Soul and Exactitude
(Giovanni Guanti)
Among the many reasons behind the present day suffocating atmosphere of musicology, we must include the total closure, mistrust and lack of sensitivity on the part of ‘music historians’ towards those who, like Fabio Uccelli, believe that scholars dealing with this Art/synthesis can and should also set up a fruitful dialogue with mathematicians, physicists, biologists, neurologists and psychoanalysts, in order to newly endow it with its role as a ‘yardstick’ for the entire epistemological human travail long ago recognised by Pythagoras and Plato. Anyone who is unwilling to subscribe unreservedly to the “extra historia nulla salus” stance taken up by certain musicologists, whose main concern is the protection of the poor fruits of their circumscribed fields of activity from attack by seminal heterodox ideas, will heartily welcome this neo-baroque musical pansophy, a catalyst of both the most recent scientific notions and the most urgent, irreducible philosophical problems. As a new Athanasius Kircher, Fabio Uccelli will always be able to counter-attack the fanatical, short-sighted exactitude of the specialists with Mark Twain’s deduction: if a specialist is someone in possession of the greatest number of notions of a particular, ever more limited field of knowledge, then the supreme specialist will be he who knows everything…about nothing!
In his confrontation, with sincere scientific modesty and great patience, with a colleague from the Italian Control Committee on Statements Concerning Paranormal Phenomena, in front of the studio audience of Italian television’s most important talk show, Uccelli claimed the right to “pretend to formulate hypotheses”, at least until proved otherwise, and deduce all possible implications, including the apparently most remote ones from the point of departure. In his book, Uccelli claims that the computational-non-computational dualism (the ‘bi-logic’ of the universe) maintained by physicists like Roger Penrose and Brian Josephson – together with striking confirmation from psychoanalysis of the existence of a ‘double logic’ in the structure of the psyche, and thus of the universe to which it belongs (cf. Matte Blanco’s theories) – can respond more convincingly than other ‘scientific paradigms’ to our questions about the ultimate grounds of the spiritual, mental, biological and physical universe.
Independently of future confirmation of the above mentioned theories (perhaps by means of experiments being carried out by Uccelli and his collaborators on the microscopic structures of the brain), the author’s intellectual support for scientists who have never hidden their disgust for any form of blind overpowering reductionism is exemplary. It is no accident that Uccelli has highlighted the enduring topicality of Pascal’s famous antinomy between esprit de géométrie and esprit de finesse, pointing out that it is arguably more ‘scientific’ to admit that “the heart may have reasons that the mind is unable to understand”, rather than presume that reason can, in the end, even manage to ‘compute’ the miracles of intuition and feeling.
The fact that I am unable to understand the experiments on microtubules or “large scale quantum coherence”; or that Uccelli’s arguments concerning the genesis of consciousness insistently recall the theses of a long debated and still debatable book like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) by Julian Jaynes does not prevent me from appreciating some of Uccelli’s conclusions, after moving in research directions quite different from mine: above all – and here I like to think of him side by side with militant companions such as Robert Schumann (“The aesthetics of one art is identical to that of another, only the material is different”) and Benedetto Croce (“Only Art exists, not the arts”) – that rejecting (to quote Uccelli’s own words) “the deduction of anyone who does not acknowledge a single musical language as the basis of all music and the existence of a single “cerebral modality” presiding over the formation of any artistic expression”.
The way in which, in the chapter entitled “Nature and art. The world of ideas (and universal memory) as sources of emotional archetypes”, Uccelli presents the connection between innate and acquired knowledge, shortly before demonstrating the unsatisfactory nature of ‘empirical cognitivism’ and Gestalt in explaining the organisation of visual perception in humans and its reinstatement in the artistic field enables me to encourage two categories of readers to read his book.
The first is that of musicologists who are not ashamed of not yet having, once and for all, put aside reflection on innateness in art, considering it inconclusive and outdated. Despite the unchallenged imposition of a conventional conception in the sphere of contemporary musical theory and analysis, they, at least, have not forgotten the existence of another conception, albeit a minority one in total contrast with the former, which, to restrict ourselves to the 20th century, was defended by, among others, Alain Danielou, Joseph Schillinger, Paul Hindemith, Hans Kayser and Ernest Ansermet. They had already argued, more or less exhaustively and convincingly, for “musical archetypes”, the psycho-physiological and biological conditioning – and thus limits – of musical practice, and the morphogenesis of the work of art analogous to that of plants and animals. Though agreeing with their faith in Natura naturans with its Platonic, and, more precisely, Timaecus features (and how could it be otherwise?), Uccelli did not restrict himself to analysing its macroscopic level formative action, as all his ideal predecessors had done, but also analysed it at the molecular, atomic and subatomic level, reinterpreting it (also in the light of the most up to date scientific findings) the classic psychagogic function attributed to music in an innovative, courageous psycho-poietic key.
