2nd Heightening and Anti-Tones

[Duxredux he/him]

With being able to just sing in order to disrupt investiture, anyone think that the 2nd Heightening which grants perfect pitch to suddenly be a lot more powerful and relevant in the Cosmere as a whole? 

Edited January 19, 2022 by Duxredux

[CryoZenith he/him]

I think it's a *bit* of an overstatement to say that you can disrupt investiture through singing alone. It's technically true but there's a lot of missing steps like extracting the investiture, enclosing the investiture in a closed space, isolating that closed space from outside tones etc. If you just, no other extra steps, start singing an antitone, even with perfect pitch, you're basically doing the equivalent of nails on a blackboard to invested entities. Not much more.

[+Invocation]

8 minutes ago, CryoZenith said:

you're basically doing the equivalent of nails on a blackboard to invested entities

Now I want to see Nightblood's reaction to that.

[HSuperLee]

44 minutes ago, Invocation said:

Now I want to see Nightblood's reaction to that.

Would Nightblood even be that affected? At this point they've eaten so many different kinds of Investiture, and if "you are what you eat" applies in any way to investivores, then Nightblood might not even be dominated enough by the pure tone of Nalthis to really be that hindered by its anti-tone. Nightblood might be more like a whole orchestra than a single tone at this point, even if there is some level of Investiture conversion going on.

[CryoZenith he/him]

I suspect that anti-Investiture is harmful or at the very least annoying to all beings made of investiture, even those of mismatched type. Like, you would require the correct type to outright destroy or "annihilate" an investiture-based being, but even the offtypes would do something. So even though Nightblood is probably not purely endowment-type investiture anymore, endowment-type anti-investiture would probably still bother it.

But whether endowment-type anti-investiture can hurt Nightblood is light years away of a question from whether the antitone of endowment can hurt Nightblood. The latter is silly even on a hypothetical level.

[Anomander Rake he/him]

1 hour ago, CryoZenith said:

I think it's a *bit* of an overstatement to say that you can disrupt investiture through singing alone. It's technically true but there's a lot of missing steps like extracting the investiture, enclosing the investiture in a closed space, isolating that closed space from outside tones etc. If you just, no other extra steps, start singing an antitone, even with perfect pitch, you're basically doing the equivalent of nails on a blackboard to invested entities. Not much more.

I feel like singing/humming certain tones should have at least some effects on certain actions - like, maybe humming the anti-tone for preservation would screw with any emotional bronze, zinc, or brass alomancy, like a sort of destructive coppercloud of sound and intent?  Maybe you have trouble burning the metal, and thus tapping into preservations power, if you hear his anti-tone?

[CryoZenith he/him]

Yeah, I'm making a proactive guess that that wouldn't work. Or, to clarify (because the two examples you gave might work differently), I think it's moderately unlikely that humming the anti-preservation tone protects you from a-zinc, and I think it's very unlikely that humming the anti-preservation tone hurts the misting's ability to burn zinc.

Edited January 19, 2022 by CryoZenith

[Duxredux he/him]

There's a few applications that we've seen. The Shanay-im use a spear with Raysium and humming to pull Stormlight out of Windrunners, and I'm guessing they're humming the tone of Stormlight. Navani singing the anti-Voidlight tone drove off Moash, allowing him to feel pain again. We also don't really see what happens when spren hear anti-tones, and if they're affected far more than a Fused.

[CryoZenith he/him]

The spear thing works because Raysium as a metal has the innate magical property of being conductive to investiture. Think of the Shanay-im humming as an on/off switch rather than the source of the leeching.

The Navani and Moash scene is admittedly a bit more interesting, but you do have to keep in mind that Moash was easily dealing with Navani before Navani bonded the Sibling, requiring Raboniel to buy her time. If the primary thing that removed Moash's Odium-mental-protections was the hum, then Navani could've handled him without bonding, which didn't happen.

[Quantus he/him]

Devil's Advocate statement here, but we dont know that any other forms of gaseous Investiture that is not manifesting as rosharan-style "Lights" would respond to sound or frequencies.  If they did, for example, there should be some way to move investiture in or out of a Metalmind using the same mechanisms, and I dont think that would work for a few reasons (Identity being the first complication). 

[Zoey she/her]

2 hours ago, HSuperLee said:

Would Nightblood even be that affected? At this point they've eaten so many different kinds of Investiture, and if "you are what you eat" applies in any way to investivores, then Nightblood might not even be dominated enough by the pure tone of Nalthis to really be that hindered by its anti-tone. Nightblood might be more like a whole orchestra than a single tone at this point, even if there is some level of Investiture conversion going on.

This just makes me think, I wonder what it would be like if you un-key Investiture from any tone, and then get 16 peoples to sing the Tones of different Shards at the same time, wonder what the Investiture born would be like. 

[Quantus he/him]

2 hours ago, Zoey said:

This just makes me think, I wonder what it would be like if you un-key Investiture from any tone, and then get 16 peoples to sing the Tones of different Shards at the same time, wonder what the Investiture born would be like. 

