golden Section, Phi, creates a non-linear and asymmetrical understanding of consonance. Over time, this distance from ‘true’ form, has left us with less than ‘true’ function.

The Pythagorean scale of music is not symmetrical or linear. The musical system we have adopted now, Max, has been ‘Tempered’ or forced into symmetry. It is really an approximation of music, as such. I will show you very soon, how music has been squandered by such symmetry of form, we have almost lost the access to the dynamic and asymmetrical music of motion and force. This is the first of the ‘lost’ secrets of music that I have for you, Max. I need you to listen to me carefully, as there are many more to come."

I am excited and nervous to finally be offering some of my research and share the intimacy of this story, 'The Eighth Octave' with you. I have been researching and writing for fifteen years now and it feels like it cannot wait any longer to be given out. I have decided to self-publish the work because I believe this is the time for it. I have signed a major recording contract with Interscope in the past and I would like to try something completely different with this work. I don't see any place for waiting games here.
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Please leave questions and comments here and follow my social links @theeighthoctave.


ISAAC KOREN

Dear reader,

This blog has been set up to share with you some of the lesser known aspects of the intangible 'thing' we call Music. It is a companion to 'The Eighth Octave' and  my way of staying in touch with you and hear your comments. Here I will dive deeper into the history and the science of the lost art of Music, as a mathematical, geometric and mystical practice. 

A bit about me? My name is Jack Jericho.  As I was graduating in Philosophy and Politics at Northeastern University, I was asked by my lecturer of Heidegger and the 'Socratic method', to continue my thesis on 'The Being of Music' with him into post-grad studies. Professor Kerry Dugan is his name and he was both disappointed and excited to hear that I was, instead, to embark on a journey 'In' Music and pursue a career as a songwriter and performer. 

And so i did just that. I am a co writer on hundreds of songs, many of them published and licensed for major TV and film placements. My music has earned a 'gold record' and major radio play in a number of territories. I have had the pleasure of international touring at the Arena level with pop stars and have played to millions of people around the world. I signed a major recording contract and met with the greatest business men and women in the industry. I still love to write, make and perform music and make it my daily meditation to sing and gather people into Music to express themselves.

Along that fifteen year long journey, I have continued to study the science and mathematics of Music and to understand the effect it has on the human brain. I studied Jazz vocalization at the New School in NYC and took private classes with Michael Harrison on North Indian Classical Raga Music. I studied for two years with a female Sufi mystic, and discovered new evidence for the spiritual power of Music. An avid reader of astrophysicists such as Carl Sagan, I began to link ancient musical paradigms of scientists such as Kepler, Plato and Pythagoras, to modern theorists of Time and Space. In particular, the questions of proximity of other intelligent and communicative alien races. 

I began to question whether or not I would prefer this research to be written in the form of a story, something personal and emotional to keep the attention of a young mind, while still relaying the basic principles of the science of Music. I decided to ask a blogger/writer I knew from reading online and I took a meeting with her. She and I are now married with a baby boy and it was the power of their love that has given me the strength to complete the first book of three, 'The Eighth Octave'. I will be making it available for pre-release later this year.  
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Thank you for your readership and interest in Music, as such.

ISAAC KOREN
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