The second category of readers, who, in my view, could gain useful insights from reading Fabio Uccelli’s book is that of composers feeling the need for a new “musical rhetoric” based on biological-innate grounds, rather than cultural-conventional ones and deliberately aiming at making it felt through their scores. Admittedly, “musical rhetoric” and its “figures” have been amply treated by a great many scholars, who, however, have provided more information on where, when and how this is practised than on why particular rhythmic and melodic clusters (rather than others) are supposedly so pregnant with meaning and emotionally effective. Once again the majority of scholars who have dealt with the question have provided conventional interpretations. Though I have no objections against them, in my view, they should not have a monopoly over the solution of this delicate, as yet unresolved (and perhaps irresolvable), problem. A book like Uccelli’s, with its detailed “archetypal hypothesis” and convincing explanations of how the prototypical “emotional granules” are already set in the human embryo, can at least serve to keep a hermeneutic alternative alive. It is actually on this basis that Uccelli has been able to hypothesise coherently the reason why musical therapy is effective, opening up a whole new field of application and testing of his hypotheses.
Musicologists who have not yet shut themselves up in sectarian analytical or historiographical specialisation and composers ready to share with Fabio Uccelli and Noam Chomsky the hypothesis that the deep structure of human language (thus including musical language) has profound analogies with brain structure, morphologically reflecting its characteristics, will undoubtedly be the ideal readers of this book, together with scientists from many different fields discussed in its pages. But even those who do not belong to any of these categories will find confirmation of Robert Musil’s inspired intuition that “Music is the art that better than any other can place soul and exactitude side by side”.

The Moulding Force of the Senses
(Marco Margnelli)
There is always a no-man’s-land between scientific disciplines accidentally visited by some and penetrated by others out of curiosity. They are large areas where anything is possible, from thinking impossible things to feeling free from rules and dogmas, from dreaming up experiments and theories to inventing exchanges and transfers, as if one were in a huge thought supermarket.
This book arose from these areas: a mathematician enamoured of music, to whom its secret relations with numbers are well known, imagines that sound can be poietic energy of enormous strength, to the extent of being able to mould consciousness.
The idea is one of those that cannot be proclaimed in one’s own discipline, both because they are apparently alien and also because of their apparent absurdity. It is, however, also an idea, which, temporarily stored in a corner of the mind, every now and then returns to tease one’s imagination and require attention and testing, like a growing child. There is a highly fascinating passage where mathematical sequences of notes, instead of giving rise to uninteresting confused ticking, provoke intense emotions, as though they were a primordial language, only acquiring meaning when attaining the level of intersection between the structures of number logic and the meaning taken on over time by sounds.
But what is the origin of “number logic”? Is it an innate entity or acquired ability? In one case it could be imagined as an enormous network of circuits whose very make-up confers meaning on the signals crossing them, i.e. hardware without which the problem would not even exist, in the other the hypothesis would have to be made that learning be a kind of moulding force physically stimulating nerve tissues to arrange themselves on the basis of functional needs. Analogously, to endow sounds with meaning hardware to be moulded would already have to be present, just as an organisational process would be required to give them symbolic/cultural sense.
It is with this kind of idea that one finds oneself on the borderline, realising, all of a sudden, that one is going ahead alone, without companions and cultural aids, since the usual ones no longer seem to be valid.
In the case of this book, one finds oneself in a narrow border area between philosophy, neurophysiology, psychology and computer science. This no-man’s land was once a large area. Nowadays it has become much more limited, since progress in knowledge has greatly amplified the borders of individual disciplines, so that philosophers, neurophysiologists, psychologists and computer experts can find themselves involved on occasion. In such a situation, instead of hurriedly withdrawing, in fear of the unknown, a need is felt for companions and navigation charts.
