Music

[negativ]

What *is* music?

I don't mean "what qualifies as music", I mean... when people deliberately make noises at specific intervals for no other purpose than to make those noises, what are they doing?

The guitarist Adrian Legg once told me in an email that he thinks music is a form of communication that is just another manifestation of what the human brain is really good at. Beavers instinctively build dams; humans instinctively build communication systems, e.g. language, music, radio, television, the internet, etc. He expressed it much more eloquently than I am here.

As far as I know (which is admittedly not very far), every human culture has its own music. Has there ever been a culture of humans who never independently developed their own flavor of music?

Is music an innate trait? If you were to somehow raise, let's say 1000 people from birth to an age of relative self-sufficiency without ever exposing them to any form of communication and then stuck them on an island totally isolated from everything else, would they eventually develop music?

In western music, at least, certain "harmonic situations" seem to impart specific communications. I have no idea if this is just cultural conditioning, or if it's something more innate. For example, a melody functions in a harmonic climate. The chord that is being played is the harmonic climate - if it's an augmented chord it's a mysterious climate; if it's a diminished chord it's a little tenser; if it's minor it's serious; if it's major it's happy; if it's major seventh you're falling in love, etc. etc. Would someone raised on a diet of exclusively Indian musical textures get the same "vibes" from those examples of western music?

Damn, I shoulda went to college.

[orpheus]

I don't mean "what qualifies as music", I mean... when people deliberately make noises at specific intervals for no other purpose than to make those noises, what are they doing?

This is a fascinating topic, and a truly profound question. I don't know the answer - I don't think anyone really has answered this satisfactorily. Many books have been written - some quite interesting, many very silly, but nobody has figured it out.

The guitarist Adrian Legg once told me in an email that he thinks music is a form of communication that is just another manifestation of what the human brain is really good at.

That's possible. We certainly are, as a species, really good at it. But it presupposes that the purpose is communication. That's the popular notion - the cliché about music being a "universal language" and all that. Most people assume that since listening to music elicits such powerful emotional responses, it must be a form of communication of those emotions. I think that's such a basic assumption that most people probably don't even think about it. But it's an assumption that may not be warranted, and certainly should be examined. If a piece of music makes us feel sad, does it follow that a) that the composer him/herself felt sad when composing it? b) the composer's (possible) sadness during the compositional process causes our sad feelings? and c) the composer's purpose in writing it was a desire to communicate these feelings? Certainly there's some association and causality going on there, I'll be the first to admit that...but I think the truth of the matter is probably far more complicated than we know.

I know for myself as a composer, I have no idea what my music communicates to people. Or rather, I have maybe a vague idea, since I am aware of the aesthetic of the music I write. But, as I've said somewhere on these boards before, composing is such a slow and technique-intensive activity, there would be no way for me - even if I wanted to - to sustain any specific mood I might be in throughout the whole process. Ten seconds of music might take me two days to write; someone hears the piece and says, oh, this bit sounds sad, the composer must have been sad when he wrote it. Well, yes, probably I was, at some point and for some reason during those two days. And probably irritated as well, when I found that we were out of coffee. And happy, too, later that day, when my cats did something cute. And a whole host of other emotions as well....

Also, though I do want people to be interested in my music, for me, communication isn't what it's about. I'm not trying to communicate a message to some theoretical listener. I compose like a child plays with Leggos - to see what I can build; to see what happens if I put things together like this or like that. I have an idea of what I want to do before I start, but once I start, the thing takes on a life somewhat of its own, as new possibilities show themselves. So I wouldn't even know how to go about trying to "communicate sadness" - or communicate anything, for that matter, in a piece of music. It's just a different kind of activity.

As far as I know (which is admittedly not very far), every human culture has its own music. Has there ever been a culture of humans who never independently developed their own flavor of music?

Not that I know of. Isn't that remarkable?! Amazing.

Is music an innate trait? If you were to somehow raise, let's say 1000 people from birth to an age of relative self-sufficiency without ever exposing them to any form of communication and then stuck them on an island totally isolated from everything else, would they eventually develop music?

Let's try it and see! :eek: Seriously, this is a good question. I don't know. I suspect they would develop music - that particular meme (if that's what it is) seems to sprout up everywhere, no matter what.

