Stephen Hawking’s voice/Justin Bieber’s breaths

Bieber’s breaths are cut from Love Yourself, obvs. And, as far as I can tell, speech synthesis has never included breathing.

Contrast love yourself with sacrifice by Elton John, 1990s biggest hit

In any case, 2019 saw way more attention on breathing than any other year in the history of pop music.

Which is curious because we are now in the midst of a respiratory pandemic.

Not to mention the way that breathing has become politicised in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (after Eric Garner in 2014).

It’s only relatively recently in medical history that we’ve known what breathing is for.

They used to assume that it had to do with regulating the rhythm of the heart or something - who knew or cared, the liver was where the real action was

But once it was established and once they discovered what oxygen was, it was a small step to inventing the concept of public health.

Understanding the function of breathing completely transformed social relations

But it’s never really made its way into music properly. It’s noise in the machine - allowed to be audible only really as a metaphor for sex.

Until now, apparently.

Fuck knows why. But there’s something - in the air -

Incidentally, the NHS and the shards of laughing gas canisters that litter the streets are distant cousins - with the invention of oxygen as the common ancestor.

Also incidentally, how come those nitrous oxide canisters are absolutely everywhere but you never see anyone taking it? Laughing gas afficionados are like baby pigeons.

Anyway, in the eighteenth century, wind instruments came to be regarded as inferior to what you might group (imprecisely) as resonant instruments. There was something about the act of breathing that meant that they were less real.

That the proximity to the human body made them less true than instruments that simply presented material facts, like a bell or a violin.

Stravinsky called the organ ‘the monster that doesn’t breathe’.

Everyone knows that dinosaurs had brains in their bums but no one knows that birds have a spare lung in their arses.

Anyway, the Abrahamic religions have almost nothing to say about breathing. Why is that? Please RT to vicars, etc.

I recognise that this thread is limited. I’d love to know more about the position of breathing in other spiritual traditions, for example, but it’s really hard to cut through the jungle of interpretation from yoga hippies, etc.