9.1. Music is silent (ancient China tells us)

“Music is a succession of sounds and combinations of sounds organized in such a way as to produce an impression that is pleasant to the ears, and this impression on intelligence is understandable [...]. These impressions have the power to influence secret parts of our mind and sentimental spheres, and this influence makes us live in a dreamland where desires are fulfilled, or in a dream hell” Arnold Schönberg [GAR 97, p. 112].

“The wind blows and all the cavities of the earth let us hear an infinite multitude of sounds. It is up to the wind to animate softly, but in depth, the infinite diversity of realities of the natural world and confer the essential beauty of a living harmony to it”. François Jullien [JUL 03, p. 91].

It is fitting to cautiously think of the musical MO.O.N., because like the concept of intelligence and talent, we could be inclined to think of music from the point of view (idein) of art (composition, creation, interpretation) and of the emotion obtained. To work on this issue of operation, and consequently of assessment and observation, we will have to remember that in China, historically, music is quiet...

Laozi [HE 99, p. 76] tells us that “Great music is quiet”, and in doing so reminds us that we must not get lost in the image we may have of “music”. We must avoid believing – theoretically – that the musical MO.O.N. – forcibly – implies an artistic or emotional field in the background, under the pretext that a melody seems to generate an emotional state, itself emerging from a context that the listener is going through it: the person who has lost a loved one can cry when listening to Albinoni’s Adagio, Tornerò’s I Santo California or the track, Journey to the line by Hans Zimmer, from the film The Thin Red Line. For the latter, played in a minor third, as soon as we let ourselves “go”, our minds are invaded with images; these can inspire a feeling of calm, love or melancholy. If the artistic field refers to a social body that thinks, legitimizes and applauds it, emotion, as an “affected” state, overwhelms us (already) without us being able to apprehend it.

Since its origins, Chinese thought, has woven music and poetry. The sound texture of poetry allows music to develop: “Music is born of poetry [...]. Subsequently, although poetry and music separated, the fact remains that, as far as poetry is concerned, it is by leaning on its aspect of sound that we can begin to penetrate it” [JUL 03, p. 154]. For the Chinese musician, silence is a state to be adopted, mastered, and guided, because the purpose of music is to bring (t’ong) humans closer together. For classical Chinese thought, social relationships are deployed and tuned with music: “eyes and ears see and hear well; between blood and breath, a harmonious balance is established; morals become civilized; the Land of Men [GRA 34, p. 411] is peaceful [...] when music is perfect, there is no more rebellion”.

The traditional guitar, which is 81 inches long, has the longest string in its center; it represents the Prince. The sound produced by it is called kong, to its right is the note chang, then the others, which, according to their dimension, shows a precise organization. The prince, the clefts, the affairs of state and the people are “in their place”:

Kong (81, Center) is the Prince; chang (72, West, right), the cleft; kio (64, East,) the people; che (54, South), the affairs of state; yu (48, North), the resources (of the people, referred to here as wou: the ten thousand beings). When in the 5 Notes, there is no trouble, everything is harmoniously modulated. If (it is a note) kong (that comes trouble), (the modulations are) rough: (it is that) the prince is arrogant. If (it is a note) chang (that comes the) troubles, (the modulations give the image of) leaning: (it is that) the offices are badly filled. If (it is a note) kio (that comes) trouble, (the modulations are) sorrows: it is that the people become rebellious [...]. Music allows the wise (kiun tzu) to grow (among men, the feeling of) fair distributions (yi).¹

Whether it is poetry or music, both involve mastering breath, inflections and sounds. The mastery of the sounds is necessary because the rhythm gives the poem a lyricism in the image of the wind: harmonious, continuous and fluid. Silent music (wu sheng zhi yue), according to Confucius, responds to Heaven’s mandate, the wind is not the messenger, but the effective support, the one to “imitate” (fa, 法 “to comply with the principle of, not opposing”), in other words, the capacity of a favorable influence (clear and soft, qing feng) must be reproduced by conforming to it. In his Treatise of the zither (Xishan Quinkuang), the musician Xu Shangying (late Ming and early Qing period) defined the qualities of the music offered by the zither (qin). Among these is silence, not as a drowned quality “with others”, but as one of the fundamental qualities:

