曼菲德·克莱恩斯(Manfred Clynes)

“Cyborg”,这个名词是Manfred Clynes与Nathan Kline于1960年所提出,指的是采用辅助的器械,来增强人类克服环境的能力,后来指有机和人工的系统存在于一个生物体上。假肢、假牙等这些人工器官,将人变成了Cyborg。在《终结者》、《机械战警》和《骇客帝国》中,Cyborg是机械入侵人体的交融物。
1960年,在美国航天医学空军学校进行合作研究的两位学者——Manfred E.Clynes与Nathan S.Klin,第一次把Cyborg这个概念引入了人们的视野。当时两位学者中Clynes是生理仪器和电子数据处理系统的设计者,Kline则是临床精神病学的医师。两位不同领域学者共同定义了Cyborg这个概念,
最初这个概念的提出是为了解决未来人类在星际旅行中面临的问题。人类脆弱的肌体显然无法承受动辄上百光年的高速旅行,为了克服人类生理机能的不足,两位学者提出,可以向人类身体移植辅助的神经控制装置,增强人类适应外部空间的生存能力。Cyborg这个词就是神经控制装置(Cybernetic device)与有机体(organism)的混写。
Cyborg是能够“自我调节的人机系统”(self-regulating man-machine system),它既拥有机械装置运作精确、寿命长久的特点,也具备人类的一切特质,比如感觉、感情以及思维。
这个概念自提出以来,即受到学术界的普遍关注,特别是在后现代思潮涌动的当代,更以其象征意义成为研究的热点。
关于Cyborg的研究大体可以分为两大类,一类与科技相关,主要是探索cyborg的未来可实现性,也就是通过移植、修补之类的技术,将生物体同非有机体结合以增强生物适应环境的能力;
另外一类则可归结为对cyborg的哲学思考,主要是反思cyborg给人类个体和社会所带来的深远影响。在现时代,cyborg已不单是个学术话题,许多艺术家更是以电影和美术等形式不断展现其魅力所在。
个人简介编辑本段回目录
Manfred Clynes (born August 14, 1925) is a scientist, inventor, and musician. He is best known for his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology.

Overview
Manfred Clynes' work combines music and science, more particularly, neurophysiology and neuroscience. Clynes' musical achievements embraces performance and interpretation, exploring and clarifying the function of time forms in the expression of music--and of emotions generally--in connection with brain function in its electrical manifestations. As a concert pianist, he has recorded outstanding versions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. As an inventor, his inventions (about 40 patents) include, besides the CAT computer for electrical brain research, the online auto- and cross-correlator, and inventions in the field of ultrasound (Clynes invented color ultrasound.) as well as telemetering, data recording, and wind energy. The creative process of computer realizations of classical music with SuperConductor is based on his discoveries of fundamental principles of musicality. Clynes was the subject of a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21 1991.
Emotion shapes, biologic primacy laws
Clynes concentrated on what he saw as the natural and unalterable interlocking of the central nervous system with basic expressive time forms, and on the innate power of those forms to generate specific basic emotions. He recognized that we are all familiar with this interlocking in our experiences of laughter and of yawning, although its scientific importance had been largely swept under the carpet by a Skinnerian bias and still largely is. According to Clynes’s experimental research[1][2][3] these time forms (“sentic forms”), as embodied in the central nervous system, are primary to the varied modes in which they find expression, such as sound, touch, and gesture. Clynes was able to prove this by systematically deriving sounds from subjects’ expressions of emotions through touch, and then playing those sounds to hearers culturally remote from the original subjects. In one trial, for example, Aborigines in Central Australia were able to correctly identify the specific emotional qualities of sounds derived from the touch of white urban Americans. (This experiment was featured on Nova, What Is Music? in 1988). Clynes found in this a confirmation of the existence of biologically fixed, universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of emotion that give rise to much of the experience within human societies.[2][3]
Some of these dynamic forms appear to be shared by those animals that have time consciousnesses at a similar rate to humans; hence the intuition of pet owners that their dog or cat understands tone of voice and the emotional form of touch. Anger, love, and grief, for example, according to Clynes, have clearly different dynamic expressive forms. Importantly, a cardinal property of this inherent biologic communication language, in Clynes’ findings, is that the more closely an expression follows the precise dynamic form, the more powerful is the generation of the corresponding emotion, in both the person expressing and in the perceiver of the expression.[2] Hence, presumably, such phenomena as charisma (in persons whose performance of emotional expressions closely follows the universal form). His experience with Pablo Casals confirmed for Clynes the importance of this faithfulness to the natural dynamic form in generating emotionally significant meaning in musical performance.
Sentic cycles
Drawing on these findings, Clynes also developed an application—a simple touch art form—in which, without music, subjects expressed, through repeated finger pressure, a sequence of emotions timed according to the natural requirements of the sentic forms. The 25-minute sequence, called the Sentic Cycle, comprises: no-emotion, anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence. Subjects reported experiencing calmness and energy. Many also evidenced progress in the alleviation of depression, and, to some degree, tobacco and alcohol addictions, as a result of repeated application of this process.[2][3][4] Thousands of people have by now experienced sentic cycles, some for years, some even decades. In the 1980s especially, Clynes taught various groups to conduct Sentic Cycles on their own. Nowadays, the Sentic Cycle kit is available on the the Internet.
