What is called music?

[Chirs]

Gian Carlo Menotti, composer of "Ahmal and the Night Visitors", was asked how he came to compose such a wide variety of music. His reply was that he had never composed any music, rather, he had just listened attentively and had written down what he heard. Other great composers have made similar remarks indicating that the music is already there, and their task was only the writing down of it. There is an astonishing amount of research on the effects of various types of "music", which most people ignore if they even know it's there. The reason? They don't like it's implications re the stuff they choose for listening. The same filter they apply to news, politics, and history, they also apply to music. Certainly, we have the "right" to ignore the facts when forming our opinions,but if we look at the world around us, we see a lot of unnecessary chaos results. The problem arises when we begin to believe our own PR and believe our opinion is fact, resulting also in closed threads. Poor listening choices, like poor food and drink choices, can not only negatively effect our health, but damage and impair even our ability to think clearly.

Sadly, beyond all else, it may well damage our relations to one another.

[Chirs]

Interesting paper. I'd not thought of music from those perspectives but I find that, for the most part, I agree with the conclusions.

Music "grabs hold of beings by inserting them – through sound – into time" (p.11). This reminds me of Yoruba philosophy which holds that an 'event' must occur to 'insert' one into time.

[tripleblessed]

"it may well damage our relations to one another".......Chirs

Thanks for seeing my point so clearly and succinctly.

A drum begins to entrain the brains of the hearers within eight seconds, leading one in the direction of the intent of the performers, with the added baggage of their emotional state at the time of performance. What kind of day are/were they having? Are/were pharmaceuticals or alcohol involved? Is that where you want to go? We can fall into it, which may be desired, or we can drive our own bus through that ambiance for a different (better?) experience. Awareness and intent are the keys. Music can create a shared reality, which can be a very good thing. Or not. For many, it's as close as they can get to caring about others, or to the Oneness from which we all spring.
'

[Bugbear]

"it may well damage our relations to one another".......Chirs

Thanks for seeing my point so clearly and succinctly.

A drum begins to entrain the brains of the hearers within eight seconds, leading one in the direction of the intent of the performers, with the added baggage of their emotional state at the time of performance. What kind of day are/were they having? Are/were pharmaceuticals or alcohol involved? Is that where you want to go? We can fall into it, which may be desired, or we can drive our own bus through that ambiance for a different (better?) experience. Awareness and intent are the keys. Music can create a shared reality, which can be a very good thing. Or not. For many, it's as close as they can get to caring about others, or to the Oneness from which we all spring.
'

When all are one and one is all,
To be a rock and not to roll. -- LZ


I have read Michael Harner's book on modern shamanism, the one with the drum CD; your post reminds me of the book, tripleblessed.

To CMcG, any question like this, in my philosophy of life, begins and ends with this. The world a person knows is being put together in that person's mind or brain; it is a very limmited model of "the real world," not a direct experience of it.

I'm sure there are genetic influences on how one may perceive music, like ear drum issues etc, but the culture one grows up in, the experiences one has very much influence how one perceives the world. Furthermore, people communicate unconsciously quite a bit through body language of sorts, think group dancing and moving to music, and this has effects on the models of the world in our minds. In other words, over time we communicate our perceptions of the world with each other, or in the case of music, our perceptions of the world become synchronized as we are focused on the music all at the same time. That is how I interpret what tripleblessed is discussing.

If you need citations for my supporting sources, I could probably cough them up.

[tripleblessed]

Well said, and on the money.

[Bugbear]

Well said, and on the money.

Ehh, thankfully I didn't have to write a paper like CMcG.

[OC Richard]

The question is "what is called music?" which of course is a very different question than "what is music?"

To me it seems to be a linguistic question rather than a philosophical question, and the answers would vary from language to language (because there are never exact cognates between languages).

And much easier to answer. You simply need to play various sounds for native speakers of a particular language and have them declare whether the sound should be labelled with that language's word for "music" or not.

