SETMI™
Search for ExtraTerrestrial Music Intelligence
Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg
Guildmeister, The Triode Guild, Thermionic Techno-Shaman 

The feature article in April Rolling Stone Magazine is a story about an Internet millionaire who has dropped out of Cyberspace, and is devoting his life to SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (www.thewordistruth.org). The music industry, which has traditionally supported revolutionary political ideas, is just beginning to explore the revolution in cosmology and quantum physics. Like you, I started to explore the notion of higher forms of musical intelligence a number of years ago and now that the millennia is about to pop its cherry, it is time to enlist your help and go further and deeper. Why is it so important for us to expand our imagination about the nature of music, mind and evolution? Because we must first expand our imagination, before we can get beyond the crudity of all audio technology which is limiting our musical expression. Let me make the sequence of music expansion clear: (1) expanded imagination, (2) new technology, (3) new forms of musical expression.

1999 is 1899

Let’s pretend, because this imaginative leap will help put this adventure in perspective. One hundred years ago we were poised at the next millennia, and there was much excitement. Now let’s check out the amazing world of 1899. There is no electricity. There are no motor cars or airplanes. There is no electronics, little or no music in our lives, no computers, no hot-rods, no Playboy Magazine, no television, no rock and roll, no pizza, and while we have heard about motion pictures we haven’t seen them yet. In spite of the dizzying changes all about us, it is very difficult to believe the fantastic stories we hear about the future.

Can you imagine the effect on someone living in 1899 if we could bring them just thirty years into the future to 1930?

I am suggesting that the same type of dynamic is still true, and many of you will find the notion of higher dimension of music intelligence unbelievable. If I would have predicted in 1899 that, very soon, you would have all the music you wanted in your home, or on the street, or in your car, and would have described a rock concert, you would have looked at me like I was crazy, and you would be right. If I would have tried to describe, in 194O, the electric guitar you would have screamed in horror.

Yet, we are on the verge of exactly the same type of revolutionary shift in human culture, and it is not about technology, but about the way our mind in our brain organizes itself. These revolutionary shifts in mind/brain have occurred many times during its current 500,000 year old form, yet we seem oblivious to them. Not only is the human mind, for the first time, on the verge of knowing higher dimensions of reality, it is on the verge of expressing higher dimensions of music reality, and music will be the primary mutagenic of this new mind expansion.

Just think of our entire music and music/audio technology culture as being in 1899. We wrongfully think we are at a very high level of development, but we are not. We are impressed by the enormous variety of music that is available. We have expanding choices of how we experience music in our headphones, home or car. We walk into recording studios and we are impressed by all the knobs, buttons and gizmos. We go to rock concerts and are impressed by the impact of the sound. Soon it will be apparent that all of these are still artifacts of a "horse and buggy" music/audio culture that is already obsolete. Listening to the finest state of the art custom sound system, like those featured in Positive Feedback, or on the Triode Guild web site, and you are still listening to a primitive whined-up Victrola.

For this new music paradigm to emerge a new music mind must emerge first; a mind capable of imagining higher dimension of music intelligence. This is already happening, and again, like our friends in 1899, if they would have looked harder they would have discovered the auto, electricity, and electronics were very pregnant ideas, and would soon be born into their world.

DON’T MIND ME

Anyone who studies the development of mind is keenly aware that they are studying not an elegant, coherent or consistent design but more a Rube Goldberg, a cognitive mish/mash patch work quilt of conflicting cognitive centers. We all know how very little we know about mind, but we can be sure of this: the enigmas, paradoxes and conflicts inherent in the structure of mind is manifest in all human activities.

As we enter the next millennia we are hearing predictions about what the future holds, yet there little or no rumination on how our mind will evolve. It is easy to talk about the material world. It is very difficult to describe the evolution of trees while you living up one in the forest.

BREAKOUT

To this thermionic techno-shaman, the major breakout of the next century is very predictable: we will begin to experience beyond our normal four dimensional reality and finally sense what Einstein predicted almost one hundred years ago....reality is far more complex than we experience with our feeble "modern model" of reality. Those of you who are following the frontiers of quantum physics and cosmology know what I am talking about.