Early work developing sentic cycles in the 1970s had convinced Clynes also that it is easy with it for most people to proceed from experiencing one emotion to another quite rapidly. After three or four minutes of one emotion, a person tended to be being satiated with the current emotion. The ready switching to the next emotion with quite fresh experience pointed to the existence of specific receptors in the brain, he suggested, that become satiated with particular neurohormones; this was later confirmed by the identification of a number of such receptors.[3] This finding links well with the historic tendency of composers to vary emotions every 4 minutes or so in their compositions. The human need for variety is based on brain receptor properties. As anyone who has seen more than three Charlie Chaplin movies in a row can testify, laughter, too, palls after prolonged exposure, and it seems to be for the same reason. Clynes also studied laughter, "nature's arrow from appearance to reality"[2]. In (nonderisive) laughter, according to Clynes, a small element of disorder is suddenly understood to be only apparently disordered, within an actual, larger, order. He then predicted the existence of soundless laughter,[2] in which the sound production is replaced by tactile pressure at the same temporal pattern. In studies at UCSD the mean repetitions of the “ha's” was found to be approximately 5.18 per second.[5] Clynes further hypothesized that couples with unmatched speeds of laughter might not be as readily compatible as those whose laughter was harmoniously coordinated.[5]
Clynes enthusiastically published his realization that love, joy, and reverence were always there to be experienced, capable of being generated through precise expression and accessible by simple means, due to the connection to their biologic roots. Music had always been a special means for this, but now, with this touch artform, it was universally accessible. By this means , even negative emotions, such as grief anger, could be enjoyed in a compassionate non-destructive framework.
In the 70s and in the 80s Clynes had started to write poems, a few of which had found their way into his book Sentics. Later, Marvin Minsky quoted from them in his book The Society of Mind. In the late 1980s and in the 1990s he wrote his 12 Animal Poems.[6] Boundaries of Compassion is a substantial set of poems growing out of his experience in Germany while doing experimental work at the Luedenscheid hospital in the summer of 1985, poems in regard to what Germans call “the Jewish Question.”[7]
Early invention of inertial guidance at age 15
Manfred Clynes was born on August 14, 1925 in Vienna Austria. His family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in September 1938 to escape the Nazis. In Australia, at fifteen, in his last year at high school, having newly learned calculus, he invented the inertial guidance method for aircraft using piezoelectric crystals and repeated electronic integration, but Australian authorities denied that it would work. In fact, the same system Clynes had invented was later used with great success, during the last part of the Second World War. The detailed descriptions of this invention as written by the fifteen-year-old Clynes are rigorous; it was the first of his many inventions to come that worked. (Clynes' earlier attempt, at the age of thirteen, to create a perpetual motion device was naturally a failure). In 1946 Clynes graduated from the University of Melbourne having studied both engineering science and music. His musical talent was recognized by a series of awards, concerto performances and prizes, one of which provided a three-year graduate fellowship to the Juilliard School of Music. At Juilliard, he was a piano student of Olga Samaroff and Sascha Gorodnitzki.
He received his MS degree from Juilliard in 1949, after having performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Tanglewood Music Festival (in 1948) then under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky in a performance of which the pianist Gerson Yessin, who was present, recently recalled as "monumental." [Yessin: "Manfred played beautifully, outstandingly."] After graduating from Juilliard (It gave no doctorates then), Clynes retreated to a small log cabin at six thousand feet altitude in the solitude of Wrightwood, California. There he learned Bach's Goldberg Variations and other works. He performed them for the first time in October 1949, in Ojai, at J. Krishnamurti's school, and, in 1950, along with other works, in all the capital cities of Australia, to great acclaim. He soon became regarded as one of Australia's outstanding pianists.
In 1952 he was invited to Princeton University as a graduate student in the Music Department, and issued a green card, to pursue his studies in the Psychology of Music, with a Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Award. There he became aware of the work of G. Becking, who in 1928 had published a sensitive, if nonscientific, study of distinctive motor patterns associated in following the music of individual composers. It was this work that led, in the late 1960s, to Clynes' scientific sentographic studies of what he termed composers' pulses, as their motor manifestation, in which Pablo Casals and Rudolf Serkin were to be his first subjects.[8]

Young Clynes had a personal letter of introduction to Albert Einstein from an elderly lady in Australia, with whom, in her youth, Einstein had exchanged poems. Soon Einstein invited him repeatedly to dinner at his home, and a friendship sprang up between the two men. (See details Michelmore’s Life of Einstein.) Clynes played for Einstein on his fine Bechstein piano, especially Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. He loved Clynes’ Mozart and Schubert, calling Clynes “a blessed artist” (Ein begnadeter Künstler) In May 1953 Einstein wrote Clynes a personal letter by hand to help him in his forthcoming European tour.
Letter from Einstein(Translation of Einstein's letter, dated Princeton, 18 May, 1953: "Dear Mr. Clynes, I am truly grateful to you for the great enjoyment that your piano playing has given me. Your performance combines a clear insight into the inner structure of the work of art with a rare spontaneity and freshness of conception. With all the secure mastery of your instrument, your technique never supplants the artistic content, as unfortunately so often is the case in our time. I am convinced that you will find the appreciation to which your achievement entitles you. With friendly greetings yours, A. Einstein.")
Concert tours in 1953 Goldberg Variations
In 1953, helped by the letter from Einstein, Clynes toured Europe with great critical success, playing the Goldberg Variations. The tour ended with a solo concert before an audience of 2500 at London's Royal Festival Hall, which had just been built.[9]
Inventions and scientific discoveries
In 1954, in order to provide for his parents and to raise funds necessary to underwrite his musical career, Clynes, on the basis of his scientific training, took a job working with a new analog computer, a device about which, at the time, both he and his interviewer were ignorant. In short shrift, however, Clynes mastered that computer, and then within a year created a new analytic method of stabilizing dynamical systems, which he published as a paper in the IEEE Transactions. CLYNES, Manfred (1955-10-02), "Simple analytic method for linear feedback system dynamics", Transactions of the American Institute for Electrical Engineers, Part 2: 377–383 Bogue, the company he was working for, doubled his salary, after a year, unasked. "Only in America!" was Clynes' reaction. (He became a citizen in 1960.)
