My disertation is built upon the idea that musical sounds are capable of creating places of their own,
spaces which we inhabit through creating sounds and listening.
In this places we create our identities, we build connections and strength our bonding.
This idea is so present in humans that many cultures have constructed sonic buildings.
But the relationship of sound and space is not just a metaphor:
the physics of sound delimits a region, it defines a space.
The common sense speaks of a sonic wave, as if sound is a directional wave such as a light,
but it is actually an expansive bubble, it expands from the center towards the periphery, forming a sphere.
As a sphere, sounds forces all sound dedicated spaces to be spherical as well.
In many of the buildings made for sounds, as this one we're right now, the sphere is somehow present.
if you're listening to me, it means that you're part of the sphere I'm creating with my own voice.
For the duration of this presentation, we are a community within this sphere.
We will share not only a space but also the        meanings created in it.
And how does this sonic sphere becomes 
a music sphere?
If the first cavemen paintings were portraits of what  was in front of their eyes,
we can assume that the first songs were inspired by what the environment presented to their ears.
A landscape is never silent, it is formed by images as well as sounds.
Sounds from the body and from the environment.
It is the environment that provides the primordial references to create music.
Using these sounds as a starting point, we'll create stories to give meaning to our world.
And the meanings that sounds are given varies according to each culture.
Meteorologists and ancient Vikings will apply different meanings to this sound.
For the prior it is the sound resulting of a shockwave caused by the expansion
of the air triggered by a electrical charge.
For the latter, it is the sound of the hammer of Thor.
'Thunder' is also the name of the bass drum of Rastafarian traditional music.
To listen to the orthodox Rasta people is a good way to think the body and the environment
as providers of the foundations of music.
"...Our Nyabinghi music consists of the bass (thunder), fundeh and kete, it's the heartbeat, the 1, 2 beat...
Our father, Prince Emmanuel, originated that towards our offspring, he set the foundations….
so we don't mix with no modern music…
our music is authentic, old skin and drums…
and then we have the priests and we have the chorals and hymns…
no instrumental thing that was made by society or how we say it, the Babylon…
we make our own music ourselves…
It's like life, you come down and you hear it and you vibrate with life and if you have darkness in it,
as the drum beat, your darkness force is driven on to you".
['The Vulture and the Hawk' by Pixinguinha ]
Our music is still being inspired by the sounds of the environment
These examples show that to know the meanings each culture apply to the sounds is important
for one to be part of the music sphere.
This attribution of meaning is deeply connected to our limbic system
which controls the immediate body reactions to environmental stimulus.
This system has a sonic anticipation mechanism,
a shortcut between the sound heard and the reaction of the body.
If you were walking in a forest and suddenly this sound came up...
your body wouldn't wait for a visual confirmation of the tiger to react.
The adrenalyn discharge would be automatic:  your breathing and heart beat would get heavy,
you would start to sweat and your pupils would dilate.
Some theories cite the bodily reactions activated by the limbic system (euphoria, stress and fear)
during playful human interactions as one of the origins of music.
For the Topoke people, from the Congo rainforest, this is the drum pattern that communicates
the passing of a member of the group.
The sound ask everyone to greet the ancestors and to mourn over the deceased.
The idea behind the theories is that this very sound could be used
in a context where no one has actually died,
perhaps during a ritual or performance that display the death of a cultural hero for example.
Even as a fiction, this sound could trigger on members of the Topoke sensations related to death.
But this only occurs if everyone involved shares the same language, if the're all part of the sphere.
There is another aspect beyond language that limits the size of musical spheres.
Sonic expansion is a highly energy consuming process.
As the distance between the sonic source and the listener increases,
the energy is spreaded over a wider area of the sphere, decreasing the sound intensity.
Which means that those far from the center won't be able to listen properly.
In order to listen better, the participants want to stay the closest possible to the source of sound.
They want to be at the center of the sphere.
That's why even when there's no spatial restrictions most musical performances happen in circles,
as the circle is the best disposition so everyone stays close to the sound.
The restriction imposed by language, by the soundscape and by the decrease of volume during the sound
expansion make the sonic sphere a very restricted place.
But one that makes it's inhabitants feel home.
They feel so welcomed and cozy that they start to deny what lies outside of the sphere.
That's why the Rasta we just heard emphasizes that their music does not blend, that it is authentic.
Summing up, the primordial music space is a bubble.
The use of the bubble metaphor as a pathway to explore music practices is inspired by the work of the
german philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.
In his book, Sloterdijk barely explores music and has a single chapter on sound.
He focus in other areas such as history, politics, religion, architecture and visual arts.
In an elevator pitch, my thesis is an application of Sloterdijk's theory to explore how humans
communicate through music practices.
These are the sounds of the catholic church sphere.
Inside of it, the voices of the priest, the choral and the organ create the community.
But this sphere behaves a little different from the previous ones.
It's objective is not to isolate those inside. It wants to reach out and pull the exterior in
so it can raise the number of devotees.
In order to do so it needs to expand the radius of the sphere.
That is the main purpose of the church's bell.
The bell is always placed on the highest spot in the church, which is build on the highest hill of the town.
All in order to increase the reach of the sonic sphere.
Alongside, it expands the reach of the multiple meanings of the bell sounds:
times to speak to God, the announcement of important births, tragedies, celebrations and son on…
The bell is a great example of how a sound can create a place of its own:
in Medieval times, if one could hear the bells from home, it meant that the house was under divine protection.