We also know that we humans were making music long before we created thought or used language, by about 20,000 years. This priority of music over thought is discussed very little. This obvious continuum between music consciousness and the creation of mind seems a taboo subject.

We can be sure of the priority of music consciousness because Neanderthal/Stone Age flutes were discovered (www.webstar.sk.ca/greenwich/OG-EZ.HTM) that have diatonic scales, which, according to their dating, are about twenty thousand years older than the appearance of thought/language. How do we know that pre-thought man was creating symbolic rhythmic sounds. Anthropologist can measure their intervals. Our genius for organizing harmonics into meaningful patterns preceded our genius for thought....or is it all the same? This shouldn’t surprise any of us because, what is language other than rhythmic patterns of symbolic sounds? This means we had developed the capacity to create rhythmic symbolic sounds before we created thought and language because you can’t have one without the other. The meaning of sound is that it has meaning because our survival depended on our brain’s ability to ascribe meaning to harmonics.

THE TWANG BEFORE THE BIG BANG©

You are all aware of The Big Bang; the notion that the universe started with a big explosive harmonic. This is the central intellectual theorem of cosmology, and it is all wrong, and I am the first to name it. The Big Bang was not the primal moment of creation. Something happened before it, and it was a Twang.

I am not the first to hear the Twang Before the Big Bang©. Jimmy Hendrix who got to the Garden of Eden before Adam heard it to. I am only the first to name it. Those of you who have the newly evolved Nth Dimensional mind have this primal sound in you, in the same way cosmologists have the secondary harmonic, The Big Bang, in them. (The Big Bang is a meme, as is the Twang) It shouldn’t surprise you that all theories of creation start with a very big sound. This is an archetype of mind. Om!

I don’t know why I was chosen to detect and label the primal cosmological harmonic foreplay, and I don’t bother to ask anymore. Perhaps it is because I am a thermionic techno-shaman. Perhaps it is because many years ago I made the commitment to organize the journey to the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace©. Perhaps it is because I had a bat ear transplant almost two decades ago. If your music mind is being edited by the "accuracy" meme, you will never be able to hear the Twang Before the Big Bang©.

Let me explain why the BIG BANG was not the primal sound. The Big Bang is an intellectual construction, a metaphor of a scientific four dimensional mind; a meme of the old paradigm, like musical accuracy. A couple of obvious points: (1) the true reality of the universe is not four dimensions but N dimensions and asserting that the primal creation can be known with a feeble four dimensional mind is arrogant, Yet, paradoxically there is great scientific humility about scientist’s general weak understanding of the nature of the universe’s reality . Astronomers now admit just how little they know. But let’s face it. Scientists have to earn their keep, and their keep is to come up with really cool ideas about unknowable subjects, which is exactly what priests did in the Court of Zoroaster thousands of years ago (2) Cosmologists, and quantum physicists know squat about really cool sounds because they are all a bunch of geeks, propeller heads, nerds and dweebs who listen to Lawrence Welk on Circuit City boom boxes.

Shall I say this another way?: Music is now (because mind mandated it) the primary mutagenic of mind. Music created mind. Mind then created exactly the type of music it needed to advance its mutation. The music mind is self-mutagenic. Music is the best tool for enhancing the sensitivity of neural synapses so that their capacity to generate "imagination" is expanded, which is exactly what is missing in the scientific community, and in most segments of the audio industry. Imagination always creates the future. Imagination is the Twang before the Big Bang. The dematerial existed before the material.

Or let me put it another way. The scientific mind will not be able to grasp higher dimensions of reality because it can’t tune into the full range of harmonics of the universe. Cosmology and quantum physics, like all good orthodox religions are brilliantly structured, internally consistent, powerful editors, that desperately hopes it has some sticky relationship to reality. Science will not be able embrace the complexity of the universe until it is able to get much further down into its funky harmonic intelligence; the intelligence that was proto-thought, the mind that knew before the mind became an editor, the mind that is creating its own mutation to higher level of perception.