“It is not difficult to find a quiet place to play qin. The only difficulty lies in the silence of finger handling. When fingers move, pulling sounds, how do you get silence? I say: it is precisely in the sound that we seek silence. A strident sound suggests restless fingers; a coarse sound suggests troubled fingers; a faint sound (xi sheng) suggests silent fingers. It’s the method of judging sounds. For silence emanates from the mind, and sound from the heart. If we play qin with our hearts disturbed by disorderly ideas and our hands disturbed by (secular) things, how can we obtain silence? By the regulation of the breath, the mind becomes silent; by the exercise of the fingers, the sound becomes silent” [HE 99, pp. 81–82].

This, as it seems to us, is the cornerstone between Western and Chinese thought, “imitate” in order to reproduce (compose), without opposing (rhythm), and without exceeding.

9.2. Perceiving the sound of rain, reproducing (it) using the tip of the nail

It was raining on this day. We were training “profilers”, and the rain quietly started in the middle of the afternoon and then became more present over the next few minutes. Stéphane was located at the end of the table, and to his right, the large window door was open. At the outside base of the window, a zinc coating on which the rain was bouncing off was emitting a specific sound. As we worked with the group, we watched him turn his heads towards the window, keeping focused on it for several seconds and asked him what was happening. The latter said, “I’m listening to the rain falling on the zinc between the window and the ground. The sound of the rain is fascinating”. The way Stéphane looked at sound (by concentration) led us to hypothesize a specific skill of the musical MO.O.N., as well as to appreciate and perceive the quality and nature of a sound. Hence, we asked: “Can you reproduce the noise you hear?” Therefore not only assessing his ability to reproduce the rhythm of rain over time, but also its tone. Stéphane (he explained later) looked around and saw the metal support on which a mineral bottle was placed. He picked it up and reproduced the rhythm and sound of rain with his nails; the reproduction was accurate-confusing.

We asked him why he used nails. “Nails are what I think are closest to the sound of rain because the sound has to be drier, whereas if I use the soft part of my skin, the sound will be duller and therefore less metallic”. Stéphane mastered the sound in time and, while his gaze remained fixed towards the outside, his fingers struck the metallic surface, combining the natural sound and the reproduced sound into one.

Later, Stéphane explained that to learn to read and write, musicality was omnipresent “it was by singing that I memorized them best”. It was the same for mathematics: “learning multiplication tables was indistinguishable from a ritornelle (it was less evident with my son, who didn’t need to go through music to memorize it)”, which allowed him to memorize simple or complex sequences of signs (whether notes, numbers or words changed nothing) – another characteristic of the musical MO.O.N.

Music and its rhythm, allowed Stéphane to concentrate for long periods: “music allows me to concentrate, it helps shut me out (rather strongly); the rhythm seems so natural to me that I don’t need to concentrate in order to internalize it. This frees my concentration, since I have integrated the musical deflections that the irregularity of other ambient noises do not bring me. I stay sitting, it allows me to steady myself physically and intellectually. Some need a bubble to isolate themselves, I need a musical and regular bubble. Any other irregular noise attracts my ear right away. The TV noises are so irregular that they keep me from concentrating. The regularity is almost hypnotic and it lulls me”. Stéphane, who works as a trainer in the commercial field, explains that when he was 14–15 years old (when his parents went shopping), he turned on the TV (very loudly) on one side and the radio on the other. He would then have fun correlating images and music so that a coherent story would emerge: “I could find a rhythm between the image and the music. I was able to interpret stories by coupling the music I was listening to and the image I was looking at. If the rhythm didn’t work, I would change the channel, but it was rare”. When he runs, Stéphane doesn’t listen to music, it disturbs his running rhythm “it messes up my running rhythm, that is to say, it’s too fast or not fast enough [...] and I need to hear the surrounding sounds. I like to think that there might be an animal in the bushes if I hear a sound there. I never look across a road because I trust my ear, even if I hear a bike coming from behind. I trust sounds. In his professional world, this MO.O.N. seems to be just as useful to him; for example, he plays musical interactions with the trainees, if he hears someone say something which is the same as the first line to a song, he ends up saying and singing the rest of the line. He elaborates the titles of his training sessions so that there is musicality in them (tonality and rhythm): “When I have a memory gap, I get help from others by uttering rhythmic sounds to them”. He specifies that they are rhythmic syllables and not phonetic “the way I hear and pronounce a sentence are very related”. We ask Stéphane if he plays a musical instrument “Since my kinesthetic MO.O.N. is weak, my dexterity very quickly reaches its limits when trying to play a musical instrument. Playing drums is difficult for me because I find it impossible to synchronize my limbs. For piano, yes, but only with two fingers away. What would be easiest for me is to compose from music software, without having to go through an instrument”. He laughs and then says: “I aggravated my dad when I hit the table with the cutlery”. Stéphane’s case is interesting, because he can show that a MO.O.N. can be deployed apart from one another. We think and “too often” associate the musical MO.O.N. with the kinesthetic MO.O.N.; this “evidence” of a link cannot be generalized because rhythmic and tonal principles are not (necessarily) inherent to gestural movements, but to a skill to appreciate (ji) a more or less long sequence of tonalities and rhythms. This is one of the musical MO.O.N.’s capabilities in terms of representation, in other words, the ability to sensitize audio images without using an instrument. Perhaps this is what composers like Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams can teach us: to compose from indications of reality.

