Robert Fludd: Of Music and Mind

In a recent post about Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music engraving, illustrator John Coulthart made the following observation:

It’s only very recently I’ve paid much attention to the writings of people such as Fludd and Kircher, in the past I’ve been more interested in the illustrations from their books, inevitably when they’ve been used so often for completely frivolous reasons. Looking through the Utriusque Cosmi it’s immediately evident what an astonishing work it is; anyone with that breadth of knowledge is going to make some interesting connections.

Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music.

It’s a shame that Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, his encyclopaedic masterwork, has not yet been fully translated into English – for while the engravings are beautiful, they belong to a textually dense work of more than 1,000 pages in length, providing an overview of subjects as diverse as the creation of the universe, music, optics, chemistry, ars memoria, geometry, warfare, geomancy, surveying, drawing and cabala, all unified by an overarching Hermetic worldview that bridges the heritage of Renaissance neoplatonism with 17th century natural philosophy. 

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Imaginal Acoustics: On Subtle Listening, Sound-Shapes and Time

Poster for the 2013 Dark Stations concert.

Last year I invited Kim Cascone to the university for one of his Dark Stations concerts. Dark Stations is a 42-minute piece for a meditating audience based on a 3.1 diffusion system: the listeners sit in darkness within a triangular speaker array, a sub-bass speaker in the centre. The performance last year was one of the most interesting audio experiences I’d had for some time, culminating in a profound experience of auditory pareidolia: frequencies and room acoustics meshed to form phantom speech that I found it impossible to disassociate from the voice of my (then unborn) son, Lovernios.

I was pleased to be able to invite Kim back this year for a reprise of Dark Stations, preceded by a two-day Subtle Listening workshop. The workshop, subtitled “Inner Ear Training for Sound Artists” takes a highly reflective approach to sound, sound design and composition, designed to take participants beyond the technical ‘how to’s that education in music technology and production often dwells on, and toward a more creative, intuitive relationship with sound and what might be called ‘imaginal acoustics’.