Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture

Editorial & Introduction

Josephine Lamp — 2019-10-30

The Aesthetics of Interpersonal Attunement in Spiritual Care

Michael Nilon — 2019-10-30

This article explores how storytelling plays an integral role in interpersonal attunement, attachment, and spiritual caregiving. An interpersonal style of attuning to the experiences of others constitutes an ethical aesthetic of resonant harmonizing between the bodies, nervous systems, and minds of caregivers and patients. Neurobiological research has provided empirical scaffolding to rationally understand how attuned relations regulate the nervous systems of the relating persons. Compassionate caregiving in clinical chaplaincy practices relies on the cultivation of self-regulation capacities through meditation practices and bottom-up self-integration techniques on the part of caregivers. Compassionate caregivers then use their emotional equilibrium and empathic insights to open an interpersonal space for receiving the stories of patients, families, and other caregivers in clinical settings. Self-regulation and self-transcendence depend on the creation of physiological cues of safety and empathic understanding between persons and social groups that counteract the harms endemic to many late modern social institutions in which systemic violence often takes place. The lack of such physiological cues of safety not only undermines self-healing processes that storytelling enables but can lead to destructive negative reciprocities. This article concludes that attuned spiritual caregiving offers a more sustainable social response to suffering than the creation of silos for warehousing men and women whose exposure the complex trauma has led to chronic failure to self-regulate.

A Classical Framework for Assessing Beauty in the Fields of Science and Engineering

Raymond Santucci — 2019-10-30

Beauty is that which communicates itself clearly to the perceiver who is so pleased by what is perceived so as to inspire a movement of the will toward that beauty. Beauty is true and it is good, and it greatly enriches all aspects of human life. The sciences are no exception, as they too can be enriched by beauty. As science is concerned with the pursuit of truth for the good of all, it is only natural that beauty be a part of its patrimony. As such, beauty and science are assessed together in this article to find places of cooperative enrichment and benefit. An internally consistent framework is presented herein which defines what beauty is and how to critically assess it. This framework is classical in origin and is represented here to a modern audience. Once properly understood, this framework can be used to objectively discuss and analyze beauty, particularly within the context of scientific and engineering disciplines. Examples are given to demonstrate how beauty can be better implemented into the sciences with respect to figures, presentations, and products. The ultimate goal of the work is to encourage the critical discussion of beauty and to empower scientists to more beautifully present their research.

Musical Aesthetics of the Natural World

Eli Stine — 2019-10-30

Throughout recorded human history, experiences and observations of the natural world have inspired the arts. Within the sonic arts, evocations of nature permeate a wide variety of acoustic and electronic composition strategies. These strategies artistically investigate diverse attributes of nature: tranquility, turbulence, abundance, scarcity, complexity, and purity, to name but a few. Within the 20th century, new technologies to understand these attributes, including media recording and scientific analysis, were developed. These technologies allow music composition strategies to go beyond mere evocation and to allow for the construction of musical works that engage explicit models of nature (what has been called ‘biologically inspired music’). This paper explores two such deployments of these ‘natural sound models’ within music and music generation systems created by the authors: an electroacoustic composition using data derived from multi-channel recordings of forest insects (Luna-Mega) and an electronic music generation system that extracts musical events from the different layers of natural soundscapes, in particular oyster reef soundscapes (Stine). Together these works engage a diverse array of extra-musical disciplines: environmental science, acoustic ecology, entomology, and computer science. The works are contextualized with a brief history of natural sound models from pre-antiquity to the present in addition to reflections on the uses of technology within these projects and the potential experiences of audiences listening to these works.