The Sound Space

During the central decades of the 20th century, Hans Kaiser revived the teaching of Harmonics. Other researchers then further developed this knowledge, which was also adapted to the needs of current humanity, focused on understanding the essential features of our own field of existence.

Harmonics is based on study of the creative power of sound and applies its principles to many branches of knowledge. It can be considered the science of relationships or ratios, starting from those evident in the vibratory manifestation of physical world, from which it is possible to bring out a canon of universal applicability. Harmonics therefore concerns the “acoustic field” in its analogical relationships with the higher fields of existence, in which the acoustic field is included, sharing their same qualities.

If a sound is given off by an object free to vibrate, for example a tight string, it generates (creates) other sounds. Those generated sounds are its “harmonics” or “partials”. They are at the same time linked to the first sound and connected among themselves by precise relationships established between the numerical values of the wavelength, thus also of its reciprocal, the frequency of vibration. Note that the same phenomenon affects also the electromagnetic vibration and is known very well in Physics, where it is expressed by a mathematical formalization (Fourier’s series). In Harmonics these relationships or intervals are of particular relevance: they all present a rational number (fraction of integers) and, as all sounds, a psychical value arising from the auditory perception. Human reason and listening are here collaborating.

The study of sound relationships immediately puts us in front of a crucial threshold (not so much for its conceptual difficulty – it is, on the contrary, a simple observation – but for the necessity to pass it both through logic and in our own heart, in order to recognize the “importance” of this step): the acoustic events are divided into two categories, “Sound” and “Noise”.

To the sound corresponds a regular and periodic wavefront, oscillating between a maximum and a minumun value. To the noise corresponds an irregular and non-periodic wavefront. The former generates, with its harmonical progeny, a net of relationships; the latter remains isolated and undefinable. Here also, everything measurable by reason is accompanied by a precise perceptive value. For the human psyche, sound conveys integrity and noise disintegration.

Once we researchers have passed these “Hercules’ columns” introducing knowledge of Harmonics, we will be able to distinguish, by analogy, sounds and noises in the sonority of thoughts, emotions and human activities.