Manfred Clynes facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Manfred Clynes
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| Background information | |
| Born | August 14, 1925 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | January 19, 2020 (aged 94) West Nyack, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | scientist, inventor, concert pianist |
| Years active | 1940–2020 |
Manfred Edward Clynes (born August 14, 1925 – died January 19, 2020) was a scientist, inventor, and musician from Austria. He is famous for his new ideas and discoveries about how music is played and understood. He also made important contributions to the study of the brain and how our bodies work.
Exploring Music and the Brain
Manfred Clynes' work brought together music and science. He especially focused on how our brain works. As a concert pianist, he recorded famous pieces like Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
He was also a great inventor, holding about 40 patents. His inventions include the CAT computer, which helps study the brain's electrical signals. He also invented color ultrasound and made discoveries in wind energy. His work helped computers play classical music in a way that sounds truly musical.
How Emotions Are Expressed
Clynes studied how our central nervous system (our brain and spinal cord) is linked to how we express emotions. He believed that certain patterns of movement and timing, which he called "sentic forms," naturally create basic emotions. We see this in everyday things like laughter and yawning.
Clynes showed that these "sentic forms" are universal. This means they are understood by people from different cultures. For example, he did an experiment where people expressed emotions through touch. These touches were then turned into sounds. Aborigines in Central Australia could correctly guess the emotions from these sounds. This showed that how we express emotions is deeply connected to our biology.
Some of these emotional patterns might even be shared by animals. This explains why pet owners feel their dogs or cats understand their tone of voice. Clynes found that emotions like anger, love, and sadness each have their own unique way of being expressed. He also found that the more closely an expression follows its natural form, the stronger the emotion feels, both for the person expressing it and the person seeing or hearing it.
Sentic Cycles: Feeling Emotions Through Touch
Based on his discoveries, Clynes created a simple exercise called "sentic cycles." In this exercise, people gently press their finger repeatedly, following the natural timing of different emotions. Even without music, people reported feeling calmer and more energetic. Many also found it helped with sadness or depression. Thousands of people have tried sentic cycles, some for many years.
Clynes also found that people could switch from one emotion to another quite quickly during these cycles. After a few minutes of one emotion, people felt "full" of that emotion. This suggested that our brain has specific "receptors" that get satisfied with certain chemicals. This idea was later proven by other scientists. This also helps explain why composers often change the mood in their music every few minutes.
Clynes also studied laughter. He believed that in laughter, a small bit of confusion suddenly makes sense within a bigger, clearer picture. He even thought that couples who laugh at similar speeds might get along better!
He was excited to share that feelings like love, joy, and respect are always available to us. We can create these feelings through precise expression, thanks to their biological roots. Music is a special way to do this, but with his touch art form, it became available to everyone. Even difficult emotions like sadness or anger could be experienced in a safe way.
Cyborgs: Humans and Technology
Clynes is famous for creating the word "cyborg." This term describes living beings that have both biological (natural) and artificial (technology) parts. Cyborgs are beings whose abilities are made better by technology. The idea of cyborgs is now an important part of studying how human identity changes in a world with lots of technology.
Life and Career
Early Life and Inventions
Manfred Clynes was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1925. His family was Jewish, and they moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 1938 to escape Nazism.
When he was just 15, in high school, Clynes invented a way to guide aircraft using special crystals and electronics. This was called "inertial guidance." The Australian authorities didn't believe it would work. But the same system he invented was later used successfully during World War II. This was the first of his many successful inventions.
In 1946, Clynes graduated from the University of Melbourne. He had studied both engineering science and music.
A Musical Journey
Around this time, he also took piano lessons from a famous musician named Ignaz Friedman. Clynes' musical talent was recognized with many awards. One award gave him a three-year scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, a famous music school.
He earned his master's degree from Juilliard in 1949. He then went to a quiet cabin in California to practice. In 1950, he performed Bach's Goldberg Variations and other works in Australia. He quickly became known as one of Australia's best pianists.
In 1952, he was invited to Princeton University to study the psychology of music. There, he learned about a study that looked at how different composers had unique patterns in their music. This later led to Clynes' own scientific studies of what he called "composers' pulses."
Clynes also became friends with the famous scientist Albert Einstein. Einstein often invited him to dinner. Clynes played piano for Einstein, who loved his playing of Mozart and Schubert. Einstein even wrote Clynes a letter to help him with his European concert tour.
In 1953, with Einstein's letter, Clynes toured Europe. He played the Goldberg Variations and had great success. The tour ended with a big concert in London.
Scientific Breakthroughs
In 1954, Clynes took a job working with a new type of computer called an analog computer. He quickly became an expert. Within a year, he created a new way to stabilize dynamic systems.
In 1956, he became the Chief Research Scientist at Rockland State Hospital. There, he applied his knowledge of dynamic systems to study how the body controls itself.