Also, do Tones exist for all Shards or just the ones that are Invested in Roshar. Things were so disrupted (with the Sibling etc) precisely because a new Pure tone (Odium's) emerged once he'd Invested in the world enough.  

[HSuperLee]

7 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Also, do Tones exist for all Shards or just the ones that are Invested in Roshar. Things were so disrupted (with the Sibling etc) precisely because a new Pure tone (Odium's) emerged once he'd Invested in the world enough. 

The implication is that all Shards have their own pure tone.

Quote

Menderbug

Is the Well's pulsing a 'pure tone of Scadrial'?

Brandon Sanderson

Yup!

Miscellaneous 2020 (Nov. 30, 2020)

 

[Quantus he/him]

6 minutes ago, HSuperLee said:

The implication is that all Shards have their own pure tone.

 

Awesome, hadnt seen that one.  Thanks!

[Zoey she/her]

4 hours ago, Quantus said:

Awesome, hadnt seen that one.  Thanks!

Yup, all Shards do have a Tone. It isn't just a Roshar thing. Brandon has also said that Rhythms are a Cosmere-wide phenomenon. They are just most prevalent and strong on Roshar, for reasons we don't know yet. 

[Quantus he/him]

11 hours ago, Zoey said:

Yup, all Shards do have a Tone. It isn't just a Roshar thing. Brandon has also said that Rhythms are a Cosmere-wide phenomenon. They are just most prevalent and strong on Roshar, for reasons we don't know yet. 

Rhythms are cosmere wide, sure. And the above WOB definitely implies that all Shards have a similar frequency association to the Pure Tones (which I dont believe are the same thing at all).  I am still pretty skeptical that non-Light forms of investiture can be manipulated by sound directly anywhere in the Cosmere, as they are on Roshar.  

[Zoey she/her]

4 hours ago, Quantus said:

Rhythms are cosmere wide, sure. And the above WOB definitely implies that all Shards have a similar frequency association to the Pure Tones (which I dont believe are the same thing at all).  I am still pretty skeptical that non-Light forms of investiture can be manipulated by sound directly anywhere in the Cosmere, as they are on Roshar.  

I personally disagree, as we know that different Investitures have different Tones, as Shards are Investiture, and Shards have Tones. Therefore, I feel that the way Navani made Anti-Investiture can be extrapolated to any Shard's Investiture as long as you know the Tone.

We don't really have  reason to believe they wouldn't, IMO. 

[Quantus he/him]

1 hour ago, Zoey said:

I personally disagree, as we know that different Investitures have different Tones, as Shards are Investiture, and Shards have Tones. Therefore, I feel that the way Navani made Anti-Investiture can be extrapolated to any Shard's Investiture as long as you know the Tone.

We don't really have  reason to believe they wouldn't, IMO. 

Im not talking about Anti-Investiture, or really Im not talking specifically about the Intent/Inversion thing that happens to make the cancellation waveform.  What Im saying is that I dont think you could extract Breath from an object or transfer metalmind Investiture or charge White Sand or Manipulate the Mists, etc. with a tuning fork.  Investiture in the form of a Light reacts directly to sound, but there's no indication any of the others do or would.

At the very least I would have  expected the Heightened population of Nalthis to have noticed the effect on their own, between all the perfect pitch in their Art/Music, the existence of Instinctive Awakening as ability, and the ever-present Economic motivation of needing a way to recover breaths when their owner dies.  But, I do acknowledge that those are circumstantial objections at best.  

[Frustration]

52 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Im not talking about Anti-Investiture, or really Im not talking specifically about the Intent/Inversion thing that happens to make the cancellation waveform.  What Im saying is that I dont think you could extract Breath from an object or transfer metalmind Investiture or charge White Sand or Manipulate the Mists, etc. with a tuning fork.  Investiture in the form of a Light reacts directly to sound, but there's no indication any of the others do or would.

At the very least I would have  expected the Heightened population of Nalthis to have noticed the effect on their own, between all the perfect pitch in their Art/Music, the existence of Instinctive Awakening as ability, and the ever-present Economic motivation of needing a way to recover breaths when their owner dies.  But, I do acknowledge that those are circumstantial objections at best.  

I'll agree tones are more likely to affect gaseous forms of investiture than solids.

I'm unsure on liquid forms though.

[CryoZenith he/him]

4 hours ago, Quantus said:

At the very least I would have  expected the Heightened population of Nalthis to have noticed the effect on their own, between all the perfect pitch in their Art/Music, the existence of Instinctive Awakening as ability, and the ever-present Economic motivation of needing a way to recover breaths when their owner dies.  But, I do acknowledge that those are circumstantial objections at best.  

I agree with your conclusion but not necessarily your thought process here. Like, I agree that the tuning fork method probably doesn't work on Breath the way it works on Lights, but I wouldn't necessarily say "they would've found out by now if it did." Because we have an in-world example of a society who definitely had strong economic and logistic and military motivations to experiment a lot, arguably even more pressing motivations than the Nalthians did. Namely, the Alethi. Yet at the end of the day, for all their experimenting. the Alethi only found out about the tuning fork method by... being told by the Thaylens.

