Intro to Music now on Android!

...and some reflections on this ongoing course release

I’m very happy to announce that the first 10 tracks of the metaphysically mind-bending ‘Introduction to Music (Theory)’ are now available on the Android app (and will hopefully be on iOS soon)! You may need to update the app manually for the new course to appear, and more tracks will be added automatically as they become available.

I really hope the app helps get this new course the outreach it deserves because the truth is, I don’t know if I’ve ever been so excited about sharing anything! I must confess that this course comes at a hugely relevant time for me personally, at a time in which I have forever more doubts about the nature of reality and of existence, about what is consciousness and what is conscious, about what is matter and how it matters. I didn’t expect music to have so much to say about all of this.

The above image (whose colours I have inverted to make it slightly more legible) I posted to Facebook in the middle of a hot January night in Buenos Aires in 2013, with the caption ‘(creo que tomé demasiado café)’ - ‘(I think I drank too much coffee)'. Little did I know that these initial stabs in the dark would, nearly a decade later, lead to a course whose writing would change me.

The questions and answers that music offers us (answers which usually come in the form of more questions) feed into that spiritual obsession which has haunted me intermittently since childhood: ‘what is everything?’, or rather just ‘what is?’, or ‘what is is?’, and all of that. As the Thinking Method aims to make a generalist out of the learner (and teacher) through any specific subject, I am always looking to see what anything has to tell us about everything else. In the same way that language has seemingly endless relevance beyond language itself, well, music might just be the master at that game. From every answer music offers us, a hundred questions sprout, but as mentioned, sometimes questions are answers. The very fact that a question can stand up, that a question in itself can work, is in itself an answer, is in itself a form of knowledge. Intro to Music affords us with many such questions that we are all the richer for not knowing the answers to. Understanding enough to ask such questions with a genuine sincerity, with a new-found innocence paradoxically achieved through knowledge, threatens to move us beyond knowledge and into wisdom.

If some of you come to share any of my doubts about the reality we, apparently, coinhabit - then I’ll be a happier man for it. Along this (ongoing) pseudo-mystical experience of writing Intro to Music, I have come to believe that without such questions, without such doubts, many of us may find ourselves suffering from an underlying spiritual poverty that is out of whack with the way we might otherwise naturally engage with the world and one another. The cultural cynicism that many of us have been indoctrinated into has the effect of writing off some of those grander and seemingly unanswerable questions as stuff that doesn’t deserve our attention. But those questions -especially when we are more concerned with meaningful questions than answers- can help us understand life-changing things about ourselves, our relationships, our societies and cultures, and the empowering meaningfulness behind our lives.

Whether you want to pick up an instrument or not, whether the idea of composing music excites you or otherwise, whether you have any interest in why music makes you feel, or even if you are just wondering why you never felt especially moved by music like other people seem to be - wherever it is that you stand in regards to the sonic art forms you have been exposed to thus far in life, analysing the resources of these art forms is a delicious treat. It’s stuff I’m so excited to discover that I need to get it ‘out there’ with something akin to a wild desperation to find the bathroom. My laid back attitude about whether people do my courses or not has subsided. I want everyone to do ‘Introduction to Music (Theory)’!

I can't help but think this young course might already be my best work yet, and we’re only just starting down the rabbit hole - there’s so many more groundbreaking ideas to come, and I’m bursting to piece them together in a way which really does do them justice. ‘Introduction to Music (Theory)’ is giving me a whole new reason to get out of bed in the morning, it is changing the Thinking Method, and what this means for new language courses remains to be seen! With this course, potential future Thinking Method teachers can also see the method in action in a new context, and start thinking about what that might mean for their own subject areas. There’s no telling what collaborations this game changing course might lead to, and it is my hope that we will soon get to enjoy many new subjects, from physics to economy to gastronomy, through entirely new lenses! If you have any doubts about this new project direction, about Language Transfer & The Thinking Method branching out into areas beyond language, I can only ask you to get your teeth into these tracks and taste the bigger picture!

And last but not least, the tracks on the app are much better quality than the YouTube tracks which have since been remastered, so if the volume or echo was problematic for you before, do give the course another try through the app (or SoundCloud, where the tracks were also able to get an update)!

So, buckle up and get onboard already, we’re going somewhere!

www.languagetransfer.org/music