The CAT Computer
In 1960, Clynes invented the CAT computer (Computer of Average Transients). This portable computer could find tiny electrical signals in the brain, like finding a needle in a haystack. The CAT computer became very popular in research labs worldwide. It helped doctors detect deafness in newborn babies. This invention helped Clynes become financially successful by age 37.
The URS Law
Also in 1960, Clynes discovered a biological law called "Unidirectional Rate Sensitivity" (URS). This law explains that molecules in our body can only increase in number, not decrease in the same way. This limits how our body controls things. For example, it explains why we need two separate channels to feel hot and cold. It also explains why we don't actively feel a smell disappear.
In 1964, the University of Melbourne gave Clynes a D.Sc. degree, which is a very high scientific degree.
Connecting Science and Music
In 1960, The New York Times newspaper noted Clynes' amazing talents in both science and music. He started giving concerts at his home. He was a big fan of the famous cellist Pablo Casals. Clynes attended Casals' master classes and was even invited to join Casals in Puerto Rico for several months. Clynes felt this time with Casals was a dream come true.
Color and the Brain
Using his new CAT computer, Clynes studied how the brain processes color. He found that the brain's electrical responses to colors like red were similar for different people. This helped show that our brains are not blank slates, but have built-in ways of processing information. By 1968, he could even tell which of 100 different objects a person was looking at just by their brain's electrical signals.
The Brain as an Output Device
Clynes then started studying the brain as an "output device." This means he looked at how the brain creates actions and expressions. He focused on the unique "pulse" in the music of different composers.
In 1967, Clynes invented an instrument called the "sentograph." This device measured how musicians "conducted" music with their finger on a pressure-sensitive pad, even when no sound was made. Famous musicians like Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals were among the first to try it.
He found that the "pulse shapes" for composers like Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert were always different from each other, but consistent within each composer's music. This showed that composers had a unique "signature" in their musical expression.
Clynes also used the sentograph to measure the expressive forms of specific emotions. He found that each emotion had a unique "signature," which he called "sentic forms." These forms were consistent for each emotion and different from other emotions.
In 1972, Clynes traveled to Mexico, Japan, and Bali to study emotional expression across different cultures. His findings largely supported his idea that there are universal, biologically determined forms for each emotion.
He also wrote a book called Sentics, the Touch of Emotion. This book summarized his theories and findings. Many experts praised the book, and it is still considered a classic today.
In the late 1970s, Clynes moved to Sydney, Australia. He became a professor at the New South Wales State Conservatory. This began ten years of important research and music-making. In 1978, Clynes performed the Goldberg Variations and the Diabelli Variations in Sydney. These performances were recorded and are still highly regarded today.
Predicting Musical Expression
In 1980, Clynes discovered a new principle called "Predictive Amplitude Shaping." This is a precise rule about how each musical note's sound is shaped by the next note and when it will occur. This applies to music in general.
He then made a big discovery: how a composer's unique "pulse" shows up in each individual note. He found that each group of notes has a special shape or "gestalt" that is unique to that composer. This helped explain how classical music should be played.
Later, in 1983–84, Clynes found a way for computers to create vibrato (a slight wavering in pitch) that was perfect for each note. This depended on the musical structure. All these principles could be adjusted for each piece of music. The computer didn't replace human feeling; it helped musicians express themselves better.
In 1986, Clynes gave the first classical concert played entirely by computer. The music sounded expressive and meaningful, even though the sounds were made by computer-controlled oscillators.
Composers' Pulses and Computer Music
Clynes returned to the United States in 1991. He was featured in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal. This article opened many doors for him.
He showed two vice presidents from Hewlett Packard (HP) different recordings of a Mozart sonata. He included a computer performance among recordings by famous pianists. The HP visitors couldn't tell which was the computer version and even rated it second best!
This led to a contract with HP to develop his principles for real instruments, not just simple sounds. Clynes and his son Darius worked on this. They successfully made a computer play a Haydn trio with expressive flute, violin, and cello sounds. This was a big step forward in computer music.
SuperConductor Software
Clynes then developed his own software program called SuperConductor. By 1996, they had a working version that could interpret music with all his new principles. They used it to record all of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and Beethoven's last six quartets.
Clynes also added a fourth principle called "Self-tuning Expressive Intonation." This allowed the computer to adjust the tuning of notes slightly, just like skilled musicians do. For example, it could make a leading note sound a little sharper. This meant that even a piano could sound more expressive.
With SuperConductor, Clynes performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto at MIT in 1999. The audience of over two thousand people was amazed. In 2006, he performed Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in Vienna.
Clynes aimed to make music sound better than ever before using computers. He believed that computers could help improve musical interpretations of great works over many years, even centuries.
Clynes continued to play the piano himself. In 2002, he gave a big concert. In 2007, at 82, he even developed new exercises to improve piano technique. He also applied for new patents to make computer interpretation of music even better.
Manfred Clynes married in 1951, divorced in 1972, and had three children and eight grandchildren. He passed away in West Nyack, New York, in January 2020, at the age of 94.
Images for kids
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1967 New York Times article on Clynes
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1960 New York Times article on Clynes