9.3. Touching the earth and taking it in your hand, composing Gladiator

The composer Hans Zimmer evokes the importance of perceiving a reality before being able to compose. He explains that for Gladiator, he went to England where he met Ridley Scott on the set, which was located “deep in the farmland. It was cold, it was snowing and it was really muddy, as you’d never seen before”. He then goes to where one of the first battles of the film is going to take place, and the very moment when the hero of the film, Maximus, gives his speech to the men who are going to go into battle: “What we do in this life will resonate for eternity”. Hans Zimmer evokes a recurring image of the film, where Maximus takes earth in his hand before each fight: “He reaches to the heart of the earth, reminding us that he is a farmer and that he needs to touch the earth. I was sitting in this muddy place, with Ridley, and I had suddenly changed era by passing from the 20th century into a different place. I remember leaning to the ground to pick up a handful of earth; and suddenly I was in the movie”. It is here that the principle of capturing a musical idea begins, in other words, drawing from a situation that may initially start as a trend, because “capturing” implies perceiving and grasping what becomes available. This sequence by Hans Zimmer illustrates another aspect of the characteristics of the musical MO.O.N.: to interpret and symbolically encode an aspect of reality in tone and rhythm. By taking this muddy and cold earth in hand, while having the images of this Roman officer fighting for values in mind, Hans Zimmer composes a rolling, rising, unfolding and pouring music for this first battle, in the image of a wave which unfolds until it forms a surge of sound that roars as it unfolds and collides.

