Manfred Clynes
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Manfred Clynes | |
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Background information | |
Born | Vienna, Austria | August 14, 1925
Died | January 19, 2020 West Nyack, New York, U.S. | (aged 94)
Occupation(s) | scientist, inventor, concert pianist |
Years active | 1940–2020 |
Manfred Edward Clynes (August 14, 1925 – January 19, 2020) was an Austrian-born scientist, inventor, and musician. He is best known for his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology.
Overview
Manfred Clynes' work combines music and science, more particularly,
Emotion shapes, biologic primacy laws
Clynes concentrated on what he saw as the natural and unalterable interlocking of the
Some of these dynamic forms appear to be shared by those animals that have time consciousnesses at a similar rate to humans; hence the intuition of pet owners that their dog or cat understands tone of voice and the emotional form of touch. Anger, love, and grief, for example, according to Clynes, have clearly different dynamic expressive forms. Importantly, a cardinal property of this inherent biologic communication language, in Clynes’ findings, is that the more closely an expression follows the precise dynamic form, the more powerful is the generation of the corresponding emotion, in both the person expressing and in the perceiver of the expression.[2] Hence, presumably, such phenomena as charisma (in persons whose performance of emotional expressions closely follows the universal form). His experience with Pablo Casals confirmed for Clynes the importance of this faithfulness to the natural dynamic form in generating emotionally significant meaning in musical performance.
Sentic cycles
Drawing on these findings, Clynes also developed an application—a simple touch art form—in which, without music, subjects expressed, through repeated finger pressure, a sequence of emotions timed according to the natural requirements of the sentic forms. The 25-minute sequence, called the Sentic Cycle, comprises: no-emotion, anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence. Subjects reported experiencing calmness and energy. Many also evidenced progress in the alleviation of depression, and, to some degree, tobacco and alcohol addictions, as a result of repeated application of this process.[2][3][6] Thousands of people have by now experienced sentic cycles, some for years, some even decades. In the 1980s especially, Clynes taught various groups to conduct Sentic Cycles on their own. Nowadays, the Sentic Cycle kit is available on the Internet.
Early work developing sentic cycles in the 1970s had convinced Clynes also that it is easy with it for most people to proceed from experiencing one emotion to another quite rapidly. After three or four minutes of one emotion, a person tended to be being satiated with the current emotion. The ready switching to the next emotion with quite fresh experience pointed to the existence of specific receptors in the brain, he suggested, that become satiated with particular
Clynes enthusiastically published his realization that love, joy, and reverence were always there to be experienced, capable of being generated through precise expression and accessible by simple means, due to the connection to their biologic roots. Music had always been a special means for this, but now, with this touch artform, it was universally accessible. By this means, even negative emotions, such as grief anger, could be enjoyed in a compassionate non-destructive framework.
In the 1970s and in the 1980s Clynes had started to write poems, a few of which had found their way into his book Sentics. Later,
Cyborg (cybernetic organism)
Clynes is credited with developing and coining the term
Biography and career
Education and influences
Early invention of inertial guidance at age 15
Manfred Clynes was born on August 14, 1925, in
Around this time he also had lessons with the Polish virtuoso Ignaz Friedman, then resident in Sydney. Having seen Friedman play in concert several times, Clynes approached him by letter and was accepted sight unseen. He hitchhiked from Melbourne as he could not afford the train fare, let alone the fee charged by Friedman.[12] His musical talent was recognized by a series of awards, concerto performances and prizes, one of which provided a three-year graduate fellowship to the Juilliard School. At Juilliard, he was a piano student of Olga Samaroff and Sascha Gorodnitzki.
He received his
In 1952 he was invited to
Young Clynes had a personal letter of introduction to
(Translation of Einstein's letter, dated Princeton, May 18, 1953: "Dear Mr. Clynes, I am truly grateful to you for the great enjoyment that your piano playing has given me. Your performance combines a clear insight into the inner structure of the work of art with a rare spontaneity and freshness of conception. With all the secure mastery of your instrument, your technique never supplants the artistic content, as unfortunately so often is the case in our time. I am convinced that you will find the appreciation to which your achievement entitles you. With friendly greetings yours, A. Einstein.")
