[microsound] point about music cognition and language

[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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