Higher forms of intelligent life exists, They are, it is, just like mind, a dematerial form of energy, and it is already deeply embedded in the harmonics of the mind, except our hearing is not sensitive enough to hear what it/they are telling us. That is why I have organized SETM™: SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE. This is our best chance for making contact with higher forms of music intelligence, and to be successful at that task we must travel to the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace on the XH-1, The World’s First High Tech Biomachine Dirigible Astronomic Space Laboratory Recording Studio In The Sky. The search for higher dimensions of being is the most natural instinct in everyone. It is the most fundamental instinct of music in mind. Music in mind is an out of control virus that is forces the mutation of mind. Yet, there is no doubt to make CONTACT we need more advanced music technology, not more advanced telescopes, and for that to happen we must first elevate our music consciousness; we must first elevate our imagination.

LET’S GET IN TOUCH WITH REALITY:
MUSIC AS A MUTAGENIC OF MIND/BODY

How intense is humankind’s efforts to alter its mind/body metacontext? How large is the demand for mind alteration in America? I did some research on this subject while I was Chairman of the Addiction Brain Trust and tried to figure out how much Americans were spending on all forms of mind/body altering substances: alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs. The amount of dollars spent was much larger than the Defense Department budget. When you add in other forms of exogenous mind/body altering products like music and audio technology, it appears to me that America’s largest group of consumer products are those that are expressly designed to get us out of "normal mind" and boot us up into an altered state of consciousness. This is nothing new, yet it is one of the best insights into the music explosion all over the world....humans are demanding increasing doses of mind expanding stimulation.

The archaeological and anthropological record is clear: humans have been using mind altering plants, substances and rituals, and music, from a time long before we could speak and think. Is there some relationship between the extraordinary achievements of Egypt and the fact this culture consumed enormous quantities of cannabis? Why is there such a clear pattern between successful ancient civilization and the use of mind altering plants, not only in daily life, but as an essential ingredient in their religions? The answer is mind knows exactly what to do; what to use to advance its mutation, and open the door to higher dimensions of reality.

Nothing is a clearer sign of our species’ genius than our creativity in inventing and discovering WHAT EVER IT TAKES to improve the mutation and evolution of mind, and at the top of that creative impulse is the invention, in this century, of the process of encoding and decoding music. Clearly, today music is the most commonly consumed psychotropic substance. Music is an exogenous neural transmitter; it is an external stimulant to the brain Mind knows how to create stimulants to alter its own processes. Music alters and advances the operation of our brain in exactly the same way as any (now illegal) plant alkaloid. This explains why music is so popular. We need to alter our minds so that it gets out of its low level industrial, and highly edited, limited perceptual/sensual metacontext, and is made more aware, more alert, and more capable of experiencing the whole-osity of reality. Or is music just the most commonly consumed pain killer needed for survival in industrial society?

What is the meaning of the above? When and if the music/audio business makes the next leap forward in the quality of their products, billions of dollars now spent on illegal mind altering substances will flow into their pockets. While this may seem like a revolutionary marketing idea, I am very certain that 99% of America’s music fans haven’t got a clue, have never experienced a high quality music high (that didn’t need to be induced by an illegal substance), and if such an experience could be made affordable, dollars flowing into this industry would double.

INTELLECTUAL COWARDS?

Are we cowards? Why have the savants of this industry avoided discussing the most significant perceptual paradigm shift of the twentieth century; a preliminary step that had to taken on the way to experiencing higher dimension of reality? I am now discussing the perceptual revolution that was the foundation for creating the modern high end audio industry. It began in earnest in the late 1960s, synchronistically with the world moving towards a nuclear holocaust. The conjunction, in our mind, of plant alkaloids and the new tribal primal music (marijuana and rock and roll) is the single most significant shift in mind/body awareness of this century. From that plant alkaloid/rock and roll mind convergence emerged a sexual, political, culture, scientific, artistic revolution that we still do not yet understand. This was the first sign of the new mind harmonic.

I am suggesting that this new mind harmonic created by the convergence of plant alkaloid/rock and roll music was the primary anti-war/anti-nuclear political force of the cold war. It was the crow bar in crack of the four dimensional mind. Throw in that mix the birth control pill (appearing in the mid-1960s) which liberated women’s primal sexual energy, and you have nuclear culture cocktail that melted down, and continues to meltdown the America created by Mr. White Control Freak, and he is still not happy and is trying his damnedest to get things back under his control. The four dimensional mind will fight to the death to halt the mutation of mind/body.