This is what Fabio Uccelli has done, reading books on the borders and discussing issues with musicologists, questioning neurophysiologists, searching for neuro-philosophers, but, most of all, opening up to his intuition and investigating his own cultural make-up to the extent of meditating in a kind of musical-mathematical-neurophysiological metaculture.
Leaving aside geographical metaphors, I am convinced that it is not so much sounds alone, or sounds alone arranged in musical constructions, but sensoriality as a whole that is the moulding ground of consciousness (Uccelli also introduces the analogous concept of sensory ‘enrichment’ of the, initially only rhythmic-sonorous, archetype), so that, on reading this book, I was in turn very pleased to have found a travel companion.
Ever since I began to show interest in consciousness, I have always given priority to the problem of its ontogenesis, believing for years that the whole of consciousness is formed following on from identical processes to those leading to self-awareness, i.e. identical to those underpinning the ontogenesis of identity.
In the brain, to be precise, in the ascendant parietal circumvolution, there is a topographical representation of the body surface, called the sensitive homunculus, whose main function, in the adult, consists in precise placement of sensory messages in this representation of the body, for example, the tactile ones, and their re-transmission in partially elaborated form in brain cortex areas, which will further elaborate them and, finally, decide on reaction to them. The adult brain homunculus is a physically concrete “map”, in the sense that, if the nerve tissue where it is situated is damaged, awareness of part of the body can be lost, with serious functional and psychological consequences. We are dealing with the so-called somato-agnosic syndromes. The disappearance of the representation of a limb, for example, can cause wounding or serious damage without the person involved realising it. Psychologically, it may involve the person developing a hostile attitude to a part of his/her body which has now become estranged, to the extent of seeming to be a parasite. At birth, the homunculus is only potential and thus only reaches full functional maturity by means of a growing/learning process, which can be considered almost complete when the child begins to make use of his/her “Ego” for self-reference, i.e. when identity has been acquired.
The potential homunculus could be thought of as a pencil drawn circuit in the nerve tissue, which the sensory impulses continuously running through it end up by “printing”, making it a materially concrete structure. Neurophysiology, over the last thirty years, has identified these growing/learning processes of neuronal circuits, showing that, apart from axon myelinisation, they principally consist in the development of contacts among neurons with a particularly rich gemmation, caused by continuous neuronal circuit activation (guided synaptogenesis) and/or elimination of useless contacts (neuronal Darwinism). These processes are obviously valid for all sensory tracts, and it cannot be excluded that auditory ones, as Fabio Uccelli argues, get off to a good start, since sounds certainly reach the uterus, which, before birth, can set off growing/learning processes in them, while light does not reach it and tactile stimuli are few.
It can therefore be argued that sensory messages initially solely constitute electro-chemical tract openers making up hardware, and that only afterwards can perception become gnosis, or that these signals acquire cognitive meanings.
This passage marking the border between structure and function, between hardware and software is one of the most important themes in modern neurophysiological research, which, after concluding the study of neuron microphysiology, that of functional attributions to the various parts of the brain or that of hodology, has begun to look into the so-called “upper nerve functions”.
The border between cerebral-mental hardware and software is a problem which, under other names, was of great interest to philosophers of the past, who widely discussed the possible existence of innate thought structures or the mental conditions of new born children, calling it, for example, a “tabula rasa”, or arguing, like the British empiricists, that reality only exists because “it is thought”. The pressure to which neurophysiology is subjected is thus understandable: it is supposed to supply concrete evidence for the solution of these fundamental problems.
