Harmonic Loop

Recent reports about harmonizing mosquitoes have intrigued me greatly. Get the scoop at Neurophilosophy, or listen to the story on NPR. In either place you can hear the sound that's generating the buzz: turns out that the annoying whine a mosquito makes is produced by the wings as they rub against themselves. Interesting. But the amazing part is that female mosquitoes can determine if the frequency of the whine from the male's wing-beats will harmonize with its own wing-beats, and the resulting harmonic tone generated by their respective whines appears to be a primary mating signal. In the YouTube link on the Neurophilosophy post and on the NPR report we humans can listen in on their duet. Incredibly, with careful observation, entomologists have recorded the third-tone of a mosquito's harmonic convergence.

Musicians are trained, obviously, to recognize and respond to harmony. I'm not a musician, but I did play guitar in a band in college, and I clearly remember the first time I really heard and could manipulate that harmonic third-tone. It was breathtaking. Though I knew it existed, in theory, I hadn't actually heard it before, so I was shocked and surprised when it appeared -- a tone not attached to me or my partner, floating between us, steady in the space between our voices and instruments, only to fade away as we drifted out of sync with each other.

So how does this converge with photography and picture-making? As conversation. But we have to jump to metaphor to get there.

When we talk about stuff that matters, patiently, listening and responding from immediacy and not from cliches or a memorized script, we find ourselves in new territory, unearthing new knowledge. Meaning that did not exist before becomes the point of our exchange. I'm sure you can point to a moment when this happened for you: inside conversation, suddenly, you find yourself saying something you didn't know you knew. This is the third-tone. Meaning comes from the harmonics we generate by listening and talking about stuff that matters with people we respect and care for.

For me, photography matters. Pictures matter. In class this semester, as we get to know each other, we'll start a conversation that harmonizes thought and action, and new pictures will emerge. This has been one of my primary goals ever since I started teaching -- to build a deeper engagement with pictures. Partly it involves building a common vocabulary within the classroom, and partly it involves unfolding some of the mystery behind the tools. Mostly it means making lots of pictures, and then building patience with ourselves and each other as we learn to share them.

I love this mosquito story because it reminds me of that harmonic moment a long time ago. And because it suggests another way to talk about the conversation photographs ignite; it's another analogy, or metaphor, that might help clarify the process. But mosquitoes aren't metaphors; they're physical components of an observable universe, and harmonics seem to function for them as part of an auto-feedback loop. Pictures are part of the observable world too. But for us, the harmonics aren't automatic; we have to complete the loop ourselves, by keeping the conversation alive.

This picture is from a few years when my sons still engaged in elaborate games of fantasy that required each player to weave imaginative narratives. Score was kept by some internal calculus I never mastered. In this case they were able to act out some of the individual threads of the story-game because we were visiting my brother in Washington state and there was lots of room to run around, a rare occurrence of their verbal game taking on a physical life of its own. I wrote about this way of playing once in an earlier post.