Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music

[Kassen <kassen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

aleks vasic;

> The use of music on the battle field had a finite set of purposes
> throughout military history.  Communication, psychological
> intimidation, morale booster.

Yes, I agree. What I was trying to say was that such factors also come in
play in conventional music, in adition to the IMHO comparable element of
impressing prospective mates and the afiliation with a certain social tribe.
That last factor may also play a role in military use of sound and music.
What I intended as the core of my message but which may have been pushed to
the back by other points is that when those factors play a role in civilian
music then the influence they have is taken to be caused by aestetic
concerns while very comparable influences in military use are often asumed
to be purely practical or admitted to signal the kind of thing we´d rather
not admit to signalling in day to day life on a personal scale.

I think this muddies that way in which we evaluate the material,
particularly because it would mean multiple levels of comunication within
music.

>
> To the best of my knowledge we are addressing the use of Music and
> instruments on the battlefield as a form of communication , at least
> thats what i responded too from a previous microsounders post.

Yes, I might have digressed from that a little, back to the comunicative
sides of sounds and music.
Sorry if that confused.

I jumped on your discussion of military comunication more to try to use it
to illustrate sides of non-military music then to engage in a detailed
discussion on battlefield comunication, interesting as that may be currently
with the word "friendly fire" becoming common.

> Im sure some personal choice may go into it.  But in the spirit of the
> Military tradition, functionality is king.  You can play all the
> beatiful songs you want after your enemies are crushed under foot.  To
> crush them you need an efficient way to communicate on the field of
> battle.  Hence the topic matter.  Remember my original opinion was that
> using music on the battlefield is not a form of literal communication
> IMO, or a better description would be complex communication.  Using
> your rationale the lights on a stop light, red, yellow, and green are a
> language of sorts.

Yes. It is debatable indeed wether that is a language. When push comes to
shove I think I believe those things to be a very limited language with just
a few words and hardly any gramar. To me, within the larger context of
comunicating ideas (possibly political ones) through the use of non-verbal
sound the concept of comunication and the transfer of information are much
more interesting then wether something is a actual language, should we be
able to find a definition of "language" that everybody finds satisfactory..

Hope that helps.

Yours,
Kas.



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.microsound.org