Manfred Clynes

Manfred Edward Clynes (August 14, 1925 – January 19, 2020) was an Austrian-born scientist, inventor, and musician. He is best known for his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology.

Overview

Manfred Clynes' work combines music and science, more particularly, neurophysiology and neuroscience. Clynes' musical achievements embrace performance and interpretation, exploring and clarifying the function of time forms in the expression of music—and of emotions generally—in connection with brain function in its electrical manifestations. As a concert pianist, he has recorded versions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. As an inventor, his inventions (about 40 patents) include, besides the CAT computer for electrical brain research, the online auto- and cross-correlator, and inventions in the field of ultrasound (Clynes invented color ultrasound.) as well as telemetering, data recording, and wind energy. The creative process of computer realizations of classical music with SuperConductor is based on his discoveries of fundamental principles of musicality. Clynes was the subject of a front page article in ''The Wall Street Journal'', September 21, 1991.

Emotion shapes, biologic primacy laws

Clynes concentrated on what he saw as the natural and unalterable interlocking of the central nervous system with basic expressive time forms, and on the innate power of those forms to generate specific basic emotions. He recognized that we are all familiar with this interlocking in our experiences of laughter and of yawning, although its scientific importance had been largely swept under the carpet by a Skinnerian bias and still largely is. According to Clynes's experimental researchClynes, M., Sentics: The Touch of Emotions, 250 pp, Doubleday/Anchor, New York, 1977.Clynes, M., Generalised emotion, its production, and sentic cycle therapy, in Emotions and Psychopathology, M.Clynes and J. Panksepp, eds., pp. 107–170, Plenum Press, New York, 1988. these time forms (“sentic forms”), as embodied in the central nervous system, are primary to the varied modes in which they find expression, such as sound, touch, and gesture. Clynes was able to prove this by systematically deriving sounds from subjects’ expressions of emotions through touch, and then playing those sounds to hearers culturally remote from the original subjects. In one trial, for example, Aborigines in Central Australia were able to correctly identify the specific emotional qualities of sounds derived from the touch of white urban Americans. (This experiment was featured on Nova, What Is Music? in 1988). Clynes found in this a confirmation of the existence of biologically fixed, universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of emotion that give rise to much of the experience within human societies. In 2018, he co-authored a publication with Dr Alicia Heraz in the Journal of Medical Internet Research that demonstrate similar emotional patterns on mobile phones with force sensitivity.

Some of these dynamic forms appear to be shared by those animals that have time consciousnesses at a similar rate to humans; hence the intuition of pet owners that their dog or cat understands tone of voice and the emotional form of touch. Anger, love, and grief, for example, according to Clynes, have clearly different dynamic expressive forms. Importantly, a cardinal property of this inherent biologic communication language, in Clynes’ findings, is that the more closely an expression follows the precise dynamic form, the more powerful is the generation of the corresponding emotion, in both the person expressing and in the perceiver of the expression. Hence, presumably, such phenomena as charisma (in persons whose performance of emotional expressions closely follows the universal form). His experience with Pablo Casals