searching for experimental music forums

[vurt]

do you never seek absolute silence?
albeit impossible,getting as close as you can
yes i enjoy what i can hear,sometimes, but that doesnt neccassarrily make it musical.
my heart beats,i hear it i dont have any control over it happening.while it can be considered musical if yoou attach idioms like rythym s necassarry to music,but then we get into a deeper realm in that the sounds we cant hear,are they music?
we can record and pitch these things to listenable levels so we know for a fact they make a sound,but would you say sound at least has to be heard to be musical?

just tryna find a base to your theory is all

[whyterabbyt]

> If all sounds are music, then music, as a separate concept, ceases to exist....

yes! very cool. music is *not* separate ... it's *part of* everything. i love it.

Surely, then, as a result, one maintains an awareness of different categorisation of sounds; rhythmic, arhythmic, harmonic, unpleasant, accidental, delibrate, natural, mechanical, transient, recurrent et.c.?

[detfella]

i see music as organised sound

on another point i was listening to a radio4 program on music and language a while back and it said that there is some indication that music came before language (for us humans!)

[vurt]

i would have no doubt that man danced to beats on logs to tell stories long before he could speak yes.

[shamann]

shamann: it's getting down to semantics, isn't it?

Of course, if you speak of definitions, it all comes down to semantics. Semantics aren't an impasse, though, they only suggest that definitions are a matter of design rather than innate. The problem with the post-modern insistance that nothing is real, that meaning is a matter of personal taste, ignores the function of meaning. We have moved on from meaning being decreed from the heavens, but meaning, definition, boundaries have all been established within a social/human context.

We say music so that the other guy knows what we're talking about. We don't call it dirt, because then the other guy doesn't know what we are talking about (am I standing on music?). Whether things are real and or defined in the grand, cosmic sense is irrelevent to our use of meaning, because at the end of the day, things happen around us which we can observe and to which we respond, and they happen with a fair degree of concreteness and regularity. Our tools, such as meaning, are developed to aid in this situation, whether it is the imaginings of an ant or not.

There's a reason we have separate definitions for sound and music. We call the act of appreciating sound through gesture music, sound is "mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium." If we say that all sound is music, we ignore the reason we used the term music in the first place, and we do so only as a suggestion that there is a hierarchy of definitions, that the word "music" outranks "sound."

[dystonia_ek]

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that the intentionality of most music is the single largest obstacle we face in appreciating sound.

Only if you maintain some sort of attachment to the concept of music (and related semantics).

[emdot_ambient]

for me, it's yes, yes, and yes! but that's because i don't accept the limitations of the conventionally agreed upon definition of music, which does involve artistic intentionality. for me it's ... well, it's pretty much everything (even silence).

By that, then, surely you render the term 'music' completely irrelevant. If there is no distinction between sound (or the absence of sound), and music, then the idea of music is negated. If all sounds are music, then music, as a separate concept, ceases to exist....

No. Not at all. Like so many others, you're confusing the conscious attempt to create an aesthetic experience (composition) with the actual experience (music).

Surely you must agree that humans started composing only after they experienced sound as aesthetically pleasing? Composition came about, I think, as a reaction to aesthetic experiences derived from natural sources. Music is all in our minds. It is a human response to sound. Composition is just a conscious effort to either mirror the beauty we hear around us, or to take control of our environment by forcing an aesthetic experience rather than waiting around for it from an external source.

You're all focusing on the creative act rather than the aesthetic experience . . . two distinctly separate things. One does not necessarily follow from the other.

I would argue that the fact I can have a deeply moving aesthetic experience of sound completely apart from someone creating a composition, coupled with the fact that so very many compositions are created that result in no aesthetic experience at all, points to the conclusion that music is all about how we perceive and experience sound, not how someone constructs a sound.

[mystahr]

I've always felt 'music' to be a border crossing language that many hear and understand in their own learned perception as being 'music'.

This discussion is a very interesting one, and I am happily reading the additions placed by more and more.

For the longest time I've been inspired by nature and have often felt that it knows its own rhythmics and sequences be it made by animals or wind rustling through the bushes. It definately takes effort to hear these as such and many of todays sounds are bombastically overruled by manmade sounds. There is no such thing as silence anymore as there will always be a sound happening.