In western music, at least, certain "harmonic situations" seem to impart specific communications. I have no idea if this is just cultural conditioning, or if it's something more innate. For example, a melody functions in a harmonic climate. The chord that is being played is the harmonic climate - if it's an augmented chord it's a mysterious climate; if it's a diminished chord it's a little tenser; if it's minor it's serious; if it's major it's happy; if it's major seventh you're falling in love, etc. etc. Would someone raised on a diet of exclusively Indian musical textures get the same "vibes" from those examples of western music?

Lotsa stuff you touch on here. The debates still rage about cultural conditioning vs. something innate. One example of the latter argument is that of the harmonic series: any note sounded also sounds a whole series of overtones as well. The intervals, in order, above the main note, or "fundamental" are: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, minor third, etc. (If we were in the same room, and I had a piano at hand, this would be really easy to demonstrate. It's pretty cool, too - many people are unaware that you can actually isolate and hear overtones quite easily; when I did this lecture for students, I always loved the astonished looks and exclamations of "whoa, dude! Awesome!") So, some people say aha! These are the main intervals of the tonal system; the tonal system is therefore not a cultural construct, but is something present in nature itself. That's why we respond to it.

I say yes, maybe. But notice that all those intervals get smaller as you go up. Quite early on in the series, the intervals become smaller than a half-step (two adjacent keys on the piano). They'd have to be played by keys that don't exist on the piano - in the cracks between keys. Therefore, it's also true that intervals much smaller than those we use in Western music - smaller than those that constitute the tonal system - are also present in nature - and yet we don't have the same responses to them; we tend to hear them as simply "out of tune". So, there goes our theory. (BTW, this is closely related to a phenomenon anyone who plays the guitar has surely noticed: using harmonics, you get all your strings in tune. Then you play a major chord, and it's out of tune. Too involved to explain in detail, but basically it's due to the fact that our tonal system is an approximation: it partly follows the natural harmonic series, and partly distorts it.)

Another thing: major = happy....often true, but, as Ira and George G. said, it ain't necessarily so. There are so many counterexamples. Here's one: the beginning of the second movement of Mozart's piano concerto in G, K. 543 - pure major chords, and so sad!

Anyone really interested in this stuff should get the DVDs called "The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard" by Leonard Bernstein. He was absolutely a proponent of the "tonality is natural" school of thought, and many have problems with the parallels he tried to draw between musical grammar and Chomsky's linguistics. Doesn't matter: these are brilliant lectures. LB was a shockingly good teacher; he seemed to know everything; he was a great explainer; and, as another conductor has said, the man was incapable of talking down to anyone. Doesn't hurt that he plays musical examples on the piano himself and conducts them with the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the course of the talks. I know I'm gushing, but these lectures really are that good - and he covers so much, they could serve pretty well as a general introduction to Western art and culture.

[shecky]

In western music, at least, certain "harmonic situations" seem to impart specific communications. I have no idea if this is just cultural conditioning, or if it's something more innate.

I tend to think this may be largely cultural baggage.

ISTR a questionable article about a prehistoric bone flute which supposedly would play a major (do-re-mi) scale. However, the flute was more of a fragment than a playable instrument, and the determination of it's scale was base on measurements alone. I thought this a reasonable idea until I decided to make some flutes out of PVC pipe, to find that random hole placement and uniform hole size could come remarkably close to a major scale. A little more experimentation in hole placement and size yielded remarkable variations, most very pleasant, even if they strayed quite a bit from a modern major scale.

After this little experimentation, it became harder for me to believe the notion that certain modes or intervals can universally impart the same kind of information. If someone creates a random scale, and it sounds good, it seems plausible that it could become entrenched within that culture and obtain whatever meaning is ascribed to it.

[Mojo]

ISTR a questionable article about a prehistoric bone flute which supposedly would play a major (do-re-mi) scale. However, the flute was more of a fragment than a playable instrument, and the determination of it's scale was base on measurements alone. Would that have been the Divje Babe I flute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divje_Babe)?

On the topic of the thread, The Singing Neanderthals by Steven Mithen (http://www.amazon.com/Singing-Neanderthals-Origins-Music-Language/dp/0674021924/sr=8-1/qid=1159092585/ref=pd_bbs_1) has some interesting ideas about the development of music and language.

[Bikewer]

Diane Rehm had a neuroscientist on about a month ago who was studying the reactions of the brain to music. As I recall, he was leaning towards music being more-or-less innate, causing certain deep structures of the brain to be stimulated.
Here's a link to a Scientific American article that covers much of the same ground:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007D716-71A1-1179-AF8683414B7F0000

[bigred]

What *is* music?

