One of the most well-known songs of renewal in the late 20th Century was the song HEART OF THE MATTER by former Eagles lead singer and drummer Mr. Donald "Don" Henley.

tempo graphics © 2008.  Meanspeed Music Company. Use By Permission.



Heart of the Matter is recorded on top of a drum machine which is playing at almost exactly 88 beats per minute.


The meanspeed music conjecture has asserted that songs in the tempo range of 85-89 beats per minute have a strong tendency to emote renewal, forgiveness and homecoming. Such patterns are vividly seen on the tempo graphs I have synthesized and presented here with the the drama of the actors



John McCook
(1987-present)




and Jennifer Gareis
(2006-present) , making the point for me better than I write and FAR better than I  photograph! In renewing their lives on the world's most popular television drama, CBS's THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, Donna and Eric got down to the heart of the matter and then got in bed legally as man and wife. The issue in the story line is that Eric's heart is 65-70 years old and Donna's is 35-40 years old, a possible cause of Eric's heart giving out after a Viagra-induced sex marathon. He still lays in fictional real time in that same Los Angeles hospital at which thank-God-at-least-she's-still-alive Elizabeth Taylor always visits people.


No, there is nothing funny about a man in a coma. Not even when that coma is inspired by the rabidly creative yet macho character Eric Forrester. However, this most interesting couple is fictional. I feature musical examples in tempo maps, graphs, abstract visuals: whatever group you are in call the same [meanspeed graphs] different names. A "graph" implies an pictoral aspect whereas a "chart" does not necessarily connote a 'visual'. A chart can be Text Only - a graph implies a picture. Another example in which The Bold and the Beautiful was used on graphs to show the tempo line of an archetypal song of lust was for the late Robert Palmer's ADDICTED TO LOVE, a pure song of lust written by Palmer in a dream. In that song, Eric's then wife Stephanie Forrester, played by the actress Stephanie Douglas Forrester (Susan Flannery), is forgiving and accepts that her rugged yet creative husband must move on with a new woman, her care turns to her family in general as she emotes graceful forgiveness - she can only accept that the lust between these characters played Gareis and McCook are smoldering in bed with the heat of the passion of Forrester Creations, the fictional Ralph Lauren in the B & B and the utility of Viagra®, a pill made by Pfizer®.
For you TiVo and DVR users out there, though I know you would want to watch the commercials religiously every day, CBS's drama is only 1/2 hour and is the only television program to be broadcast (not filmed) live by satellite throughout the world in general. No, my data base does not have amongst its song very many from Brazil, but, you do what you can, and this show is popular in Brazil, it is popular in Ireland! In trying to explain the meanspeed ideas, that certain tempo ranges imply corresponding emotive characteristics where predictive elements can be quite high, using internationally known fictional characters is more useful than talking about my in-laws.
In the meanspeed scale, the range of range 77-78 beats per minute strongly implies 'bittersweetness'. √60 x 10, or 'the square root of 60 seconds *divided* by ten' is equivalent numerically, with the decimal place moved over to the right 2 places, to the amount of time of each beat - i.e., while 75 beats per minute requires 800 milliseconds in between beats and is highly predictive of songs of grace and poise, songs at 80 beats per minute require only 750 milliseconds per beat and are highly predictive of loneliness and discontent. 77.5 eats per minute ironically requires 774 milliseconds per beat. This the *mean* speed, that which is numerically identical as both speed and space is not intuitive. The only speed where the numbers do not move are 77.45966692414834... beats per minute which requires exactly .7745966692414834... seconds per beat.
The emotions which I translate by music tempo are universal and thus I try to translate the language and culture barrier. I am a trained lawyer, though, not a trained international music pop music research person and cannot conduct experiments around the world using 15,000 songs in German, 15,000 in French and so on. I leave that for someone else! Insofar as at least the half of you reading this who are not American, though most of you speak English, I believe it is sometimes best to comprehend, understand or feel the emotive qualities I call mean-emotions using a dramatic analogies, here, the international language of love of music, love of sex, and love of television (not necessarily in that order)!
I believe that with most "process X in the brain is controlled by a timing pathway" and "the fMRI showed that people had quicker healing time in the hospital with the use of music" studies lack the narrow but essential area I study: the ACTUAL SPEED of such 'relaxing music'. What is relaxing music to me is not for *you* - which in turn is not for the next person and so on. The 10s of thousands of studies that promote 'soft relaxing music' do not tell you th etempo of their music, and even when they do, a study sample of 10 rather than 10 thousand is used, and while the experiments are closed, deductive and valid, they remain largely useless. In order to actually USE any such "music is a healer" study we need to establish that my speed is not your speed, which the German scientists essentially provided the groundwork for in the late 1800s.
In the meanspeed conjecture we look to specificity. It is one thing for Professor X to assert that "anesthesia was reduced by 25 % when soft, relaxing music was played during the operation" and another assertion that "when songs chosen by the patient which had *tempi of under 76 beats per minute* reduced anesthesia by 25 %" or "song at every speed which the patient *herself *considered relaxing reduced anesthesia by 25 %" or "anesthesia was reduced by 25 % when music considered by the *surgeon* was played during the operation" and so on.
If there is one thing we can all agree on it is that music taste is as varied as people's faces.  My relaxing is getting my mind to slow down to about 37 beats per minute using a metronome and a song in my head I have, in my aural imagination, literally brought down to that speed. That is, when I am nervous and want to calm myself. Ian Bush, one of the first people who ever asked me about improving his sports performance by setting a mental tempo did it - in California - and went on to set new records. When everyone else was nervously chattering before the race, he would go into the corner and play 2 Genesis/Phil Collins songs, both between 92-97 bpm, I believe they were "In The Air Tonight" and "Dodo/Lurker." In fact. "In The Air Tonight" was used by Jimmy Johnson as a psyche song when he was a football coach, and Ray Lewis used it for decades as a football player.
Putting speed into words is violently difficult. I discovered this pattern TWENTY years ago to the week and when I stumbled on it I thought it was an established fact that I had discovered backwards. So said, I knew if it was undiscovered I would spend up to my last breath trying to explain the benefits of autochronicity - controlling one's own mental speed. The term "autochronicity" was coined by Dr. Lawrence Silverman and until Dr. Silverman agreed with my findings I had no graphics of any kind, which was 8 years after I discovered the patterns in the first place. The great doctor bought me Excel 5.0, and I still use that program to synthesize the graphs for Meanspeed Music Education in general.
A message to the "he's doing this to sell the graphics" critics: I saw the meanspeed conjecture with my eyes on a legal pad with has a page for each major metronome click, as per back in the Analogue days: 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 66, 69, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, 92, 96, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 126, 132, 138, 144, 152, 160 [and the rest of the 'standards' ], and after calibrating approximately 300 songs crudely matching a red light on a Seiko metronome. I was a 25 year old law student who was trying to make some sense of practicing piano in my down time from reading Supreme Court cases.

