Besides being a child’s work, play can be an adult’s way of life. It is a creative state of mind where one uses the ability to symbolise in order to create something unprecedented. The ability to play doesn’t only lead to artistic masterpieces, but also enhances one’s inner freedom by enabling a rich relationship with life.

A playful state of mind can be seen as a third reality between oneself and the outer world. When playing, one is neither in the real world nor experiencing their inner reality in the purest sense. You draw on the surrounding material environment, but make it yours by altering it for your own purposes.

Being both the third reality and an intermediate area of experience, play is also an illusion. It is simultaneously true and untrue. The play experience is like watching a Technicolor film, which also produces a mixture of realistic and unrealistic worlds – ecstatic disbelief combined with a wish that all you see could be true.

“Besides being a child’s work, play can be an adult’s way of life.”

Play can be escapism or a place to rest. It allows a break from reality that conflicts with inner wishes. In play, one can deal with complex things through an “as if” attitude.

Play is a potential space – it enhances a creative relationship to one’s surroundings. When playing, it becomes possible to free presentations from their referents and modify them, generating more flexible ways to see the world. For example, a child can use a wooden stick as a phone to call someone but also as a saw to cut imaginary trees.

The ability to use real-world objects in creating imaginary ones emerges during the first year of life. Later, the playful state of mind continues to prevail in artistic practices, cultural and religious acts, and in the attitude towards oneself and the others. At best, play is manifested in the freedom to be the potential you.

The mind is a complicated place with all its parts, states and processes. I will never be able to get in touch with it in a way that I would become fully aware of all that is happening in me. There are and will be hidden parts in my mind. Something remains untouched and beyond the consciousness.

The unconscious mind has its roots in the body and bodily sensations. It is the most primitive and fundamental part of me where the urges of my body dictate the development. It is about keeping and feeling myself alive through constantly competing desires to create and destroy, to love and hate. Those were my very first experiences when I was little and did not master the words yet.

Nowadays, the closest I can get to my unconscious mind is when I’m dreaming. The dream world is a timeless place where anything I can and can’t imagine is possible. There is neither daytime logic nor any rules. Dreams are based on emotions. While dreaming, I have experienced the strongest and purest feelings: hatred, despair, horror, embarrassment, longing, and passion.

“Art touches the unconscious mind, because it connects with my archaic feelings.”

Art touches the unconscious mind, because it connects with my archaic feelings. Through art and its link to the unconscious it is possible to get a profound feeling of togetherness, an integrated sense of self. It is a magical feeling – like I had discovered something new and got connected to something old at the same time. There is a sense of alienation and familiarity side by side.

The unconscious mind hints about its existence to me. I can sense it in the instances of intuition and glimpses of gut feeling. In dreams and artistic achievements I can see pieces of my unconscious thoughts although they are in a masked form. I am connected to the unconscious when my body produces speechless, emotionally charged experiences and a free-floating sense of being alive.

My attitude towards the veiled part of me is ambiguous. It would be interesting to know more about what I am made of. At the same time, it is also scary to get in touch with the stranger in my mind. It is like diving into muddy water, not knowing what lies beneath. I have an urge to hold my breath and struggle to the shore, but going with the flow fascinates me more. That is why I will continue these gentle attempts to get in touch with different parts in me. For all I can say by now is: hello me, whoever you are!

Emilia Suviala is a psychologist specialised in developmental and educational psychology. She is interested in human attachment and psychoanalytic thinking.

Teemu Suviala is the creative director and co-founder of design consultancy Kokoro & Moi. He started his career drawing comics for Pahkasika magazine.

The waveform of the Science Poems mix.

The Science Poems mix sets out to explore the sound of science and the science of sound. The playlist ranges from sonic experiments and musical inventions to sounds and music deriving from science. But while science can be described as a systematic knowledge-base or a prescriptive practice, best sounds don’t usually make any sense. So listen, let dopamine set the mood and get lost in science.

Download the Science Poems mix here (by right clicking)!

Kraftwerk: Geiger Counter

Kraftwerk call themselves “music workers” somewhere in between musicians and technicians. 
In the spirit of the Science Poems mix, Kraftwerk’s 1975 concept album Radio-Activity has a twin theme being partly about radioactivity and partly about activity on the radio. Geiger Counter is a study on a radiation detector picking up more and more gamma rays as we go on with our mix.

