Notebook:

scratchpad of my unfinished and uncorrected thougths and ideas...


Sound, sex and collision.

Sound is inherently collision. There is nothing elegant in sound. To produce sound you must bounce a moving mass against an elastic object. Thus sound all strings and drums, but also wind instruments. In the latter case sound is produced by colliding a high pressure windstream against an obstacle, if not indirectly, by using the compressed air to bounce a reed against a mouthpiece or against a copy of itself (double reeds) . Regardless how you face it, acoustical sound generation seems to entail collision of some sort. Musicians are colliders. They use body movement to collide sound producing objects. The lack of elegance in music makes that dancers, although also using body movement, cannot be musicians. They are elegant, or try to be so. When dance meets music, it becomes sex. Intercourse. A mixture, or confluence if you like, of collision and elegance. In the past they might have called it yin and yang.


 

Prof.Dr.Godfried-Willem Raes