philosophy of music

[Mind Movie]

[Robert Anton Wilson]

[SquishypuffDave]

[SquishypuffDave]

Bump. Where's Purple?

I'm really interested to hear more about this idea of different cultures experiencing music differently. I'm completely open-minded on the issue of nature vs. nurture when it comes to emotions and music. Are there any universal emotional reactions to particular musical properties? If so what are they? Are they unchangeable?

The idea of an innate human reaction to certain musical properties, which can then be developed/changed through experience sounds quite believable to me, although I don't know of any research that supports or challenges this idea.

[purple]

I saw your previous post. I'm on break now and the remaining days of my break will be spent champagne dieting and recovering. However, I have the class again Tuesday. Wednesday or Thursday I'll update you on stuff we discussed previous to break, during Tuesday's class, and what I'm personally writing about for that class (free jazz!).

As far as some quick answers to those questions...

several cultures view the mourning process as a personal journey and believe that the public funeral services should be celebratory e.g. the ancient Greeks. The Ewe people, from what I've seen, don't cry at their funerals but do sing dirges, while dancing to music specific to funerals, so their seems to be a weird mix of celebration and mourning going on. However, this still doesn't change the fact that, if you were to ask (for example) a Canadian what emotion he thought Ewe funeral music was purveying his description would not fit an Ewe's because he perceives the emotions that music purveys differently. This does not mean that music doesn't have emotional significance, simply that it appears to be interpreted through culture (and of course the culture that creates it is accepted to have the most correct emotional interpretation of it). Bottom line, the first time someone from the western world hears so many layered polyrhythms created from so many drums his brain cannot possibly comprehend the music, though they may be paying full attention to it; it likely all sounds the same. It takes time to adapt to the sounds themselves, but even then you will never fully understand a music made outside of your culture as far as its emotional impact. A possible analog is language translation; there are several words in German that cannot be translated to similar words in English; you can create a combination of several words in English to mimic the German definition, but some cultural and/or emotional significance is lost e.g. zeitgeist. Same thing happened when Asian ambassadors came over to Europe; the hosts would take them to Western symphonies and they thought it all sounded the same, with no emotional impact; in fact, there's a few anecdotes of how these Asian ambassadors enjoyed the tuning session more than the body of work (When I'm finished with this class, I'll post all the references we're using so you're exposed to these anecdotes properly and don't have to take my word for it).

As far as the "relaxing" show... easily, yes. I have a friend that listens to death metal when he goes to bed, it's easy to imagine a possible case in which that is considered relaxing.

I wouldn't look to biology or psychology for our pleasure in music, but anthropology. It's largely a cultural phenomenon. The most generalized aesthetic pleasure that humans gain from making music might be biological; I don't touch psychology because I view it as borderline pseudoscience; and the music we're exposed to, are subconsciously taught to understand, and what we'll generally play if we perform music (even is we've been exposed to other music cultures) all comes from our culture.

wow, this is getting much longer than I expected it to...

I don't think you read my comments carefully on musical space. summary on three views:

(1) the language we apply to musical space is metaphorical, because how can a non-physical object (pitch) move spatially. an obvious criticism is that higher frequencies mean higher pitches, but pitches have ranges of frequencies that (I think?) overlap. Weird problems also arise when you start thinking about tuning, esp. "badly" tuned instruments, but I can't think of these off the top of my head

(2) we use polysemy, or similar words with different meanings, to describe musical space and motion. e.g. when we say a man cuts a sad figure, he might not actually be expressing sadness but simply demonstrating the body language of sadness. Likewise, when say music is going up or down, it might not actually be going up or down, but simply appears to in our minds.

(3) we use dead metaphors to describe musical space and motion i.e. an anthropological argument stating that when we first started using the words "up" and "down" to describe pitch we were using metaphor (and indeed could have chosen any combination of movement, "left" or "right", etc. (and we do have several forms of concomitant notation for music)), but know the words "up" and "down" have been so engrained in our various cultures for thousands of years that we perceive them as literal now.

I personally find the second argument strongest, but that's because I've read the papers from which these arguments came. I might not have expressed them as well.

[purple]

the only thing I can think of that comes close to a unifying emotional response of all music cultures is that drums tend to be used for war songs. However, I haven't really been exposed to Asian music outside of Indonesia, so I don't know if this holds up across Asia. Note though that the cultures still use the drums for different things: the Agbekor of the Ewe was used to terrify the opponent; the drums used in the American civil war were used to communicate strategy to your own troops; etc. You should also note that I'm not a musicologist and am speaking with comparatively little experience in other music cultures!

[SquishypuffDave]

Cheers.

I was watching a video earlier, where Europeans played various different music to an african man who had no experience in western music, and got him to point to which emotion he thought it embodied. He got them "correct", but I noticed that when each was playing, I could recognise which emotion it was written to embody, based on my experience with western music. But those were not the feelings that they stirred up in me. The "happy" music caused me to feel agitation and the "sad" music caused me to feel happy.

It seems to me that the temperament of an individual person has a significant effect on how they emotionally react to music, so I doubt it's entirely anthropological. The fact that people from within the same culture have such varied reactions to music seems to indicate that there is a personal (psychological) aspect.