However, in my experience, interesting musical sounds are far more complicated than this. In my work I am not concerned with synthesizing orchestral sounds-we have excellent orchestras for making those sounds: my interest is in making new sounds which are musical. But I find that the adding of sine waves together in these 'classical recipes' gives a very 'electronic', inhuman sound with a clinical quality, lacking the possibility of subtlety and nuance. To be human is to have great ranges of expression, to have such infinite range that one moment there can be warmth and the next moment coldness. But what a dreadfully inadequate description that is . . . it needs a poet to give even a hint of the richness of being human. What words can hope to describe it?
But could we, perhaps, here just attempt an analogy? For it is as if the human being has thousands upon thousands of energy stores, each tuned for a purpose, each charged with a potential which allows it to sound forth. It is as if each human being is an instrument of concord and discord, consisting of thousands upon thousands of finely tuned circuits ; each circuit with its own control of pitch and loudness, able to adjust its voice, in harmony or dissonance, in balance and accord, so that it becomes part of the great pattern which makes the individual.
To visualise a human being in this way we would need a most wonderful mixture of fundamentals, harmonics and overtones, all subtly changing from moment to moment . .. a whole spectrum of resonate frequencies which are never at rest, never in a steady state, but are vibrant with pulsating tension. Like the intricate groove of a gramophone record the resulting 'sound track' would be extremely difficult to analyse in all its aspects, for there would be so many components in a state of flux. Yet it would exist as an entity, as a resultant whole, as a vast tangible river of flowing tensions.
Is this picture really so fanciful after all? Could it be that within our material, chemical, make up we have an electrical existence which consists in reality of actual tuned circuits? Is each cell in our bodies itself a tuned circuit (or part of a tuned circuit)?