Now let me bring you back to our state of intellectual primitivism. We are just beginning to accept the dynamics of the evolution of species thanks to a theory created in the last half of the 19 Th. century by Darwin. Almost one hundred and fifty years later there are still wide segments of the American population that resist this notion and believes that the world was created in seven days. As we enter the 21st century we still don’t have a credible theory about the evolution of mind, but mind doesn’t care, because it just keeps on mutating. What a perplexing paradox...we are still not yet intelligent enough to understand the evolution of intelligence.

A LESSON FROM MY TANTA ROSEY

In the 1960s when my great aunt Rosey died my father and I went to her house and gathered her belongings and by her bed was the family whined-up Victrola. My father told me this tale: In the 1920s when his father finally had enough money to buy this exotic machine and cranked it up for the first time everyone in their tenement building gasped in amazement. My father swore that it sounded like Carouso was actually singing in the room...that’s how real the music sounded coming from that archaic machine. As my father told me that story his face shone with the light of that moment.

The reason I mention this story because the same is true today. Even the most sophisticated audio system, and I don’t even mean the store bought equipment, but our hyper-hot-rod edge of the art systems are still only a tiny step away from that whined up Victrola. All forms of "normal" four dimensional audio/music technology is still at an incredibly primitive state of development because it arises out of a paradigm that wants nothing more than having Carouso "accurately" appear in its living room. Of course that doesn’t prevent me from bellowing out...."It sounds so real"...just like my father. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Which brings me to the subject of the male-techno-ego, which is an artifact of mind. Men struggle long and hard to create the most advanced technology, and when they are done building their V-16 supercharged nitro-methane powered tube amps, can we expect them to say: this is incredibly crude? No. Yet we know, even with all forms of technology accelerating at an accelerating rate, machines still can’t keep up with imagination. What is the half life of today’s computer? Mind always mutates at a faster rate than machines. At the mutating dance contest the dematerial is always the winner.

Our music imagination, our new music consciousness, is far ahead of our music making ability, and the music and audio industry is struggling to keep up and is in quandary on how to respond. Just stop for a moment and consider the quality of music that comes from the average home music system or television. What time is it? In terms of music, for the average person, it is still 2,000 BC, not 2,000 AD. Again, what an exciting opportunity for men of vision.

A BLADE OF GRASS BREAKING THROUGH THE CONCRETE

While I was in the middle of the Soviet revolution a friend of mind, a Catholic priest, offered me this insight into both the life of Jesus Christ, the Soviet revolution and all revolutions. He said..."Revolutions are blades of grass breaking through the concrete". The future never emerges from the center, but from the rebel on the edge.

This is grand good news for those with a brave new vision of the audio arts, and the new generation of music lovers who are not bound by the old four dimensional paradigm of music. The harder we hold on to the old ways the sooner we will perish. Mutate or die, which means it is time for us to elevate our imagination about music and music technology.

There is no music out there. There is only one music. You are the only music. ExtraTerrestrial music intelligence is already embedded in you. Are you ready for contact? When you are ready, you too will hear The Twang Before The Big Bang©. I am inviting you all to join me on the XH-1, as we journey to the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace as we Search for ExtraTerrestrial Music Intelligence, which is embedded deep in our musical souls.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

HyperSpace, Michio Kaku

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (Chapter 11:Memes)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Break-Down of the Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes

The Evolution of Consciousness, Robert Ornstein

Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Gerald M. Edelman, (A Nobel Laureate’s vision of how Mind organizes the brain)

ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence: Jean Heidman (serious discussion of subject)

The Measure of Reality: Alfred W Crosby (about the quantification of society 1250-1600)

Plants of the Gods: Schultes/Hoffman (About the relationship between the sacred and plant alkaloids)

Aaron Copland: Music and Imagination (Must reading)

Music, Brain and Ecstasy: Robert Jourdan (A complete affirmation of the premise of my book, The Search for Musical Ecstasy)

The Origins of Music, Bob Fink

Brain Sex, Moir (explores the structural and cognitive differences in the male and female brain)

™© Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg, 1999

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