Tag: concept

Two years ago I thought to myself, “I don’t understand music.”

Why?

I can listen to classical music, then rock, then rap, then musical parody, sung poetry, postmodern music, and so on, and so on, and so on… …and I can’t find many common elements for these songs… And I really can’t understand what music is?

Musician John M. Parker (St Celfer) commented (via email) on my doubts: “For me my background was to treat music as language, a superior one.”. And this is where I have doubts about the meaning of music. What kind of “language” is it if it is “different” for so many songs?? Maybe it’s the language of angels? Maybe it’s the language of our souls? What do they express, what can they express, what can the style of the work prove about the creator? Can anything be proven about them? Apparently so – but I have never found the “global” key. For example, my parents hardly listen to music at all. Does this in any way indicate the quality of their souls? About their life paths, about themselves? You can trace billions of tastes and… I doubt whether there will be a global algorithm describing what music talk about…

Once I found on the internet this sentence: “Music is not a language because it has no grammar”… and I could be done with the topic but… Let’s undermine understanding “language” for a moment.

I don’t understand what a language is. And no one is sure of it. There are many thesis what are the main criterias of language. Even if I don’t understand the boundaries of the definition, I know that for something to meet the definition, the criteria of this definition must be met to at least a minimal degree.

I see a problem – the most important criterion of language is communication! It is so important that even body language is called that, even though as an unstructured, ungrammatical and widely interpreted form of communication, and is not a form of language… I can use miming or my hands to communicate many situations, actions and emotions. I know scientists won’t call it language, but being the everyday language of ordinary simple people, they might call it that.

Next problem is that music has structures and rules which are not understood by people. Maybe superior souls have hidden grammar inside them?

…how is it possible that there is so much of it?!? As Władysław Komendarek, a master of inventing forms and tools of musical expression, often repeats: “there are billions of possibilities!” 

Personally, when I was twelve years old and I was fiddling with the piano keys, I feared that I would run out of inspiration to create melodies. It was hard for me to believe that I would come up with something… and then I would come up with it again… and again. There are over two hundred pieces by Chopin and… it was magic for me… The very fact of creating a new melody was something wonderful, extraordinary, impossible – but despite this impression, I did not become a professional composer or musician. 

What I also don’t understand about music: when I listen to music, I don’t have just “ears” for a given song. I am, rather, in the composer’s “world”, as if I was penetrating the intentions and maybe even examining the his soul(?). It’s not that the “world” of his piece becomes my world, but that it fills my “surroundings” (can these be described as “empty spaces” in my thoughts?). How is it possible that so many of these 44,000 samples per second are contained in a wavelength that can contain music, and at the same time can “contain” other “realities” and, even, “souls” (more precisely: to describe music, a much smaller “wavelength” is enough, e.g. just musical notation)? You can put a picture next to a picture and compare your impressions almost simultaneously/in parallel – this is not possible with music. And yet there are “billions” of works in one world describing “billions” of “realities” that can exist in one world at the same time.

Assuming that we do not analyze the boundaries of music, I cannot determine, among others: what a piece of music is. And this is just an atom, an entity of music

• Assuming that a piece of music is an ordered set of sounds, can notes represent a piece of music if they are an abstraction, devoid of the subtleties of sound and arrangement?
• Assuming that we have a precisely defined piece (notes + sounds + intonations + others) – when does the interpretation of the piece end and when do variations on the theme of a given piece begin?
• Sound is said to be changes in air pressure, but what if the sounds “sit in the head” of the ex-listener, where there is no air naturally?

• If we find that a musical piece is defined by momentary samples (digital recording), what if the spectrum distribution changes subtly (for example, the listener’s hearing defects or the player’s imperfection)? Isn’t this lofi version of the song the same song?
• Something less precise, but requiring greater contemplation: in what cases will a given recording of sounds never be considered music by any human being?

These reflections are my internal reaction to the technical and scientific education I had. A reaction to positivist education which very often promotes empiricism, technocracy and the absolutism of science, and which, unfortunately, I sometimes succumbed to in my youth. In my quasi-philosophy that I shaped while writing this blog – music is something I don’t understand, but it is intertwined with the soul in a way that is beyond understanding. The most important thing in all this is the fact that you don’t have to understand music to enjoy it.

P.S. I remembered something that results indirectly from the text – in the dispute about universals, I tend to side with realism versus nominalism.

Someone or maybe most think that a boundary is such a simple term as e.g. integers in mathematic. The imagined geometrical definition is simple – something like a line or surface separating two areas or spaces. In practice, even geometrical boundary, is more difficult to clearly define. In the physical world, when we have to measure the surface of something real like a island, then we have no single number defining area – it depends on precision and the method of measure. Do you think that precision is not important? Quantum-level disruptions could cause massive changes in weather prediction….

These were the simplest thoughts about boundary. The problem is when we think about something that has more dimensions than two or three. Naturally I do not mean spatial dimensions, but certain abstract…

Defining

To understand something, we need a definition. One of the most obvious problems is its boundaries – something is inside – in the set covered by the definition, and something is outside.

Are the definitions real?

