What is the part that makes us human?
Is it IQ, EQ or quotient of beauty and love?
What remains of a person when their narrative is gone?
What remains of a humanity when their beauty is gone?
Were we to turn around, look outside, look inside, recognize the assumptions we hold about the world as purely that, merely assumptions – perhaps then we could step back from those beliefs long enough to begin to change them. We don't have to engage in grand actions to participate in the process of change. Small deeds of creating beauty, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.
EuMuse enterprise aims to initiate the transformative impact of continually changing one’s music horizon towards beauty. Because when we move away from beauty and ethics, both conceptually and linguistically, we end up with ugliness, disorder, and dissonance.
Our world today is flooded with entertainment sound that some mistake for music. Culture of background noise is (without our consent) assimilated in shopping centers, restaurants, airports, and public spaces creating “music” to be heard, rather than listened to.
Making Fugues Together
Living in the world where computers can translate languages without understanding a word, where engineers are perfecting technologies that can take over intellectual processes, humans are less and less aware of their absence (or removal) from the whole process of inquiry.
For thousands of years, indigenous cultures the world over have been using the most intriguing range of memory technologies – including songs, stories, drawings, and dance. Thus, cultures without writing were recording and storing their knowledge of astronomy, navigation, calendars, plants, and animals within their environment with a help of a song and visual imagery. Their vast “portable” encyclopedia was stored in an interwoven memorized web tied to an imagined memory palace or a real landscape. Their memory palaces were spread across the land, structured by sung pathways referred to as songlines. A songline, then provided a table of contents to the entire knowledge system.
How does the “invisibilia” of invisible forces influence human behavior, memories, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and assumptions today?
In the last few centuries engineers have automated physical labor, while in the last few decades we are in the process of automating emotional responses and thoughts.
Equipped with deep learning and other machine-learning technologies, artificial intelligence has proven capable of matching or surpassing some of the most impressive human feats of intelligence. Algorithms are valuable to find patterns and connections that would escape human analysts. They produce, among many things, artwork, and musical compositions. But can algorithms truly replicate the creative process? Can we outsource thinking and our appreciation for art to machines? Can engineering mindset replace our quest for beauty, our complexity of ethical reasoning, and love for the mystique of art?
What is the part that makes us human? Is it IQ, EQ or quotient of beauty and love?
What remains of a person when their narrative is gone?
What remains of a humanity when their beauty is gone?
“Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph.”
Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Marina de Moses