Do you hear noise or a story?

i've meditated quite long on the statements i've read here, regarding 'what is music?' thematic. i came up with some observations. i'll address these statements separately and in relations, where i think they become crucial.

there was a statement, that 'music is the thing one says to be music'. it is extremely subjective proposition. i think it doesn't hold up to its own critic, even forgetting the circle the statement is. for let's for example say that one piece of music is not liked and regarded as music for one person at some point in time. then, according to the logic of a statement, the piece of music is not music. well, then the same piece of music is regarded as music to the same person at some other (presumably later) moment in time. do we have to conclude from that, that the same piece has two contradicting properties that somehow starts to shift from time to time? i don't think so. i think the statement should be less strict subjectively.

it shouldn't weigh so much on the subject's shoulders. and let the object have some 'becoming' property. anything can become music, if someones starts to listen to it as music( obviously, to listen to something as music one already has to know what is music, or, as i explain later, must be a part of anything becoming music).

the same critics applies to the statement that said ''music is everything'', which is, of course, analytically shorter version of the above statement - "music is the thing one says to be music" this part - 'thing one says to be music' could easily be changed by 'everything', for one can say anything to be music.

it (the truth of the statement) doesn't have sufficient logical ground as to even propose such statement - if music is everything, then there could have never ever arised the mentioned question (what is music?) it wants and supposedly answers. so it must be that music is not everything, and is not anything that anyone says is music in a sense criticized above. anything could possibly become music, but is not in any strict sense.

now, we come to crucial part, the one that states - "by listening to something you make it music''. here we must stretch on the notion "listening" - do we use it in the same sense as hearing? i believe, as most probably many of you, not. actually it is even physically impossible to hear some sounds or to sustain them. so, no, not every sound is music. and not every sound that we hear is music, ''cause it kills you in the act of hearing it. this framing could be the infinite-small condition for physical coding and listening, which are two sides of the same coin. listening creates codes. to listen, not just hear, one must live in the music one hears. to live somewhere means to have relations to the thing and the site. some (relations/codes) are physically based, but more profound ones are nets of psychological, sociological and grammar phenomens. for instance to listen to the cars passing by is a trail of the other in a subject. it captures your attention, because it's strange, foreign, yet somehow existing. we can call it infinite-small condition for social-coding. there is no otherness outside of meeting and living with the strangers and unknown. now, every time you try to incorporate the otherness into a piece of work, you bring it to your own site. you create relations. you mix up preexisting codes and the one you only have as infinite-small specimen of not yet coded, but open for coding. so, generally, music of avant-garde is such a procedure of 'free' coding - that is to say bringing outside of subject inside of it. that is why 'subjective' in avant-garde is rather crossed-out subjectiveness. it's bringing the otherness (objectivity) to the work of art (codes) that is mainly conditioned by so many things before. subject here just has a capability for choice. works exist to prove the choice. to prove that you can listen to the cars passing by.that they can become music. they are not as such, and are not because of the fact you can/have heard them. so there the whole adventure and event of listening as a subjective condition of/for music comes into play. it resides in the fact that the listener has (chosen) or can choose. it's subjective and arbitrary in a sense that it (the sound one chooses) can be anything, but - having different conditions of infinite-small coding - it's not subjective in a 'individual' or 'personal' sense of the word. there is nothing personal in the fact that i'm a subject.

if i'm devoted to listening, i, in a sense, must become creator. that is to say - the price of listening is the adventure of inventing codes. and herein lies the trick - the otherness which once existed as a break from the code, as its condition (infinite-small of freedom), now becomes a code. it (listening and music in general) is not innocent.

"anything can become music to a subject, only and if only there are and were other subjects and things (codes)"

that is to say - a law of plural and difference in music.

This may seem like another bizarre 'internet mode' tangeant, but SSC do you by chance have slight deafness or even tinnitus? There is a reason I'm asking you this, namely I've had the same experience as you and I think it has something to do with my inability to hear things as they really are, due to tinnitus and partial deafness.

For example, I remember lying down in bed and hearing the sound of trickling water from somewhere outside. As I could not properly hear what it was, my brain would misinterpret it as music. It was almost like literally hearing distant picollo runs. The same thing has frequently happened upon suddenly heaingr an unexpected noise and I often completely misinterpret it as some kind of orchestral manoeuvre going on outside. I would imagine that this kind of experience would be fairly common in people with varying hearing difficulties, and/or people who write a lot of music.

In some sense you could argue that sound and music are one, that there is no objective difference between the two. However, certain sounds inspire a musical reaction, rather than being the music itself. If I literally interpreted water flowing, it would be nothing more than the sound of water flowing, only by 'misintepreting' it can we claim that it is music.

In my opinion music and sound are completely different. Science has shown different parts of the brain react to sound than to music; bizarrely people with severe motor-neurone syndrome (actually it was a different disorder, but I don't know the name) have been shown to get up and dance to music, but no sound has ever been shown to produce this effect. Similarly, some people suffering from an inability to speak (not from birth) have been able to sing lyrics of a song along with its melody. They can only speak in harmony, in other words the strict orders of music seem to be separate from the unordered frequencies of speech and noise.

Music is such a huge part of what makes humans separate from animals. Many human babies will instinctively react to music, very young toddlers will even dance to it without instruction. However, chimps who have been raised by humans show no 'human' reaction whatsoever as far as I know, to music. Yet every creature reacts to sound, and probably is able to distinguish between a number of frequencies, but not to the extent of the human ear. So really, in my opinion music is a glorified sound, entirely separate from 'noise'.

