Music as part of the problem-solving space

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Thomyum2
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Thomyum2 »

Repoman05 wrote: November 14th, 2019, 9:08 am If music exists independently of humanity, you haven't accepted where when how or why it might. I'm certainly not struggling or grasping at anything by any meaningful comparison.
Of course music doesn't exist independently of humanity - music grows out of existing culture and also forms the raw material for evolution of new cultures.

You're correct in saying that it is one of the forms that resonate among people of a certain group, and acts as part of the 'glue', so to speak, that holds together a group that has those particular customs and traditions in common. Where I think you're wrong though, is to suggest this only as a negative thing, as only having an exclusive use as if to separate one group from another.

While it's true that music has a military or patriotic use, it has others as well - music is created to accompany the expression of feelings about a whole spectrum of experience, of romantic love, maternal love, the beauty of nature, the pain and anguish of loss, and one could go on. In fact, because of this, I think that music and all the arts for that matter have a more unifying than separating role among peoples because music can reach across the boundaries between groups in ways that other forms of communication may not. People can understand each others' arts even while they may not understand each others' language, because the arts can allow us access something fundamental and common to all human experience, not just the experience of your own group. Cultural exchange can build bridges because it allows one people to come to know another people's spirit, it can give us a whole new window into other peoples' experiences, even across distance and time. It's just so much more than just all 'whole tribes unanimously giving out the same call'.
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Felix
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Felix »

This thread seems to be more about the effects of lyrical poetry - lyrics set to music - than music itself. As far as instrumental music is concerned, I agree with Igor Stravinsky that "music is powerless to express anything." People do of course inject their own subjective meaning into it.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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Thomyum2
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Thomyum2 »

Felix wrote: November 14th, 2019, 1:14 pm This thread seems to be more about the effects of lyrical poetry - lyrics set to music - than music itself. As far as instrumental music is concerned, I agree with Igor Stravinsky that "music is powerless to express anything." People do of course inject their own subjective meaning into it.
My main interest has always been mainly in instrumental music, and I find it very expressive indeed!

But to the Stravinsky quote, it's interesting, and to the point here I think, to read it in the full context:
  • For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.
It strikes me, on reading this again now after so long, that I think he's really saying the same thing we often say about language - that the meaning is its use, in the meaning we assign to it. I think that music operates in many ways like a language and he's saying exactly that, that its expression is that which we give it.

Interestingly, many years later he clarified what he had said above with the following:
  • The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.
“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
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Papus79
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Papus79 »

Felix wrote: November 14th, 2019, 1:14 pm This thread seems to be more about the effects of lyrical poetry - lyrics set to music - than music itself.
That might be what other people are saying in this thread, it's not true of the OP or much of what I've been suggesting.
Felix wrote: November 14th, 2019, 1:14 pmAs far as instrumental music is concerned, I agree with Igor Stravinsky that "music is powerless to express anything." People do of course inject their own subjective meaning into it.
It does frame a set and setting. The lyrics or lack of will either further determine the implications of that set and setting or possibly over-determine it. Much of what I listen to either doesn't have lyrics or has snippits/samples. The stuff that really hits me properly quite often has no words at all.

Part of the challenge here - when I brought up the analogy of a prism, it's a defined area that filters what's put into it. It's like having two different photographs, putting a green-blue or orange transparent piece of plastic over them, and realizing that either one is still the same picture but that it's also true that it has the orange or green-blue overlay. With all of the instrumentation and levels involved in that you have a little bit more than just a color tone, you have maybe at least two or three meaningful parameters that can be played with if you think of the style and timber of percussion, bass, treble, you could break treble further into rhythm and lead as well as punctuating effects. Melody's widely multivariate and there's a wide array of applications for that - ie. major scale, minor scale, most interestingly blends of both, blends with blue notes, you can even get really gaunt major scale if you work with it right. The mixing is also another parameter - the space could be small and intimate, it could be awesomely large. You have different ways of apply saturation, reverb, delay, compression, filtering, EQ'ing, etc..

The way I'd say it maybe - it's not pointing at 'exact' content but it's clearly fencing in a particular space and on rare occasion can indeed even build the architecture within that space. It's still to some degree a prism in that the contents of the person's mind whose listening to it will be refracted through it, but it's tough to argue that various pieces of music have differing degrees to which they tighten or define the space and where some pieces of music get a wide range of interpretations there are others that yield a tighter cluster.
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Repoman05
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Repoman05 »

Felix wrote: November 14th, 2019, 1:14 pm This thread seems to be more about the effects of lyrical poetry - lyrics set to music - than music itself. As far as instrumental music is concerned, I agree with Igor Stravinsky that "music is powerless to express anything." People do of course inject their own subjective meaning into it.
But if it is actually accessing instincts. Then it accesses objectivity doesn't it? Isn't the threshold of when it's subjective, necessitate accessing only our unnatural inner contrarions? It at least firstly accesses our instincts and then our interpretative contraions make value judgments. It's then either dismissed or valued from what meaning they could apply to it and whether or not that meaning needed further consideration.
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Repoman05 »

Instincts are natural. Codified minds are not. It doesn't matter how firmly we believe that codification. One human mind can't comprehend the infinite intricacies necessary to capture reality. We can only guess how our instincts work. They don't require the mind to negotiate them because they're innate.
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Repoman05
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Repoman05 »

I think my statement to music not being independent of humanity is subject to a degree of critisizm as it's incomplete. In its typical current firm it doesn't exist independently of people but then again, this is what music really is.

https://freesound.org/people/Frankie012 ... ds/214869/

Or

https://freesound.org/people/Bidone/sounds/65879/

But a little more like this

https://freesound.org/people/robertjd/sounds/69584/

Perhaps it's an objective natural instinct that's warped by artists and then censored or sold out by douchebags till it's just plain "entertainment."
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Papus79
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Papus79 »

I'm going to actually bring up a few pieces, in part because I don't know how anyone would say that 'music is powerless to express anything'. It would take a very esoteric definition of powerless or anything in my books to make that phrase work.