I imagined that the outset of gnosis is determined by the two possible functional conditions of nerve tissue, whether they be neurons, axons, nuclei or circuits, i.e. activity and rest conditions. Information is created by a change in condition. If a structure in the rest condition begins an activity, an event is created, or rather information is generated. This event, in turn, creates the need for an “explanation” and this is impossible if there is no consciousness able to provide it. Passing from silence to sound, light to darkness, no tactile sensation to being touched are elementary examples of passages from one condition to another which can set off sense attribution to information. Once the tract opener function is complete, nerve signals become “condition modifiers” and thus undifferentiated activators of structures which, on the other hand, do begin to differentiate themselves in a particular functional specialisation. An acoustic stimulus, for example, only has the role of activator of auditory structures, causing a change of condition in them, but this event will, in turn cause a change of condition throughout the brain. Thus a computer like network of “on/off” condition changes will be created and they will begin to attribute a rough, though sufficiently specific meaning to the signals. Silence/sound, light/darkness, not touched/touched are, in turn, pairs of opposite conditions requiring codification of the activating event in specific sensations, with which a “representation of reality” can begin to be built up. Analogously, smooth/rough, sweet/savoury, black/white, hot/cold are pairs of opposites with which one can continue building up this “description of the world”, whose use will, in the end, be equal to that of the homunculus. This “sensory consciousness” can be imagined as a computer program, software compiled in detail with numerous pairs of opposites making up a “virtual description” of the physical world, in such a way that any sense information, placed in this representation, takes on meaning. Here grass, for example can be nothing but green, or at most yellow, never blue or violet, humans will be unable to fly, rocks will be heavy, water transparent, the sun cannot be cold, using the elementary sensory information which has also been termed “self-referring internal constants”.
At this stage, however, it needs to be stated that, at birth, the brain contains “potential consciousness”, which, like the homunculus neuronal substratum, resembles fresh wax ready for moulding, a consciousness that must grow/be taught. It must also be stated that sense stimuli set off and maintain over time these growth/improvement processes.
Nevertheless, if the consciousness addressed by Fabio Uccelli can be compared with a software program (which I agree with) we must also posit a conscious consciousness that this consciousness is only a representation of reality, but not the one true reality, since in the consciousness of dreams there are no models of reality: animals speak, grass can be violet, rocks made of rubber and, above all, humans can fly.
But this is another story.
I hope that my remarks on this book have been clear enough for readers to realise the importance and sense of Fabio Uccelli’s hypothesis, and to understand my enthusiasm in meeting this courageous traveller I feel as though I bumped into a mathematician/dreamer and I hope he does not think of me as a neuro-philosopher, but a neurophysiologist who has ended up in border territory.

Tiziano Cantalupi
Computational and Non Computational
The originality of Uccelli’s thought undoubtedly lies in his positing a model of knowledge acquisition in living species in general and humans in particular, based on the role that particular rhythmic-sound stylemes can play in its origin. It is well known that life is born and activates its initial functions in a fluid-liquid environment: fish and other oviparous species in eggs and mammals, including humans, in placental fluid. This means that the first “emotions” reaching living embryos are directed by elastic type signals and stimuli (sound waves), the only ones that can be propagated in fluids. They will only later be reached by electro-magnetic waves (light). So the first “emotional clots” reaching the embryos are of the sound type, actually rhythmic-sound type, since the various sounds are not generally continuous, but have rhythmic scansion. The first emotional rhythmic-sound styleme is certainly the mother’s heart beat, followed in unison by that of the embryo. Now, while the developing nervous system already assures continuity in the heart beat, the initial dispositional representations able to “memorise” this styleme are already being formed in the embryonal brain, internally connected with the embryo’s hearing. An analogous mechanism “fixes” other rhythmic-sound type stylemes in the brain, which become true “archetypes” by means of a sensory integration process and psychologisation.
And it is on these a-rational “original sensations”, on these “musical” archetypes (these rhythmic-sound stylemes being entirely comparable to musical expressions) that the newly structured mind of the living being begins to recall and live these emotions, and, subsequently, build up an emotional continuum, a kind of thought preceding and forming rationality.
Now, if “function created the organ” in nature, realising, as in the case of the ellipsoid brain structures (thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala etc.), the required “sensors” able to acquire and memorise the emotional stylemes, nothing prevents us from thinking that, analogously, the very computational (rational) language constituting the rhythmic-sound stylemes (consisting of elastic electro-magnetic waves and their physical-mathematical laws) in the end (after millions of years!) determined the structure of the brain cortex and neocortex whose function is computational and rational. And it appears equally natural to think that, once the brain cortex has been acquired and the primordial “mind” has begun to function, the structuring (numerical, logical etc.) archetypes modelling and causing rationality to function and making the birth of conscious thought, language and all relational human life possible have been extracted from the mental “metabolisation” (rational re-elaboration) of the initial emotional archetypes.
Admittedly, carrying out this double process requires a fundamental condition: that the universe have a “double logic”, double computational and non computational structuring, since all its realities must necessarily re-posit these characteristics (even psychoanalysis, recently, with Matte Blanco has noted the existence in the unconscious of an asymmetrical-symmetrical “bi-logic” with similar characteristics!).
