Music in context vs music in a lab

[herodotus]

...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.

[Musicologo]

I fully agree with the bold part of that Nettl's citation. And that's part of the problem we're trying to solve in order to answer:

the subject of whether there are common musical motifs shared by cultures is an interesting one.

That's why I suggested the original study is interesting and intruiguing but the atlantic article already shown some problems with its methodology. I'm a big fan of Lomax that started the whole thing back in the 50's. That's the idea. The problem is exactly how can we identify the biological component from the cultural one.

I'd say that having an open textbox instead of a checklist of 6 categories would be more useful. I'm still not sure how can one circumvent the problem of listening to trimmed recordings though. It certainly is a useful study to know more about perception of the sounds of the musics.

The idea that 2d can simulate reality in nonsense. The argument of herodotus is that it can faithfully reproduce the sound of the event, but again, music is not sound. It can't reproduce the smell of the opera house, the faces of the guests and performers, the background noise, the social environment, the gestures, the costumes, etc... and all those things influence and are involved in the reception of any musical practice. Just one case in a western musical context:

«People reliably select the actual winners of live music competitions based on silent video recordings, but neither musical novices nor professional musicians were able to identify the winners based on sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound.»
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3767512/)

I'm pretty sure if instead of sound recordings there would be videos the meanings would already be quite different in some cases but we would still miss interaction (how the music is also reacting to your presence in the context). It's very difficult to study these things because of the many factors involved.

Philipp Tagg's long study ten little title tunes was a great one. His ideas on Music meanings as well.
It seems that we essentially share anaphones and biological intuitions regarding sound. How we perceive the sound source size and gender, their physical properties (is the sound source made of metal, glass, etc...) tone of voice (is the sound source sad, happy, agressive, etc...) and therefore metaphorically associating those traits with abstract sounds: the sound of a homophonic instrument (flute or violin for instance) making a sudden fast upward portamento can probably be picked up with the same reaction as a vocal scream anywhere, probably...

Also the notion of what is fast or slow in relation to the average heartbeat, since we all have a heart, the notion of tempo should be fairly cross-cultural... other than that I really don't think we would share many more things?... At least that was what i could pick that could tell appart lullabies from dancing songs and the difficulties with love songs.

[Musicologo]

I'm actually wondering that this could actually be a scientific field where Virtual Reality might be welcomed to make the lab tests more realiable... If very different subjects comming from diverse cultures instead of recordings were presented with Virtual Reality immersions of several musical practices and ask for open text answers that might actually provide more reliable results! Now THAT study is something I'd like to see.

[Gamma-UT]

«People reliably select the actual winners of live music competitions based on silent video recordings, but neither musical novices nor professional musicians were able to identify the winners based on sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound.»
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3767512/)

The abstract is at odds with the actual results. Neither novices nor experts "reliably" picked out winners with video-only. Their results were better than chance (which was the rough outcome for sound and sound+video) but at less than 50% correct, clearly not reliable. The fact that both novices and trained musicians had approximately the same results overall suggests an issue with experiment design or that, as the samples were from shortlist finalists, that the results of such competitions are themselves more or less coin tosses.

Had the experiment picked examples at multiple levels of expertise (like an early heat for Pop Idol), I would expect a somewhat different outcome for this type of experiment.

[Gamma-UT]

the sound of a homophonic instrument (flute or violin for instance) making a sudden fast upward portamento can probably be picked up with the same reaction as a vocal scream anywhere, probably...

That would suggest that both the "boiling kettle" squeaking sax sample beloved of 80s/90s hiphop and Bernard Hermann-style portamento string clusters would normally be interpreted as screams.

In reality, only one, I find, is interpreted as being a musical representation of a scream. Guess which one was used in a horror movie and then reused relentlessly in horror movies. Would people not exposed to that genre interpret it the same way?

[herodotus]

The idea that 2d can simulate reality in nonsense. The argument of herodotus is that it can faithfully reproduce the sound of the event, but again, music is not sound.

You just changed your wording from saying a 2d photograph fails to 'depict' reality to saying it fails to 'simulate' reality. This lack of precision doesn't help advance the discussion.

And your assertion that music is not sound is just that: an assertion. Not an argument. It is possible that music can transcend its context to have a meaning independent of it. Then again, the opposite might be true. But one thing is certain: that I haven't seen any actual proof of either notion.