The Eerie Sounds of Saturn’s Radio Emissions

This winter, Palais de Tokyo displayed a piece of sound art by David Allen as part of the Chasing Napoleon exhibition. It recreated Eric Saties’ piece Véritables préludes flasques (pour un chien) [Truly flabby preludes (for a dog) in French] in a literal manner: the preludes were played above the audio frequency of 20kHz. They were thus unperceivable to humans yet comfortably within the hearing range of dogs who are able to hear much higher sounds.

Well above the audio spectrum of Allen’s piece, The Eerie Sounds of Saturn’s Radio Emissions relate to the auroras of Saturn‘s poles. The emissions were recorded by the Cassini spacecraft and are to be found somewhere in between 30 and 80 kHz. Theyhave been made audible by shifting them downwards. As the changes in frequency are rather slow, the recording is also sped up altogether 22 times. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones is very similar to the Earth’s auroral radio emissions.

We included this track by the inspiration of Avaruusromua (Space Junk in Finnish), a weekly radio show on the Finnish national radio we both grew up with. Avaruusromua has presented musical visions beyond time and space for two decades already.

Bass Extreme & Techmaster P.E.B.: Bass Sweep

At the other end of our perceivable audio spectrum lies bass. Bass test tracks are used to test the low end, or bass response, of audio systems, particularly loudspeakers and amplifiers. They mostly concentrate on frequencies under 50 Hz where sound is more about feeling and less about hearing. Bass Sweep features two bass notes sweeping in stereo creating clashing harmonics and pulsating overtones. Note: you might not hear anything on your laptop speakers as their frequency response goes down to only around 150 Hz!

Kenji Kawai: M01 Chant I – Making of Cyborg

The year is 2029. Cyborgs are made to protect the increasingly information-oriented world from hackers. Kenji Kawai’s Making of Cyborg haunts like Ghost in the Shell, a 1995 science fiction anime film by Mamoru Oshii and the most impressive science poem that we know.

Timothy Leary: Trip: The Beginning of the Voyage (Heart Chakra)

Timothy Leary (1920-1996), an American writer, psychologist and futurist, urged people to embrace cultural changes through the use of psychedelics and by detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society. An icon of 1960s counterculture, Leary is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic, spiritual and emotional benefits of LSD. This is one of the sound montages he recorded for accompanying the experiments in turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

Dopplereffekt: Z Boson

Like Russia in Winston Churchill’s words, Dopplereffekt is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. There is no absolute certainty about the individual(s) behind the music. However, Dopplereffekt is generally believed to be the producer and artist Gerald Donald who is also connected with the projects Der Zyklus, Japanese Telecom and Arpanet. He is also half of the late Drexciya. Although the musical style of Dopplereffekt has changed over time the artistic production has always had a strong thematic and conceptual affiliation with science, sexuality and politics.

Z Boson is taken from the album Linear Accelerator released in 2003 – just a few years after Dopplereffekt had become linked with the “electro revival” happening at the time. However, with Linear Accelerator this ended quickly. The album’s music took its conceptual cues from high energy physics and mostly also sounded like it. While Z Boson is one of the album’s more “approachable” pieces, its subject matter is not: z bosons are elementary particles that mediate the weak force, one of the fundamental interactions of nature.

Ataraxia: I Ching

I Ching, Book of Changes, is one of the oldest Chinese classic texts. It presents a system of cosmology and philosophy intrinsic to Chinese culture, centering around the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and the acceptance of the inevitability of change. Ataraxia, then again, is not only the pseudonym of the Moog-wizard Mort Garson but also a concept used to describe a spiritual balance or a state of perfection that is not possible for human beings to reach entirely. The track I Ching by Ataraxia was made in 1975 to accompany meditations.

David Rothenberg: Beezus, Beeten, Breep

Musician, composer, author and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg meditates by playing with a band of birds and crickets, and writes about the deep connections between humans and the natural world. Like evolutionists, Rothenberg has never been able to completely explain why birds sing and what their song means to both avian and human ears. It is an aesthetic and scientific mystery. “There is music in nature and nature in music. We can be immersed by both without needing to understand how the two are forever intertwined. It is enough to know that they are,” Rothenberg writes.

Laurie Anderson's debut album Big Science (1982) is minimalist and monochrome in sound. Photo by the courtesy of Nonesuch Records.

Laurie Anderson: Let X=X

Closing the circle, the arbitrary title of Laurie Anderson’s track Let X=X from her avant-garde debut album Big Science (1982) brings the words of John Cage to mind: “I love sounds just as they are, and they don’t have to be anything more than they are. I don’t want them to be psychological, I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s a president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.”