Varieties of Tone of Voice and Engagement with Global Strategy

Alternating between a requisite variety of voices to engender coherence?

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Introduction

This speculative exploration follows from the juxtaposition of tones-of-voice and human values in a previous exercise (Varieties of Tone of Voice and Engagement with Global Strategy, 2020). That was provoked by the potential relevance to climate change (Hearing the Variety of Voices in Climate Change Discourse: recognizing the challenge of soundscape comprehension in controversy and emergency, 2019).

With respect to tones-of-voice, it was concluded that there was a case for exploring the design of new kinds of cognitive vehicle for the strategic navigation of knowledge space -- possibly to be caricatured as "Toneship Earth", in contrast with various existing preference for "Spaceship Earth".

Tones have long been organized by musicologists in terms of a tone-network (Tonnetz), typically presented flat in 2D -- although some 3D graphical representations have been proposed, as well suggestions for 4D. The concern here is with the cognitive engagement with an array of tones, especially  given the experiential importance of music to many. Whilst many special "visual effects" are now valued as an accompaniment to popular music, the current focus on Tonnetz would seem to ignore its cognitive implications in favour of its explanatory role in non-experiential academic terms. Global strategies are prsented in a similar non-experiential mode.

The array of tones can be understood as an integrative pattern of a high order, and with implications for even higher order. The question is how engagement with that array, and the modulation of tones within it, might suggest subtler forms of understanding of relevance to the articulation and comprehension of "global" strategy. This might be especially the case if the tone-network is represented spherically, effectively "wrapped around" the listener -- consistent with the manner in which "wrap around sound" is promoted and appreciated, increasingly in immersive environments. That situation can be caricatured otherwise if the array is then compared with an intrument which can be played like an organ, as may itself be speculatively explored (Envisaging a Comprehensible Global Brain -- as a Playful Organ, 2019).

A particular concern of this exploration is the manner in which comprehension is stepped down from levels of subtlety which defy meaningful articulation -- to degrees of articulation which do not adequately reflect the experiential reality of which they are then only a symbol. Especially problematic is the situation in which words are used as though they adequately held and communicated such subtlety -- as is typical of many references to human values.

The dilemma is that articulation through that process of reification is what enables distinctions to be made and interrelated, whereas this is a major difficulty with subtler experience. Hence the confusion of meanings of values such as peace, freedom, justice, and the like. Arguably these are even more appropriately understood dynamically rather than statically (Freedom, Democracy, Justice: Isolated Nouns or Interwoven Verbs? Illusory quest for qualities and principles dynamically disguised, 2011).

Imagining Toroidal Life as a Sustainable Alternative: From Globalization to Toroidization or back to Flatland? 2019

Matthew Huntbach, Notes on Semantic Nets and Frames, 1996

flatland grid system -- triangulated

inside-outside -- music

objectification

reification

Euler -- music and polyhedra

John Kao Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity Harper Business, 1997

The use of polyhedral features in this way recalls the long tradition of the method of loci, fundamental to mnemonics, as described by Frances Yates (The Art of Memory, 1966). In that light a toneship could then prove comparable to a memory palace or a memory theatre. Of potentially greater relevance, from an environmental perspective, is the function of a memorial garden -- as may have been the primary role of a philosopher's garden (Damon Young, In the Philosopherâ-'s Garden, Financial Review, 13 December 2012). As emphasized in the classic Chinese treatise on gardens, garden-making is then recognized as an exercise in world-making (Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, 1631). To be able to make a garden, the garden maker needs to meld with the landscape on the site, where natural phenomena become mnemonics. It is the ecology of nature, including man, which motivates and moves design

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