Finally, these huge rambling posts you write are almost impossible to respond to, especially when you keep changing the wording of your statements as you go along. Perhaps fewer, more carefully worded posts would be more fruitful.

[jancivil]

The premise supposes the person making it can apply it to all music. That is simply stupid.
And yes, definitely in the quotes I see here from the OP (frankly the premise on the face of it struck me as so absurd I was curious to see some of the trainwreck), it's a lot of shifting goalposts trying to make this dodgy notion score by this and another instance of special pleading.

People are forced to explain things that a person with a clue doesn't need to be brought up to speed on. But the premise of cultural and social function absolutely trumps all considerations for Mr. Musicologo. This_is_a_mistake; this is not critical thinking; this dodging about trying to seem right is frankly just a signal illustration of intellectual dishonesty. You need to listen to people who know more, man, and stop talking *at* people. I remember when you used to ask questions, now somewhere along the line this board occurred to you as the venue to present these pretentious lectures.

I make music. I am a practical musician, a composer that uses the computer to hear things I want to hear. It IS MADE 'in a lab'. A lot of the music I want to hear was. One of my favorite pieces of music for all of time is Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch by Frank Zappa. He writes about the 15 edits it took to get this ideal final result. It's all live. So there is no one context; this is where I saw the future. Who else here makes music programming synths and editing phrases you record in, in a piano roll editor and automating a mix? Does it mean fake music? Sure, and does that mean that motion pictures, movies are fake plays?
This is fraudulent idealism.

The entire exercise hopes to apply this vague supposition of things out of 'ethnomusicology', which you're not doing from your chair looking at the internet, as though it's such a lovely notion it works generically. It doesn't.

[herodotus]

I have always thought that music is uniquely susceptible to syncretism.

In a way, worries about taking things out of context are beside the point. Once musicians hear any recording or see any performance of music that they find interesting and memorable, it just tends to get into their personal musical vocabulary.

What any musician gets out of any music they encounter has at least as much to do with his or her own previous musical experiences as it does to do with the music's perceived context, however authentic.

[Musicologo]

I totally agree I should be more precise. Succint, I don't know exactly how, since I feel many important concepts and assumptions that build and sustain the positions and arguments I bring to the table are challenged at their root, and then I feel I need to clarify them, and it's not easy at all.

For instance, I interpreted the first sentence of Jancivil as to find absurd the idea that a science/method can be applied to study all musics. This is indeed an assumption I have (see blacking below). Then he also says "I am a practical musician" and describes the concepts and the practice and I get the feeling that this was in opposition to somethin, like if we were not all practical musicians. I don't see Music as dettached from everyday life and musicians as specialists. As long as you're alive you are a practical musician. I recall an old ethnomusicologist anedocte in Africa when he was expected to participate: "What do you mean you can't sing? Don't you have a mouth?" Singing was seen as just as normal as eating. Everyone would sing. If you're alive you're a practical musician. Of course you might have different practices and different complexity in your practice.

So I acklowledge some people might have concepts in which music is seen as an art/craft/specialized labour, that only some people do and might get good at and that require talent or training to do. This very basic concept is biased and not universal. And yet, I see it applied all the time, mainly by people in western societies. If you go to conservatories it gets even worse. There, I find people who think only notated/symbolic music (erudit music) is music and all others forms are inferior, primitive and not even worth studying or considering. Then I have also a friend who thinks music is all kinds of vibrations. A flowing river is music, an earthquake is music, the planets moving around are music.
I also have other sorts of friends whom when I play them heavy metal claim "that's not music, that's just gibberish noise". Other friends for whom only songs are music. If you don't have a vocal it's not music. And then even friends who think music is only what is "authentic". If it is business then it is prostitution. And of course, the other way around as well. People for whom music is business and their job is producing tracks (commodified music) to sell. So there are a myriad of different concepts and practices in the same city alone.