In 1955, at Clynes' suggestion, Bogue employed his father, then aged 72, from Australia, as a naval architect; the elder Clynes had not been permitted to work in his profession in Australia, because he was not British-born. For a time Clynes father and son went to work together every morning (to Clynes’ rejoicing).
As the result of a chance meeting, in 1956, Dr Nathan Kline, Director of the Research Center of Rockland State Hospital, a large mental hospital, offered Clynes a substantial research job at the Center, where he in 1956 became ‘Chief Research Scientist’. Kline was to become the recipient of two Lasker Awards, and had built up that research center to formidable renown. (It is now called the Nathan S. Kline Psychiatric Center.)
CAT computer
An autodidact in physiology, Clynes applied dynamic systems analysis to the homeostatic and other control processes of the body so successfully in the next three years, that he received a series of awards, including, in 1960, Clynes' annus mirabilis, the Baker Award for the best paper published that year. In that year he invented the CAT computer (Computer of Average Transients) a $10,000 portable computer permitting the extraction of responses from ongoing electric activity—the needle in the haystack. The CAT quickly came into use in research labs all over the world, marketed by Technical Measurements Corp., advancing the study of the electric activity of the brain (enabling, for example, the clinical detection of deafness in newborns). In this way, Clynes made his fortune by age 37.
URS law
1967 NY Times Article on ClynesAlso in 1960, he discovered a biologic law, "Unidirectional Rate Sensitivity," the subject, in 1967, of a two-day symposium held by the New York Academy of Science. This law, related to biologic communication channels of control and information, is basically the consequence of the fact, realized by Clynes, that molecules can only arrive in positive numbers, unlike engineering electric signals, which can be positive or negative. This fact imposes radical limitations on the methods of control that biology can use. It cannot, for example, simply cancel a signal by sending a signal of opposite polarity, since there is no simple opposite polarity. To cancel, a second channel involving other, different molecules (chemicals) is required. This law explains, among other things, why the sensations of hot and cold need to operate through two separate sensing channels in the body, why we do not actively sense the disappearance of a smell, and why we continue to feel shocked after a near-miss accident.
1967 NY Times Article on ClynesAlso in 1960, in collaboration with Nathan Kline, Clynes published the cyborg concept, and its corollary, participant evolution. "Cyborg" became a household word and was misapplied, much to the dismay of Clynes, in films such as Terminator. Cyborgology is now a field taught at numerous universities. In 1964 the University of Melbourne awarded Clynes the degree of D.Sc, a degree superior to Ph. D and rarely given by British universities.
Towards synthesis of scientific and musical work
1960 NY Times Article on ClynesAlready in 1960 The New York Times had noted Clynes' remarkable double-stranded gifts. In 1965 he began to give concerts in his newly acquired large mansion on the Hudson, which had a real pipe organ in the living room, and 5 acres (20,000 m2) of park-like grounds. Now, with the financial success consequent to his scientific innovations, it became possible for Clynes to return to music. An ardent admirer of the great master musician Pablo Casals since early childhood, Clynes now attended all Casals' master classes, many with his family.
In 1966, Clynes played both the Diabelli Variations of Beethoven and Bach's Goldberg Variations for Casals, and was invited to join Casals in Puerto Rico for several months to take part in his music and to accompany some of the master classes at the Casals home in Santurce. Clynes considered this contact with Casals to be a fulfilment of his most cherished lifelong dream. Casals exceeded his expectations in every way, and Clynes considered his friendship with Casals to have been the highpoint of his life. As no one else, Casals had, by Clynes' estimation an immediate contact with the profound in music. After his return to New York City, Clynes performed Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto and also gave several concerts at his mansion for invited audiences that included Erich Fromm.
Color and the brain
With his new CAT computer, Clynes studied the relation of color processing in the brain and the dynamics to sound, and, jointly with M.Kohn, to color of the pupil of the eye. He showed that brain electrical responses to the color red from previous black produced similar patterns form several distinct brain sites, for all subjects. Other colors produced their own distinct patterns. These results from 1965 went a long way to help dispel the Skinnerian notion of tabula rasa. By 1968 he was able to show that it was possible to distinguish which of 100 different objects a person was looking at from his electrical brain responses alone, with repeated presentations. In other experiments in 1969 he described what he called the R-M function (from Rest to Motion) detectable at the apex of the brain for various modalities of stimulation, showing how two sets of unidirectionally rate sensitive (URS) channels in series could produce an effect corresponding to the mental concepts Rest and Motion. What could three URS channel sets do in combination? He never found out. But here were the beginnings of the embodiments of mental concepts in a wordless manner—a way of representing intuitive concepts to the brain wordlessly.
The brain as an output device
His work until around 1967 had been concerned with the brain as an input device i.e. for perception; now he began to study it as an output device. He turned first to the question of the characteristic pulse in the music of various composers, which had been on his mind since his Princeton years. In 1967 Clynes designed an instrument he called the sentograph to measure the motoric pulse. The experiments required outstanding musicians to "conduct" music on a pressure-sensitive finger rest, as they were thinking the music without sound. Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals were his first subjects. Soon it became apparent that the ‘pulse shapes’ for Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn were consistently different from each another, but similar across their different pieces (when normalized according to selection of similar tempo). Encouraged by these positive findings relating outputs to specific inner states of the brain, first presented at a Smithsonian Conference in 1968 at Santa Inez, Clynes then proceeded to measure the expressive form of specific emotions in a similar way, by having subjects generate them by repeatedly expressing them on the finger rest, thus finding specific signatures for the emotions, which he called sentic forms. As in the case of composers' pulses, the form associated with each emotion consistently appeared for that emotion and was distinct from the forms of other emotions.