I don't mean "what qualifies as music", I mean... when people deliberately make noises at specific intervals for no other purpose than to make those noises, what are they doing?IMO they aren't necessarily making music.

This is a good topic though. Think I'll click on one of the links provided and do a little reading...

[varwoche]

Diane Rehm had a neuroscientist on about a month ago who was studying the reactions of the brain to music. As I recall, he was leaning towards music being more-or-less innate, causing certain deep structures of the brain to be stimulated.
Here's a link to a Scientific American article that covers much of the same ground:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007D716-71A1-1179-AF8683414B7F0000 Thanks, I've been trying to locate this article for some time. From the article: And when a symphony's denouement gives delicious chills, the same kinds of pleasure centers of the brain light up as they do when eating chocolate, having sex or taking cocaine. Yup. Certain music has a strong impact on my system. It makes me feel euphoric, the way that I imagine heroin feels. A vast majority of music does not have this effect on me -- certain elements are required. It seems that it's mainly harmonic and/or rhythmic elements, not melodic, which makes this part all the more curious: Although most research has focused on melody If you are a musician or otherwise listen to music extensively, the phenomonon is more pronounced.

[xibalba]

What is music?

Music is raw human emotion distilled into a form easily recognizable by anyone who hears it.

Even a Kalihari bushman could hear thunderous heavy metal guitars (or thunderous classical horns) and feel the same thing that a high-society fop would feel.

[orpheus]

What is music?

Music is raw human emotion distilled into a form easily recognizable by anyone who hears it.

Even a Kalihari bushman could hear thunderous heavy metal guitars (or thunderous classical horns) and feel the same thing that a high-society fop would feel.

I'm not so certain about this. First of all, "raw human emotion" (distilled or not) is not the only thing music is. Ask any composer. It may have a profound emotional effect on a listener - and on the performers, and, in fact, on the composer him/herself. But it rarely starts out as raw human emotion.

Secondly, you seem to assume that there is "one thing" that people will feel when listening to a given piece of music - and we all know that emotional response isn't that uniform. (though it isn't entirely "in the ear of the beholder, either, it seems, either. Sticky area here.) I mean, just listen to the arguments people have all the time about music.

Thirdly, I think that sometimes - not in every case, but sometimes - cultural divides really are quite pronounced. For example, are you certain that you would feel the same thing that a Japanese person would feel when listening to Gagaku (traditional Japanese court music)? I, for one, know I couldn't. I can love it, I can perceive a kind of ritualized majesty and seriousness in it, but to me it's a beautiful and deeply moving foreign language.

Furthermore, there's the question of cultures separated chronologically: I'm fairly certain that when listening to Mozart I do not feel the same things as would a Viennese in say, 1790. So much is different - cultural cues, perceived clichés, slight but radical changes that would have registered strongly then but not at all now, etc.

Curious thing that the conductor Simon Rattle said about Mahler: that when we see in his scores the indication "ohne hast" (without haste), we have a certain sense of how that's telling us to play that passage. But when you think that Mahler wrote that in a world without automobiles - "ohne hast" takes on a completely different character. In my own conducting of Mahler, I've found this to be absolutely true. Such a subtle thing, but it makes all the difference in the world in terms of the feeling of the music. This is a specific instance of the much larger phenomenon of cultural changes affecting perceptions of art - and the changes happening (in many cases) so slowly that we can't really perceive it. And several generations removed, there's no way to give ourselves a "soul transplant" to feel what they might have felt.

I think it was Rilke who said that all art boils down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Yes, indeed. We're not simple - the human being is really very complicated, and our arts reflect that.

[bigred]

Music is raw human emotion distilled into a form easily recognizable by anyone who hears itSorry, but no. Putting aside the fact that raw human emotion is already easily recognizable by anyone who hears it (or sees it, experiences it, etc), I think you're confusing what music is with the effect it can have. Also, an emotional reaction isn't the only one (or only pleasure) one can get from music. There can be mental and even physical ones as well.


Even a Kalihari bushman could hear thunderous heavy metal guitars (or thunderous classical horns) and feel the same thing that a high-society fop would feel.For the sake of argument one would have to concede technically it is "possible" but I'd say the odds are at least about a gazillion to one as they have such diff. cultures, mindsets, etc etc....so their reaction to most any given art, really, is pretty much a given to be different - often extremely different.


