In the book, Davis follows his teacher to Brazil to visit indigenous tribes living in the Amazon rainforest. Davis describes a plant found in the rainforest with very specific chemical bonds that are considered to be a type of hallucinogen.
Davis meets a tribesman who is manufacturing a substitute for the plant with no written language to describe the qualities that make this particular hallucinogen active. The tribesman is able to derive the molecular compounds that are inside of the plant and synthesize the same compound from different physical materials. He understands the invisible qualities that are inside of the plant enabling it to produce the hallucinogenic effect without using a written language. He ends up producing a substitute of the compound using very different methods.
When Davis took samples of the substitute, they were chemically identical to the original. The tribes person explained the rational for his process by saying, that the plant sang to him and told him what compounds the original plant was comprised of. When he was under the influence of the psychotropic he was really receptive to the feeling of the plant and hearing its state of' awareness.' The way that the compound manufacturing process is transmitted from one generation to another within the culture of the tribe is by singing.
So the tribes person sings the plant’s song to his adept and the song tells him about the process. The fluctuations of tone in the singer's voice signifies the qualitative aspects of the compounds found in the original plant. If the tribes person raises the pitch a little, he's describing another quality of that chemical. We're talking about chemical synthesis, biochemical synthesis, described in the form of a song. I thought if you can teach chemistry through listening to someone sing, and by understanding the qualities of that song, then the world for describing chemistry is wide open, why not use dance to describe the molecular realm.