Its Own Gospel

What is the shape of a phrase?

In music, structure and feeling are one.

We can point to a structure in sound, break it down to its mathematics, and connect it back to the order of the world. And simultaneously, primarily even, we can pay attention to how the structure feels, appears to us.

Musicians know that the two shape and inform each other; feeling and structure are not separate. When the music is playing, the real structures of our own living dance with the structures of the cosmos.

In feeling and meaning, I explored the structure of stories, musical phrases, and the way our neurons fire and learn—and out of that exploration, a general shape of articulation emerged.

In all three areas, we feel a pattern that grooves in 3:2:

• In stories, we find a 3-pattern—beginning, middle, and end—and also a deeper 2-pattern: rise and fall.

• In a sample musical phrase, we find—opening key, modulation, final cadence in a new key—and also: open and close.

• In the neuroscience of concept formation, we find—expectation, break, repair—and also: tension and release.

The “3:2” Shape of Articulation

All of these insights come together as the “shape of articulation.”

the breath that moves through story, music, and our living

Articulations are fractal, working at every level of perception: from the entire piece down to a single pulse.¹

3-pattern:

• beginning/middle/end

• expectation/break/repair

• tension/transformation/release

• exposition/climax/recapitulation

• stimulation/awareness/felt-cognition

• A/B/C

2-pattern:

• open:close

• tension:release

• inhale:exhale

• rise:fall

• stability:instability

• impact:resolution

• A:B

The 2-pattern emerges when the 3-pattern is understood as a process unfolding over time. The 3 (a→b→c) is not just three ••• fixed points. The 3 is a movement, where the transitions from a→b and b→c are what truly matter. Living inside the process reveals not three static things but two movements that form one breath. This living-inside is how the 3 becomes 2, and how, through the deepening of relation, the 2 can become 1.

Let it be stated clearly: the ‘open-close—tension-release—inhale-exhale—rise-fall’ pattern is fundamental to sense-making and consciousness.²

The ‘proof’ is found in listening closely. Eventually, it becomes everywhere. All meaningful structures breathe in this way.³

— Inhale exhale. One becomes the other.

3 → 2 → then 1. —

1. See also Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of actual occasions—or “drops of experience”—what he considers the ultimate building block of reality, in his book, Process and Reality. Whitehead (in 1929) writes:

“I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience are the really real things, which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe ever plunging into the creative advance.”

2. This view aligns with contemporary theories in both neuroscience and phenomenology. Concepts and emotions are made through predictive processing pathways of expectation-break-repair in the body/brain (See Barrett, How Emotions Are Made). In phenomenology, accounts of lived experience describe perception as horizons of anticipation and integration (See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, and also the concept of the Lifeworld).

3. See my post on The shape of musical time to get a deeper feel for how the “3:2” shape is nonlinear.