Neil McLachlan

I have always been fascinated by sound. Perhaps this started as a young child with inner ear infections, living in a world of sound that changed profoundly from day to day before I had time to establish normality. Music came later as a young teenager, when I found my grandfather’s violin on the top of his wardrobe. But my music teachers treated me like a 5-year-old, and I quickly became frustrated with boring lessons and obtuse notations and theories. So, I found my own way, taught myself to play and explore new worlds of sound and culture.

As a teenager and young adult, making music was an emotional sanctuary and place of communion with friends. It was never a professional career. Eventually a competitive and endlessly self-referential music culture repelled me. I had stayed at university, completing a PhD in the physical sciences which combined my love of nature with my love of physics. But by the time I had completed my degree, I was learning and working in sound art and performance with the university’s Mill Theatre.

It was there I discovered a Javanese gamelan, and became entranced by its otherworldly tonality, and a career in the arts seemed possible. Learning non-western music and dance, and building instruments in alternative tuning systems became a way to escape the confines of western music and to creatively explore relationships between music, dance, and society. Artist residencies in first nation and other communities created opportunities to develop new approaches to making instruments, ensembles and installations, and new ways of creating performance, re-telling social histories and reforming living culture.

Eventually this work allowed me to apply my education in physics to musical instrument design through computer modelling of vibration. But the western music theories I used to guide my instrument designs didn’t stack-up. Musical pitch and harmony could not be based on the harmonics of a string for instruments that don’t vibrate like strings. Moreover, after creating the first bells with harmonic overtones, a

feat that European bell makers had been attempting for over 300 years, I was shocked to find that bell players didn’t like them. They preferred the inharmonic bell sounds they already knew, even if that conflicted with western rules of harmony.

So for the next 25 years, in and out of universities, I have studied the neuroscience and psychology of auditory perception, often using music as the test case for the brain’s ability to create meaning from sound. But ideas that challenge the hegemony of western music theory are no longer welcome in western universities, university-based musicologists would not collaborate, and research funding dried up long ago.

The Music Research Institute is a response to this situation. I found a musicologist who had also discovered the inconsistencies of western music theory, and a philosopher and performer who was fascinated with how to think in sound rather than about sound. We talked and debated, we travelled together in Thailand to work with Buddhist music teachers, and we sought out fellow travellers, people who prized scholarship over tenure. These new companions sparkle with the joy of discovery, are gentle and thoughtful in disagreement, and never censure. This is the creed of the Music Research Institute as it seeks out new ideas about what music is and does. This is why I’m here.