Music in context vs music in a lab

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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«Imagine that you’re a researcher who has unlimited time and resources, and a time machine that can travel anywhere in the world. You use these wondrous gifts to get a recording of every song that has ever been sung, whether by people in big cities or those in small hunter-gatherer groups. You play these recordings to random volunteers, and ask them to guess the behaviors that were associated with each tune. Was the song used for dancing? For soothing a baby? For healing illness? Could people guess what songs are for by their sound alone, without any knowledge about their cultural context?»

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... up/551447/

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/ful ... 17)31675-5

This is really interesting and a step into a direction to pick up the work of Lomax in Cantometrics which I still think was incredibly valuable. Now, some shortcomings seem to arise in the "data" and the "listeners". The very fact that the data are songs in the format of "recordings" and that "listeners" are listening to recordings in a computer using headphones creates a "lab experience" dettaching most of these musics from their original context. For many people in many cultures music is not about "listening" to "recordings", it is about experiencing a live context full of movement, colour, interaction, that may last for several hours and having human interaction. Reducing "music" production to "trimmed recordings" and music reception to "listening to trimmed recordings" is creating biased data and a faulty experience.

I wonder how many people nowadays given the standardization and commodification of music actually believe music is "the sound of recordings". Many times I've seen people complaining in live concerts because "they don't play like the record" or "that cover is very different from the original"...

I also acknowledge it would be extremely difficult to test such things like taking 70 americans to 80 different places around the world and make them living there for a while and attent the social rituals, etc... That's why for a start this is already very good.
Play fair and square!

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The Atlantic wrote:“I am skeptical of this sort of attempt to impose order on humanity’s music making by scholars with relatively little on-the-ground ethnographic experience,” says David Locke, an ethnomusicologist at Tufts University. In the West African songs he studies, songs of very different styles can be repurposed for all kinds of functions. “Songs associated with war or death can be sung to soothe an infant—but there would not be a thunderous drum ensemble and full dance ensemble present,” he says. “When I teach courses that ask students to listen to unfamiliar music, they usually make wrong associations between the singing style of the selection and its use in human life.”

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Musicologo wrote:The very fact that the data are songs in the format of "recordings" and that "listeners" are listening to recordings in a computer using headphones creates a "lab experience" dettaching most of these musics from their original context
But taking musical works out of context is the only way to see whether music has emotional 'content' that exists outside of this context.

It has long been believed, by many different sorts of people, that music does have such emotional content. Because so many people believe this, this kind of experiment makes sense as a way to test this belief's veracity.

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But taking musical works out of context is the only way to see whether music has emotional 'content' that exists outside of this context.
I believe you mean *sound* instead of music then. Music only exists in context because it encompasses a lot more things, namely movement, gestual and expressive agencies, often dance, etc... The very act of capturing 3 minutes of sound of a certain musical practice and reproducing that sound elsewhere is a feeble reduction of what "happened". It is like pretending a 2d photograph is a faithful depiction of reality.

Now, the content of sound we already know what it is for a long time and the authors acknowledge that... Meaning is attributed externally based on some biological constraints and different cultural values.

I wonder why leading people to chose from 6 "universal" categories instead of leaving an open text box and asking people to tell what they think those sounds were about...
Play fair and square!

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Check it out, 'Musicologo', this is the Music Theory board. Where people like to go to get information they can use to make music, that's what the idea is here.

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Musicologo wrote:I believe you mean *sound* instead of music then. Music only exists in context because it encompasses a lot more things, namely movement, gestual and expressive agencies, often dance, etc...
Then you mean "performance" instead of music. Music is defined as sounds organised or combined in some particular fashion. Dancing, costume, gesture are not music though they well may be involved in and add to a musical performance.

If we take your approach to its logical conclusion then the music of Bach is lost to us because we can't go back a few hundred years to hear J.S. himself playing or conducting it. And that will be true for most of the music ever made.

Steve

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Music is defined as
By whom? There is no universal definition of music. The definition you presented therefore is incorrect/incomplete in many contexts. It may apply to your practice in particular, though, but most musics around the world are not defined like that.

