"Being always means condensed totality." (Cusanus)
Human beings are able to think of simultaneous things successively. This is thinking. Thinking is making a successive order out of the surrounding whole, out of totality. Thinking therefore might be considered of as negation of simultaneity. Thinking then is the negation of an actually accessible experience. Linear thinking in time finds its opposition in hearing. Hearing is simultaneous perception. Hearing is spherical. It transforms time into illusion.
Most composed music seems to contradict this conception. The reason is that most composed occidental music of the last centuries has widely been based on the concept of music as a language. Thinking music then takes place within a linear time conception. I want to contrast this with a more immediate way of hearing and experiencing.
By condensation successive events are transformed into the simultaneity of a spectrum. A succession of sounds as an input turns into a colour of sound as an output. Not just pitch but also each and every characteristic of a sound, including the initial transient of the tone and its decay, defines the resulting colour. Time then is no longer different from spectrum. Frequency has become identical to time.
The increase of density through layering transforms each temporal succession into the simultaneousness of a spectrum. What was input as a sequence of sounds is output as a timbre. The temporal and the spectral course cannot be distinguished any more. Time as such has become identical with colour.
(Peter Ablinger)
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