So the emotional rhythmic-sound stylemes perceived by living beings, when they had not yet acquired rational “tools”, can only be themselves a-rational and non computational.
Now, while we all are well acquainted with the computational, which is basic to most of our daily activities (we continually use rationality for all kinds of organisation, administration and technological development), we are not always aware of the existence of the non computational, owing to our acquired habit of reasoning, which, on occasion, also “imprisons” genuine perceived emotions. However, incredibly and paradoxically, it was precisely the rational mind which made us conscious of the non rational, the non computational, when it found itself face to face with behaviour shown to be inexplicable and concerning all fields of knowledge, from mathematics to (nuclear and quantum) physics and cosmology. Nowadays, non computational behaviour of the neuron tubulines has also been hypothesised in neurobiology (Penrose), and, some time ago, Frolich demonstrated a large scale global “vibration” of the biological structures, and an attempt has been made to identify other types of non computational behaviour in them, in the essential conviction – fully accepted by Uccelli – that a-rational emotional perception can only “get fixed” in humans by means of the intervention of a-rational tools and phenomena. Furthermore, the idea that the mind can also express itself through non computational dynamics makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate on artificial intelligence. Nowadays, a large number of scientists believe it impossible that a computer (working with present day logic) can entirely simulate the human mind. Any modern computer must “reason” following predetermined algorithms, as well as obeying the principle of causality. Thus, both for interpreting the most intimate brain mechanisms and following new routes for the development of artificial intelligence, Uccelli proposes the partial abandonment of classical physics (and biophysics), turning to quantum physics. The latter, which is a-causal and non computational, can turn out to be an effective tool for the interpretation of mental dynamics, at the same time contributing to opening up the way to the possibility of deciphering the deep mechanisms (so far unknown) in serious brain pathologies linked with psychotic states coming to light with analysis of the unconscious.
Certainly the big problem of “psyche emergence” remains and, especially, its connection with the brain structures; and then the way in which the human psyche is connected with the Universal Psyche, which Uccelli, in the splendid last part of his book, is forced to hypothesise as a lengthening, extension and enlargement of the “World of Pure Mathematical Forms” which is presupposed by many scientists to precede and be the basis of the origin of the Universe, and which makes up the essence of each archetype.
Uccelli’s answers, certainly the result of life long meditation, follow an extremely rigorous, honest route, claiming the right to doubt and envisaging a kind of “scientific innateism”, almost as if science itself must hypothesise the need for a “non dogmatic faith” as the basis of reality.

My initial thanks go to the authors of the three prefaces: musicologist Giovanni Guanti (University of Pavia), neurophysiologist Marco Margnelli and physicist Tiziano Cantalupi, for their valuable comments from different standpoints.
I should also like to thank all the participants in the Seminar on the Philosophy and Sociology of Music organised by the review entitled La Nuova Civiltà delle Macchine: Fabio Bellissima, Gianni Zanarini, Andrea Giansanti, Amalia Collisani, Stefano Leoni, Carlo Bensi, Gianfranco Gavarini, Marco Toniatti, Davide Arecco, Costantino Catena, Giulia Vannoni, Anna Maria Lombardi, Benedetto Scimemi, Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Carlo De Pirro, Antonio Di Lisa, Franca Gulisano, Bernardino Fantini, Igino Zavatti, and my friends Abbri, Palazzi, Fubini, Castellani.
I am also grateful to the following for discussion of the hypotheses presented in this book: Gianfranco Briani, Giorgio Tacconi, Maurizio Alessandri, Luigi Romani, Patrizio Barontini, Pierfrancesco Niccolini Serragli, Natale Rauty, Rita Feri-Rauty, Donatella De Cecco, and Lori Banci.
I am very grateful to Laura Pederzoli for designing the figures and the beautiful drawing on the dedication page.
Returning to the years 1940-1950 and recollection of people who are no longer with us, I should like to pay tribute to my violin teacher Maestro Aldo Petrelli for his infinite patience.
Special thanks are due to Prof. Piera Lavacchi, who first introduced me to the relationship between music and emotion.
Finally, I owe a debt of deep gratitude to Fr. Giovanni Platone Cecchini, both mystic and rationalist, to whom this book is dedicated and who brought alive for me the double nature of our most profound essence.
Florence, 7 April 2002