Manfred Clynes - Biography and Career - The Brain As An Output Device

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.

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. 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.