In 1972 Clynes, whose work had long been supported by NIH Grants, received a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation in Sweden, allowing him to collect data in Central Mexico, Japan, and Bali, using the sentograph to investigate emotional expression cross-culturally. Though considerably more limited in scope than the nature of that inquiry would demand, the data were largely confirmatory of Clynes' theories of universal biologically determined time forms for each emotion. At the invitation of the NY Academy of Sciences, Clynes wrote an extensive monograph on his findings and theories to date, which the Academy published in 1973.[10]
That same year he accepted a visiting professorship in the music department of the University of California at San Diego, where he completed his book Sentics, the Touch of Emotion, which he had begun in 1972. In it he summarized the theories and findings on sentics, and outlined hopes for the future that his work contained. In 1970 and 1971, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held two symposia on Sentics.
Since the sentic cycles suddenly helped individuals feel better without drugs, Clynes' work was now deemed contrary to the line of research sponsored at the Rockland State Research Center, headed by Nathan Kline, whose supporters were the major drug companies. As a result, Clynes was unable to continue the work at that facility. In his new environment, there was no laboratory in which to amass new data. Although dismissed by the NY Times, Sentics was lauded extravagantly in other publications. (The book is considered a classic today). It was read in manuscript with great approval and excitement by several authorities: Yehudi Menuhin volunteered a foreword, itself a remarkable document, welcoming Clynes "as a brother." Rex Hobcroft, the director of the New South Wales State Conservatory in Sydney, the foremost musical institution in Australia, compared it to Beethoven's Opus 111, the last of Beethoven's sonatas and held to be his most profound work. (Hobcroft's endorsement appears on the jacket.) Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's resident psychiatrist, Dr. H. Bloomfield joined in.
During his three years at UCSD, in La Jolla, Clynes gave a concert at Brubecker Hall, playing the Beethoven Diabelli Variations, as well as a first performance of a group of 5 songs he composed, called "Sentone Songs," employing the remarkable vocal range of Linda Vickerman who performed them. The songs, in his own avant garde style, contained many varied syllables but no known words of any language.
He did studies of laughter at the brain Institute of UCLA at that time, unsuccessfully attempting to measure the electric counterpart in the brain of the moment that initiates laughter. He was the first to discover, in studying voice recognition in 1975 that a speaker’s identity, though unimpeded by changes in speed (tempo), was masked by transposition of as little as a semitone in pitch.[11] This seemed to indicate that perfect pitch was involved far more universally than thought possible. He began work on a book on laughter, which, however, was only two thirds completed.
In 1977 Rex Hobcroft, director of Sydney's New South Wales State Conservatory, who had praised Clynes' Sentics, offered Clynes a substantial position at the Conservatory initially connected with the International Piano Competition held at the time in Sydney. Accordingly, Clynes moved to Sydney in what proved to be the beginning of ten fruitful years of research and music making. In 1978 Clynes gave performances of both the Goldberg Variations and the Diabelli, as well as works of Mozart, at the Verbruggen Hall in Sydney. These performances were recorded live and are today regarded as unsurpassed. From a concertizing point of view, there were unusual difficulties: Clynes' two big-city performances had not been preceded by the usual shake-down cruise of smaller venues: Clynes had only one chance to get it right--and did.
Hobcroft and the government of New South Wales provided Clynes with a Music Research Center and staff at the Conservatory for his work, supplied be the state of NSW Ministry of Education. The staff were mostly enthusiasts of Clynes' work from the United States.
Predictive amplitude shaping in music
The following year 1980, at the occasion of a the 10th International Congress on Acoustics in Sydney, Clynes and his staff presented no fewer than four papers. With the aid of his new DEC PDP 23 computer and associated oscillator gear, he discovered the principle of Predictive Amplitude Shaping (a precise rule for how the shaping of each note is influenced by what note is next and when it will occur) applicable to music in general, a result he presented at an international conference in Stockholm at their invitation.[12]
Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception of this work in Stockholm, Clynes, on his return to Sydney, now made the major leap to discern how a composer's unique pulse is manifest in each note. It had been known (Leopold Mozart, C.P.E. Bach) that in the work of many composers of the "classic" period, a group of, say, four notes, when notated equally, were not meant to be played equally. The leap was in treating the four durations and loudnesses not as separate entities, but as a group, an interconnected organism, a ‘face’ in which each component played a unique role, but all combined together to form a gestalt. To find this gestalt, and how it worked organically in the music, he intuited a specific combined amplitude and timing "warp," so that each such group has a configuration--a gestalt--that is characteristic of the particular composer. (Now there was also a link to the motoric pulse, previously identified, which had contained no information about single notes but gave a motoric identity to the output of the brain in conducting music of a particular composer).
The identification of composers' pulse, and its use in interpreting classical works via computer, was later extended by Clynes, according to his knowledge and experience with dynamic forms, to comprise several levels of time structure.
Shortly after this, in 1983-4 Clynes, with the programming help of N. Nettheim, found a method of allowing computers to design vibrato suitable for each note, depending on the musical structure, also sometimes anticipating next events.
Further, all these principles could be easily generically adjusted for the requirements of each musical piece. Of course, a work’s interpretation was not robotically created: the computer needed to get adjustments to correspond to the concept of the interpreter. The computer did not replace the human sensitivity, it empowered it instead
When Clynes' longtime close friend and supporter Hephzibah Menuhin had launched his book Sentics in 1978 in Australia, small symptoms of her developing throat cancer had made their first appearance. Ms. Menuhin died in 1981, and Clynes gave a memorial concert for her in the Verbruggen Hall, of the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Op 109, 110, and 111. He had learned Beethoven's Opus 110 especially for that occasion, never having performed it before. Intensive practice resulted in his losing an exquisite living place in Vaucluse and his subsequent relocation to an apartment in Point Piper, an adjacent suburb in Sydney.