In Gladiator, the first image is that of a hand on wheat “it’s so poetic... And it’s in this way that it sets the trend of the film [...]”.Opening with a wide shot of a hand grazing the wheat, the rhythm of the music gives the feeling of slow motion, a feeling evoked by Lisa Gerrard’s voice which envelops the stage in the background. Writing and organizing, as well as capturing the musical idea, are procedural; there is nothing “sudden”, but development from numerous discussions and a direct interaction with the “reality” of the film. On this subject, Zimmer says that there was never any discussion on the music wanting to be a certain way, but rather they discussed scenes, characters and lights, in addition to what they wanted to accomplish or what they wanted in terms of aesthetics. The composer says that in the end, he was talking about everything but music, because (subsequently) there was nothing to say about it. Indeed, there is no need to produce the intelligible, nor to formalize reasoning, there is only the need to perceive, that is, to let oneself be “affected”, not in the sense of being overwhelmed (already overrun), but by being upstream of the subject, that is, upstream of the part of the “self” that names its emotions by translating them into a “perceived” and “felt” state. To let oneself be affected by sound is to (therefore) understand it in a global and categorical, and not psychological way (including ontological), by reducing it to an isolated state that one then seeks to explain and thus dissolving the resource. To let oneself be affected, for the “composer”, is to let oneself be touched by the vibrations emitted by tone and rhythm. This, as it seems to us, is what Hans Zimmer achieves when he feels the pressure submerging him before any work. Indeed, the man with multiple Oscars, Golden Globes and Grammy Awards for the best music, evokes the major doubt he feels, even which consumes him before beginning each new project. He says, half laughing and half serious, talking about the producers to whom he would sometimes like to express the following comment: “finding a real composer, I can’t do it. I can’t do it” ² and then he says “something happens. I don’t know how it happens..., but something appropriate is suddenly there for the film. It’s happened for every film”. What can be hypothesized from this “innocuous” and apparently “magical” phrase? Hans Zimmer, with regard to the indications he offers in his interviews, in his music (correlated with images), his way of working in a team, is able, in terms of the discriminatory point of view, to discover the implicit content of a musical impulse and to give form to sounds: “something appropriate is suddenly there”. This something – the musical idea – is perceived, in Gladiator’s case, from the physical indications (the mud), the sounds (the battle), the smells (the wheat), but also from his intimate knowledge of the rhythms and tonalities that capture the musical idea, from which the composition begins, corrects, adjusts and actualizes itself: “There is a lesson to learn from animation, you look for a long time before you really start, with animation, the film is made last. You do the storyboard, you film it so you can preview a video without having to read it like a comic book; you can then constantly change things until you get the best possible result before moving on to animation. That’s why I write my music before they finish shooting a movie. I want the luxury of being able to experiment and make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes in order to learn from them”.

For the film The Lion King, for example, Hans Zimmer created 48 main themes, and although they were not “bad”, he said that they were not right. “I have more than an hour of material that no one has ever heard; it’s a bit like a garment you buy in a store, it may seem fine, but it’s actually not the right fit”.

When Hans Zimmer talks about his collaboration with the director Terence Malick for the film Thin Red Line,³ he says that he was given a (very long) script which he started to read, but in which he got lost very quickly. They then agreed to talk about what the film expresses. Among other things, they spent hours discussing the colors of the film. For one of the key sequences of the film (of high tension), Zimmer evoked the idea of basing the music on a minor third, a certain musical interval on which he could work in a “very intellectual” manner, whereas at other times, he was emotionally oriented. While he was working on the “idea”, Térence Malick asked him to orient himself towards another form of interval, a pure fifth, “but one that doesn’t mean much”, he said, in other words, one whose phonic signifier didn’t correspond to the sequence of the film. After a heated discussion, Hans Zimmer returned to his studio and maintained his choice of “his” minor third. He created (actualized) a piece and explained it as a metaphor for religious paintings of the Renaissance⁴. The composer evokes having wanted to represent a moment of faith, “a light effect⁵ in a moment of darkness (war)”: “Everything we were trying to obtain with this effect of light was finally there. It was incredible, a new lighting dominated the stage and if you removed the music, it would immediately disappear [...]. Remove the music, no more light!” We found the same process with composer Harry Gregson-Williams on the film project The World of Narnia. He says that the precision of a configurational type of information (moment-position) associated with a gesture expressing “a feeling of emptiness” given by the director Andrew Adamson was “a formidable indication for me musically”⁶.

NOTE.– Music – a concept expressing the ability to translate sequences of sounds and silences into a combination of sound that can be reproduced – translates into sounds, alternating silences, rhythms (acceleration-deceleration) that the “musician” captures and commands. Capturing a musical idea – as one of the assessment criteria of the musical MO.O.N. – promotes the translation of the beginning of a story from a situation where sound, through its texture, tone and configuration, is associated with the person with an “image”. The image makes its “way”, that is, it unfolds, matures and emerges until a composition is actualized.

The question of imagination (concrete mental object) within Mozart’s “creative” skills is (thus) omnipresent:

“How can we talk about Mozart’s music without talking about the power of his imagination? Imagination is, stricto sensu, the ability to create and combine images, in other words, sensory representations different from what our perceptions show us, marked by objectivity [...]. Music is a privileged field of application of the imagination, as well in hearing and interpretation, as in the composition. Melodies, tones, rhythms are represented mentally by the composer in the form of auditory images, which are more created images than reproductions of previous perceptions received” [LEC 03, pp. 252–253].