Inhabitants could count on the king's knights for protection against barbarians
the same way they could count on the tax                collector to knock on their door,
as the bell's sonic range also delimits the area for tax collecting.
Slowly, new technologies of sound creation 
and amplification came to life
which made sonic spheres bigger and more attractive to more people.
If once they were small and isolated bubbles, now they become to dispute the open space with other bubbles.
As bubbles meet, they merge into even bigger spheres.
In the past, to be able to share a sphere
we would have to be on the same place and share the same sonic repertoire.
But in the Modern Age spheres reached new spaces and the Sonic Beings don't have to
be in the same place or speak the same language to be part of the same sphere.
All they have to do is to share a similar music taste.
Small bubbles becomes huge Globes connected by radio, telegraphs, television and soundspeakers.
These technologies affected more than just the size of the spheres and their drive to gather more people.
They have affected sphere's matter itself.
If soundscapes are the starting point of music,
once these soundscapes change the music also change, one informing the other.
In one hand, these large globes became home for millions of dwellers.
In the other, their massive size made them 
 more uncomfortable and less cozy.
To live in the old bubbles meant to experience a reassuring feeling of
being unique and intimate, the feeling of 
 being at the center of the sphere.
Even though global technologies solved the  problems of sound reach,
they couldn't replicate the intimacy and strong bonding between all global dwellers.
This happens because the powerful, appealing messages emitted by globes are generic.
They are not enough to make everyone comfortable inside the sphere.
Little by little, we start to realise that globes were not formed by consensus as the cozy bubbles were.
They were formed by force.
They were never a solid and pacified sphere but a set of many bubbles held together.
Cracks start to gradually appear on   
 globes' walls and from inside of them
an infinite number of new bubbles start to emerge.
Different from ancient bubbles who isolated their inhabitants and the sounds they produced,
these new bubbles have thin walls, which enables the sounds to spread into the next bubble.
These new bubbles share, lend, borrow, steal, contaminate and get contaminated by their neighbours.
Music instruments themselves become copying machines.
On the DJ's turntables, discs are spheres and the mixer is the accelerator that put sounds into collision route.
At the end of the XX century, thanks to DJs, these collisions are more frequent in music.
This is a collision that happened in 1984 caught on tape, a case of mutual strangeness and inspiration
that became known as the first contact 
 between the spheres of rock and rap.
Run-D.M.C & Aerosmith - Walk This Way (1985)
When Globes crack open, the new bubbles that come out of them have a new shape,
the shape of foam: a set of highly malleable and connected spheres.
Combined with bubbles and globes,   
 foams form the trilogy
I used as theoretical and methodological  
reference to my dissertation.
Sloterdijk explicits one can read the three 
volumes in any particular order
because apart from the sequential interpretation that connects bubbles to Ancient and Medieval History,
globes to Modern Age and foams to Post-Modern, Contemporary Age,
there's also the interpretation that spheres coexist in time and space.
In other words, it is possible that a lost in time, isolated bubble somehow gets in touch with the foam
and both spheres are cross-contaminated with new sounds. This metamorphosis could turn this small
bubble into an expansive globe that later on could burst open and reveal even new small bubbles.
This is Bach's Partita in A minor, composed in 1718.
It is an obscure piece of the composer for 2 reasons: first because Bach's repertoire is
marked by vocal pieces such as chorals and masses and this is an instrumental piece.
Also because Bach's instrument was the organ and the Partita was written for the Baroque flute.
Bach's presumable inexperience in writting for such instrument made the Partita
one of the most difficult pieces to play on the baroque flute.
The Partita was almost lost forever. It only survived due to a single copy handmade in 1723
by a copyist known in the literature as 'anonymous copyist n.5'.
It was born as a small bubble in Dresden, Germany,
and reappeared 300 yeas later as a globe in Capao Redondo, in the suburbs of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The new version of the Partita was the world's most played brazilian song in 2018.
In YouTube alone there were more than 1,25 billion playbacks.
800 million of these playbacks came from foreign countries.
This global expansion later gave birth to foams.
The current dynamics of music happen in part due to these two devices I have with me today.
None of them are novelties, at the beginning of the 80's they were already available in the market.
The mixer is a foam machine. It works by mixing bubbles together to see what comes out of them.
Each channel controls the level of contamination of a specific sphere
With the sampler I can access any bubble from different times and regions and bring them to the present time
either by sound recordings of the original bubble or by digital approximations.
With them I can take the Partita to different times and places.
For example, I can remain in Germany, Partita's birth place, but fast forwarding 250 years ahead,
leaving the Baroque era and entering the Krautrock, the avant-garde, rock-electronic scene.
I can also go back 500 years and explore what  would be like if Bach lived in a monastery
and had composed the Partita for his main 
instrument, the medieval organ.
*I just closed the synthesizer bubble I  
  left open from the prevous example :-)
My thesis is built upon this potential of visiting infinite sphere to explore a different place in each chapter.
The primordial music experiences of hominids.
A Pataxó music ritual in a National Park in Bahia, north east Brazil.
The popular song of the Modern European metropolis.
The musical taste of the XX century.
The contemporary music fusions based   
 on the mixer and the sampler.
And finally the music created by artificial intelligence.
This is a brief summary of my dissertation
I thank you for your time and look forward to hear your thoughts.