In 1982, Clynes undertook further extensive studies on the nature of the expression of emotions through touch. Subjects were touched on the palm of the hand, from behind a screen, with specific emotional expressions, in order to discover whether they could identify the emotion. In fact, they could. Clynes and Walker extended this work in a research trip to central Australia, to the Yuendumu Reservation, to test if Aborigines would recognize emotions expressed by touch of white urban dwellers when transformed into sounds that conserved the dynamic shape of the touch.
The test was highly positive: the Aborigines did in fact successfully identify the emotions expressed by the touch, of white urban subjects, from which were produced (through a simple transformation, preserving the dynamic shape) the sounds they heard. The American television program Nova reenacted this experiment in 1986, effectively linking the expression of emotions through touch to musical expression, using Beethoven's Eroica Funeral March to exemplify grief, and a Haydn sonata for joy.
In 1986, Clynes gave his (or anyone’s) first classical concert played entirely by computer, according to the three principles he had discovered, to a full house in a free concert at the Joseph Post Hall of the Sydney Conservatory. As a result of the application of those principles, the music, ranging from Bach to Beethoven to Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn was musically expressive and meaningful, even though all sounds, except for the piano, were produced by computer-controlled oscillators, and so did not represent familiar instruments--the real time expressive modification of the canonical orchestral sounds remained elusive until 1993.
In 1986, the Fairlight Company, a maker of top-of-the-line synthesizers in the hundred thousand dollar range, immediately opted to license what they called "the best sequencer in the world." Clynes, at that time, did not even know what a sequencer was. Fairlight started paying royalties on the patent; however, not long afterwards, the company went bankrupt, having lost government subsidies through a change of government, before bringing the product to market.
Reaching retirement age in Sydney, Clynes left to be professorial associate in the Psychology Department at Melbourne University and became Sugden Fellow at Queen's College, which he had attended as an undergraduate.
He stayed for three years. During that time he found an analytic equation for an egg, incorporating fractals, which also provided, with some modification of the equation, beautiful shapes of flowers and of vases. He also performed as pianist, in a Sunday series at Queens College, twelve of the Beethoven sonatas, lecturing to the Physics Department on Time, (starting with a poem beginning, "What time is it?") and to the Medical Faculty on the biologic nature of dynamic expressive forms.
Composers' pulses
Also during this period, Clynes undertook a large statistical study with various groups of the perception of composer's pulse. In the study, Clynes played four different pieces by computer, by each of four different composers (sixteen in all), with what his studies had determined to be the composer's own pulse and three times the same with a ‘wrong’ composer’s pulse, to see which one subjects actually preferred. There were four groups of subjects: internationally well-known pianists, Juilliard graduate students, students at the Manhattan School of Music, and college students at the University of Melbourne, altogether some 150 subjects. The results, published in the journal Cognition[13], showed that the "correct" pulse was preferred in all groups; more pronouncedly so the higher the musical standing of the subjects. (Among the ‘famous pianist subjects’ were friends of Clynes, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Paul Badura Skoda.)
Clynes returned to the United States in 1991 and settled in Sonoma, California. Not long after his return he was featured in a large front page article of The Wall Street Journal, an outgrowth of his invitation to a Canadian meeting on music. This highly favorable article opened many doors. Two vice president from Hewlett Packard flew separately to Clynes' home to learn about his findings. When they arrived, Clynes played versions of the same Mozart sonata K 330 by six famous artists, including Vladimir Horowitz, Alicia DeLarocha, Claudio Arrau, and Mitsuo Uchida, and included the computer performance at a random position among them. The visitors from HP not only could not identify the computer version, but they rated it second best of the seven. (MIDI versions were considered too musically crude to be included).
As a result, Clynes received a development contract that would for the first time enable the expressive implementation of real instrumental sounds other than the piano, using a workstation made available to him by HP, a $40,000 computer, which was, at 150 MHz, barely fast enough to do this. Clynes enlisted his gifted son Darius as software engineer on the HP team to help make it possible. Nine months later, a critical demonstration took place to show that the principles Clynes had discovered would work well with real instruments, not just with oscillators, to enable music played with meaningful phrasing and expression.[14] Clynes and the assembled HP Researchers first heard the sound of flute, violin, and cello from the HP Workstation performing a Haydn Trio expressively in real time over the loudspeakers of the vast halls of the HP Research Building. The inanities of MIDI had been conquered.
Once Clynes had successfully developed a real-time implementation of his principles for musical interpretation via computer, using UNIX, HP gave Clynes' company, Microsound, Intl, a second development contract to bring this capacity into the burgeoning world of PCs, which, in 1994, functioned at 60 MHz. A French division of HP, then in charge of PC development, supported this enthusiastically. Clynes was fortunate to obtain the help of Steve Sweet, a programmer of great distinction, to carry out the conversion. However, soon thereafter, HP transferred the PC work to a new division in the United States whose director favored popular music.
SuperConductor
Henceforth, with the help of Steve Sweet, Clynes developed the software program, called SuperConductor himself. By 1996 they had a fully working version, incorporating all the new principles, with which they interpreted, first, all the Brandenburg Concertos of Bach, and then all of Bach's solo violin and cello works and the last six quartets of Beethoven. All these works were recorded on CDs.[8]
Clynes further expanded SuperConductor's capacity for real life expressive interpretation of music with a fourth principle he called "Self-tuning Expressive Intonation," which unfixes the equal temperament tuning and permits the sharpening of the leading tone and other modifications of the sort executed by fine players of stringed instruments and other instruments whose intonation is actively controlled in the playing; now even a piano could exhibit this technique--by means of a laptop computer and synthesizer. Since it is a melodic tuning, depending on intervals, no transposition was required. The same interval going up received a different small pitch increment from that interval going down. Moreover, similarly to known use in tones like the leading tone, Clynes found it appropriate to provide quite small, specific increments to all melodic intervals, 24 in all (twelve up and twelve different ones down). A new patent [US 6,924,426] was granted in 2006. This now made it possible for all computers and synthesizers to benefit from expressive intonation, a non-static, dynamic tuning, in which the same note has a slightly different pitch depending on the melodic structure (the demise of equal temperament).