Blacking in his resarch says some interesting things:

«We must recognize that no musical style has "its own terms": its terms are the terms of its society and culture, and of the bodies of the human beings who listen to it, and create and perform it.
We can no longer study music as a thing in itself when research in ethnomusicology makes it clear that musical things are not always strictly musical, and that the expression of tonal relationships in patterns of sound may be secondary to extramusical relationships which the tones represent. We may agree that music is sound that is organized into socially accepted patterns, that music making may be regarded as a form of learned behavior, and that musical styles are based on what man has chosen to select from nature as a part of his cultural expression rather than on what nature has imposed on him.»
«The sound may be the object, but man is the subject; and the key to understanding music is in the relationships existing between subject and object, the activating principle of organization.»
«In the musical system of the Venda, it is rhythm that distinguishes song (u imba) from speech (u amba), so that patterns of words that are recited to a regular meter are called "songs." Both Stravinsky and the Venda insist that music involves man. The regular beats of an engine or a pump may sound like the beats of a drum, but no Venda would regard them as music or expect to be moved by them, because their order is not directly produced by human beings. The sound of electronic instruments or of a Moog synthesizer would not be excluded from their realm of musical experience as long as it was only the timbre and not the method of ordering that was outside human control. Venda music is founded not on melody, but on a rhythmical stirring of the whole body of which singing is but one extension. Therefore, when we seem to hear a rest between two drumbeats, we must realize that for the player it is not a rest: each drumbeat is the part of a total body movement in which the hand or a stick strikes the drum skin.»
«To describe these differently organized patterns of sound as the same "sonic objects" simply because they sound the same would be grossly misleading. Even to recognize the way in which the sounds are produced and to describe some of them as examples of polyrhythm would be inadequate in the context of Venda music. They must be described first in terms of cognitive and behavioral processes that belong to the pat- tern of Venda culture.«
«Functional analyses of musical structure cannot be detached from structural analyses of its social function: the function of tones in relation to each other cannot be explained adequately as part of a closed system without reference to the structures of the sociocultural system of which the musical system is a part, and to the biological system to which all music makers belong. Ethnomusicology is not only an area study concerned with exotic music, nor a musicology of the ethnic—it is a discipline that holds out hope for a deeper understanding of all music. If some music can be analyzed and understood as tonal expressions of human experience in the context of different kinds of social and cultural organization, I see no reason why all music should not be analyzed in the same way.»

Therefore, I'm just trying to build bridges between the scientific knowledge musicology can and has produced and what I've been reading in the internet as to try to produce more rigorous and compelling answers to the questions raised in the daily life of every musical practice. I often find many philosophers, biologists, psychologists and even conservatory music teachers [so called music theorists or performance/artistic studies] aiming at an idealized universality are starting from incomplete or redutionist concepts of music, using wrong methods and therefore are reaching poor conclusions and helping to spread fake knowledge. It's also frustrating when I'm accused of those exact same things or labeled as post-modernist (which i find insulting) by intelligent people when all I'm trying to do is being a more well-rounded musician and better scientist, by bringing to the table valid knowledge I think has been missing.

[Gamma-UT]

I have always thought that music is uniquely susceptible to syncretism.

In a way, worries about taking things out of context are beside the point. Once musicians hear any recording or see any performance of music that they find interesting and memorable, it just tends to get into their personal musical vocabulary.

What any musician gets out of any music they encounter has at least as much to do with his or her own previous musical experiences as it does to do with the music's perceived context, however authentic.

I agree and it seems to be the case for everyone - whether they only get involved to the extent of being a passive listener or a participant. I think David Huron's line that it's mostly a process of enculturation is the one that best describes what happens when we hear music – and how it seems to change as we hear more of it. That's how you get from confused, near-rioting audiences at the premiere of Rite of Spring to audiences who love it.

[jancivil]

... again, music is not sound.

... your assertion that music is not sound is just that: an assertion. Not an argument.

Music has to be sound or we wouldn't hear it. See, when you dance around interested only in justifying your premise and assertions centered in that half-baked premise, this is what happens. Emphasis reveals a certain energy put into sticking by the assertion.

You have shown us before when dancing around making assertions - and again, not in any real exchange of ideas, as one would do if one is interested in this being a richer experience or a learning experience - that you operate with peculiar and narrow definitions of music. CF: Tuvan throat singing is just noise to you. That's passing strange for someone whose handle suggests musicology, and further an effort to present as though this is the abiding interest, and it's, well, so narrow it's offputting to see.

What is the definition of music? You have to get rid of quite a lot or simply dwell in a state of ignorance to come away with this quality of assertion.

