« La musique est donc dans notre cerveau dans un certain sens. Cela ne veut pas dire qu’il n’y a pas d’ondes sonores en mouvement. Tout cela est vrai, c’est vrai. Mais ce qu’on appelle la musique, c’est ce qu’on fait avec tout ça dans notre cerveau. »
Our concept of time is false – theoretical physicist — RT SophieCo. Visionaries
▻https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco-visionaries/513288-carlo-rovelli-sophieco-interview
SS: I wanted to also use the example of music if I may. It’s a thing that doesn’t really exist but only does because it is happening in time, right? Like instruments play together in a rhythm or a pulse that brings time alive. And we only feel something when music changes in time. And non-changing note becomes a drone and stops having meaning like, you know, my refrigerator making a noise. So if on an elementary physics level, time doesn’t matter, or it doesn’t exist, why does it matter on a non-elementary level, on a level of music, for instance? Does music essentially create time?
CR: This is a great question. And in fact, you know, in the history of thinking about time, music played a huge role. Suppose, you’re hearing music, a song. And in some moment, right now, you’re hearing one note, not the full song. And then in the next moment, you’re hearing one note. So you’re never hearing the song. You only hear one note at the time, in every moment you hear one note. So why do you react to the song? There’s never a song up there in nature. At every moment, there is only one note at a time. I mean, this was before harmony. Most of music was just melodic. Okay, so what is the answer? The answer, if you think for a moment, is obvious. When you hear a note, your brain still remembers the previous notes. So what you’re hearing, you think of the melody, just think of your preferred melody, in a moment, you hear a sound, but at the same time, you remember the previous one. So if you think at the time, the melody itself is really memory stuff, it’s not out there, it’s in your memory that stays together. Out there, there’s one note at a time. And this shows that a lot of our feeling and perception of temporality, it’s connected to the fact that we remember. And in a sense, if you want, let me put it in some way, a stone cannot hear music. Because it doesn’t have memory. To hear music, you need memory. And memory requires a brain or a computer that has memory, not brain because we’re spiritual things different from the rest of nature. I think that we’re just pieces of nature, like everything else, but we’re very peculiar pieces of nature with a lot of wiring and neurons and stuff, and it’s this peculiarity that allows music to exist. In a very precise sense, music can only exist because we have this brain, which remembers and it’s not only that, because when you hear music (I think everybody knows music) you hear a piece of a melody and your brain anticipates what would come next. And music is all a game, that the music is coming and in part, it comes what you expect. The next note - you know what it is. So you’re happy that you get and in part it surprises you, because there comes something [else]. It’s all this game of surprising and satisfaction, which makes music. So music is in our brain in some sense. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t, you know, sound waves moving around. That’s all true, that’s real. But what we call music, it’s what we make with all that in our brain.