Edit: I should've read orpheus' post first, well said

[SusanB-M1]

There is a choir in London, which was the subject of a radio 4 programme a while ago, called the 'Can't Sing Choir' for people who have always been told they are tone deaf, useless at singing etc and who have no confidence in their voices, but who would really like to. The first thing they are told to do by the woman who runs this is to take a deep breath and then say 'em' and hold it. She said it is notpossible to do this without the sound turning into a musical note.

[bigred]

There is a choir in London, which was the subject of a radio 4 programme a while ago, called the 'Can't Sing Choir' for people who have always been told they are tone deaf, useless at singing etc and who have no confidence in their voices, but who would really like to. The first thing they are told to do by the woman who runs this is to take a deep breath and then say 'em' and hold it. She said it is notpossible to do this without the sound turning into a musical note.

:confused: Just about any sound could be considered a musical note of a kind. I guess you mean a musical note as in sounding sort of like hitting a key on a keyboard kinda note (ie a more definite/clear note)?

[SusanB-M1]

:confused: Just about any sound could be considered a musical note of a kind. I guess you mean a musical note as in sounding sort of like hitting a key on a keyboard kinda note (ie a more definite/clear note)?

I think she meant a sound that would show as a vibration causing an even, up and down
wave pattern, not simply a sound which would make a jagged pattern.

That's probably more confusing than the first attempt! I expect there's probably someone here who could describe the oscillations(?) and the patterns they make in a proper way.

[Sceptic Realist]

But it presupposes that the purpose is communication. That's the popular notion - the cliché about music being a "universal language" and all that. Most people assume that since listening to music elicits such powerful emotional responses, it must be a form of communication of those emotions. I think that's such a basic assumption that most people probably don't even think about it. But it's an assumption that may not be warranted, and certainly should be examined. If a piece of music makes us feel sad, does it follow that a) that the composer him/herself felt sad when composing it? b) the composer's (possible) sadness during the compositional process causes our sad feelings? and c) the composer's purpose in writing it was a desire to communicate these feelings? Certainly there's some association and causality going on there, I'll be the first to admit that...but I think the truth of the matter is probably far more complicated than we know.

I know for myself as a composer, I have no idea what my music communicates to people. Or rather, I have maybe a vague idea, since I am aware of the aesthetic of the music I write. But, as I've said somewhere on these boards before, composing is such a slow and technique-intensive activity, there would be no way for me - even if I wanted to - to sustain any specific mood I might be in throughout the whole process. Ten seconds of music might take me two days to write; someone hears the piece and says, oh, this bit sounds sad, the composer must have been sad when he wrote it. Well, yes, probably I was, at some point and for some reason during those two days. And probably irritated as well, when I found that we were out of coffee. And happy, too, later that day, when my cats did something cute. And a whole host of other emotions as well....

Also, though I do want people to be interested in my music, for me, communication isn't what it's about. I'm not trying to communicate a message to some theoretical listener. I compose like a child plays with Leggos - to see what I can build; to see what happens if I put things together like this or like that. I have an idea of what I want to do before I start, but once I start, the thing takes on a life somewhat of its own, as new possibilities show themselves. So I wouldn't even know how to go about trying to "communicate sadness" - or communicate anything, for that matter, in a piece of music. It's just a different kind of activity.



Not that I know of. Isn't that remarkable?! Amazing.



Let's try it and see! :eek: Seriously, this is a good question. I don't know. I suspect they would develop music - that particular meme (if that's what it is) seems to sprout up everywhere, no matter what.



Lotsa stuff you touch on here. The debates still rage about cultural conditioning vs. something innate. One example of the latter argument is that of the harmonic series: any note sounded also sounds a whole series of overtones as well. The intervals, in order, above the main note, or "fundamental" are: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, minor third, etc. (If we were in the same room, and I had a piano at hand, this would be really easy to demonstrate. It's pretty cool, too - many people are unaware that you can actually isolate and hear overtones quite easily; when I did this lecture for students, I always loved the astonished looks and exclamations of "whoa, dude! Awesome!") So, some people say aha! These are the main intervals of the tonal system; the tonal system is therefore not a cultural construct, but is something present in nature itself. That's why we respond to it.