"Someone would've noticed by now" is a dangerous and stunting mindset to have in science. The process of scientific development doesn't cleanly transition new inventions in monotonously ascending complexity. Sure, there is a positive correlation between how complex an invention is and how late it is discovered, but it's not strict at all, because creativity and ingenuity themselves are NP problems. To give a real life analogy, there are ancient Earth cultures that invented the bow before they invented the wheel, even though on an abstract level bows are more complex "devices" than wheels are.

[Quantus he/him]

33 minutes ago, CryoZenith said:

I agree with your conclusion but not necessarily your thought process here. Like, I agree that the tuning fork method probably doesn't work on Breath the way it works on Lights, but I wouldn't necessarily say "they would've found out by now if it did." Because we have an in-world example of a society who definitely had strong economic and logistic and military motivations to experiment a lot, arguably even more pressing motivations than the Nalthians did. Namely, the Alethi. Yet at the end of the day, for all their experimenting. the Alethi only found out about the tuning fork method by... being told by the Thaylens.

I see where you are coming from but I dont necessarily buy the argument.  Roshar has unique situation that periodically reduces all development back to a bronze age equivalent, and still (as you pointed out) Roshar did figure it out, at least twice.  Nalthis, meanwhile, has a magic system that provides "Instinctual" understanding of its use so they arent nearly as restricted to pure Scientific development.  And that's just one of the examples we have where development and scientific study has been pushed pretty far (arguably a lot further than modern Roshar). 

 

Let me put it this way: I think assuming that all things broadly falling under the category of "Investiture" will have all the same properties is folly, any more than assuming all things in the category of Energy all the same properties is silly.

 

Edited January 20, 2022 by Quantus

[CryoZenith he/him]

Hm. I'm not actually sure that's a correct interpretation of the 6th Heightening. (I'm not saying I strongly or even moderately disagree with you necessarily; here I actually don't know for sure where to lean)

But, from the coppermind wiki:

Quote

The Sixth Heightening grants Instinctive Awakening, the ability to immediately understand and use basic Awakening Commands without training or practice. More difficult commands are easier for them to master and to discover

You could be right that "understand" here refers to understanding fundamental properties of how endowment type investiture works. But there is an alternate reading, which is that the Sixth Heightening does exactly what it says on the tin: it gives instinctive understanding of Commands *specifically*. That it doesn't make you instinctively understand Breaths better, but rather it makes you instinctively understand how to issue Commands better. It's like if someone was very naturally talented at programming in C++: this would make them better at understanding and creating computer programs, but it wouldn't, by itself, make that person automatically understand things about how computers are built or how computers work mechanically speaking.

And since transferring Breath between things with a tuning fork would be an example of an activity you could do with Breath which doesn't involve any Commands... yeah.

[LewsTherinTelescope]

On 1/19/2022 at 10:34 AM, CryoZenith said:

I suspect that anti-Investiture is harmful or at the very least annoying to all beings made of investiture, even those of mismatched type. Like, you would require the correct type to outright destroy or "annihilate" an investiture-based being, but even the offtypes would do something.

I don't see why it would, neither the anti-Voidlight tone nor the anti-Voidlight spheres had any effect on any of the humans in the slightest and in fact it was only noticeable that it was different by looking very very closely and seeing the distortion (my guess is that that effect comes from very small amounts leaking and annihilating with ambient Investiture in the environment and giving off slight amounts of heat, since Odium has become Invested in Roshar enough to be one of its "pure tones"). Heck, anti-Voidlight could be channeled through raysium pretty much exactly the same with no ill effect, as well, despite raysium being Odium's Investiture too.

[DiePie]

From the scene where Navani first makes some, it seems to be just another kind of investiture, that just happens to have the properties of reacting to voidlight

[Duxredux he/him]

On 1/30/2022 at 4:47 PM, LewsTherinTelescope said:

I don't see why it would, neither the anti-Voidlight tone nor the anti-Voidlight spheres had any effect on any of the humans in the slightest and in fact it was only noticeable that it was different by looking very very closely and seeing the distortion (my guess is that that effect comes from very small amounts leaking and annihilating with ambient Investiture in the environment and giving off slight amounts of heat, since Odium has become Invested in Roshar enough to be one of its "pure tones"). Heck, anti-Voidlight could be channeled through raysium pretty much exactly the same with no ill effect, as well, despite raysium being Odium's Investiture too.

I'll throw this out there. There's no guarantee that the Raysium weapons aren't an alloy and every reason for Raboniel to underplay the complexity in creating such a weapon. That could explain why it could channel anti-Voidlight without reacting itself. If anti-Light is finicky enough to need a pure Investiture to react to the pure anti-tone, that might make a difference. 

We'll probably see this in the next book, but we've only seen anti-Stormlight kill an Honorspren. Do we think it would work on all spren, or just Honorspren? Would Cultivationspren be exempt or just Wyndle since he seems to be the only spren powered by Lifelight?