								October 7, 2008





"The Heart of the Matter" - After the debate: Meanspeed Music still
calls for an OBAMA/McCain, old school style - "Signed, Sealed,
Delivered"



 

       The original psyche song of Barack Obama was Stevie Wonder's Sign Sealed Delivered.
The
original manner of picking the president and the vice-president was:
top voter gets top slot, 2nd place gets vice-president. The men running
have plenty of mutual ground, respect. and, most importantly more
competence than either of their well qualified vice-presidential
choices.

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
song title="Signed, Sealed Delivered I'm Yours"
Album=Stevie Wonder: The Definitive Collection
Intellectual Property=Motown Records, Copyright 2002
Kind=Protected AAC audio file
Size=2.6 MB





 Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
song title="Heart Of The Matter"
performer=Don Henley
mean speed/objective tempo=88.1 beats per minute
average beat=681 milliseconds
mean emotion according to the meanspeed music conjecture=Renewal



/Ian Andrew Schneider/
NJ, US

http://www.google.com/search?q=meanspeed+&btnG=Search

Ian Andrew Schneider
"I didn't inhale."

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Researchers map the math in music

by Kitta MacPherson · Posted April 17, 2008; 02:00 p.m.

The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries.

More than 2000 years ago Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.

And the so-called musica universalis or “music of the spheres” emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies — the sun, moon and planets — could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors – Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University — have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called “geometrical music theory” that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into “families.” They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way “x” and “y” coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

Different types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.The work represents a significant departure from other attempts to quantify music, according to Rachel Wells Hall of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. In an accompanying essay, she writes that their effort, “stands out both for the breadth of its musical implications and the depth of its mathematical content.”

The method, according to its authors, allows them to analyze and compare many kinds of Western (and perhaps some non-Western) music. (The method focuses on Western-style music because concepts like “chord” are not universal in all styles.) It also incorporates many past schemes by music theorists to render music into mathematical form.

“The music of the spheres isn’t really a metaphor — some musical spaces really are spheres,” said Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton. “The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn’t done before.”

Like what?

“You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys,” he said. “You could create new kinds of visualization tools — imagine going to a classical music concert where the music was being translated visually. We could change the way we educate musicians. There are lots of practical consequences that could follow from these ideas.”

“But to me,” Tymoczko added, “the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries.”

Understanding music, the authors write, is a process of discarding information. For instance, suppose a musician plays middle “C” on a piano, followed by the note “E” above that and the note “G” above that. Musicians have many different terms to describe this sequence of events, such as “an ascending C major arpeggio,” “a C major chord,” or “a major chord.” The authors provide a unified mathematical framework for relating these different descriptions of the same musical event.

The trio describes five different ways of categorizing collections of notes that are similar, but not identical. They refer to these musical resemblances as the “OPTIC symmetries,” with each letter of the word “OPTIC” representing a different way of ignoring musical information — for instance, what octave the notes are in, their order, or how many times each note is repeated. The authors show that five symmetries can be combined with each other to produce a cornucopia of different musical concepts, some of which are familiar and some of which are novel.

In this way, the musicians are able to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence.

Once notes are translated into numbers and then translated again into the language of geometry the result is a rich menagerie of geometrical spaces, each inhabited by a different species of geometrical object. After all the mathematics is done, three-note chords end up on a triangular donut while chord types perch on the surface of a cone.

The broad effort follows upon earlier work by Tymoczko in which he developed geometric models for selected musical objects.

The method could help answer whether there are new scales and chords that exist but have yet to be discovered.

“Have Western composers already discovered the essential and most important musical objects?” Tymoczko asked. “If so, then Western music is more than just an arbitrary set of conventions. It may be that the basic objects of Western music are fantastically special, in which case it would be quite difficult to find alternatives to broadly traditional methods of musical organization.”

The tools for analysis also offer the exciting possibility of investigating the differences between musical styles.

“Our methods are not so great at distinguishing Aerosmith from the Rolling Stones,” Tymoczko said. “But they might allow you to visualize some of the differences between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And they certainly help you understand more deeply how classical music relates to rock or is different from atonal music.”