Music is born in the sea

 

I.

A disturbing wave

Brought new visions

In four dimensions

While I rave

Be wave

Be the change

Within a pressure range

Of how water behaves

Teacher wave

Of the sound of the sea

While I rave

It’s around me

Wave, Water,

Wasser, Vud,

Hydro,

Unda, Onda

 

Before our planet became the way it is today, there was quite a long period of time, the length of which is still reason of debate among researchers, when no man-made music existed on land. As extraneous as it might seem, humans lived simply without it, timing their movements only to the sounds they randomly produced and to the sounds of nature. Dances to leaves moved by the wind, songs of the birds in the morning, falling asleep with the waves – that was pretty much it.

Only a very limited number of people, the people of the sea, had sometimes experienced exposure to harmonies and melodies, but they were still quite unfamiliar to the music they were perceiving. This was because listening happened mostly underwater, as if by chance, and lasted only instants, before the sound vibrations dissipated in the depth of the ocean.

The people of the sea knew the sea best; they were fishermen, divers, swimmers, shell hunters, cliff jumpers and surfers, and, yet the sea was too vast and deep to know it all. Nonetheless, it happened periodically that a person of the sea came back from a long journey, with eyes tired and skin dried by the sun light, to tell with a whisper, in the night circles, about hearing a music, a melody, which could have only come from the oceans. The whisper died there, like a wave dying on the sand, partly because the people of the sea knew no words with which to describe what they were hearing, because there were no instruments to reproduce the music, and because the vocal cords did not suffice to sing it. There was another reason why the whisper died there, like a breeze passing fast in a hot day. The people of the sea were naturally reserved and respectful. They hardly ever shared secrets about each other, and they never revealed those that nature had shared with them. Like waves that crush on the shore and die, but constantly repeat their movement, periodically, yet another person of the sea came back from a long dive to report having heard a melody, a special rhythm, a magical harmony. None of the people who came back, though, ever revealed what was producing the music, where it came from and what it sounded like. Those were secrets of water bodies, it was not the people’s of the sea responsibility and right to share them.

 

II.

Separating wave

Water and air

At the junction

ψ is your function

Propagating wave

Fluctuate faster

It is a disaster

If only we take

Cuddling wave

The people of the sea

They are honest and brave

It’s been guaranteed

At the junction

Of what’s theirs and yours

Music endures

A secret well kept

Until foreign intercept

 

Before our planet became the way it is today, there was quite a long period of time, the length of which is still reason of debate among researchers, when music only existed underwater. Sea creatures were able to sing and produce melodies and rhythm that spun across infinite genres. Each creature was able to generate different sounds depending on its characteristics. While swimming through currents and meeting other fish, they were able to assemble always new forms of music based on depth, on the mood they were in, based on what they had just eaten, on their age and on their previous encounters. The ocean was the only holder of all the sound waves created under the sea, and its memory was as vast as itself.

Sporadically fish and other sea animals would meet a weird species, humans or, rather, the humans introduced as the people of the sea. Those beings were strange mainly because no melody seemed to come out of them. The first reaction of the sea creatures was always to become suddenly silent, as if they as well had mirror neurons inducing an imitating behavior. Beside this initial response and surprise, the meeting between the two species had always been harmless. It was as if, both the people of the sea and the creatures of the sea, were keen on listening to each other, without having a common communication method. The physical properties acting as obstacles for the exchange were not yet understood, but both parties believed that patiently, one day, a revelation would have happened. They waited, calmly, respecting each other in the meantime.

 

III.

Wave dissimulate

The music within

Sound of violin

That changed your fate

Wave propagate high

Show mankind

We have no right

To take everything we find

Moving wave

A silent transformation

Slowly changing ratios

Wave communicating

While I rave

The secret of space

Where we left the trace

Of all the injustices we perpetrate

Silent sea,

Sacred sound.

 

The planet became the way it is today quite fast, when considering the long history of the universe.
One day, out of curiosity, greed and desire of expansion, the people of the far arrived at the place where the people of the sea had lived for ages. They started listening to their stories, observing their traditions, and learning their practices. The people of the sea were transparent, too close to water, to realize that the people of the far might not have been as respectful towards the long-held secret of the ocean. So it happened that the next time, when a person of the sea came back from a long swim and whispered in the night circles about the melody that was heard underwater, the whisper did not end in silence; the wave did not die on the shore. Unnaturally, the murmur was picked up by the people of the far, who, filled with curiosity and greed and desire of expansion, promptly started organizing expeditions in the underwater world. Armed with tools such as goggles, fins, and oxygen cylinders, they felt fearless in the name of their technical advantage.

The people of the far dove deep down and far wide and soon confirmed with their own ears and eyes the secret of the ocean, that had been kept safe for so long. They loved the music generated by the sea creatures and they started building instruments to reproduce it. In a very short time, they built flutes, violins, synthesizers, pianos, and triangles – firmed in the idea to stop creating only when all the music of the sea could have been reproduced on the earth.

The people of the far loved the music in a different way than the people of the sea; their love was possessive and jealous and brought with itself terrible consequences. In fact, little did they know that the more musical instruments they were creating and the more they were reproducing sea music, the more the creatures underwater stopped singing. The people of the sea were the first to notice the change, as attentive observer of the ocean. The person of the sea who came back from an expedition no longer whispered in the circles at night about hearing a melody. Now, every time a person of the sea came back from a dive, questioning eyes were awaiting, worried eyes on the point to ask out loud about the music from the ocean. More and more so, the response were eyes full of sadness for disappointing such profound expectations.

The sea became completely silent, quite fast.

Before it did, the sea creatures revealed themselves to the people of the sea: they let their last song propagate on the surface, where waves meet the air and, thus, released forever the music stored in the ocean, memory.

IV.

We were willing to share

Our music on earth

but what happened was theft

This is nature’s last call

when the people of the far

will have taken everything that’s left

nothing will remain of the earth’s whole