After a four-year absence in Thailand, Steve Sweet returned to Sonoma and resumed his development work with Clynes, incorporating the new functionality into SuperConductor II. (ref to mp3s on the webpage of SuperConductor)
With SuperConductor, Clynes performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto at MIT's Kresge Auditorium in 1999 to the astonishment and wonder and thunderous applause of over two thousand people.[15] In 2006, using Self-tuning Expressive Intonation, he performed the Schubert Unfinished Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony at the University of Vienna in the Kleine Konzertsaal.
It became Clynes' aim gradually to make music better than had ever been possible before: to empower the computer in an enterprise of historic proportions to incrementally improve, and increase in profundity, the musical interpretations of great works of our music heritage. With computers, this work of increasing musical perfection could span years, decades, and even centuries.
Clynes has also kept up his own playing of the piano. In 2002, he gave a very substantial concert program (of which a videotape exists) as a memorial for a prominent resident of Sonoma. The program included including Liszt’s Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody, Campanella and Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata as well as several major works of Chopin. In 2007, at the age of 82, Clynes has developed new exercises for piano playing away from the piano, which may permit the improvement of piano technique even for octogenarians. In 2007 he applied for three new patents related to SuperConductor, to enhance computer interpretation of music, through: (1) increased mathematical subtlety of note shaping and resulting timbre variations, as earlier, dependent on musical structure, resulting in (2) ‘instant rehearseless conducting’, and (3) importation of note-specific vibrato and shaping from SuperConductor into MIDI files. [patent numbers when available]
Clynes married in 1951, divorced in 1972 and has three children Darius, Neville, and Raphael, and eight grandchildren.
创造“Cyborg”词汇编辑本段回目录
电子人(cyborg),一个用cybernetics(控制论)和organism(生物体)结合而成的单词,在1960年由Manfred Clynes创造,它用来描述人工提高人类的生物学能力,以在恶劣的环境中存活。开始,电子人指的是靠机械装置维持生命的人,比如依靠氧气罐,人工心脏或胰岛素。随后几年,此术语产生了更多的意思,描述依靠技术的人类,在这种情况下,电子人用来刻画某个依靠电脑完成他们日常工作的人。

Cyborg的概念可追溯至1948年,由美国著名的数理逻辑学家维纳(Norbert Wiener 1894-1964)所提出的控制论(cybernetics)开始。控制论研究人类与计算机的相互作用。而Cyborg一词是1960年则由美国太空总署的科学家Manfred Clynes与Nathan Kline率先提出,Cyborg即是cyb(ernetic)神经机械学+org(anism)有机体的合成,即人机混合体。与Cyborg相关的科技技术,主要为基因工程、人工智能等。然而,在网络传播时代,Cyborg词汇里的人机混合的机器概念,在技术意义上已经被计算机连线、尤其是互联网所覆盖。Cyb不应该只看成cybernetic这一狭隘概念的简写,而应该视为cyber这个前缀词的同一语;正如赛博空间cyberspace今天被视为网际空间一样,Cyborg也随着语言的进化而产生了“赛博人”(网际人)的直接意义——类似于Netizen(网络公民,或网民)一词的含义。