*

There are many philosophical arguments that lead to a conclusion that music is simply impossible to define, yet scientific experiments show otherwise. There are people who literally hear music as noise, yet have developed normal speaking habits. In other words, they are not blind to frequency, or noise, but only to music itself. They cannot appreciate or distinguish between musical intervals, yet they can recognise spoken idioms such as a raised pitch for a question.

Philosophically you can call anything what you like, but scientifically you cannot.

*Really if noise and music were one, we would be no more impressed by a person with beautiful singing voice than we were by the sound of a washing machine. Also a parrot that can sing, is by anybodies admission, remarkable. However, a parrot screeching is not remarkable.

Of course and I recognise that. I'd like to hear you opinions please!

But this is a discussion about noise and music (or at least became one!). How can we discuss it if nobody shares their opinions? Your opinion does matter! It matters to you, and I assure you it matters to me!

In regards to the original topic, the way in which I personally perceive music has nothing to do with a story. I see abstract images, and specifically associate colours with each piece. Elgars Cello concerto for example on the whole is green simply because it's in E minor. In more detail it's more complicated but near impossible to explain. The lower bits seem tinged with brown, yet when the tutti section arrives it is strikingly yellow, although the green still exists in some part of the 'visual soundscape'. This soundscape doesn't dominate my musical experience but I would imagine influences my opinion of it. I have found music that I don't particularly enjoy is dominated by the colours grey and black. I don't associate grey with a key, infact funnily enough a lot of music without a home key become associated with grey. However, black or extremely dark purple is most definitely Csharp minor!

Each key specifically has real meaning to me, because they each have a colour. C major is reddish brown, yet C minor is dark blue. I don't quite know why this happens, but there is a possiblity that I associate colours with the words "C major" rather than the sound of the key itself.

In regards to the importance of melody, for me specifically it is immensely important. As I hear a melody I often visualise it in some way, and music with no real discernible melody is certainly harder to visualise in this manner. On a simple note, I simply prefer to listen to music where harmony and melody are married, but I think that perhaps some of this has to do with the way in which I 'see' music.

Some problems arise due to technology however, namely that with pieces of music I listen to on a computer whilst looking at the screen, tend to end up 'looking' like windows media player visualiser. This is incredibly annoying in some ways, as it can obstruct my own 'visual' reactions to take place.

In reply to the scientific thing: Yes, it is probably true that neurologically we have different ways of hearing "noise" and "music". However I'm highly doubtful of whether this distinction is automatically made according to objective properties of these sounds, or whether it is made according to the way we choose to listen. You -can- listen to noise as noise, or as music, and you can listen to music as music, or as noise. This may even be stronger in other cultures, where the distinction between noise and music never was so clear. Take japanese shakuhachi music, for example, which consists almost more of noisy breathing sounds than a clear tone. But still, a japanese will hear that as music, and it will probably activate the "music centres" in his brain, rather than the noise centres, because he -knows- that it's music and thus listens to it like that.

But it would be interesting if those neurological tests would have been made with, say, composers who heavily focus on composing with unpitched noise or even musique concr

This may seem like another bizarre 'internet mode' tangeant, but SSC do you by chance have slight deafness or even tinnitus? There is a reason I'm asking you this, namely I've had the same experience as you and I think it has something to do with my inability to hear things as they really are, due to tinnitus and partial deafness.

No. My ears work like they should, and so does everything else.

I've already talked this thread down into the ground pages back, and I've already pointed out my view on "science" getting involved in stuff that has to do with subjective tastes. Sorry, but go look for a fight elsewhere.

Oh, I know I shouldn't add to this thread but I will.

First, a little side note humans seek patterns sometimes where or when there isn't any. For example, Bartok didn't write his music to the proportions of the Golden Mean. This is a myth innocently purported by a music theoroists who worked hard to find a mathematical constant in Bartok's mature works. There are some mathematical relations to some features of music. There are features of human made music which are found in our environment (fractals being one of them). So the post regarding tonality I believe was a bit too broad in his statement.

As for the intial thread. I enjoy music much like a story in a variety languages. Classical music and a little pop and jazz I have the confidence to offer an opinion because I am familiar with it and studied its grammar. If you ask me about Arabic music I would be less capable as I do not know the extensive theory of maquams (sp?) though I am familiar with the style of singing as I heard quite a bit of the more westernized Arabic music when I was younger. In sum I will say a story for which I may not understand exactly what is being written/spoken all the time.

For example, Bartok didn't write his music to the proportions of the Golden Mean. This is a myth innocently purported by a music theoroists who worked hard to find a mathematical constant in Bartok's mature works.

Now that is interesting. I always was convinced that he did use the golden mean too, but that's of course because it's what I've been taught (and because it was shown to me in pieces like the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta). But it wouldn't be the first time of music theorists repeating the same thing for generations just because it's what they learned themselves, without it actually having an objective basis.

But do you have any source for this? I'd imagine it would be pretty hard to show that Bart

Sure -

The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number, by Mario Livio.

Ron Knott's excellent website Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Section, at the University of Surrey in England.

University of Maine mathematician George Markowsky pointed out in his article "Misconceptions About the Golden Ratio", published in the College Mathematics Journal in January 1992

The main problem which I understand from the Mathematical Association of America's (MAA) website is that whether the use of the Golden Section was intended. In many causes there is no proof. Exception and it isn't conclusive is some f Debussy's work.

Here is the link to the MAA site article:

Good stories, pity they're not true

Thanks!

No problem. BTW - any projects for the summer (yes I know this is off thread)?