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THE SUPPRESSION OF ANCIENT HARMONIC SCIENCE SUPPRESSION THE SCIENCE ANCIENT HARMONIC Knowledge of the harmonic geometry of sound has been kept secret from the masses by the Church and, more recently, by science but a new era is dawning in which we'll learn to connect with our "inner archetype". wo years ago I decided to return to a research project in music perception that I had postponed nearly 30 years earlier. It seemed that time had not diminished my curiosity about how we are able to organically measure the degree of dissonance and mentally anticipate the direction of resolution in music Laer anee harmony. My original work in this area had taken me deep into mathematics and computer simulations in search of an explanation. Now, armed with the scientific method, powerful computer tools and access to the world's latest research, I was sure that I could determine once and for all whether our perception of music is something organic or nothing more than cultural conditioning. I had no idea that what I was about to learn would shake the very foundation of my 21st-century world view. Slowly but surely I began to put the pieces together. From a wide array of scientific research in music cognition, neurophysiology, genetics, acoustics, quantum physics and my own calculations and experiments, I developed a set of principles and mathematical models to explain how we perceive music. Naming this system harmonic interference theory, | found a way to show how harmonics—the overtones of a musical note—play a common role in both sound and the structure of our anatomy. The theory proposes that life grows as a balance between resonance and damping, just like a vibrating string, and that music perception is a built-in pattern-matching between the harmonic geometry of sound and identical structures in the ears and the brain. It is from this organic pattern-matching process that the musical qualities of consonance, dissonance, tension and resolution can be defined mathematically and then visualised geometrically as crystalline and quasi-crystalline structures. From this, I came to the conclusion that the entire body is a form of crystallised music. but a new era Is dawning in which we'll learn to connect with our The Vitruvian model Once I had convinced myself of the existence of harmonic properties in human physiology, I found myself drawn to Leonardo da Vinci and his popular illustration of the Vitruvian Man to see what he might have known. I learned that the circle and square surrounding the Vitruvian Man represent the mathematical "squaring of the circle", whereby the perimeter of the square is equal (as near as possible) to the circumference of the circle. First proposed by Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio in the first century BC, the squaring of the circle was intended to represent the harmony and balance in the ideal human form. As I pondered what this could mean, it occurred to me that the circle implies an inside-out resonance of cells in the body, while the square represents an outside-in damping effect to contain the outward push of cellular resonance. It dawned on me that, like the standing wave and ring models in my interference theory, all organic life could be defined as energy exploding outward into space that is then pushed back inward into specific shapes, presumably depending on which Email: Website: NEXUS ¢ 45 by Richard Merrick © 2008 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2009 www.nexusmagazine.com