[microsound] note about music cognition

[brandon schakola <me_i_a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

re: Also I believe you have to know something about music to enjoy music.
 Cause if no one new anything about music then why the hell do people 
have preconceptions about how music should sound. It'd be easier if we 
didn't have a bias to say 3 minute diddies.


Well, as far as preconceptions about how music should sound, those are 
fairly deep structures, in terms of the mind-brain.  We understand music
 as syntactical, in a language-like sense: phrases, motives, etc.  There's
 a book called "A Generative Theory of Tonal Music" by Ray Jackendoff 
and Fred Lerdahl, which presents some interesting notions about how the 
mind understands music in a language-like way.

i found a summary of some of these points:

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~schreudr/ppt/imatra2001b/imatra01ax6.pdf

So, although we can metaphorically speak about mapping literature to 
music, there's something lacking in music that's not in language: a deep
 sense of semantics.  Music in this sense is mostly syntax.  So we might
 be able to talk about the turnings and twistings of motives inside a 
piece of music, we can't really speak about music in the same ways that 
a symbol in a text, or a theme might be developed, as these are 
inherently tied to semantics.  Its quite difficult to talk about "meaning"
 in music.

Puns in language usually occur when there are issues in the mind 
determining the "logical type" of a phrase.  Jokes or puns are usually 
trying to access more than one logical type at the same time, or show 
some sense of "stress" or "leap" between logica types. So, i guess if we
 want to push this metaphor into music, we would probably need to say 
what we mean by "logical types" in music.  Unfortunately my brain isn't 
quite big enough to wrap around that.  But it would be interesting to 
try.   The "Suprise Symphony" comes to mind here.

One way to test a theory about literature to music would be to take a 
text, parse or structure the text in some way (xml, perl...) and asign 
musical phrases to certain themes in the structure, and see what the 
outcome is.  This could be achieved via max/msp, pd, supercollider or 
the likes....

just a thought.

brandon.


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