Already, in the early years of philosophy (age of Greek domination of ideas), people had a problem with definitions. Until the end of the Middle Ages, people were thinking if definitions, abstracts, entities or only physical units are real? Next problems for philosophy were, among others, how do people get to know the world…?

The most known enemy of realism of definitions is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that the most important aspect of life is language and that our minds “create the world” and complicate everything.

Does music exist?

In earlier post I don’t understand music (part 3 – how to define song?) we had technical problems with defining song. Now I go to another plane of thinking – the problem is that a piece music doesn’t exist only in our mind, doesn’t exist only in a score sheet, doesn’t exist only in the air. How it is possible that it can be in these planes at this same time? Does music is a part of physic, mind, structure, or beyond our reality? I don’t understand that and I give myself a rule to undermine understanding music. We have some interesting adventures ahead of us…

What is the reason for the existence of music? Isn’t it the secret of humanity? Technological and scientific progress improves the economy and the quality of life, and sometimes saves or extends it. Books and cinema contain a specific, more or less intellectual message. Traditionally, a picture was supposed to reflect what a person sees, while a sculpture was supposed to reflect the shape of objects. The taste of cuisine comes from the times when distinguishing between good and bad food could affect health or life (nowadays, taste can be treacherous for health, e.g. when a person succumbs to the temptation of “fast food”).

And what is the anthropological justification for Music? What is the goal of ambitious creativity, since most people are satisfied with the musical equivalents of “fast food” or “instant soups”? Not that they are bad in themselves, but they cannot be – for health reasons – the basis of a diet…

I decided to delve into Karl Popper’s three worlds and try to place music in them. According to his theory, the first world is the physical world, the second is the mental world, and the third (roughly speaking) is the “world of language products”.

My instincts failed me a bit, because I cannot directly insert the language of music in place of the language of abstraction. K. Popper stated that language became necessary to produce tools that became an extension of biological evolution. Music, on the other hand, does not produce these tools.

The common element for language and music is that they build a world common to many people, but in different meaning. Language, by eliminating errors, builds a world of victorious abstractions (to put it poetically), while music builds a world… well, I don’t know what kind…

In “I don’t understand music, Part 4” I wrote that I do not find an anthropological justification of music. However, I will try to “defend” the evolutionary meaning of music:

1 The world of mathematics, 2 The world of chaos and 3 The psyche. And what connects these three worlds is music, which is chaotic mathematics, meaning breaking the rules embedded in forms and harmony in order to create a sense of security.

For man is not only language and logic, but also suffering, pleasure, certainty and fear. Evolution must have clearly responded to the formation of abstract memory in man and the associated more frequent sense of threat.

What I am about to write may seem too poetic, abstract, or even absurd, but in my defense I will mention that in the Renaissance people described human memory not as a record of events, but as a garden of growing memories. From the point of view of people of the 21st century who are obsessed with computers, this is a mistake, but from a human perspective it seems very lifelike. In this poetics I will “paint” my idea of ​​something that I would personally call a soul, although I may be wrong.

I imagine the soul as a multidimensional carpet that can be limited to a tape/long image for the purposes of imagination. With the passage of time, this tape gets longer and is formulated by experiences (I do not mean a record of memories). Experience is multidimensional and contains all dimensions of sensations, it is wound incoherently on a spool. In my opinion, this whole “reel” is precisely the soul of a person – as if a record of their life path, something that is embedded as an idea in the immaterial, Platonic world. This ball is not written in human language, but in the same language as music is written – it is a kind of struggle between order and chaos – what the soul does and what it should do.

So why are musical pieces composed in connection with the above? A person’s moment, their feelings are a compilation of fragments of this spool – on this basis they build a kind of image of their internal (seemingly external) world. Music is a kind of bridge between these images of themselves with their life and the harmony hidden within themselves, creating the impression of the meaning of life and its order.

Philosophers ask: “why is there something rather than nothing?“. The existence of no thing is more likely, because some thing is specific and requires a lot of coincidences. Personally, I approach this self-centrically: if I can ask this question, it means that I exist, so there is a single probability of the existence of some thing rather, since the possibility of asking this question arose…

I have more strange question in my mind – “why is there anything exists at all”? Why mathematics exists? Why matery and space exists? Why music exists?

So there is something, several instances or abstractions of something, and from this you can infinitely combine… this is how I feel about mathematics and this is the reason I feel that music is unfathomable.

In mathematics, you can partially derive numbers from the theory of sets, logic or geometry from numbers… everything is connected and creates a mosaic that is impossible to fathom. And… the great miracle: “How is it possible that we find these abstractions in physical world?”

A simpler example is chess, which, limited by several dozen rules, creates a mosaic of an unlimited number of rules that lead to a winning position… but I’m not intend to writing about mathematic, physics, chess… I want to write about music, understanding and understanding of music…

Understanding (even partial) as a miracle

To understanding we need not only anything, not only something, not only abstraction but also mind. These combinations are almost impossible – this is a miracle of the universe… I can undermining understanding but – the infinite and greatness of everything implicit that we are not even so small

Where does music come from?