In the case of J S Bach his practice involved notation on paper of some sound parameters (pitch, duration, some agogic), to be often performed by others. There was a functional separation, which is not the case in most musical practices I know of. Of course the "music" of Bach is lost because you can't listen to it in context. What survived are 2D snapshots of that musical practice compared to what the 3D version would be. And a rendition of those snapshots by Glenn Gould for instance is no more than someone in the XXI century dressing up as Mona Lisa and making the same pose and then someone else painted them and sold those painting claiming they were Da Vinci's art. Those are merely commodified reproductions. Calling them "the music of X" seems a bit of a strecht. A concert of Bradendburg concertos by Glenn Gould seems to be mostly the music of Glenn Gould interpreting Bach notated ideas and a recording of those would also be the music of the producer/engineers/label involved to make that commodity. Reducing "music" to some abstract materials is ignoring the musical practices of all other people socially involved in the process.

Jancivil, this is a Music Theory board, I don't dare to assume what people come here for. I come here to engage in conversation about all kinds of music theories, specially when they present refreshing or out-of-the-box points of view. Reducing this forum to prescritive algorithms about styles of recorded or european-centred notated music seems redutionist, even if you perceive the majority of users to be here for that. I'm also interested in those, since they are part of my practice as an European songwriter/bedroom producer. But I don't limit myself to them, specially If I want to innovate or include ideas from other practices. I think discussing the work of music scientists is part of what a music theory board should also be about to spark new thoughts... When people don't care about some threads they are free to not reply to them. I hardly read any post in the EDM sections...
Last edited by Musicologo on Mon Jan 29, 2018 10:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Musicologo wrote:
Music is defined as
By whom? There is no universal definition of music. The definition you presented therefore is incorrect/incomplete in many contexts. It may apply to your practice in particular, though, but most musics around the world are not defined like that.
Then your definition is equally false. Postmodernist ideology cuts both ways.

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what "my definition"? I didn't present any, noone asked for it and it would be irrelevant... there are multiple ones around the world. One has to see them case by case.
Last edited by Musicologo on Mon Jan 29, 2018 11:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Musicologo wrote:I didn't present any definition, because there are multiple ones. There are thousands of musics around the world and you have to understand each one case by case.
Defined by whom?

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Concepts are historically constructed, socially mantained, individually experienced. And one has to understand the concepts, shaping the behaviours and informing the sound/text results to understand any given musical practice. Therefore in the extreme each individual has a different definition. But what science has observed is that at least, on the level of a cultural community in any given place and time there seems to be shared consensus. The suya seems to agree between themselves what "music" was there [Seeger], the same for the Venda [Blacking], the same for the students and professors of a conservatory in New York [Kingsbury], etc... I noticed that in my own City there are very discrepant concepts among different groups of people I know. Globablization made cultural borders much more nuanced.

https://www.amazon.com/Study-Ethnomusic ... 0252080823
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Musicologo wrote:Therefore in the extreme each individual has a different definition.
Oh dear. It looks like your quest has hit an early roadblock.

That's what happens when you follow Richard Rorty into the land of "nothing is defined, everything is true, everything is false".

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Wrong assumption and interpretation of the positions stated. I'm a pragmatist and Constructive Empiricist according to these worldviews: «Truth (and meaning) are always relative to a particular practical context, to a set of practices and values. Truth is what works (in that particular practical context).» I reject Anti-Realism and all that postmodernist mambo jumbo. I'm a scientist, after Poper and Godel. And the science I've been following actually "works". Where are you coming from?...



Anti-Realism:
Metaphysical: (Richard Rorty)
There is no world apart from our experience. The idea of a noumenal world or a world of things in themselves apart from experience is nonsensical or is not a possibility we are capable of representing,

Epistemological: (Kant, Late Putnam)
We cannot have knowledge of reality as it exists independently of our point of view. Reality exists independent of us, but we can't know it as it really is.

Pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952)
Truth (and meaning) are always relative to a particular practical context, to a set of practices and values. Truth is what works (in that particular practical context).

Constructive Empiricism: (Bas van Fraassen). Science does not describe reality as it is apart from us and our perceptions, nor is that its job. Its job is to describe the common appearances that normal average size objects have to normal human observers. There is a common perceptual world shared by all normal humans. Science aims at systematically describing these and constructing our theoretical understandings of the world from this base.

