Guiding Hypotheses and Principles
“Music,” “dance,” “visual art,” “architecture,” “cuisine,” and “literature” are examples of tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony being expressed/perceived through separate senses.
Every tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony can be expressed/perceived through various senses.
Every song can be expressed/perceived through multiple senses.
The combination of tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony provides the benefits associated with “music” regardless of the senses through which tone, rhythm, melody, and harony are perceived. This is especially relevant to autistic individuals who are sensitive to sound, and Deaf people.
A Biological Foundation for Tone, Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony
Every thing in nature (regardless of which sense it is perceived through) is comprised of tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony. In other words, flora, fauna, geology, weather, and water are made of and form tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony. Visual rhythm is produced by everything from honeycombs to layers of sedimentary rock to the patterns on a turtle’s shell. The changing of the seasons creates rhythm of color, visual patterns, movement, temperature, and barometric pressure. Furthermore, the human body is made up of rhythm. There is rhythm to fingerprints, the structure of muscles, and DNA. Rhythm is experienced through breathing, locomotion, and the heartbeat. As a result of absorbing multisensory tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony from nature for millennia, the species of mankind values them highly regardless of the senses through which they are perceived.
The Impact of Culture
Each society takes the tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony that is deeply ingrained in the species of mankind and organizes those concepts according to its worldview and values. This results in the creation of each society’s particular art forms. Non-Western, multi-sensory ways of organizing tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony are the norm. In contrast, the Western practice of expressing and perceiving tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony in one sense at a time is the exception. The Western concept “music” with its emphasis on sound is merely one possible way of organizing tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony.
Cross-Sensory Perception
Cross-sensory perception is the study of how phenomena perceived through separate senses correspond to each other. When comparing phenomena perceived through separate senses, different people tend to report the same phenomena as going together. In other words, the color blue and the number “3” are often associated with each other. Or, salty and b-flat may be thought to correspond to each other. As young children, we all encounter the world through the crossing of senses, and only through neural and social development come to modularize the senses. Consequently, in societies where cross-sensory perception is ingrained in the culture, neural pathways for cross-sensory correspondences remain intact. Cross-sensory perception is often tapped into through the creation of multi-sensory art forms.
