To form an octave is to double or halve a given frequency.                                                                                                                             The Cosmic Octave    Cousto    

When asked what one piece of information represented the most important knowledge humans possess, Richard Feynman, the remarkable mathemetician/physicist, replied:

Everything is made of atoms.

Indeed! What an amazing discovery! While the atomic structure and molecular composition vary from one object to the next, from one human to the next, from one star to the next, still – Everything is made of atoms!

But wait! There is more! Atoms are comprised of electrons that orbit a nucleus. And atoms are primarily “empty” space. Yet this moving, spacious world of Everything appears to human beings as material form. Even our earth suits have an animate integrity. What holds all of this together?  Within these “building blocks” lies a deeper cohesion, a durational measurement, a simple, but pervasive infrastructure for all of Creation – the oscillation.

An initiating gesture, rising to a peak, falling past the midline to trough, and rising back to the midline beginning – motion across/around a central axis – a cycle, one complete oscillation.  (The actual measurement is from peak to peak = one cycle) Put a bunch of oscillations together in a periodic sequence, and you have frequency. Frequencies, along with resonance, consonance, dissonance, hold the world together AND move us through our experiences. While our reality appears solid and stable, it is actually in constant flux driven by frequency oscillations. Oscillations are the pervasive movement pattern that weaves together what we call “reality”. From the quantum, to the electromagnetic, to the world of form, all of existence is waving at and through us. If this is true, then frequency is a portal into and through all of existence. And this portal is accessible and useful due to the Law of the Octave.

A vibrational frequency is known through a measurement called hertz. Hertz expresses the number of oscillations per second. One oscillation per second is 1 Hz, twenty-five oscillations per second is 25 Hz, and so on. Vibrational frequencies reveal the world to us through our senses. Everything we hear, vibrates at 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, which is the audible spectrum. Everything we see is vibrating between 400 Trillion Hz and 750 Trillion Hz, which is the visible spectrum of the electro-magnetic field.  The entire electro-magnetic field is a vibrational gift basket of frequency bandwidths that give us telegraph, radio, television, mobile phones, internet, and the electricity to power it all. And then when we go deep into the building blocks of matter, what do we get? – more oscillations.

According to the Law of the Octave – every frequency is entangled with its half and its double. Any known frequency can be calibrated as an audible frequency or visual frequency or x-ray frequency, simply by  dividing higher frequencies by 2 and multiplying lower frequencies by 2. In the book The Cosmic Octave, Hans Cousto argues that the octave is a unit of measurement that can be useful in understanding and working with our very existence.  Using a simple mathematical formula, Cousto converts all manner of measureable phenomenon to audible tones.

The audible frequency range demonstrates clearly how The Law of Octave works. A frequency of 440 Hz is the infamous Concert A- multiply 440 x 2 and 880 is also an A tone. The frequency is higher, denser, more oscillations per second, but it is the same expression as the 440 – it also is an A. Divide 440 by 2 and you have 220 Hz – also an expression of an A note. This suggests a repetitive pattern that is renewed each time it doubles or halves. This is a moment of return, an opportunity to begin again. I am wondering about The Law of the Octave as a jumping off point in the design of all kinds of fractals (mostly sound fractals).

And this is just the beginning, as there are other factors informing my fractal understanding, including Nature’s Chord, the Golden Mean, and Fibonacci numbers.

For now, The Law of the Octave and its relationship to the movements of the Universe are enough to ponder.