正是在这个意义上,1991年,社会学家哈拉威(Harraway,D.)所发表的著名的A Cyborg Manifesto才可视之为“赛博人宣言”。这个宣言实际上就是在宣布”赛博人”作为合理的人类属性的真实的和正式的存在。“赛博人宣言”阐述了这样的生活方式和思想信仰:网际人类采取的是一种不同于传统的生活。他们回避地理邻居,却喜欢虚拟社区。他们不喜欢(大多也不善于)面对面的交谈,而乐于在计算机界面上的交流。他们不愿去传统办公室而热衷于虚拟办公室。他们不遵守居住社区的规范,却是模范网民。他们不去商场,而喜欢网上购物。
Cyborg详解编辑本段回目录
Cyborg是一个诞生于学术界的词,它是“Cybernetic Organism”的缩写,按照字面意思来说,可以翻译成自动化生物体,但这个翻译并不准确。一般,现在在科幻、大众文化、科技领域,它都是指一类同时有着人和机器人特征,但是以人类特征主导的人机混合物。进一步地解释说,Cyborg是指一类身体某些部分被机器所取代的人,但是人最关键的神经系统,比如大脑和脊髓被保留,这是关键,假如不保留神经系统,哪就是另外一个概念了,我们在下文中也会阐述。Cyborg也是一个相当复杂的概念,我们之前说过,机器人之所以很难被定义,是因为牵涉到一个“何之为人”的哲学概念,这个模糊性的概念在人与机器人这两个对立概念中很难划分出一条清晰的分界线,而且,随着科学技术的发展,这个“何之为人”的概念也一直在被更改之中,所以,可以说,各个时代对于机器人的定义是不同的。而现在,人和机器人这两个对立概念同时存在于Cyborg这一个矛盾共同体之中,这令Cyborg这个概念的定义也复杂化了,而且,随着时代发展,也有着不同的解释,因此,很难为其找到一个恰当的中文译名,以有的几个中文译名也都很难解释清楚,所以我们接下来还是直接使用英文来指代它。

由于CYB-这个前缀,机器人、科幻、科学技术、乃至现在的数码产品消费领域,都有着重要的影响,而且也牵涉我们接下来需要介绍的另外一个概念Cyberpunk。因此在深入探讨Cyborg之前,我们先来解释一下CYB-这个前缀的由来。CYB-这个前缀来自自动化控制学,它由“Cybernetics(自动控制理论)”派生而来,是由自动化控制论的鼻祖诺伯特·卫纳(Norbert Wiener)参考希腊语“kubernetes”所创,“kubernetes”在希腊语中原意为“导航员”或者“驾驶员”,因此,在起初的定义中,它他主要指的是统领机械运转的自动控制核心,它也是“A.I.(人工智能)”概念的始祖,当机械体足够复杂到成为机械人的程度时候,自动控制核心也就成了“A.I.(人工智能)”。但因为这个概念在形成之后,又不断地在科幻、文化、艺术、商业领域被引用和引申,其内涵被不断地补充和修饰,所以,如今我们所看到的“Cybernetics”实际上包涵着机器人、自动化、通讯、计算机、生化人、智能等等诸多主题,而原本的意思“自动化控制核心”则随着自动控制对象的逐渐复杂化而被“A.I.(人工智能)”所取代。所以,根据以上解释,CYB-这个前缀主要包涵的意思可以分为机械和智能两个主要的大类,其中,智能部分的最终引申为“A.I.(人工智能)”,而机械部分则最终被引申为“cybertron”,也就是智能化的机器。Cyborg则建立在第二个引申意上,在其基础上加入“Organism(有机体)”的概念,强调一种钢铁与肉体的结合的产物,一种集两种对立矛盾于一身的统一体。
Cyborg相当年轻,关于这个词的由来,我们在本文的上半部分已经初步地解释过。他源自1960年发表的美国航天医学空军学校的两位学者Manfred lynes与Nathan Kline的研究结果。两位学者中Clynes是生理仪器和电子数据处理系统的设计者,Kline则是临床精神病学的医师。两位不同领域学者共同定义了Cyborg这个概念,在最初的设计构想中,Cyborg被寄予希望透过辅助机械以增强人类的生存能力,以期达到克服外层空间环境的要求,而且是一种能够进行“自我调节的”人机系统。因此,在一开始的定义中,Cyborg就拥有了自己最明确的特性——它就是指整合有机的和人工的系统于一身的物体。尽管,诸如器官移植、义肢辅助、缺陷弥补乃至整形美容在随后的年代中都已经开始在使用Cyborg这个概念,但作为一个比较学术化的词,在其诞生之后的较长的一段岁月里并没有为大众所熟知。真正把Cyborg这个概念推广给大众的时间是在1971年,归功于David Rorvik所著的小说《当人成为机器时》(As Man Becomes Machine: The Evolution of the Cyborg),才使Cyborg这一概念为世人所熟悉。这是一本科普性质的小说,作者本身是一位学者,站在一堆学术化资料的基础上对Cyborg这个概念进行了一番浅显化的阐述,并在一定程度上预见了几十年内Cyborg可以期望的发展。由于这本科普小说的原因,公众开始对Cyborg这个概念熟悉起来,并不断地补充各种新的想法和概念,最终使它成为了一个相当流行的字眼。

但是,尽管没有使用Cyborg这个定义,但是在科幻小说之类的幻想文艺作品中,类似的存在可以追溯得很早,因为科幻小说本身具有一定的科技前瞻性嘛,因而这个领域的发展其实并非在Cyborg定义之后,而是在Cyborg这个字眼开始流行之后开始使用它。其实,历史上第一部科幻小说玛丽·雪莱的《科学怪人》(Frankenstein)就是一本
Cyborg题材的科幻小说,疯狂的瑞士科学家Henry Frankenstein的这个在手术台上利用死尸和机械装备的怪物被认为是文艺作品中最初出现的Cyborg。而1923年E.V. Odle所著的科幻小说《发条人》则从另外一个角度阐述了Cyborg的可能,他从人类自身的逐渐机械化出发描绘了未来的一个令人担忧的可怕图景。它描述了在未来,人们的大脑被植入发条时钟用来控制和规范整个人的行为(当时,电脑的概念尚未建立起来)。而之后,随着Cyborg概念逐渐流行化,越来越多的文艺作品开始喜欢选择Cyborg为题材,其中包括很多我们较为熟悉的科幻、动漫、游戏作品。比如著名科幻电影《机械战警》(RoboCop)、《终结者》(Terminater)、士郎正宗原著押井守导演的著名动漫作品