(Of course you might encounter languages which don't have a word meaning more or less what our word "music" does.)

[CMcG]

A drum begins to entrain the brains of the hearers within eight seconds <snip>

I'm rather interested in entrainment as a bio-psychi phenomenon. Do you have a source for the 8 second timeframe?

<snip>
If you need citations for my supporting sources, I could probably cough them up.

An interesting aspect of this paper is that my prof told me to cut out 3/4 of the sources I was going to use. He then told me to try and think through it on my own

I'm curious about the title you put on your post "Our Shadows Taller than Our Soul..." Could you elaborate on that?

As you specifically mention Pythagoras, I'll post a quibble with the definition
as requiring human manipulation. <snip>

For Pythagoras, there are two types of human music: instrumental and body. Both of them are based on the ratios you mentioned in your post but only instrumental is actually audible. While the ratios themselves are considered to be eternal, the sound of instrumental music definitely requires human manipulation to come into being. The ideal, in this case, is to produce music that is in harmony with the numerical organization of the universe, aka the music of the spheres.

I'm sure Pythagoras would have been mortified by other cultures embrace of "dissonant" ratios, let alone modern experimental music!

<snip>My answer to your question would then be: music is a form of cultural expression that may reflect common activities (do we see this represented in modern 'gangsta rap'?); may reinforce cultural values, norms, mores which would include religion, warnings of what to avoid doing, and songs of praise for what is to be encouraged; may reflect social standing (how many people today consider orchestral music to be 'high class'?); and, in more recent times, music may simply be yet another commodity, just a product for sale.

The question is "what is called music?" which of course is a very different question than "what is music?"

To me it seems to be a linguistic question rather than a philosophical question, and the answers would vary from language to language (because there are never exact cognates between languages).

This being a philosophy course, a linguistic or sociological answer would not suffice. Framing the question as "what is called music" is basically a recognition of the fact that "what is music" will be discussed using language.

One of the tools that I used is called a phenomenological reduction or epoché. The idea is to first gather up a lot of assumptions about whatever is being studied and then temporarily withhold them in order to rethink the issue. In looking at a cross-cultural perspective on what is called music, I considered the fullest range of musical events. This would go anywhere from a "silent" piece like John Cage's 4'33 (not actually silent because the world always has sound, even if it's just one's own heartbeat), to full orchestra, from ambient drones to African drums, and everything in between. Reducing all those things down from their surface qualities, I arrived at a more inclusive definition to work with: sound in time that beings listen to and are affected by.

Point three is sound is one of the senses that can influence how we think or feel but the influence is not the same for everyone or even for one person at different times.

If we assume we are talking about man made music <snip>

I rejected any assumption about musical sounds needing to be man-made because birds are said to "sing" and there are soundscape compositions that use only natural sounds. The point that music is not the same for everyone or for the same person all the time is very important...

<snip>
To CMcG, any question like this, in my philosophy of life, begins and ends with this. The world a person knows is being put together in that person's mind or brain; it is a very limmited model of "the real world," not a direct experience of it.

I agree that the mind is integral in the "worlding" of brute matter and that our experience is coloured by many factors. The height of this type of thought would be Descartes cogito ergo sum or "I think therefor I am." The danger of this type of philosophy is that it too easily leads to solipsism. I'm inclined to embrace a couple of things to mediate that risk.

The first is intersubjectivity because we don't live in a vacuum but instead are constantly influenced by other humans. Even someone who has chosen to isolate themselves still has the heritage of language to connect them back to other subjects.

Second is the fact that our own mind is not actually separate from the objects around us. An example that Merleau-Ponty uses is the touch. Our hand can touch an object but this is contingent on the hand itself being touchable. We can think about the world but this is based on the world being able to think about us. While we can make a distinction between self and other, in practice one cannot exist without the other. We are helplessly intertwined with the world and whether or not our perception is "real" is less important than the facts of our experience. While this facticity might be a limited model, it is always in relationship with everything else and not purely constructed in the mind.