Concert tours in 1953 Goldberg Variations
In 1953, helped by the letter from Einstein, Clynes toured Europe with great critical success, playing the Goldberg Variations. The tour ended with a solo concert before an audience of 2500 at London's Royal Festival Hall, which had just been built.[14]
Inventions and scientific discoveries
In 1954, to provide for his parents and to raise funds necessary to underwrite his musical career, Clynes, on the basis of his scientific training, took a job working with a new
In 1955, at Clynes' suggestion, Bogue employed his father, then aged 72, from Australia, as a naval architect; the elder Clynes had not been permitted to work in his profession in Australia, because he was not British-born. For a time Clynes father and son went to work together every morning (to Clynes’ rejoicing).
As the result of a chance meeting, in 1956, Dr Nathan S. Kline, Director of the Research Center of Rockland State Hospital, a large mental hospital, offered Clynes a substantial research job at the Center, where he in 1956 became ‘Chief Research Scientist’. Kline was to become the recipient of two Lasker Awards, and had built up that research center to formidable renown. (It is now called the Nathan S. Kline Psychiatric Center.)
CAT computer
An autodidact in physiology, Clynes applied dynamic systems analysis to the
URS law
Also in 1960, he discovered a biologic law, "Unidirectional Rate Sensitivity," the subject, in 1967, of a two-day symposium held by the New York Academy of Science. Also in 1960, in collaboration with Nathan S. Kline, Clynes published the cyborg concept, and its corollary, participant evolution. "Cyborg" became a household word and was misapplied, much to the dismay of Clynes, in films such as Terminator. Cyborgology is now a field taught at numerous universities. In 1964 the University of Melbourne awarded Clynes the degree of D.Sc, a degree superior to PhD and rarely given by British universities.
Already in 1960 The New York Times had noted Clynes' remarkable double-stranded gifts. In 1965 he began to offer concerts at his newly acquired home on the Hudson, which had a real pipe organ in the living room, and 5 acres (2.0 ha) of land. With the financial stability resulting from his scientific discoveries, it became possible for Clynes to return to music. An ardent admirer of the great master musician Pablo Casals since early childhood, Clynes now attended all Casals' master classes, many with his family.
In 1966, Clynes played both the Towards synthesis of scientific and musical work
Color and the brain
With his new CAT computer, Clynes studied the relation of color processing in the brain and the dynamics to sound, and, jointly with M.Kohn, to color of the pupil of the eye. He showed that brain electrical responses to the color red from previous black produced similar patterns from several distinct brain sites, for all subjects. Other colors produced their own distinct patterns. These results from 1965 went a long way to help dispel the Skinnerian notion of tabula rasa. By 1968 he was able to show that it was possible to distinguish which of 100 different objects a person was looking at from his electrical brain responses alone, with repeated presentations. In other experiments in 1969 he described what he called the R-M function (from Rest to Motion) detectable at the apex of the brain for various modalities of stimulation, showing how two sets of unidirectionally rate sensitive (URS) channels in series could produce an effect corresponding to the mental concepts Rest and Motion. What could three URS channel sets do in combination? He never found out. But here were the beginnings of the embodiments of mental concepts in a wordless manner—a way of representing intuitive concepts to the brain wordlessly.
The brain as an output device
His work until around 1967 had been concerned with the brain as an input device i.e. for perception; now he began to study it as an
In 1972 Clynes, whose work had long been supported by
That same year he accepted a visiting professorship in the music department of the
Since the sentic cycles suddenly helped individuals feel better without drugs, Clynes' work was now deemed contrary to the line of research sponsored at the Rockland State Research Center, headed by
During his three years at
He did studies of laughter at the brain Institute of
In 1977 Rex Hobcroft, director of Sydney's
Hobcroft and the government of New South Wales provided Clynes with a Music Research Center and staff at the Conservatory for his work, supplied be the state of NSW Ministry of Education. The staff were mostly enthusiasts of Clynes' work from the United States.