If you're going to make an argument, think it through. Here, you've posted notions where a somewhat large number of people will encounter them. More specifically *here* you're encountering criticism and you're running up against people who've been around and understand some things which you aren't even looking at.

Edgard Varèse ended up disclaiming status as a composer, preferring to claim he worked in *organized sound*. Music is not organized sound?
Confer Déserts (1950–1954); for 14 winds (brass and woodwinds), 5 percussion players, 1 piano, and electronic tape. The tape source is primarily a factory. One recording I had integrated it virtually seamlessly with the percussion.

We're operating in year 2018 now. Advanced music has been dealing with noise elements for a long time now. So, this piece, finished ca. 1954: do we need to be in the factory for this to be not a bogus experience of the music? The context there is an imaginary motion picture.

Et cetera. All of these examples are before you. One would have to be a young person to be this bold and this ignorant. Open your mind and quit acting you have all this sussed. Seriously. I am aware this is harsh but why would one beat around the bush? It spurs discussion but you aren't showing us anything and we're just reiterating things we already understand. Perhaps as though to a wall.

[jancivil]

For instance, I interpreted the first sentence of Jancivil as to find absurd the idea that a science/method can be applied to study all musics.

You do not have science or a real method. This is what I mean in my last sentences above.
(yeah, you interpreted the hell out of it. You twisted it into the perfect strawman you can argue against. You may as well create all our parts in this play and continue talking to yourself.)

You can't know the context of all music. The notion is absurd. One looks at the actual posts to see just how far you go with the absurdity, out of a perverse and morbid curiosity. You have a very narrow supposition which has been demonstrated not to work. With that, I'm done here.

[Musicologo]

You do not have science or a real method.

«Ethnomusicology is an academic discipline with a very broad mandate: to understand why and how human beings are musical through the study of music in all its geographical and historical diversity. Ethnomusicological scholarship, however, has been remiss in articulating such goals, methods, and theories. A renowned figure in the field, Timothy Rice is one of the few scholars to regularly address this problem. In this volume, he offers a compilation of essays drawn from across his career that finds implicit and yet largely unrecognized patterns unifying ethnomusicology over its recent history.

Modeling Ethnomusicology summarizes thirty years of thinking about the field of ethnomusicology as Rice frames and reframes the content of eight of his most important essays from their original context in relation to the environment of today's ethnomusicology. Rice proposes a variety of models meant to guide students and researchers in their study of ethnomusicology. Some of these models pull together disparate strands of the field, while others propose heuristic models that generate questions for researchers as they plan and conduct their research. A new introduction to these essays reviews the history of his writing about ethnomusicology and proposes an innovative model for theorizing in ethnomusicology by ethnomusicologists. This book will be an enduring, essential text in undergraduate and graduate ethnomusicology classrooms, as well as a must-buy for established scholars in the field.»

https://global.oup.com/academic/product ... pt&lang=en&

[jancivil]

BTW, I am not a he. And this is not a music theory topic.

"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?"

You're interested in something other than music it looks like. Like a lot of the detritus which gets attached to music, rock journalism for instance, writing about this kind of thing [talk about lifestyle] is just easier than dealing with music. You are trying to reduce it, we see it in your first paragraph, you want to say listening to music is a reduction of something bigger. No, talking about something which is not music is a reduction to what you can deal in.
And I cannot help but note that somewhere along the line here you decided this was more for you than how music works. At least to talk about around here!

I'm a practical musician. That in itself is affirmative and I absolutely do not define myself in opposition to anything (I don't believe in most people's conception of God but I'm not calling it Atheism as I never considered Theism as anything to do.).
But here we do have two quite different fields. I find music qua music vastly if not infinitely more compelling than 'was the song used to sooth a baby'.


This here is a music board. "Music Theory", conceptions of the mechanics of music. This thread is an Everything Else (Music Related) thread. You aren't redefining what music theory is by your predilection for this other thing.

