“After I went into the anechoic chamber…in that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward, I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said…”the high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.” –John Cage
“The body is a learning device of the mind.”–William Tiller
Tuning Score for the Nervous System invites artists/musicians to participate in creating new sound to help open pathways to a transformed way of being.
Dancer Lisa Nielsen developed tuning scores as an improvisational practice and collaborative communication that is a performance in itself, where dancers investigate movement through perception of impulses and the corresponding actions in space.
Our nervous system carries an enormous amount of sound information and is an indicator of our inner tuning. Each of us are tuned to our own sound. Different states of awareness and emotions are considered tunings. Re-tuning our nervous system through patterns, sound, rhythm leads to healing of our senses.
Tuning Scores for the Nervous System begin with a vertical band representing the spinal cord dividing the right and left sides of the body. Similar to major and minor key polarity, the human body polarities are described as:
Left/Yin/Feminine/Descending/Front
Right/ Yang/Masculine/Ascending/Back
The ideal nervous system tuning is the Perfect Fifth with a frequency ratio of 3:2, an interval of seven semi-tones between notes. Sympathetic Vibration, the communication of sound from one body to another, as in tuning forks, acts as transmitter and receiver tuning to the same frequency of vibration.
I invite all who are interested in composing sound to contribute to this project through their own interpretation of a Tuning Score for the Nervous System.
Listening to these amazing sculptural sounds…the sonorities move so deeply into the body and resonate within the whole organism…. Not only hearing as such, it’s beautiful and unique, and as usual you are opening the properties of materials to an aesthetic realm that has not previously been explored. –Carolee Schneemann
All music can be heard on Soundcloud.
If interested in contributing to the project, please contact: artkamp@frontiernet.net to receive a copy of a Tuning Score.
Tuning Score for the Nervous System 