What I see happening in this thread is the shifting of music being explained from the intention of the creator to the music that is being perceived by the listener. Inbetween there lies quite a big field of interpretation.

I do think the deeper this topic is going the harder it becomes to find the denotations of what experimental music is. I can but only hope this thread will go on as it sure makes for one heck of an interesting read.

And in the end; isn't it all for the most part interpretation and perception?

[emdot_ambient]

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that the intentionality of most music is the single largest obstacle we face in appreciating sound.

Only if you maintain some sort of attachment to the concept of music (and related semantics).

No, not an attachment to the concept of music per se, but only an understanding that what you're about to hear was consciously create to BE music.

Words are getting in our way here.

As soon as you expect a certain experience, your mind will begin categorizing and judging based on that expectation. Swtich on a radio and you expect . . . sounds that some composer intended to be music. How's that?

[rachmiel]

> Music. It's all in your head, man.

yes. :-)

the question is: where is your head?

rachMiel

[rachmiel]

> would you say sound at least has to be heard to be musical?

i don't want you to misinterpret what i'm about to say, so i'd rather rephrase the question as:

> would you say sound at least has to be heard to be (...) ?

(...) being the all-inclusive substitute term for music.

no. for me, wave patterns that are inaudible can also be (...) . i'm not able to "listen to" these inaudible patterns very often, but i trust that they are there.

i guess it boils down to this for me:

(...) is not an exclusively human phenomenon.

rachMiel

[mystahr]

where is your head?

I sometimes wonder where mine is, was or is heading to....

[shamann]

In large part I agree with that statement but in a very different way than you intended it. "Music" is an act of human invention, but that act is in the hearing, not in the creation. I define music as an aesthetic appreciation of sound. I don't believe there is any intrinsic quality that can be defined as music. Just because a composer sits down and arranges a lot of notes doesn't mean his creation is going to be universally acclaimed to be music. It doesn't matter one bit how intentionally something is created, it will only be declared beautiful if it is experienced aesthetically. So in that sense, the beautiful tree you mention can be appreciated as art, just as much as some piece of Christmas kitsch can be reviled as anything but art.

I think a lot of what Cage was on about was wrong.

Then I think you probably are interpreting what he was on about in the wrong way. He wasn't about trying to convince you some of his horribly unlistenable sounds were music; he was about trying to shift your thinking so that you could come to an aesthetic appreciation of sounds apart from their intentionality.

Cage's point, which he made explicitly clear very often in interviews, essays and lectures, was that the sounds he heard when he just stopped to listen were music. But that goes beyond appreciation. Appreciation of sound is appreciation of sound. Moving that act up to the term "music" suggests that words like music and art are inherently better things to be. That the word "sound" is vulgar, so we must elevate it to music to let it shine. But they're both just words, and the problem with supplanting one for the other willy-nilly negates all shared understanding of that word. I might as well say gobbledeegook and be done with it.

And it just doesn't jive with me to say that things are art only when I perceive them to be good. Art can suck, quite often does, but it is still art. Art is the function/act/product, how we perceive or grade comes after.

When you say "Just because a composer sits down and arranges a lot of notes doesn't mean his creation is going to be universally acclaimed to be music," your using music as a qualifier rather than a descriptor. You're saying it is only music if people love it. But again, that negates any useful meaning.

[rachmiel]

>> where is your head?

> I sometimes wonder where mine is, was or is heading to....

:-)

mine is skirting the orbit of a chunk of receding dark matter (or is that dark energy) right about now. ;-)

[rachmiel]

> Surely, then, as a result, one maintains an awareness of different categorisation of sounds; rhythmic, arhythmic, harmonic, unpleasant, accidental, delibrate, natural, mechanical, transient, recurrent et.c.?

i am maniacally differentiating when it comes to music. all that german education, i think ... my professors sitting on my shoulder wagging their fingers, exhorting me to analyze, dissect, critique! in fact, i wish i were able to just relax and let the music take me more.

why did you ask this?

rachMiel