Predictive amplitude shaping in music
The following year 1980, at the occasion of the 10th International Congress on
Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception of this work in
The identification of composers' pulse, and its use in interpreting classical works via computer, was later extended by Clynes, according to his knowledge and experience with dynamic forms, to comprise several levels of time structure.
Shortly after this, in 1983–84 Clynes, with the programming help of N. Nettheim, found a method of allowing computers to design vibrato suitable for each note, depending on the musical structure, also sometimes anticipating next events.
Further, all these principles could be easily generically adjusted for the requirements of each musical piece. Of course, a work's interpretation was not robotically created: the computer needed to get adjustments to correspond to the concept of the interpreter. The computer did not replace the human sensitivity, it empowered it instead.
When Clynes' longtime close friend and supporter
In 1982, Clynes undertook further extensive studies on the nature of the expression of emotions through touch. Subjects were touched on the palm of the hand, from behind a screen, with specific emotional expressions, to discover whether they could identify the emotion. In fact, they could. Clynes and Walker extended this work in a research trip to central Australia, to the Yuendumu Reservation, to test if
The test was highly positive: the Aborigines did in fact successfully identify the emotions expressed by the touch, of white urban subjects, from which were produced (through a simple transformation, preserving the dynamic shape) the sounds they heard. The American television program Nova reenacted this experiment in 1986, effectively linking the expression of emotions through touch to musical expression, using Beethoven's Eroica Funeral March to exemplify grief, and a Haydn sonata for joy.
In 1986, Clynes gave his (or anyone's) first classical concert played entirely by computer, according to the three principles he had discovered, to a full house in a free concert at the Joseph Post Hall of the Sydney Conservatory. As a result of the application of those principles, the music, ranging from Bach to Beethoven to Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn was musically expressive and meaningful, even though all sounds, except for the piano, were produced by computer-controlled
In 1986, the Fairlight Company, a maker of top-of-the-line synthesizers in the hundred thousand dollar range, immediately opted to license what they called "the best
Reaching retirement age in Sydney, Clynes left to be professorial associate in the psychology department at
He stayed for three years. During that time he found an
Composers' pulses
Also during this period, Clynes undertook a large statistical study with various groups of the perception of composer's pulse. In the study, Clynes played four different pieces by computer, by each of four different composers (sixteen in all), with what his studies had determined to be the composer's own pulse and three times the same with a ‘wrong’ composer's pulse, to see which one subjects actually preferred. There were four groups of subjects: internationally well-known pianists,
Clynes returned to the United States in 1991 and settled in
As a result, Clynes received a development contract that would for the first time enable the expressive implementation of real instrumental sounds other than the piano, using a workstation made available to him by HP, a $40,000 computer, which was, at 150
Once Clynes had successfully developed a
SuperConductor
Henceforth, with the help of Steve Sweet, Clynes developed the software program, called SuperConductor himself. By 1996 they had a fully working version, incorporating all the new principles, with which they interpreted, first, all the
Clynes further expanded SuperConductor's capacity for real life expressive interpretation of music with a fourth principle he called "Self-tuning Expressive Intonation," which unfixes the equal temperament tuning and permits the sharpening of the leading tone and other modifications of the sort executed by fine players of stringed instruments and other instruments whose intonation is actively controlled in the playing; now even a piano could exhibit this technique—by means of a laptop computer and synthesizer. Since it is a melodic tuning, depending on intervals, no transposition was required. The same interval going up received a different small pitch increment from that interval going down. Moreover, similarly to known use in tones like the leading tone, Clynes found it appropriate to provide quite small, specific increments to all melodic intervals, 24 in all (twelve up and twelve different ones down). A new patent [US 6,924,426] was granted in 2006. This now made it possible for all computers and synthesizers to benefit from expressive intonation, a non-static, dynamic tuning, in which the same note has a slightly different pitch depending on the melodic structure (the demise of equal temperament).
