Kommunikologie (Communicology), Looking through the eyes of music

The reason I study the relationship between mathematics and music originating from ancient Greece—a subject almost trite in its foundational nature—is not merely to trace the origins of music history.

Rather, it is an ongoing process of asking what my own, myself once again: “What is music?”

Where mathematics in ancient Egypt and Babylon developed for pragmatic ends like land surveying and celestial observation, the Greeks initiated a playful intellectual expansion, transforming it into an abstract language of universal order. In that distant era, Pythagoras discovered cosmic harmony not in isolated tones, but in the ratios between them, while Plato viewed music—alongside mathematics and astronomy—as a vital discipline for comprehending the order of the universe. This lineage extends from Philolaus’s “harmony of the limited and the unlimited” and Archytas’s synthesis of music and geometry, through the cosmology of the 'Timaeus', to Kepler’s 'Harmonices Mundi'. The classic texts and philosophical inquiries that serve as the bedrock for understanding music as a matter of cosmos and cognition continue to shape not only Western philosophy, but the collective intellectual heritage of humanity.

This connects intimately with the music I strive to embody.

Through the methodology of jazz, when one navigates various altered tensions over dominant chords, I believe this can be conceptually expanded into the mathematical framework of a "manifold." Attempting to understand the local stability of the perfect fifth, the curvature induced by equal temperament, the connections traversing the tritone, and improvisation as a trajectory moving across a manifold is, as I have discovered, ultimately a process of reinterpreting Pythagoras’s “order of relations” in a modern language.

At the outset of this endeavor, I do not pose ontological questions such as "What is music?", nor do I engage with the dismantling of scales or the discovery of microtonality characteristic of modern avant-garde music. Instead, by accepting established scales and their discrete properties, I make my position explicit: the music I engage with begins firmly upon the foundation of Western musical tradition. Therefore, rather than merely rehearsing ancient cosmologies, my work aims at an innovation built upon a somewhat conservative foundation—one grounded in an epistemological critique that refuses to confuse human cognitive models with the world itself, exploring instead how human beings construct and experience order. Here, music is not an act of reproducing a pre-existing cosmic order, but an epistemological practice that navigates spaces of relationship and possibility.

I am suddenly reminded of how, thirty years ago, I was intensely drawn to the phrase “Crystal Line Sphere.” Though my younger self lacked the vocabulary to articulate it, I felt a deep pull toward a certain transparent order and cosmic structure. Now, I seek to revisit that intuition through Pythagoras and Plato, modern mathematics and physics, and improvisation. Perhaps only now, after three decades, am I finally beginning to give concept, language, and sound to the vague questions I harbored within my youthful passion for music. In this sense, my work is not merely about crafting novel timbres or challenging the established order; it is my present answer to a timeless question: How may the world—as cosmos—be understood in its order, and how do human beings experience that order through music and art?