David Powers wrote:
Emotion only exists in terms of probability. You can encode a set of gestures into a piece of music, that (given a culturally homogenous group with known conditioning) has a high probability of provoking an emotional response. However, if you played the music for someone who lacked the relevant cultural context and conditioning, there would be no emotional response.
Does this mean there is no such thing as universal art?.... Is the experience of beauty an emotion? I believe it is, but I was having an interesting discussion with my flatmate the other morning where she was saying that she didn't think that it was.
I wonder if that means that in order to describe microsound as 'emotional' one has to broaden one's idea about what an emotion is. Defenders of scifi writing are sometimes in the same boat, finding themselves having to argue that sense-of-wonder is an emotion, just to counter claims that scifi is unemotional.
-- Damian Stewart +64 27 305 4107 f r e y live music with machines http://www.frey.co.nz http://www.myspace.com/freyed --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx website: http://www.microsound.org