I say yes, maybe. But notice that all those intervals get smaller as you go up. Quite early on in the series, the intervals become smaller than a half-step (two adjacent keys on the piano). They'd have to be played by keys that don't exist on the piano - in the cracks between keys. Therefore, it's also true that intervals much smaller than those we use in Western music - smaller than those that constitute the tonal system - are also present in nature - and yet we don't have the same responses to them; we tend to hear them as simply "out of tune". So, there goes our theory. (BTW, this is closely related to a phenomenon anyone who plays the guitar has surely noticed: using harmonics, you get all your strings in tune. Then you play a major chord, and it's out of tune. Too involved to explain in detail, but basically it's due to the fact that our tonal system is an approximation: it partly follows the natural harmonic series, and partly distorts it.)

Another thing: major = happy....often true, but, as Ira and George G. said, it ain't necessarily so. There are so many counterexamples. Here's one: the beginning of the second movement of Mozart's piano concerto in G, K. 543 - pure major chords, and so sad!

Anyone really interested in this stuff should get the DVDs called "The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard" by Leonard Bernstein. He was absolutely a proponent of the "tonality is natural" school of thought, and many have problems with the parallels he tried to draw between musical grammar and Chomsky's linguistics. Doesn't matter: these are brilliant lectures. LB was a shockingly good teacher; he seemed to know everything; he was a great explainer; and, as another conductor has said, the man was incapable of talking down to anyone. Doesn't hurt that he plays musical examples on the piano himself and conducts them with the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the course of the talks. I know I'm gushing, but these lectures really are that good - and he covers so much, they could serve pretty well as a general introduction to Western art and culture.

Interesting points brought up here. Also, I would like to hear some of your work, of you could direct me to some of it.

Anyway, that being aside, you brought up some excellent topics, and I would like to expand/pitch in my own thoughts. The first and foremost is that you suggested that even if you wanted to, you couldn't communicate a sustained emotion through music, and you compared your composing with building LEGOs and experimenting with sound. There is nothing wrong with this, but it also doesn't mean that every composer has the same method or outlook about composing. I mean, if you've ever heard Mahler's Ressurection Symphony, or Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet (there are several more examples, these are meerly off the top of my head), these are certainly meant to convey sustained emotion, or the mindset of the composer during a specific moment in his life. Or maybe not an emotion, but simply a way of telling a story or describing a time. For example, the Resurrection symphony (one of my favorite works of all time), that was inspired by his conversion to christiantiy, and so naturally, his emotion came out in that piece - or at least his interpretation of that idea. There is also Shastakovich's (I think 5th) symphony, which was written as he was in the communist state, and it brought out a lot of his frustration of the government (especially in the last movement). Another example is Respegi, his Feste Remane (Roman Festivals), in which the entire work is not built around "what can I do with sound", but "how can I use sound to portray those times, and what the people did and felt." For example, the whole last movement is about everyone getting drunk - the trombones have those big slurs, it gets a bit frantic and uncontrollable, a little silly. That's building directly from something other than composing for music's sake - though I would agree that some composers undoubtedly compose for music's sake alone, or to experiment, as you suggested.

Further, there are more variables to music than I think has been discussed. It's not just how the composer sees music or uses it, but also how the performer interprets it, how the listener percieves it, etc.

I wholeheartedly agree that Leonard Bernstein was a genious. I will locate that DVD as soon as I can.

Crap, I was going to add something else, but I forgot it in the course of typing so much :).

[darnold]

That made me think of something else - there's this band that I can't stop listening to: the raveups's version of "Smokestack." my friends and i caught their show and everybody was loving it - made us think of the yard birds. check out on google - theraveups - all one word

[darnold]

Doh double post again! Sorry I'm new here guys :X

[El Greco]

the beginning of the second movement of Mozart's piano concerto in G, K. 543 - pure major chords, and so sad!

453 perhaps ?

[Sceptic Realist]

I really don't want to see this thread die! It's one of the most interesting on this entire forum! There must be more people that have something to offer....;(

[orpheus]

I really don't want to see this thread die! It's one of the most interesting on this entire forum! There must be more people that have something to offer....;(

I agree, and I'm sorry I haven't been posting for quite some time. Real life intervened. I'll get back to this asap, though.

[Godmode]

I agree that music is a form of communication. It's like any art, with the artist trying to convey a message, a mood, or an idea in a way they might not be able to otherwise. Some people are better at communicating then others, and some people will never understand the "language".

On a side note, music seems very much tied to time and heartbeats... it moves like life and is able to capture or even provoke moods. A very amazing medium no matter how you hear it.

[SirPhilip]

What *is* music? Noise, and at times unexcelled religion.