A Blog Book, by Victor Grauer



. . . . . for Alan Lomax, who lives . . . . .



I felt that their music came from the back of time, but also, to a certain extent, from my own depths.

Simha Arom

Monday, August 15, 2011

Sounding the Depths, online and in paperback

Sounding the Depths is now complete in eighteen chapters, readable either online, as a freely accessible "blog book" -- or as a beautifully bound paperback, available for purchase via CreateSpace or Amazon.com. To read online from the beginning, you may start with the Preface or Introduction -- or go directly to any of the chapters or "sidebars" from the Blog Archive to your right.

After receiving some complaints from people who, like myself, prefer reading from a printed text, I decided it would be a good idea to make a hard copy version available. My task was made especially simple and convenient by a remarkable organization called CreateSpace, which enables authors to publish their own work at minimal cost, thanks to the new "print-on-demand" technology that is transforming the world of publishing. 

The paperback contains the complete text, more or less as it appears on this blog, though with a number of relatively minor revisions. However, it doesn't contain, for obvious reasons, any of the audio or video links. Nor does it contain, for reasons not so obvious, most of the figures (photos, maps, diagrams, etc.). As I see it, such materials are covered by the "fair use" provisions of US copyright law, but publishers and their lawyers are running scared these days, so in order to include them in the printed version I'd have needed to obtain permissions for each and every one, an all but impossible task for reasons that should be obvious. 

Thus, for the convenience of hard copy readers, I've added two pages to this blog, one containing the Audio-Visual Examples, another containing the Figures. (Both links can be found directly under the Blog Archive.) 

The paperback, priced at $18.00, can be ordered from either CreateSpace or Amazon. (If you order from CreateSpace I'll get a larger commission, but you'll get free shipping from Amazon with an order of $25 or more.)

10 comments:

  1. Hi, Victor. I fear I do not have your email, so I'm dropping a comment here. Even if aridly technical, I'm quite sure that you want to take a loot at this new PLoS ONE paper on "musical genetics":

    AVPR1A and SLC6A4 Polymorphisms in Choral Singers and Non-Musicians: A Gene Association Study.

    They found some correlations, and discarded others, in an ethnically homogeneous sample (white British). Not much but you surely want to know.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Maju. Thanks for the reference and the link. I just skimmed the article but am not sure what to make of it. A correlation in itself doesn't mean that much, as it could be due to a wide range of possible factors. It would be more interesting if the sample included singers from several different cultures, especially because a correlation involving people from only a single milieu could easily be due to all sorts of factors not considered by the researchers. I'm also skeptical of any study that is exclusively based on statistical "significance," as this is, as I'm sure you realize, an artificial standard.

    Nevertheless, this sort of research is certainly of interest and could lead to something significant, so thanks for keeping me posted.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nah, just for the record. Also another archaeo-music news I stumbled upon today: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/16/10426123-scientists-revive-sacred-sounds.

    Just so you know. I can't make much of either but I imagine that you, with your specialist interest, want to know.

    As for ethnically homogeneous samples, that's a common vice in all GWAS studies: researchers find easier to scan a homogeneous sample, leaving the possible extension to the rest of the World for future research (which may or not arrive).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dear Victor,
    Could you kindly send me your email again as I am away from my desk and do not have access to my address book. I finished reading Sounding the Depths (the paperback)and I'd like to send you some comments.Your findings and conclusions do indeed match mine in ways that are decisive and fundamental. I will put your link on my web page and maybe try and create a blogbook. In any case, bravo and bravo encore. There are of course a number of questions marks, but considering your reconstruction of what you call the HBC/HMC and my own construction of open-aggregated "anarchic" communities, the similarity and even structural identity of both models are overwhelming.
    Charles

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dear Victor!

    I hope this link will be interesting for You:

    www.frrepublic.com/focus/chat/2933236

    it's about link music & language genesis

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry, but the link doesn't work. Did you mis-spell it?

      Delete
    2. Sorry, it's my mistake
      "freerepublic"! other data is correct
      Please forgive me

      Delete
    3. Still doesn't work: "The requested document does not exist on this server."

      Delete
  6. Rice University author is B.J Almond 18.09.2012

    ReplyDelete
  7. http://fulllotusqigong.blogspot.com/2012/11/non-commutative-resonance-quantum.html Non-commutative resonance, quantum biology and logical inference: the secret of paranormal alchemy

    Dr. Victor Grauer - the above is my new blogpost overview on the secret of the 1-4-5 music intervals. I link your book. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete