It’s good the see the kids taking on the Beatles, now available on “Rock Band”.

It disproves a theory of mine, that you cannot transmit the soul of something through the digital medium. The music is proving itself to be good enough to stand the test of time, such as Mozart’s or other great composers have managed over hundreds of years, but it is first in historic terms, that music is lifted into a new generation not from notation, but digital recordings. Yes, these guys recorded analogue, but the kids these days have never heard the real bands or analogue records played, yet they respond, otherwise no sale, so what is it?
It’s a code.
Within the pulse of melodies and dynamics of music a connection is made between souls. Something familiar passes between two observers, something that reminds them both where they came from, and perhaps where they are going. I smiled to Mozart standing in the room when I heard a sonata for the first time and he chose a better phrase that I expected. Across time I felt his presence through the artist now playing. Within the regularity of patterns others stick out and get through to us. It’s a code that doesn’t repeat, in a way. Some people feel the same way studying famous chess gambits. Some feel it in poetry – the lilting of the words, the pulse of metaphoric fields…
Perhaps memory itself is a melody. DNA could be considered digital information in that it contains a finite number of combinations, but is that all there is? What, other than sequences of numbers is included in DNA? It is part of living cells, but once separated from the living cell the DNA can produce no offspring. A single protein requires enough code for building that would fill volumes of books, but how can proteins form from the presence of DNA molecules alone within a cell? To me, it is similar to having the schematics of a tractor in a book on a coffee table – having the information is one thing, but someone still has to build it, find parts, physically put them together. How does that get done? Is there a melody that goes along with DNA that makes all of life dance to it?

One could argue that classic music notation is a digital medium, i.e. that the notes are quantified in terms of placement on the scale and duration within the measure – and then it is up to the player to add human expression. The spirit of the composition lives in luring the mind in unexpected ways. I’ve often said, the melody exists only to confuse the mind long enough for the Soul to get the message. As long as the melody is ahead of the mind it will lure the mind by speaking of mystery.
Music is rich, deep code. Just like Callill Gibbran use metaphors that take you to unexpected insights of your own humanity, it is in the listener’s heart the composer lives.
I have long speculated that an energy, “ki”, “prana”, “essence”, “soul” can be passed among living beings, and that this energy is vital to our experience here. I have thought that this energy could be transmitted though the mediums of art, especially music, and it would still be present in recordings, just like original paintings and sculptures still resonate from the artists’ hands. As example, I understand that one cannot visit the original “David” without still sensing Michelangelo in the stone. I still believe, that when such art is represented digitally the “vital energy”, in lack of a better phrase, is absent. It makes sense to me that something which is infinite cannot be reduced to a finite set of numbers, but the Beatles are doing it, the kids are getting the spirit of the music – how?
I don’t have the answer, but here is a final thought on the “added feature” that must be present in the DNA molecules, besides the information:

If one looks at a cross-section of DNA (as above) it looks to me like printed circuit-boards, hence it must be capable of electromagnetic resonance still singing the song of creation.
This seems similar to me in the mystery that a mother passes all the eggs for her daughter’s children to her before she is born. I believe the reason the eggs are passed from mothers bodies directly to their daughters – unlike men who make sperm as they go – is that the key of life must always be passed alive and cannot be created from physical parts alone. Like an Olympic torch, the melody of life has been sung like endless mantras within each living cell from the very beginning.
Trippy stuff…