Music and Speech Are Based on Human Biology
Lincoln Cannon
3 December 2009 (updated 27 March 2020)
No surprise to learn that neuroscientists at Duke University have found evidence that popular music can be predicted based on harmonics characteristic of human speech. Of course, the link between anatomy and esthetics goes far deeper than this.
We are our esthetics, radiating from the structures and patterns of our world. In turn, our esthetics informs our ethics and epistemics, our goods and evils, our knowledge and truth. The possibility space for humanity and its post-human future is already embedded in our anatomy and its environment.
Nietzsche might declare this all too human, and that too is an esthetic. The more profound power of a god, perhaps, is the ability to don an esthetic as we now don clothing. After all, God declared it good – not the other way around. Whereas now, our music is based on our biology, the day may come when our biology is based on our music.