This example allows us to recall how Walt Disney paid particular attention to the role of music in the narration of animated stories. Let us remember that he was the first to “imagine” synchronizing music to animation in 1928, thus generating a narrative combining images and music, which remains “coherent” when we know the close proximity between the brain’s ability to create images and sound structures.

Music, as a concept, is the consequence of a process, a sum of activities aimed at making what has silently taken shape “audible”. Thus, inspiration and music are born from external encouragement; this silence, punctuated with sounds, (then) takes form and coherence in the ears and/or perceptions of those who listen to and perceive it.

9.4. An object of rhythmic and tonal sound

The musical MO.O.N. favors the “creation” of works through its ability to perceive the nature of sounds, the intervals of successive sounds of different pitches, as well as the succession of sounds forming, what is called in the West, a melody.

The musical MO.O.N. makes it possible to perceive, interpret and produce sound structures, which leads to the ability to qualify and appreciate (ji) the nature of a sound. When we say appreciate, we mean assess the nuances of sounds in order to combine them so that we perceive them as “harmonious”. Music is often amalgamated with mathematics, because of its “sequential” and “structural” aspect, which is wrong for at least three reasons. Mathematics is an abstract symbolic system for encoding thought into an object of thought, and the use of long chains of complex reasoning plays a decisive role. “Mathematics” is “silent”. Although it is “true” that writing a score by writing abstract symbols (musical notes) may seem “identical” to mathematical logic, because of the apparent proximity of the encoding (score), playing as much as composing so that it is possible to make sound audible is not “identical” to a thought of producing intelligibility. Although it is still “true” that one can “measure” rhythm, it is in reality an issue of understanding a distance of sound, such as Galileo did, who in 1583, from his pulse, defined what would become the second by looking at and assessing the oscillation produced by the swinging of the lamp located above the altar of the Pisa cathedral. To obtain an octave (the interval between two sounds), it is necessary to press on one string at its half point (in other words, a ratio of two to one of the original frequency), while for a fifth, all you have to do is make two thirds of the same string vibrate (in other words, a ratio of three to two of the length of the string). The mathematical fraction is not the same as the rhythmic fraction. The signifier, the signified and the usage are distinct. If we use a few words from mathematics such as “half”, “two thirds” and “ratio of three to two”, it is a semantic use for visual orientation, not pure mathematical processing. Mathematics, as a tool of thought (“convenient” abstract mental object), may be useful for understanding how a harmonic breaks up, for example, an octave or a fifth, but the actual processing and application is not mathematics. These reverberations are part of our everyday Western culture.

Over the centuries, our brain has been “shaped” so that it has the (natural) ability to perceive and understand a principle of sound regularity. Rhythm, says Lechevalier, “rhythm is not the regular succession of notes [...], it is, on the contrary, the perception of the irregularity of tempo” [LEC 03, p. 58]. Music as a process of sound, organized in rhythm, tempo, tone – in memory and time – can be understood and recognized through four types of musical sounds: pitch (melody), tone (characteristic qualities of tonality), duration and intensity (inherent to rhythm). Neurologists specify that the last two do not belong to the same sensory category, because they imply a duration principle that the first two do not integrate at first sight. According to Lechevalier, it is possible to organize its four aspects into three simplified levels:

• – the acoustic level, which engages what is called the “pleasure” of listening to musical sounds;
• – the structural level, which deciphers the musical discourse by apprehending the entries of the themes, their covers, variations, modulations, developments, nuances and recognition relating to the quality of tones and voices;
• – the signifier level, in other words, the ability to identify a work and its author in a similar way as a person deploying a spatial MO.O.N. could identify work and its author by observation of forms and colors.

