This elemental internal life of a tone or sound can be most meaningfully described as ‘the microcosm of music’.

From the first sound impulse, a sound grows in time and space into a complex tonal pattern, like a tree from a seed and at some point in time it decays – like every other thing in creation.

Today, these internally living structural developments of tones and sounds can be rendered visible and audible using special scientific devices.

Thus today it is scientifically and technologically possible to filter out individual internal tonal developments from a tone or sound and, as such, to examine them.

And if we spatially and temporally lengthen these acoustic expressions, which may themselves last only fractions of a second, then we recognise in each one of them an infinite number of connected movements – each of them a completely individual variable tone with its own variable pitch and volume, its own variable rhythm, its own point and time of origin and a completely unique pattern of development – nothing short of a ‘personal journey through life’.

Nevertheless, there are fixed rules in their evolution, like those we also know in the physical, chemical, biological or astronomical world as ‘natural laws’.

Thus in the complexly constructed internal tonal world of just a single individual tone or sound, we find multifarious, natural ‘social’ relationships between very many fine tones, whereby, time-and-again, new ‘social’ orders gain and then lose the upper-hand: the development of ever newer, more natural, more individual, more integrated social and ecological patterns of order in chaos.

With ‘music’ we best describe first this internal life of tones or sounds, which is an integral part of them and makes their internal developments possible – similar to the way in which our internal life determines for each one of us the way through life and, over and above this, the way of our social relationships and ultimately, also the course of the entire ecological development.

Even in one single sound alone – singled out from the twittering of birds – it is possible to discover a gigantic concert of birds, and in a single sound from the human voice one can hear – if one listens carefully – massive choirs, full of sounds and individual songs.

However, the natural abilities of our ‘musical ear’ have been deafened and disabled by the many ecological crises – especially in music too. Therefore it must be our commitment to open up this microcosm of music little-by-little and, as listeners, to penetrate this never-ending, hidden world where the elemental nature of the music will be revealed to us. Then we will recognise the eternal laws of harmony of our life.1