[Musicologo]

Please follow this reasoning/argument:
The flourishing of scientific knlowdge led to the emergence of new technologies allowing industrialization which in turn allowed the implementation of a capitalist mode of production. This shift made possible that many folk and traditional practices were gradually appropriated and reconfigured by music businesses and publishing industries. In some cases, namely in USA this gradually led to the creation of what one can see as so-called "music industries" and POPULAR musics: making standardized music for profit. Namely, the reification and commodification of music. The creation of assembly lines of "people" doing "jobs" with the aim of generating "music artifacts" [sheet music and records] to be sold [tin pan alley, brill building]. Popular musics is a name to the process of production as opposed to folk, traditional or "erudite"/Classical [functional music created and disseminated in symbolic notation]

Therefore, what were natural expressive behaviours and processes in most daily human life were changed. Seeger, Feld, Rice, Boas... and countless others ethnomusicologists still found a lot of places in the world where musics occupy those former places, namely in indiginous tribes and rural villages.

Nowadays, in many of the western world and most urban cities all around, due to that gradual shift along the 20th century, the homogeneization of music businesses and publishing industries, also lead to music schools and the massive standardization of music education in those contexts; "music theories" [in fact algorithms, many derived from the older schools of so-called "erudite music"] were reshaped and re-appropriated to be included in popular musics making [often leading to absurd mistakes, because many of the popular musics were not conceived in symbolic notation for a start, but in a collaborative process in studio, without written arrangements. Tagg "everyday tonality" addresses many of those issues].

I argue, that what one can observe on many places nowadays is a conceptual shift of the concept of music to fit those narrow purposes. Musics are no longer the expressive behaviours and the gestual and ritual apparatuses of people in their daily lifes, but instead the symbolic materials or the practices resembling classical and popular musics: the ones that either have notation or are made in functional contexts of commodification for profit and are taught in schools. Musics becomes defined by the processes and sounds resulting of those contexts. Everything else is put down, repressed, or deemed as irrelevant of study. "Detritus" you say... bah.

Many people nowadays have vestigial traces of the practices of music as expressive behaviours: singing in the shower or humming during routine tasks, out of social shame or feelings of inadequacy, their practices reduced mostly to passive listening of commodified standardized artifacts or attending concerts. Music is seen as the activity of a small elite of professionals "talented", "gifted" or "geniuses" and not anymore a widespread expressive behaviour, spontaneous, fun, playful, important by itself and for creating bonding contexts. Instead it became often a competitive standardized task, a job, a means to create social distinction or a for-profit activity and regarded only as music in those contexts.

Well, I'm challenging those assumptions based on foundational knowledge. Music has been historically constructed, socially mantained and individually experienced in most time and in most places, by most people as a natural extension of life, expressive behaviour, social ritual, bonding ritual, creative process, way of mourn and heal, to endure labour, way to tell life stories, etc... that mostly everyone would do in an active and engaging way, in some way or another. It was a practice of the folk.

I refuse to let it be reduced and constrained to its classical or popular components, as many see it nowadays shaped by those contexts. I refuse to let it be just an art, craft or a thing that has to be reduced to symbolic manipulation aimed at commodification or standardization. This "music theory" forum seems aimed at those purposes, a natural emergence of people living in contexts in which most musics only exist in this way. This for me is a symptom (another one, along many others) of very ill societies. If somehow we don't regain the notion and concept of music as expressive behaviour, a folk practice and study and read it that way we are missing most of it, and worse: we are probably doing a lot of mistakes in interpreting it. The scientific study of musics cannot be neither just studying music notation, nor just records nor just the sounds of musics. That is a mistake that I see emerging out of a context where the very notion of what music is is already shaped by a bunch of flawed assumptions emerging from those particular context detailed above.

What you are calling "detritus" are fundamental components to understand many musical practices and are part of the concept of music itself in many contexts and cultures! To provide a concrete example, even in Europe, you cannot understand and explain Eurovision or the production and reception of songs in Eurovision if you don't address gesture or staging, and no it is absurd to call it "performance". This explanation of staging () is as important as the arrangement one () because the practice doesn't exist in isolation. When seen in their "symbolic materials" (what many in this forum would call "music" - Amar pelos dois is a banal song, similar to many other examples of light music from the 50's). Therefore, to understand and explain it, even to reproduce it, one has to go further.

Hence, I see it as crucial to take a step back, see the larger picture, for each question address the contexts in which musics were and are being produced case by case, to understand their "theories" and be able to frame them accordingly to provide more accurate answers.

Telling someone that "Creep" is strumming a guitar I-III-IV-bIV is nothing. It might help them to reproduce a bit of the sound of Creep, but does not explain Creep neither helps them making another hit like Creep. It simply is not a very useful "theory".