Coming back to music, there is sound in time and there are beings who listen to it. There is no music without sound, time, beings, and listening, but none can truly take precedence over the other. What separates this experience from simply hearing any given sound is that music affects us. The result is an ecstasis, which means music puts us outside ourselves. I think this way of thinking accounts for the many culturally determined varieties of human music, musical experience of non-human sounds, and the fact that people (or the same person at different times) experience the same thing in different ways.

Now we'll see what my prof thinks

[Bugbear]

An interesting aspect of this paper is that my prof told me to cut out 3/4 of the sources I was going to use. He then told me to try and think through it on my own

I'm curious about the title you put on your post "Our Shadows Taller than Our Soul..." Could you elaborate on that?

It's at the end of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. I've looked into "New Age" religions, or what ever you want to call it, for several years now, more or less just to try to get a feel for what several people I know are talking about. Who knows what "our shadows taller than our soul" was intended to mean, but it reminds me a tiny bit of Plato's allegory of the cave etc.

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.

from: "LED ZEPPELIN LYRICS - Stairway To Heaven"

You might put me in the Pragmatism camp. The way I look at it, and step around the solipsism, is somewhat like what you have stated. I very briefly talk about how human culture is like a world simulation across a network of many brains, and also give several of my sources in my XMTS post at this link:
http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...37/#post902585

I have written papers that touch on this a bit, but it is all in relation to Panzoism (emergent, not animistic) and from a personal point of view, rather than for a college course.

I agree that the mind is integral in the "worlding" of brute matter and that our experience is coloured by many factors. The height of this type of thought would be Descartes cogito ergo sum or "I think therefor I am." The danger of this type of philosophy is that it too easily leads to solipsism. I'm inclined to embrace a couple of things to mediate that risk.

The first is intersubjectivity because we don't live in a vacuum but instead are constantly influenced by other humans. Even someone who has chosen to isolate themselves still has the heritage of language to connect them back to other subjects.

Second is the fact that our own mind is not actually separate from the objects around us. An example that Merleau-Ponty uses is the touch. Our hand can touch an object but this is contingent on the hand itself being touchable. We can think about the world but this is based on the world being able to think about us. While we can make a distinction between self and other, in practice one cannot exist without the other. We are helplessly intertwined with the world and whether or not our perception is "real" is less important than the facts of our experience. While this facticity might be a limited model, it is always in relationship with everything else and not purely constructed in the mind.

I would need to look at the Merleau-Ponty argument, thanks for the lead, but I absolutely disagree with the last statement you made, "While this facticity might be a limited model, it is always in relationship with everything else and not purely constructed in the mind. This has been scientifically disproved, and I refer to several of the sources I cite in the link to my post I gave. Crick for example. Your brain is quite able of creating a whole world, and a sense of reality that has nothing to do with external stimuli... though I suppose it could be argued that it would still be influenced by one's life experiences. I have a book on "DMT" somewhere around here that also discusses this. If he is saying the brain is part of the world, made of the same stuff as the world, so the simulation the brain is generating is also part of the world, I don't have an issue with that.

Coming back to music, there is sound in time and there are beings who listen to it. There is no music without sound, time, beings, and listening, but none can truly take precedence over the other. What separates this experience from simply hearing any given sound is that music affects us. The result is an ecstasis, which means music puts us outside ourselves. I think this way of thinking accounts for the many culturally determined varieties of human music, musical experience of non-human sounds, and the fact that people (or the same person at different times) experience the same thing in different ways.

Now we'll see what my prof thinks

I would keep in mind the brain's body maps and peripersonal space in relation to ecstasis, unless I am misunderstanding the term. You are much more adept in philosophy than I.
Good luck.

[Chirs]

I had wanted to mention but forgot: binaural beats are used extensively for entrainment (e.g. The Monroe Institute) just as drums are used for shamanic 'work' (e.g. Michael Harner).

caveat: I know nothing of these institutions beyond having heard of them from others and offer them only as starting points for inquiry.