The enormous space we call the universe would disappear once you start to sense that your position isn’t a coordinate in three dimensional space but is a point at infinity. You will start to feel that your existence is only in between “myself = the observer” and “the observed” which is “my” reflected image.
Since I started to view the world like this, I began to feel many brand newsenses that I’d never felt before. The first thing I experienced was aloss of sense of motion and movement. Because I view the world only as a sandwich between “me” and a figure, I started to feel that my true character exists here, there, over there, and everywhere in the space, and “I” look at every agenda from every corner. Now I feel that my sense of motion when “I move” is like an illusion, as if my consciousness became just a skewer pierced through this so-called “reality sandwich.” _ 2013: The Day God Sees God by Kosen Handa
For musical culture, piece of music, and musical perception read camera, mountain and picture, and Ian Cross’s argument in ‘The mystery of the musical box’ (Forum, 29 June) looks roughly like this: different cameras take different pictures of the same mountain, and some cameras (such as those not positioned in a place from which the mountain can be seen or those out of focus) do not show anything recognisable as a mountain when pointed in the direction of a mountain at all. Therefore mountains do not really exist ‘out there’.
However, mountains do exist. Similarly, it could be that in some abstract sense individual pieces of music really do exist (as presumably do mathematical theorems) and merely await a composer’s realisation of their existence in acoustic form in some particular culture.
Good theories of vision were not produced (and neither can linguistic phenomena be fully understood) without detailed attention to the nature of the final product of the perceptual process. In the same way, one cannot expect to derive adequate theories of musical perception without attention to the nature and significance of the final product.
For a long time, psychologists resisted putting into their models mental mechanisms of any kind. It seems that musical psychologists are now busily repeating that form of error by regarding perception of music as simply an exercise in pattern recognition. _ “Musical mountains” Published 3 August 1991 From Brian Josephson, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge and Tethys Carpenter, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Reality Sandwich is an artist-duo consisting of Masashi Kitazato and Hata Kenichi.
