[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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

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

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.



On Jun 27, 2005, at 3:05 PM, Kassen wrote:

I think the line is a little more blurry then that. I once read that
music
originated from young males trying to impress the girls (from time to
time I
get the idea nothing changed when looking at DJ or car audio
culture...) and
there you could argue it´s very much a comunicative signal. Love
songs, the
more political side of punk and so on could all be argued to
comunicate.
Just like a big drum is a good medium to get messages across large
fields
putting you political or romantic aspirations to melody may make them
cary
futher, albeit in a different way.


I see where your going but i fail to see how its relevant to
communicating on a battlefield using instruments and bugle
calls(Loops!)

In many cases I´m not sure I realy see so much difference particularly
not
because music has many other functions besides just being beautufull. I
think there is for example some element of marking teritory with
portable
instalations meant for high volume such as ghetto blasters. When
picking a
drum from amongst multiple suitable canidates i´m sure the warlords of
old
would want the one that sounded the lowest for reasons very similar to
D&B
producers. In the case of the producer we´d probably call that a
musical
choice, why not in the warlord?


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.  While logically i would have to agree with you, it
would hardly be the choice i would make had i a need to adopt a fform
of communication for whatever reason.  Its limited, that was the gist
of my intitial statement that you responded too.  Kinda apples and
oranges IMO.


Perhaps it´s pushing it to call it a language but I think those uses of
sound are often very similar in how they map to meaning, even if much
of
this process may be unconcious.

Yes, i touched upon this in my previous paragraph. Again i agree. 

Microsound would at first seem to be too abstract to be linked to
comunication in such a blatant way but I think it´s no accident that
Microsound often uses sounds asociated with breaking or broken
products and
that the Microsound comunity is very crtical of comercial companies.
The
impressiveness of the drum sound does not nesicarily have anything to
do
with the functioning of the batalions as such but it´s still there
because
the general needs to urgently express how much more impressive his
army is
and I think this is akin to a Microsound composer that still uses the
sounds
of broken things even when the subject of the piece is -say-
summertime.


Thats a stretch IMO, care to elaborate for me incase i am not following
you?


Multiple levels of symbolism and comunication may be intertwined,
perhaps
even conflicting (one MTV leader sounded quite microsoundy to me) but
even
if it´s not possible to "translate" everything coherently all of the
time,
there´s still a lot of cumunication through symbolim going on and
exactly
what part of that is "music" to you may depend more on how you relate
to the
sound and who makes it then to anyhting else.

My cents,
Kas.

Within Context, sure.



aLEKs


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