《攻壳机动队》(スカイパーフェク)、木村幸人的著名作品《铳梦》等等,这些作品中的Cyborg往往可以归结为两个支配性的特征——拥有超越普通人的强劲肉体和强大而细致的机械控制能力,也就是说Cyborg是利用机械大大地加强人类的肉体和精神两个方面,这不妨可以看作文艺作品中对于Cyborg的一种主流观点。
现实中的Cyborg诞生于半个世纪前的纽约若克兰德州立医院,是一只尾巴被植入一个可以精确地控制注射化学药品的微型渗透泵的试验小白鼠,注射的药物根据小白鼠的多钟生理参数而进行精确的改变,之后这种技术被广泛运用于器官移植等现代医学手术之中。尽管十分简陋,但是它确实符合学术上对于Cyborg的定义——一个半生物半机械的生命体。作为现代科技和军方的梦想,Cyborg的实际运用与研发一直受到了广泛的关注。
从音乐心理学到神经音乐学编辑本段回目录
笔者在音乐心理学文献(指英语文献,下同)的浏览过程中,对这个以音乐和人的内在过程关系为研究对象的学科大致形成了如下三方面的印象。
其一,这个学科已具备了一定的研究和教学积累。音乐心理学的教科书和专门著作已出版约百部。音乐心理学已拥有本学科的专业期刊,刊名涉及“音乐心理学”,“音乐知觉”,“心理音乐学”,“音乐医学”,“音乐治疗学”等。另外,音乐心理学已成为高等学校的概论性质或专题性质的课程,并成为学位论文的热门选题之一。
其二,如同主流心理学的情形,音乐心理学提出的问题大于其解决问题的能力。音乐心理学研究的既定学术规范,是实证定量方式,而它在人们期望中所应解决的问题,往往是意义较宽的定性问题。这两者之间存在矛盾。比如,我们的确较难基于课题狭小的研究报告,归纳出能为音乐各类实践提供现成和令人满意的答案的一部著作或教科书。笔者的看法是,从解决问题的角度严格地看待音乐心理学,它尚停留在前科学阶段。或者说,它还是一门工具性的学科,我们只是可以将其研究方法作为一种工具,对音乐的各类心理和行为问题给予微观和具体的探索和实验。

其三,音乐心理学的发展,出现了向脑神经科学延伸的明显趋势,一门新的交叉学科正在产生。这是本文所要提出的讨论话题。
1982年,美国纽约的Plenum出版社出版了一部题为《音乐、思维和大脑》的著作,副标题是《音乐神经心理学》[1]这部由Manfred Clynes主编的研究论文集的参与者,多为音乐界以外的脑神经科学和认知科学研究者。这些研究多为基础性的探索,例如,诗文和音乐的节奏在脑半球中的控制区域定位等。今天回顾这部著作,令人感到十分有意思的是,如果我们把音乐心理学向脑神经科学的延伸视为音乐心理学发展的必然,同时视该书为这种学术趋势的一个重要起点的话,从参与这部著作的作者身份、选题切入点、研究方法以及研究表述的方式等方面,我们可以明显地看到,这种学科的交叉,首先主要是由科学家而不是音乐家启动的。
20世纪末,情况发生了很大的变化。美国政府把新旧世纪之交来临前的10年定为脑科学的10年。这项旨在通过对人类智慧探秘来强化智力开发竞争力的国策,使脑神经科学吸引了众多美国人的关注,同时也开拓了音乐心理和音乐教育等领域的学者的视野,敦促他们把研究的眼光移向脑神经科学。其间,一个值得注意的标志,是音乐心理学研究的代表性文献《音乐心理学手册》第二版[2]中的一个章名:“神经音乐研究:文献评述”。“神经音乐研究”在这里的英文表述是:Neuromusical Research。
此外,享誉世界科学界的英国《自然》(Nature)杂志在这10年中,恰好每隔3年发表1篇围绕音乐是否有益于智力或学习发展的研究报告。[3]具有同等学术地位的美国《科学》杂志及脑科学专业期刊,诸如《神经学研究》、《神经科学通讯》、《大脑》、《神经心理学》、《认知神经科学》,[4]在这个时期登载了与音乐相关的许多研究课题,涉及到音乐家脑结构不对称现象的论证,弦乐演奏者左手指运动对皮质表征的增强,器乐刺激的两半球表征和大脑激活,音乐训练引起学前儿童空间-时间推理的长时增强,单侧颞叶切除对歌曲知觉和表象的影响,等等。
在上述10年音乐与脑神经科学“联姻”的研究过程中,有一支研究队伍是值得特别关注的。这支队伍是美国加利福尼亚大学欧文分校学习与记忆神经生物学研究所的终身教授戈登·肖(Gordon L. Shaw)博士及其同事,和几位攻读博士和博士后的学者。
他们的研究横跨多种学科领域,包括大脑理论、神经生理学、神经解剖学、脑功能成像技术、儿童发展、音乐认知、教育学、音乐教育、数学和科学教育、神经病理学和心理学。研究的课题基于Mountcastle原理的内在神经语言语法和Trion模型,提出皮质信息的对称概念及其与皮质信息中音乐结构之间的关系,运用脑电图、磁共振成像、正电子发射层描和功能性磁共振成像等探测技术,以及人和动物的行为、认知实验等研究方法,发现所谓“莫扎特效应”[5],并对其进行脑成像技术的检验和癫等疾病的病理学临床应用;研制出“空间一时间动画推理”学习软件,配以钢琴训练和音乐学习,摒弃传统的语言分析教学模式,用内在神经语言和音乐的非词语性及对称概念,在教育实验中大幅度改善低幼儿童数理概念学习。戈登·肖为了将其研究持续进行下去,新近创立了“音乐智力神经开发研究所”[6],吸引从该所完成博士和博士后研究的成员,聘请1995年诺贝尔物理学奖得主Martin Perl等一批斯坦福大学、加利福尼亚大学各分校等著名高校的科学家,组成研究所的科学委员会;瞄准“Music as a window into higher brain function ”(音乐作为高级脑机能之窗)这个主要命题,试图在高级脑机能的内在皮质语言的解码,提高儿童数理概念学习的质量等方面,把音乐当作罗塞达碑石(Rosetta Stone [7],喻指解密工具),在脑科学的前沿课题领域中实现突破性进展。戈登·肖称,这是一个雄心勃勃的科学之梦,音乐对学习的增强功能,在高级脑机能中围绕对称概念的关键作用等秘密一旦完成科学的论证,所有的儿童就可能充分利用这类内在时空能力,大大提高思维、推理和创造的能力。
在21世纪初的今天,回顾上述研究的趋势和气氛,笔者强烈地感受到,一门新的学科正在悄然产生。它是在新世纪国际智力竞争的大背景下,从音乐心理学等学科延伸而来,用脑神经科学的研究手段、方法和课题作为切入点,以深化人类对自身思维、行为和情感的认识为基本目的,在儿童发展、教育和医疗以至人类与信息技术关系等领域具有重大潜在价值的新兴学科。笔者提议,把前述的“神经音乐研究”再作进一步拓展,称这门学科为“神经音乐学”。其英文对应词是由神经学和音乐学组成的复合词:Neuromusicology。