The correlation of the musical MO.O.N. with the spatial MO.O.N. (see the MO.O.N. wheel) can promote musical creation through the ability to involve “sound spaces” (Lechevalier) that mobilize visual and auditory areas (temporal lobe). The temporal lobe, besides being used in sound recognition (pitch and rhythm), is also used in the balance of the body in space and the perception of gravity, which explains why it is better to be “balanced” in space when playing an instrument. In case of a proximity with the kinesthetic MO.O.N., although for a long time, we shared Gardner’s idea that kinesthetic intelligence was in the continuity of music “it is itself a kind of extended gesture [...]” [GAR 97, p. 131], today, we would “reserve” ourselves a little more on this “evidence”; indeed, a MO.O.N. responds to a utility, and the kinesthetic MO.O.N. (always) responds to a directional and spatial principle, both through the body itself and through an object whose intention is to produce “something”. When the dancer deploys themself by embracing the tone, vibration and rhythm of the music, they serve, above all else, as a support for the body that “embraces” them. Let’s take a look at the martial artist: he or she can deploy a long sequence of body sequences according to variations in speed, precision, air movements, wrist and pelvis rotations in order to hit, dodge, absorb, unbalance, break or circumvent an object, a body or an obstacle by responding, for example, to a “mental narration” (e.g. the sequence of images describing a fictional battle). We are not saying that one does not influence the other, but one cannot necessarily be correlated with the other. Besides the fact that the computational mode of one remains distinct from the other, their respective operating autonomy allows them to “live” apart from one another. Indeed, using a guitar or a piano does not produce “anything” physical (in the sense of rasping and chiseling wood to give rise to an object), but produces a sound, a vibration, a composition and a tone that the body embraces. Thus, when the body moves in space when a piano or drums are played, it seems to be related to a rhythmic adjustment or a vibration (in the hard of hearing), but if the hand sews, the arm swings a 7 iron in golf, handles a table tennis racket, or if the body performs a rotation in the air with a bicycle, then the intention is to operate a movement – embracing a line of tension – in order to lead an object-body into space (implying an observable temporality and result). There is (therefore) no “repetition”, in the rhythmic sense, in a kinesthetic MO.O.N. A gesture or a sequence of gestures will rarely be “identical” to another, whereas a rhythm and/or a tempo belong to the same field of “identity” (equality). And if the body uses music to give “rhythm” to a movement, it is, above all else, to fluidify it when it is used in a concrete situation in order to “feel” the movement in its process.

The work of the neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel shows that rhythmic and tonal skills can be observed and assessed in the animal world. He went to Thailand to study a 31-year-old female elephant named Pratidah. This large mammal is the drummer in the band Thaïland’s Elephant Orchestra. The researcher observed that the elephant is able to support a “remarkable stability” [LEM 12, p. 74] when she plays the drum. He evokes how her ability to adopt a “swing” rhythm and adapt the long-brief rhythms or vice versa according to the day is just as “intriguing”. He says:

“I have seen concrete evidence that each individual elephant can play rhythmically. They can play the drum or cymbal with a very steady rhythm, without anyone giving them indications or “tapping” them on the shoulder. It was clear that they were not doing it just because they were invited to do so” [MAN 13, p. 114].

In its rhythmic and tonal aspect, there seems to be many coherences with the linguistic MO.O.N., referring to “perfect pitch” – the ability to identify any musical note without having to compare it to a reference note [ROS 98, pp. 300–301]. Indeed, perfect pitch implies both a verbal ability to name the pitch of the note and musical abilities to distinguish the pitch and tone. Hence, like the linguistic MO.O.N., the manifestation of so-called musical skills is understandable in terms of the temporal lobe. This is what Mozart (at 14 years old) succeeded in achieving in 1770, by going with his father to the Sistine Chapel. He would mentally listen-record to the highly protected piece Misere d’Allegri (no score could leave the chapel, and anyone who stole it was condemned to death). A few days later, he rewrote the entire composition from memory and was honored for it by Cardinal Pallavicini, by being named “Knight of the Golden Spur” [LEC 99, p. 18].