The scientific and philosophical associations of music are – somewhere harmony has appeared in the current reality (also cosmic – orbits of planets), rhythms have been recorded in the pulse (e.g. heart, astronomy), sounds have become embedded in our everyday life… we can connect everything with everything but does it a delusion? I don’t understand music.

Music may be the language of the soul embedded in a sonic reality, but at honestsss the priority is the soul, not the construction of the world. Therefore, honestsss musical works are guided by the following principles:

• Content over form – usually the content of the melody (imposes the interpretation of the content), so it should be kept to a minimum.

• Aesthetic shock – the human soul is by nature repulsive because it is distant from God, which is why the sincere ugliness of works is recommended.

• Story – music as a language, is supposed to tell a story. honestsss songs should be composed as an internal dialogue of the artist with his experiences, fears, dreams, suffering, conscience… or… his relationships with angels and/or demons.

The link below contains examples of pieces created according to the above principles:

https://fluffycrumb.bandcamp.com

Related articles:

I don’t understand music (part 5 – an attempt at an anthropological justification of music), Souls from a perspective of music

In the late period of my fanaticism, when I was listening to Komendarek’s music all the time, the idea came to me to mathematically determine the complexity of musical pieces. Why? Out of a certain snobbery (pride) and irritation. Snobbery, because, “I’m listening to one of the best composers in history… and I have no way of proving his greatness” (I still lack this competence.) So, a measure of complexity would be a useful tool. Irritating, because you can meet fans of weak pieces who in hundreds of comments manifest their feelings for the performers and “pat each other on the shoulders” – and in this way I could fire up a calculator and say: “it’s not what you think…” and proverbially stick out my tongue.

Is it possible to mathematically measure the complexity of musical pieces? I don’t think so, but I will nevertheless consider the various factors that affect the complexity of music. We know what the elements of a musical piece are (melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, agogy, dynamics, articulation, color). It is possible to determine the complexity of a melody and its length, probably advanced statistical methods are possible that would calculate the density and variability of the rest of the listed elements. But (1) it would not be a universal measure (if it is possible), (2) there would be algorithms generating pseudo-music that would theoretically create very complex pieces that lack emotion and are impossible to listen to, (3) there are other, including extra-musical, values of music ​​that testify to the “greatness” of a piece.

I published on this blog four posts in a series “I don’t understand music”, and yet I decide to continue to pontificate on the subject, and I will list examples of values ​​in music that are not “elements of a musical work” in the sense of being its components, i.e. its building blocks:

• innovation,
• individuality/uniqueness,
• emotions/variability of emotions,
• mixing/combining styles,
• sincerity,
• accentuation (related to emotions and sincerity),
• mood and its “strength”,
• extra-musical message,
• etc.

It is known that when it comes to paintings and sculpture, points exist “next to each other” in space, and differences occur in colors – everything is based on matter. Literature is a more complex subject in terms of parallelism – although several equal sentences cannot be presented at one time, there are many parallel threads that sometimes intertwine. When it comes to music – this is something that is a mystery to me and has several aspects:

Parallelism of sounds at the level of physics

It seems obvious – there are sounds of different colors, of different frequencies, and the musician takes care that they work according to his will, that is, that they either resonate together or occur independently. For me, it is a miracle that human hearing has such selective spectral resolution.

Parallelism and at the same time “symbiosis” of sounds (perception)

This parallelism, however, has one additional aspect concerning perception – not only can each sound be heard separately, but they also resonate together, giving a measurable aesthetic value. And it almost shocks me that the sounds occur together and separately at the same time.

Parallelism of melody with chords and rhythm

It is a matter of the structure of the piece but also of the sound. The composer feels what the final effect should look like, but can you understand how it is that in one time interval in one piece the basic frequencies of the melody notes, “tone packages” (chords) with, among others, percussion change in parallel?

Parallel melody lines

You can hear it in F. Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9 no. 1, in J.S. Bach’s polyphonies, and in Gregorian chants. When I first noticed it in my life, I felt like I was in space. Listening to the aforementioned nocturne for the first time, I noticed that my brain can analyze several “competing” melodies in parallel and simultaneously…

The brain supposedly thinks in parallel, but I am amazed by the fact that it also feels in parallel!

In mathematical terms, the matter of the image is simple – it is enough to define points on the plane. With music, mathematics is complicated – we have one numerical dimension in time, which is selected in the spectrum only at the level of perception and interpretation. Among other reasons, contrary to the wishes of Pythagoras, Leibniz or Hegel, mathematics will not encompass music. I believe that the indirect reason is that artificial intelligence “can” pretend to be a painter, but “can” not regale us with its musical compositions.

Not so simply music

I will only add that I am simplifying the matter of the structure of a musical piece very much, and for example I will give the avant-garde music of St Celfer (John MacDougall Parker), who disrupts the musical structure with almost every fragment and goes outside its framework, only to return to it after a while (in short). His works contain sounds that change color and harmony during the duration of the tone. What is ordered sometimes smoothly changes into chaos, only to change form to another after a while. Parallelism in his case is a multi-layered affair – what seems like a melody can become a chord and vice versa. I noticed this especially in the album shown below:

https://earcon.bandcamp.com/album/stc-v-earcon