58 Facts About Manfred Clynes

Manfred Edward Clynes was an Austrian-born scientist, inventor, and musician.

Manfred Clynes is best known for his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology.

Manfred Clynes' work combines music and science, more particularly, neurophysiology and neuroscience.

Manfred Clynes was the subject of a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, September 21,1991.

Manfred Clynes concentrated on what he saw as the natural and unalterable interlocking of the central nervous system with basic expressive time forms, and on the innate power of those forms to generate specific basic emotions.

Manfred Clynes recognized that we are all familiar with this interlocking in our experiences of laughter and of yawning, although its scientific importance had been largely swept under the carpet by a Skinnerian bias and still largely is.

Manfred Clynes was able to prove this by systematically deriving sounds from subjects' expressions of emotions through touch, and then playing those sounds to hearers culturally remote from the original subjects.

Manfred Clynes found in this a confirmation of the existence of biologically fixed, universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of emotion that give rise to much of the experience within human societies.

Anger, love, and grief, for example, according to Manfred Clynes, have clearly different dynamic expressive forms.

Importantly, a cardinal property of this inherent biologic communication language, in Manfred Clynes' findings, is that the more closely an expression follows the precise dynamic form, the more powerful is the generation of the corresponding emotion, in both the person expressing and in the perceiver of the expression.

Manfred Clynes then predicted the existence of soundless laughter, in which the sound production is replaced by tactile pressure at the same temporal pattern.

Manfred Clynes further hypothesized that couples with unmatched speeds of laughter might not be as readily compatible as those whose laughter was harmoniously coordinated.

Manfred Clynes enthusiastically published his realization that love, joy, and reverence were always there to be experienced, capable of being generated through precise expression and accessible by simple means, due to the connection to their biologic roots.

Manfred Clynes is credited with developing and coining the term cyborg, which refers to beings with both biological and artificial parts.

Manfred Clynes was born on August 14,1925, in Vienna, Austria, the son of Olga and Marcel Clynes.

Manfred Clynes's parents emigrated to Melbourne, in September 1938 to escape Nazism.

The detailed descriptions of this invention as written by the fifteen-year-old Manfred Clynes are rigorous; it was the first of his many inventions to come that worked.

In 1946 Manfred Clynes graduated from the University of Melbourne having studied both engineering science and music.

Manfred Clynes hitchhiked from Melbourne as he could not afford the train fare, let alone the fee charged by Friedman.

Manfred Clynes performed them for the first time in October 1949, in Ojai, at Jiddu Krishnamurti's school, and, in 1950, along with other works, in all the capital cities of Australia, to great acclaim.

Manfred Clynes soon became regarded as one of Australia's outstanding pianists.

Young Manfred Clynes had a personal letter of introduction to Albert Einstein from an elderly lady in Australia, with whom, in her youth, Einstein had exchanged poems.

Manfred Clynes played for Einstein on his fine Bechstein piano, especially Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert.

Manfred Clynes loved Clynes' playing of Mozart and Schubert, calling Clynes "a blessed artist" In May 1953 Einstein wrote Clynes a personal letter by hand to help him in his forthcoming European tour.

In 1953, helped by the letter from Einstein, Manfred Clynes toured Europe with great critical success, playing the Goldberg Variations.

Also in 1960, in collaboration with Nathan S Kline, Clynes published the cyborg concept, and its corollary, participant evolution.

Already in 1960 The New York Times had noted Manfred Clynes' remarkable double-stranded gifts.

An ardent admirer of the great master musician Pablo Casals since early childhood, Manfred Clynes now attended all Casals' master classes, many with his family.

In 1966, Manfred Clynes played both the Diabelli Variations of Beethoven and Bach's Goldberg Variations for Casals, and was invited to join Casals in Puerto Rico for several months to take part in his music and to accompany some of the master classes at the Casals home in Santurce.

Manfred Clynes considered this contact with Casals to be a fulfilment of his most cherished lifelong dream.

Casals exceeded his expectations in every way, and Manfred Clynes considered his friendship with Casals to have been the highpoint of his life.

Manfred Clynes showed that brain electrical responses to the color red from previous black produced similar patterns from several distinct brain sites, for all subjects.

Manfred Clynes 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 Manfred Clynes designed an instrument he called the sentograph to measure the motoric pulse.

At the invitation of the NY Academy of Sciences, Manfred Clynes wrote an extensive monograph on his findings and theories to date, which the Academy published in 1973.

Since the sentic cycles suddenly helped individuals feel better without drugs, Manfred 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.

Manfred Clynes 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.

Manfred Clynes was the first to discover, in studying voice recognition in 1975 that a speaker's identity, though unimpeded by changes in speed, was masked by transposition of as little as a semitone in pitch.

Manfred Clynes began work on a book on laughter, which was only two-thirds completed.

In 1977 Rex Hobcroft, director of Sydney's New South Wales State Conservatory, who had praised Manfred Clynes' Sentics, offered Manfred Clynes a substantial position at the Conservatory initially connected with the International Piano Competition held at the time in Sydney.

Accordingly, Manfred Clynes moved to Sydney in what proved to be the beginning of ten fruitful years of research and music making.

In 1978 Manfred Clynes gave performances of both the Goldberg Variations and the Diabelli, as well as works of Mozart, at the Verbruggen Hall in Sydney.

The identification of composers' pulse, and its use in interpreting classical works via computer, was later extended by Manfred Clynes, according to his knowledge and experience with dynamic forms, to comprise several levels of time structure.

Menuhin died in 1981, and Manfred Clynes gave a memorial concert for her in the Verbruggen Hall, of the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Op 109,110, and 111.

Manfred Clynes had learned Beethoven's Opus 110 especially for that occasion, never having performed it before.

In 1982, Manfred Clynes undertook further extensive studies on the nature of the expression of emotions through touch.

In 1986, Manfred Clynes gave his first classical concert played entirely by computer, according to the three principles he had discovered, to a full house in a free concert at the Joseph Post Hall of the Sydney Conservatory.

Manfred Clynes performed as pianist, in a Sunday series at Queens College, twelve of the Beethoven sonatas, lecturing to the Physics Department on Time, and to the Medical Faculty on the biologic nature of dynamic expressive forms.

Also during this period, Manfred Clynes undertook a large statistical study with various groups of the perception of composer's pulse.

Manfred Clynes returned to the United States in 1991 and settled in Sonoma, California.

Manfred Clynes enlisted his gifted son Darius as software engineer on the HP team to help make it possible.

Nine months later, a critical demonstration took place to show that the principles Manfred Clynes had discovered would work well with real instruments, not just with oscillators, to enable music played with meaningful phrasing and expression.

Once Manfred Clynes had successfully developed a real-time implementation of his principles for musical interpretation via computer, using UNIX, HP gave Manfred Clynes' company, Microsound, Intl, a second development contract to bring this capacity into the burgeoning world of personal computers, which, in 1994, functioned at 60 MHz.

Manfred Clynes was fortunate to obtain the help of Steve Sweet, a programmer, to carry out the conversion.

Henceforth, with the help of Steve Sweet, Manfred Clynes developed the software program, called SuperConductor himself.

In 2007, at the age of 82, Manfred Clynes has developed new exercises for piano playing away from the piano, which may permit the improvement of piano technique even for octogenarians.

Manfred Clynes married in 1951, divorced in 1972 and has three children and eight grandchildren.

Manfred Clynes died in West Nyack, New York in January 2020, at the age of 94.