9.5. Feeling sounds, making them visible (audible)

Sounds are created by pressure waves [MON 09, 5:33], vibrations that travel through the air. For physicist Brian Greene, sound is a wave, that is, a movement of air in vibrations. The difference between two sounds, such as a clap of hands and a note, depends on the nature of the vibration and the details relating to its particularities. A note is a regular vibration that repeats itself according to a defined principle. If we could “see” the path a sound follows between two people, we could observe how air molecules follow a cyclic progression in the form of a compression, a depletion of compression. But if you clap your hands, the vibration will be irregular and without a coherent path. This is what we would call a “noise”. We find this principle written by the Chinese writer of the Mings, Yuan Zhongdao, who evokes the experience of inner silence in “the great noise of a source” [HE 99]. He describes his regular visit to a source to listen to it. The unfolded experience is the path of sound between the source and the Chinese poet. The latter settles on a rock at the water’s edge, sitting on a cushion in order to remain there a whole day with his legs crossed. He says that at the beginning, his breath was superficial and his thoughts tumultuous, but that gradually, while his glance and his hearing withdrew, he ended up forgetting himself; then, he said:

“The source lets us hear all its varied accents. Sometimes it sounds like a pine tree that sighs or like a jade that breaks; sometimes it sounds like vibrating strings and cymbals; or it sounds like thunder shaking rivers and mountains. Thus, the quieter my mind, the louder the source [...]” [HE 99, p. 81].

The regularity of the sound produced by the source favors a specific tone and rhythm between the source and the writer. This rhythmic and tonal regularity creates a feeling of calm, independent of the “strength” of the sound. We find a similarity with the experience shared by Stéphane for whom rhythmic “coherence” is fundamental in his learning or concentration, even though the music is “loud”. Percussionist Evelyn Gleeny‘s job is that of a “sound creator”, she says. She has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12 and “hears” sounds from both the lower part (she plays barefoot) and the upper part of her body:

“The low tones go through the lower part of the body; there is great amplitude, the vibration is much more open. On the other hand, higher percussions like bells or roto toms don’t have the same amplitude as the bass drum, that’s why you feel them in the upper part of the body” [MAN 09, 8:25.].

Evelyn Gleeny’s example offers us an indication to understand another character, Milton Garces, director of the Infrasons laboratory in Hawaii and specialist in volcano-logical acoustics. We contacted him following a documentary about the Hawaiian volcano Kilauea, Kilauea: Mountain of fire. We were challenged by a “detail”, the one by which Milton recreated the sound of volcanoes using infrasonic technology. In the documentary, Milton says “this volcano produces sound continuously”, he explains the many processes by which the volcano “creates” sound. The commentator lets “slip” a sentence that leads us to be attentive to Milton’s words, “Milton loves Kilauea music, but his listening is in the service of science [...] What does sound mean?”.⁷ In his laboratory, Milton gives a new meaning to the “music” that comes from volcanic rock. When he speaks of the sound of the volcano, he uses the term “beautiful” in terms of tonal structure and harmonics, there is, he says, “a proximity to a musical instrument [...]”.⁸ He compares the volcano to a “natural singer” and evokes music in constant transformation. On November 12, 2013, we sent him an e-mail with 11 questions. These were specific to the so-called musical skills and would allow us to validate or invalidate the hypothesis that Milton mobilizes a musical MO.O.N. in his activity as a volcanologist specialized in infrasound. Indeed, we hypothesized that to make infrasound “audible”, scientific skills alone were not sufficient. The few sentences heard during the documentary gave us indications (music, harmonic, tonal, musical instrument). We now had to get evidence (and accept that our assumption was valid or wrong). Milton answered the same day.

In the introduction of his message, he specified that he is specialized in “infrasound” (inaudible sounds). He writes: “My attempts to make them audible are only subjective representations of reality”.

The answers exceeded our expectations because they gave many indications as to how Milton mobilized rhythm and tone so-called musical skills, in other words, to support his scientific research. This supported another hypothesis put forward several years ago that a person could deploy-impregnate several MO.O.N.s according to a specific utility, the one taking leadership being the one whose utility is the closest to the activity and the intention. These observations led us to distance ourselves from the concept of being “gifted”, because we were convinced that those who were called “gifted” (and the whole semantic family involved) were “in fact” just MO.O.N.s whose correlations, combinations and coherences allowed us to “see” singular results related to the said combinations in specific C.U.P.s.

Like previous MO.O.N.s, we propose a summary table (not exhaustive), allowing for the apprehension of some skills to enable the assessment of a natural musical operating mode.