Sound and Form [Part 3]

When you laugh you might make the “Ha” sound with the breathe. If you laugh very loudly you will hyper ventilate unless you set yourself properly. This requires internal and external aspects. For example, you want to feel comfortable and open enough to stretch your body to create the necessary space for the sound to loudly roar out. There are many everyday examples of sounds which happen naturally. This is what working with the sound in martial arts aims to achieve, a natural expression of the sound with added awareness and control over the body

The Moving Sound

With the help of certain sounds, we can express various sentiments and feelings. There are various techniques for this contained in martial arts to this end. For example, the physical forms in Taekwondo, called Poomsae, are used to express proper breathing and flow. I use this Taekwondo example because this is what I’m trained in formally, but the similarities hold true across the various martial arts. To do the forms properly, one needs to develop mastery over the breathing as well as the movements. Some forms of martial arts don’t do much in the way of movement and focus more on the sound. Other arts focus on slow and controlled breathing, which is also useful for different reasons. In this way you aim to become one with the movements by synchronising with the breath.

According to the mood of the form, or Poomsae, that is how it is performed. Some are faster, some are slower. I won’t go into the details, it will take too long, but you can look all this up online. You will see how some are slower, and others are faster. Others will go from fast to slow in moments. This is all common sense but there is a science to it. So you would move differently to enhance well being than you would to secure survival. and once you have attacked, it is useful to reset. You would however want to work at both levels, of attack and resetting, according to what needs to be done at different times.

When you look closely, it is not just speed and pace, but different qualities that are expressed. Some movements have a certain swing in them, just like music does. This cannot be demonstrated on the music sheet or in a book. If you try to perform a swinging motion or sound in a step by step way it just doesn’t work. This is why physical demonstrations are needed, rather than step by step instructions alone. Because a form can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end, doesn’t mean it is performed that way mechanically.

The main thing to remember is to control the volume of expression, which brings about all kinds of different effects. If you create a huge volume of sound in the movements, and you create a lot of noise, you obviously want to spread this across a big space. This is the reason for stretching the body whilst remaining rooted. You are fixed and stable, yet able to contain a large volume by extending the body.

The Twelve notes

Before you do any of the forms, you first learn the techniques individually. There are said to be 14 different movements in the Korean System of Taekwondo. Actually there are twelve, but more were added in, such as flying kicks and twisting kicks. So it is likely that various adaptions have been made for various reasons over the years. However these are really just variations of the twelve techniques. The number twelve is significant because there are twelve colours and twelve notes, so there are also corresponding movements. Of course there are many more movements than twelve, but the relevance of the number twelve is that there are twelve notes, and an infinite variety of combinations.

In the classical forms on Indian music there are twelve ways to perform a sound. This is the case for sound more generally too. For instance, we will take the example of the “Aa” sound. You can perform it rapidly, as in when doing a punch. As noted in the previous post, the “ah” sound is for engaging the abdomen or Hara Centre in martial arts. You can perform it in a circular fashion, as when performing certain circular blocking techniques. This means it goes up and down, such as when parrying an attack and blocking in a circular fashion. This would make it more drawn out and up and down a certain scale of volume and tone. These variations although subtle, create huge power and output.

There are also twelve colours, all represented in different ways. In Martial Arts, there are normally seven belts, just as in Western music there are seven main notes. Each colour represents a particular quality, so they are not just arbitrarily chosen. At the same time, the different colours are given different meaning in the different arts. This does not matter about the different interpretations, because one who is fearless as a blackbelt, should also aim to be as cautious of danger as a red belt. So you want to encompass all the qualities in one. Where you start just depends on what is being emphasised in what system.

So each system represents itself differently according to what it wants to promote. Some are hard styles, such as Karate, others are soft styles, such as Tai Chi. Obviously they will have different representing qualities. You wouldn’t put a competitive athlete on the Tai Chi notice board, not would you put a mediator on the Karate competition flyer. However, both qualities of meditativeness and movement are contained within each system.

There are also around twenty five forms to display these movements in Taekwondo, which is roughly double the number of twelve. This is because the later half of the forms are reserved for blackbelts, so you effectively start again learning a different set once you reach black belt level. The reason I’m mentioning this is that the numbers are related to the sounds and colours on a spectrum, which is itself all blended together, even though distinctions can be made. So these sounds and colours feature all over martial arts, and go back to ancient tradition and knowledge. So the number twelve is defiantly relevant.

Today, they focus only on the movements and try to make them look flamboyant and flashy. This is not the way, but it’s a cultural thing that has developed in terms of technical appearance. Actually, the real centres which preserve the arts are still alive and kicking. It’s just that they have taken on some back of shop role because they don’t do the whole Pr thing well. This is certainly true in Taekwondo. There is nothing wrong or right about this, it’s just that there are other measurements as to what is the correct form other that the visual aspect, which is kept in tradition.

So finally now we will look at some more applications.This is impossible to explain fully here, but essentially whatever you do with the hand supports what you are doing vocally. This is the case with anything. So the hands are used to follow the sound and create a form out of it. this is the case with the other limbs too. If there is a rapid up and down sound, then the hand follows this. In meditation, the hands go up and down with the breathe in some forms. When you make a more audible vocalised sound, rather than the so called “unstuck sound” of the breathe, the hands play a role in further emphasising this.

So you might punch rapidly and powerfully in a shaking kind of way, or you might push outwardly and then swing back before doing something else. This is obviously too detailed to cover extensively, which is why there was so much emphasis on practice and experience rather than book learning. The above video goes some way to demonstrating what I am saying. It appears as though you learn quite quickly with a book, but you want to bring these qualities to the practice within. This is the main purpose behind the more traditional training forms which emphasise actual experience rather than theory.

There are many different techniques to produce the various sounds. Some of them use the diaphragm and chest to support movement. This has obvious benefits to the cardiovascular and postural system, which directly affects health and physical capability. When one is performing such movements, you make a rapid up and down ascending and descending noise with the mouth and hands. This draws the sound and therefor the energy up and down. So the “Ah” sound links the abdomen to the movement, and the ascending pitch brings it up. The descending one bring sit back down. One example is that you tend to descend down when kicking, because the kick is directly related to the hips or lower body. The opposite is true of punching, which tends to draw the energy up in a more rapid way. This all requires experience and practice to get to know all this.

Much of this would have been originally improvised according to certain rules as the situation requires. Later these forms were to be handed down rather than spontaneously realised on the individual level. This is the problem with the written tradition, it is taken literally as it is written. At the same time, it helps to persevere the physical visual aspect, so on balance there are strengths and weaknesses here. The problem is today that we are to obsessed with the visual aspect often at the expense of the inner dimension of sound. The previous generation were not so lopsided in their development, because what they could see was so limited. So they needed these methods.

Once again, this is difficult to put into words, and has to be experienced directly. At the same time it is common sense and accessible to anyone. When you look at the snake like waving movements of the Chinese forms, these faster forms represent this idea of rapid escalation and deescalation. The snake symbol is actually used because its form best demonstrates this quality, rather than the human body. So to demonstrate the waving movements which go up and down, the snake was used to clearly make this obvious in such a way that words could not. The snake is used because its being is closely related to the human beings energy form, not because the human wants to physically mimic the snake.