One concession I will give - a piece of music without words can be sort of 'impregnated' with meaning by the name the artists chooses to asign to it but at the same time there are plenty of pieces you can hear where you listen and you figure the name either doesn't quite match or its just putting a bit of top-spin on the music itself.

So a couple examples that I'll preface. These are non-vocal pieces of music. One of them has sort of an abstract coughing type sound toward the back but it's devoid of speech - ie. it's as much a background element as the pads, drums, symbols, 808's, etc.. They're both tunes that etch a rather distinct environment and they're both cases where the names sort of cut an angle within the space rather than defining it (that's what I mean by 'top-spin').

There's a fan video for Silver Blade that I passed on because I'd rather you take a look at it and see if it was sort of in ballpark with what you got out of it rather than running into that first.

Dillinja - Silver Blade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnDxIXFiv6g

Sam KDC - Erosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnUBSIkaK44


My guess - most people listening to either of these, regardless of whether they like them or think they're crap, probably won't envision a bowl of fruit on a table or a Bavarian summer cottage. It's not impossible that someone 'could' envision those things, it would just be rare.

If anything this could at least help clarify some of where we might be talking past each other like 'Oh yeah - but that has a bunch of sound effects and dissonance woven in that works as tells' - perfect! That would be a start, and we might find out that we're talking about different things like strictly cannonical 'music theory' music vs. what comes out when people sort of 'dope' or muddy the tracks with atmospheric and ambient elements. That would be fair enough, I might slightly disagree at that point that music theory adherence is the gold standard for the value of music but that's at least a much easier thing to make sense of than what seems to be, at least verbally, an ongoing suggestion that music can't make people feel anything in particular or point in a given direction with its elements if it doesn't have words.
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Papus79
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Papus79 »

I also hinted at this piece in my OP. I generally don't care for pop at all so it's rare for me to ever want to loop a song let alone do it for a few days. With this one the lyrics seem pretty trite if you look them up but, again with the music and melodic patterns there's something way darker in the background, not exactly hidden either, and it seems like it's defined more by key words in the song rather than the lyrics proper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9SGYBHY0qs

If I were to try and offer a secular or at least materialist-friendly interpretation of how it could be that people could have some amplified beast of a track, in terms of emotional or archetypal content and how it all fits together, but not have it in the lyrics or possibly not even realizing that they're doing it (ie. Socrates's take on what he called 'artistic epilepsy'), you can look at conscious/subconscious or, if you think Iain McGilchrist is on to anything, right and left brain addressing immediate task-orientation vs. big picture or full-court and abstract thinking, either way it seems like there are parts of our minds that we generally don't see as often unless we either meditate, dose a lot, or see them coming up in dreams. The idea is that there are parts of us that are processing our day to day environments, doing so in much more symbolic terms where as our waking conscious minds do so generally in technical terms. Quite often it's that more symbolic mind speaking when you sense an injection of something heavier than what a person's technical mind would usually cough up.

So Neoliberalism mixed with American Psycho mixed with old-world savagery and throwing disabled babies to the wolves, or the even scarier thought that the sublime and the transcendent could be hot-wired into and even just be an aspect or extension of our most atavistic traits? Its an incredibly pessimistic idea but in a lot of ways this tune sort of seems to wedge those elements together, sort of like the movie Joker did and we know how much of a chord that struck! It doesn't 'force' you to come away with that interpretation. If anything though this might be sort of a nod to what Repoman05 was saying about tapping primal or atavistic instincts. The question of whether the unconscious or subconscious are all Jung, all Freud, or a bit of both though is a huge topic in its own wright and probably not one we could fit in here.
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Papus79
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Papus79 »

To clean up something even more that I said in the post immediately above and boil it down into a few concise terms - most 4D chess that goes on the world is 4D chess that people don't realize they're playing, it's other layers of their minds less accessible that are playing it and quite often it's the conscious mind that's backward rationalizing or making excuses, ie. coming up with a convincing cover story. It's important to think about all of those layers IMHO when we think about things like this.
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Repoman05
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Repoman05 »

I never got into techno or pseudo-porn.
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Papus79
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Papus79 »

Repoman05 wrote: November 15th, 2019, 4:43 am I never got into techno or pseudo-porn.
Beautiful display of honesty, and it's telling people in this thread far more than you ever likely intended to tell them.
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Repoman05
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Repoman05 »

What, that I know what good porn is? I fully intended to say that.
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Papus79
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Papus79 »

This is great. Tell us more.
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Repoman05
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Re: Music as part of the problem-solving space

Post by Repoman05 »

Are you afraid to admit you don't know good porn and you're easily amused by heavily censored pseudo-porn. Do you have child lock on your computer?

But let's see these two things in contrast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnDxIXFiv6g

https://freesound.org/people/robertjd/sounds/69584/

The first comes from YouTube where it makes people money

The second is from freesound. It doesn't make anyone squat diddly.

The first took someone a long long time to craft, no it didn't.

The second was an actual moment in time. It depended on billions of years if evolution to simultaneously create a coyote a train a man and a microphone and the special circumstances where they all came together in the most unlikeliest of moments. Creation could re-roll the dice infinit times and never recreate this moment.

The first can be pooped off a cellphone at will.
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