Customer Reviews

The Cosmic Octave: Origin of Harmony, Planets, Tones, Colors, the Power of Inherent Vibrations

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Mr. Eric Hirschorn's review does a great disservice to this scholarly work. I see that 22 out of 24 readers of his review said it helped them. I would hate to think that so many were missing out on a worthy treatise on how the Universe is mathematically put together. I hope to undo some of his damage with my review.
I have Masters degrees, including Math, Physics and Chemistry. I understand the details of what this book puts forth. I can say with resounding thanks, that all is well, read in harmony, in the Universe and this book goes a long way past other proofs.
What Mr. Hirschorn objects to, a factor that successfully reduces the periodic orbits and frequencies of each body in our solar system, defies many mathematical traditions. The author may not understand the significance of this factor, as we did not understand the significance of Pi for so many centuries.
The fact that the sun, planets and moon stand in the same frequency ratio as the notes on our most harmonic scale is the point, a brilliant one at that. In number theory, a science worthy of the best minds, we seek to understand these relationships between quantities. What Mathematician can explain the Law of Nines in our own number system? Mr. Hirschorn may reduce the studied body of work on that subject alone to mere "ramblings of numerology," our best minds have thought otherwise.
How can one be a mathematician and not a musician? The significance of what we see to what we hear, the frequencies we respond to and how they repeat themselves from DNA outward, are the stuff we were made to understand.
This book takes us further than we have traveled before. Have a great voyage! Once you leave the portal of what we don't want to be true, and travel into the awesome resonance of the Universe and what we see before us, your eyes, heart and mind will be in for so many surprises. Don't miss this one...

The Cosmic Octave is a gem of a handbook for anyone interested in understanding how music is truly the language of the cosmos and of the natural world. Cousto, a brilliant german mathematician, writes succinctly and in terms that are easy to grasp even for non-scientists. He outlines the basics of how specific musical tones and intervals are related to the color spectrum, periods of time, the sun and each of the planets in our solar system, and all the natural cycles and rythms we find in the world around us. By showing the reader the science behind how all life processes are tuned to specific tones or groups of tones, we are able to glimpse into the mystery of why and how music is a universal human language, indeed a universal language of life itself. For anyone curious about why music can affect listeners so profoundly, this book offers fascinating insight. And for readers interested in a more in-depth study of this subject, the appendices are rich with detailed scientific information and reference. For anyone pursuing a musical path, this handbook is invaluable as a guide and a powerful tool. It outlines the basics of how music may be created in resonance with the language of the universal life force. At a time when much of human civilization is out of sync with the earth and indeed at odds with it, Cousto offers a key to how music can be created to purposefully bring people into realignment with our roots in the natural world. Cousto is a brilliant spokesperson for all interested in how humanity may evolve wisely and gracefully into the new millenium. Certainly he is to be praised for his ability to educate and inspire a wide audience. The Cosmic Octave is a treasure chest in a very small package. Don't miss it.

In The Cosmic Octave, mathematician and musician Hans Cousto shows the reader the intimate connection between levels of vibrating periodical phenomena and how the revolutions of the planets are related to musical beats, sounds and colors -- as well as the microcosmic vibratory qualities of a single cell. The Cosmic Octave will prove to be of great and enduring interest for students of metaphysics, the harmonics of music, and the relationships of colors, tones, and the cosmology of planets.

Weird and wonderful, if somewhat confused. Just when he starts to make sense the author heads off on a tangent about the Catholic Church or some such bugaboo, and you loose confidence. The mass of facts, calculations, esoteric formulas and mathematical problems made my head hurt. But if you can get through all that and keep the basic message in mind, it is well worth reading from a musical point of view. I don't know how a scientist would judge it. The basic message is: everything connects.

This book has important information about octaves and harmonics. However it is filled with mathematical and spelling errors in its translation from German to English. One can surmise that even in the original German the style is very terse. The author does not lay enough ground work for each subject but delves right in leaving little room for orientation. Those not familiar with each particular subject will be left trying to get into each area as the dense writing style unfolds thereby missing important details along the way. Also lacking are specific proofs within the text for the frequency assignments that are given for specific phenomena.

So while the subject matter is part of the great work conveyed by mystery schools such as the Sufis and Pythagoras the specific presentation here is lacking in it's accessibility and tarnished by lack of refinement.

For the reader new to this subject the works of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Russill Paul, Joscelyn Godwin, or Pythagoras are recommened as better starting places.

I'm no idiot (I have an honours degree in psychology and an MBA) but this book was completely incomprehensible to me. If I lived in the States I would have returned it! I suspect only readers with a scientific education can appreciate this book - and maybe they'll find it excellent - but it definitely is not for the generalist.

This guy is really smart. He has alot of equations that are above my head, but they are in the book to qualify what he is saying. I enjoyed alot of the things he said, they helped me clarify some things I've been looking into. I did not get this book for his theory of theology or spiritual guidance. I got it for the science and knowledge of music and how it is in all creation. As far as I'm concerned he could have left some of his opinions out. But I'm glad I bought the book.

Wow, Cosmic, Man!
Here's a choice quote from page 72:
" 'Tune in', on the other hand, corresponds to "C sharp,", the tone of an earth year, which helps achieve harmony on the level of the soul... "Drop out" corresponds to "F", the tone of the Platonic year. If these remarks seem farfetched, I recommend reading Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Walter Clark and Robert Anton Wilson... who all investigate different areas of consciousness..."

Leary and Lilly, of course, are two of the great psychedelic cosmonauts of the 60s and 70s, who both get generous footnotes and bibliography entries.

Together, the musical tones F, G, and C# (a nice little Thelonious Monk type chord) are, according to Cousto, the musical representation of Leary's famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out" !!!

Hans Cousto's chief expertise appears to be in astrology, with a minor in astronomy (a legitimate side interest of astrologers which too few bother with) and I don't fault his knowledge in either field, having no expertise there myself. However (speaking as a musician) what Cousto knows about music wouldn't fill a baby food jar. He has taken the numbers belonging to known astronomical distances and time cycles, reduced them by successive halves 20 to 30 times, and says that the resulting numbers demonstrate harmonic resonances with both musical tones and colors. His numbers need considerable massaging to accomplish this, which he has no fear of doing with some very arcane equations (all listed in the appendix), and even so the resulting "harmonic resonances" are quite a stretch.

Along the way he takes a little detour to offer advice on tantric sex, and drags in the "hundredth monkey" myth to show that if a representative percentage of humanity would just start to resonate with the cosmos, the new age would arrive in short order.

The correspondences between the planets, musical tones, colors, metals, days of the week, chakras, etc. are an alchemical idea which goes back to ancient Egypt, if we are to believe author Moustafa Gadalla (whom I would also take with a little grain of salt). Cousto does his best to update this idea with his equations, digitizing what was originally a set of analogies (with quite different results, by the way). The original alchemical analogies were based on the visual appearance of the planetary orbits from a bronze-age geocentric point of view, making analogies with the metals and the tones of a musical scale and the rest of the sets of seven in a manner resembling the five element theory of traditional chinese medicine.

If you like this book, you'll love Terence McKenna's "The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching" in which he details his visions of the end of time while taking the jungle vine hallucinogen Ayahuasca.

I just changed my old review. You can prove anything with numbers. So far, I have not been able to find a good honest book on the octave. Goethe and Nicomachus died before they finished theirs, and it seems that no one since then has come close to writing anything credible. Out of all of the books I have read this one comes the closest, but its still far from the truth.

This book is filled with mathematical errors and typos. Makes a book on harmonics rather useless. Don't buy it.