What do casinos, Kesha, African drumming, and Tuvan throat singers have in common?

“Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.  For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.”  -Clive Bell

Have you ever had the sensation of being hypnotized?  I’m not talking in the literal sense where you get a magician or a voodoo doctor to perform a trick on you.  Maybe the word I’m looking for is transfixed.  You become so absorbed in a task that the external world seems to disappear.

One way to label this is “flow”.  Flow is a psychological state where your skill set is evenly matched with the task at hand.  It’s kind of like a goldilocks scenario: you are given a challenge that is not too hard, not too easy, but just right.

Once you are in a state of flow, you become locked in a groove.  You are being challenged at the same rate you are accomplishing your goal.  A positive feedback loop is created.  Your body and mind seem to move fluidly and automatically.  Time flies as the world around you melts away.  We have all felt something like this before, haven’t we?

Another way to describe this hypnotic feeling is “trance”.  Although it is similar to flow, I think the intended outcome is different.  Here is a great definition from Dennis Wier: “trance [is] caused by cognitive loops where a cognitive object (thoughts, images, sounds, intentional actions) repeats long enough to result in various sets of disabled cognitive functions.”  The point of flow is the self-growth of challenging yourself physically or mentally.  The point of trance is to screw up your senses (“disabled cognitive functions”) to create a state of meditation or hallucination.  This is very real and very documented by the way.  A dude named Ganzfeld tested this by covering a test patient’s eyes with ping pong balls and flooding their ears with white noise.  Within 30 minutes they were hallucinating.  Anytime your senses are assaulted by a homogenous blur of information, this trance effect can occur. 

Other cultures have been attune to this phenomenon for centuries.  There is a tiny country named Tuva that is located between Russia and Mongolia.  They are famous for their unbelievable throat singing techniques, where they can essentially sing two notes at the same time (they sing the fundamental while altering the overtones).  Their music has melody, harmony, and rhythm, but it is less emphasized than it is in our culture.  It is more about slow changes in timbre or sound color.  Here is a great quote about it:

“In European music, sound is packed compactly into discrete pitches, with the fundamental frequency and overtones all perceived as one.  But Tuvan music is like loose snow, and overtones are like the snow spray”.

Tuvan music often begins with a single drone and eventually schisms into a myriad of overtones.  The slowly changing sound is perceived as one uniform mass, initiating a mild trance effect.  Listen to a sample of Tuvan throat singing and you will hear how “cosmic” it sounds.  

Another thing about Tuva.  The Tuvan’s religious beliefs center around shamanism.  I don’t necessarily subscribe to it, but learning about it has dramatically shifted my thinking.  In shamanism, you believe that everything contains a spirit.  You can communicate to that spirit in a number of ways.  You might sing to the spirit of a river and then listen to it sing back to you (in the form of babbling and gurgling sounds every river makes).  Another way is through direct meditation, which opens up the channel between the human and spirit world. 

In the book I read about Tuva (“Where Rivers and Mountains Sing”), the author describes an experience meditating with a shaman.  The first part of the ritual consisted of the shaman draping white cloth around them, lighting incense, and ringing bells.  At first, the author was really off put by the showmanship of this ritual.  A few more moments in, however, and the author reported slipping into a trance state.  The draped cloth served as white visual noise to his eyes.  The incense blocked out his sense of smell (ever wonder why Madame Trelawney in Harry Potter always used incense in her classroom?).  The bells disoriented his sense of sound (have you ever heard the cacophonous ringing bells inside a casino before?).  Combining these three things results in the shutting down of your senses.  Without your senses, you cannot perceive your external world.  With this path blocked there is only one place left to go: retreat into your internal consciousness.  And that’s what meditation is all about.

The Tuvans aren’t the only ones.  Gregorian chant is homogenous in many ways.  It moves at a steady tempo, has relatively few instances of polyphony, and has no shocking changes in harmony.  African drumming uses dense polyrhythms that layer and layer on top of one another.  Before long, the structure becomes repetitive to the ear and the listener loses themselves in the sound (no wonder why they use drumming in religious rituals and ceremonies).  Indian classical music often features three different instruments: the sitar, the tabla, and the tambura.  The sitar and the tabla use very repetitious motivic cells to provide the melodic and harmonic features of the music, respectively.  The tambura is an accompanimental instrument that constantly sustains a long drone that seems to last into infinity.

Now I’m going to trace a line of influence here.  Minimalism was a branch of American classical music that came about in the 1960s.  It took influence from Gregorian chant, African drumming, and Indian classical music.  It shares many characteristics with these styles of music: static motion, repetitive structures, and long drones on only a few notes.  Now fast forward to the 1980s.  There is a new movement of people gathering in warehouses in the Chicago area.  At these gatherings, DJ’s are mashing up Disco, Funk, and R&B music with the latest music technology to make a new experimental form of music with an insistent beat.  They call it “house” music, referring to the warehouses where the music originates from.  Around the same time, a similar style of music known as “techno” begins emerging in the Detroit area.  These styles of music migrate to the UK in the 1990s and explode in popularity.  The UK scene prompts the volatile mixture of clubs, yet another form of music called “trance” music, and ecstasy.  The Americans fire back again in the 2000s with Lady Gaga, Kesha, and Katy Perry.  Their music is all just a streamlined version of club/dance music. 

See the lineage?  All of the club/dance music of today is Minimalist music with a heavier beat and more electronic timbres…and Minimalism itself can be traced back to even older forms of music.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to the song “Little Fluffy Clouds” by the UK group The Orb.  It directly samples Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint”.  Not all groups will show this direct of an influence, but it doesn’t mean it’s still there.

In this context, it might be easier to understand dance/club music.  I often feel people (especially of the older generation) don’t understand what the throbbing, insistent beat is all about.  It all goes back to creating a trance state.  I’m going to argue that a DJ in a club is creating the same sort of effect as an African drummer during a ritual.  People are looking for an escape.  People want the external world to melt away so they can be lifted about the stream of life for just one moment.  So what does this mean for our modern culture?  There are heavy implications here, and I will talk about it in my next post.