After a four-year absence in Thailand, Steve Sweet returned to Sonoma and resumed his development work with Clynes, incorporating the new functionality into SuperConductor II. (ref to mp3s on the webpage of SuperConductor)
With SuperConductor, Clynes performed Beethoven's
It became Clynes' aim gradually to make music better than had ever been possible before: to empower the computer in an enterprise of historic proportions to incrementally improve, and increase in profundity, the musical interpretations of great works of our music heritage. With computers, this work of increasing musical perfection could span years, decades, and even centuries.
Clynes has also kept up his own playing of the piano. In 2002, he gave a very substantial concert program (of which a videotape exists)[
Clynes married in 1951, divorced in 1972 and has three children and eight grandchildren. He died in West Nyack, New York in January 2020, at the age of 94.[24]
References
- S2CID 37643925.
- ^ a b c d e f Clynes, M., Sentics: The Touch of Emotions, 250 pp, Doubleday/Anchor, New York, 1977.
- ^ a b c Clynes, M., Generalised emotion, its production, and sentic cycle therapy, in Emotions and Psychopathology, M.Clynes and J. Panksepp, eds., pp. 107–170, Plenum Press, New York, 1988.
- PMID 30166276.
- PMID 30166276.
- ^ Clynes, M., Essentic form-aspects of control, function and measurement Proceedings of the 21st annual Conference of Engineering in Medicine and Biology. Houston, Texas. November 1968.
- ^ a b Clynes, M., The communication of emotion: theory of sentics, in Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience, Vol. 1 Theories of Emotion, R. Plutchik, H. Kellerman (eds.), pp. 271–300, Academic Press, New York, 1980.
- ^ Dr. Manfred Clynes Archived November 13, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Farewell to Australia < Boundaries of Compassion
- ISBN 9780949137005.
- ^ http://www.rebprotocol.net/senmanfredclynes2.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ Allan Evans, Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist, p. 322
- ^ a b Tedeschi, Bob. "How Would Great Composers Play It? Some Clues", The New York Times, February 22, 2000. Retrieved January 2, 2008.
- ^ < Dr. Manfred Clynes
- S2CID 51657556.
- ^ "IEEELevel Awards, see under section IEEE Prize Paper Awards" (PDF). IEEE. July 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 29, 2011. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
- S2CID 43480519.
- ^ Clynes, M., Sentography: dynamic forms of communication of emotion and qualities, computers in Biology & Medicine, Vol, 3: 119–130, 1973.
- ^ Clynes, M., Speaker recognition by the central nervous system, Society for Neuroscience, Abstract, New Orleans, November 1975.
- ^ Clynes, M., Expressive Microstructure in Music, linked to Living Qualities in Studies of Music Performance, J. Sundberg (ed.), Publication of Royal Swedish Academy of Music No. 39, pp, 76–181. Stockholm.
- ^ Clynes, M., Microstructural Musical Linguistics: composer's pulses are liked best by the best musicians, COGNITION, International Journal of Cognitive Science, 1995, vol. 55, pp. 269–310.
- ^ Riordan, Teresa. "Patents", The New York Times, April 18, 1994. Retrieved January 2, 2008. "Dr. Clynes, whose algorithms are being developed commercially in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard, said his technology would allow a musician to instruct a computer to play a given score with certain phrasings as well as changes in volume, tempo, timbre and rhythm."
- ^ Wright, Sarah H. "Pair of Media Lab events showcase toys and inventions", Massachusetts Institute of Technology press release, dated October 27, 1999. Retrieved January 2, 2008.
- ^ Manfred Edward Clynes
External links
- Manfred Clynes discography at Discogs