Internal Realism: (Peirce, Late Hilary Putnam)
Truth exists as an ideal towards which the scientific community progresses. Truth is not a relationship between our scientific activity and something else, but is what the ideal scientific community would progress towards under ideal scientific conditions. The basic unit of connection with the world is no longer the particular theory or paradigm, but the entire history of the scientific community.

Intuitive Realism: (Thomas Nagel)
There is an external world that outruns our ability to represent it in language. While a full expression of truth is impossible in language or scientific theory, there is a bedrock of non-linguistic intuitions that form a common sense to which all of our theories must conform.

Scientific Realism: (early Hilary Putnam, Paul and Patricia Churchland)
We can know reality as it exists apart from experience and current scientific theory comes close to doing so, forming a core that will be retained in all subsequent theories.
Play fair and square!

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Musicologo wrote:
But taking musical works out of context is the only way to see whether music has emotional 'content' that exists outside of this context.
I believe you mean *sound* instead of music then.
No, I mean "music".
Music only exists in context because it encompasses a lot more things, namely movement, gestual and expressive agencies, often dance, etc...


This, as a general assertion, is false. Of course the first five words are literally true, but the reasons you give for their truth are not as universal as you seem to think.

There are various musical traditions that do more or less separate music from ritual, dance and other activities. Hindustani classical music and European classical music both contain sizeable traditions of 'absolute' music: i.e. music without a program or external justification that is explicitly intended to stand on its own.
The very act of capturing 3 minutes of sound of a certain musical practice and reproducing that sound elsewhere is a feeble reduction of what "happened".


In some cases this is almost true. I could see how a recording of a Wagnerian opera performance at Bayreuth could be called a 'feeble reduction' of what happened. But even in that case the assertion is still a bit hyperbolic. Try listening to a properly made recording of an inspired performance of Siegfried on a good loud system in a properly treated room. As good as being there? Of course not. But 'feeble'? Hardly.

But this is completely ignoring another issue: which is that modern recording technology allows us to hear things that could never occur in real life, like Freddie Mercury singing each of four parts three times over at the same time, or Jimmy Page playing 3 different guitars at the same time, or performances that are sped up to a tempo that even Paganini couldn't match, or conversely, slowed down so much that a trumpet sounds lower in register than a tuba.
It is like pretending a 2d photograph is a faithful depiction of reality.
But a decent 2d photograph is quite literally a faithful depiction of reality.
Now, the content of sound we already know what it is for a long time and the authors acknowledge that... Meaning is attributed externally based on some biological constraints and different cultural values
Sure, but to assess how this works we are going to have to, I don't know, do something like ask people to listen to recordings of music from other cultures and then describe the experience, no?
I wonder why leading people to chose from 6 "universal" categories instead of leaving an open text box and asking people to tell what they think those sounds were about...
That is a problem, I agree. It is an inherent difficulty in trying to assess subjective experiences using statistical methods.

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Musicologo wrote:Wrong assumption and interpretation of the positions stated.
And yes, it's another example of Musicologo's musicological masturbation, involving an endlessly shifting series of positions in order to advance some point never quite expressed but where any other posters are dismissed for their crass errors.

Here's Bruno Nettl, the guy you cited further up and appear to agree with at least for five minutes or so:
In Nettl's Elephant, Bruno Nettl wrote:First, the "new musicology" began challenging the more traditional musicology during the 1980s. Related to so-called postmodern movements in other humanistic fields, it began to move into new areas, busting the traditionaal canons of great music; incorporating gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, critical theory, cultural criticism, and many other kinds of interpretation, some very insightful; and pursuing some others totally off the wall. Maybe most important, the movement foregrounded the notion that music can be understood fully only if one takes into account the culture from which it comes and in which it does its work, the culture that affects and constructs it...

...There's no doubt that the emergence of the new, postmodern musicology has drawn music historians and ethnomusicologists together.
I'm bored now. It's a shame, because the subject of whether there are common musical motifs shared by cultures is an interesting one. But, unfortunately, it's a subject that will have to wait for another thread because this one started as a train wreck and isn't going to get any better.

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