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Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

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Steve Gray
Steve Gray
931 posts

Re: Significance
Mar 29, 2006, 00:14
"What other 'not synchronous' things are you specifically referring to? Eclipses for example?"

Well, yes, eclipses would fit the bill, of course, but I was thinking in more general terms. People get unsettled by all sorts of things that upset the harmony of their lives. In fact "harmony" is a great analogy. When music is harmonious it's because the individual notes have synchronous relationships - the wavelengths are related by the ratios of small integers. The less correlated these ratios become, the more discordant the music sounds. Even cultures that have different musical scales from our own still embrace the overall concepts of harmony, so it's fairly clear that there must be some fundamental preference within the human brain for harmony rather than discord.

This preference in music seems to operate at a level below that of normal conscious thought and is therefore likely to be very ancient indeed. It may therefore be a reasonable indicator that the general preference for order and harmony and a fear of discord and chaos is also ancient.

Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs were founded on the desire to impose order on chaos. Their whole way of life was dependent on the cyclic flooding of the Nile and the desire to ensure that this continued was fundamental to many of their rituals.
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