searching for experimental music forums

[rachmiel]

> Because the creaking is incidental, not intentional. There's a crucial difference.

so, for you ... music requires intentionality. what kind/degree?

for example, if a bird sings to communicate, does its intentionality make its song musical?

if a randomly generated (un-intentional) sequence happens to sound beautiful and evocative, is it music?

is the collection of sounds at dusk on a summer day near the ocean (wind, surf, insects, birds, animals) musical, even though there is no collective intention there?

again: i'm really interested in your answers. :-)

rachMiel

[vurt]

well most bird song is territorial so yes intentional,but still not sure if "we" can classify it as music,if we did it would be punk.

a literal translation of 90% of birdsong would be "f**k you,this is my roof my roof! f**k off now im perching here this is my roof!my roof!"

its human intention that makes it classifiable as music i guess,altho to take recordings of any incidental sounds and to use them intentionally
does that then become art? does the interjection of "some" human element change its perception?

[Z3R0T0N1N]

here's a thought though, if you listen carefully to the sounds made by the pipes when the thermostat is set at different temperatures, and figure out what setting makes the nicest sounds, and so you start setting it to that temperature on purpose, not because you are hot or cold but because you anticipate the "music of the creaking pipes", it is then music, right?
I would say so.
When I was a child we had a family friend who was an artist: Dan Morslander; who set up old tin containers, buckets, tea kettles, cooking pots, and other metal objects that he found at old abondoned garbage dumps (the area he lived in was one of those places that had had a mining rush back at the turn of the 19th century, so there were abandoned overgrown encampments way out in the forest and mountains - this is where he got the stuff from) around the outside of his house where the rain gutters had rusted though, or otherwise deteriorated : he spent years rearranging them whenever there was a rainstorm. Every time it rained the house would be filled with this lovely abstract percussion music, all these different polyrythms and tones. It was beautiful. I loved going there in spring, and in autumn. The rainy times.
I would call that music for sure, even "composition" - and in this case i believe that John Cage would have agreed with me, anyway.

[detfella]

hi

i set one up a while back, you can find it here:

http://www.theoreticalplayground.co.uk

i did plan to spend more time with publishing articles and more interviews but i've had to concentrate on other things over the months. its doing ok at the moment, 3 new members in as many days, lets hope some of them chat!!

be good to see you there rachMiel i enjoy using your ensembles, i set it up initially for talk of synthesis but its drifted onto many other things!

[rachmiel]

> its human intention that makes it classifiable as music i guess,

sounds anthropo-chauvinistic to me. (how's that for coining an obnoxious quasi-academic term! ;-) ) i love human intentionality in music also, it's one of the main reasons i listen ... but there's another way to look at music: any sequence of sounds ... or perhaps even ... any sound. then birds, city noises, wind, surf, borborygmus ... all qualify as music.

it's easy to get lost in semantics here. i think we all love evocative sounds ... some of us call it music, some not.

rachMiel

[shamann]

for example, if a bird sings to communicate, does its intentionality make its song musical?

if a randomly generated (un-intentional) sequence happens to sound beautiful and evocative, is it music?

is the collection of sounds at dusk on a summer day near the ocean (wind, surf, insects, birds, animals) musical, even though there is no collective intention there?

No, no, and no. Musical is the likeness of music, but not inherently music itself. It's like recognizing shapes in the clouds, the shapes have meaning only to us.

The bird sings whether we call it music or not. But a symphony does not exist without music, it was made to be music. I can't speak for the bird, so if it justifies its song as music, I'm not going to argue. But that's their business, not ours.

Even language may be musical, and when applied may be music, but it is not music from the outset. Music is the deliberate arrangement of sound as aesthetic form. Language is mnemonic abstraction as communication practice.

But music is not communication. The romantics will argue, but try expressing that your house is on fire in solfege. So long house.

[vurt]

> its human intention that makes it classifiable as music i guess,

sounds anthropo-chauvinistic to me. (how's that for coining an obnoxious quasi-academic term! ) i love human intentionality in music also, it's one of the main reasons i listen ... but there's another way to look at music: any sequence of sounds ... or perhaps even ... any sound. then birds, city noises, wind, surf, borborygmus ... all qualify as music.

it's easy to get lost in semantics here. i think we all love evocative sounds ... some of us call it music, some not.

rachMiel

but we can only qualify it in human terms,to birds it may be something completely different?who are we to impose our notions on animals that were around millions of years before we even learned to grunt
ill give you anthropo chauvanism

[dystonia_ek]

well most bird song is territorial so yes intentional,but still not sure if "we" can classify it as music,if we did it would be punk.

a literal translation of 90% of birdsong would be "fcuk you,this is my roof my roof! fcuk off now im perching here this is my roof!my roof!"

We'll have to run that one past Rurik.

[rachmiel]

>> for example, if a bird sings to communicate, does its intentionality make its song musical?

>> if a randomly generated (un-intentional) sequence happens to sound beautiful and evocative, is it music?

>> is the collection of sounds at dusk on a summer day near the ocean (wind, surf, insects, birds, animals) musical, even though there is no collective intention there?

> No, no, and no.

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). :-)

rachMiel

[shamann]

sounds anthropo-chauvinistic to me.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I think you hit the nail on the head, only backwards. "Music" is entirely a human construction. We made the word, we defined it for our explicit purposes. But the anthropo-chauvinism is to say that any sound beyond what we direct is music, that we have the ability to define that which does not come from us. That our words speak of the universe for anyone but us. The birds have their own words, and I can't remember the last time a bird insisted "That's not a worm, it's a toowit-towee-daloo-loo-loo."

[vurt]

The birds have their own words, and I can't remember the last time a bird insisted "That's not a worm, it's a toowit-towee-daloo-loo-loo."

dunno you know,we get some feisty magpies round here

[rachmiel]

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

maybe music is too loaded a word, like love. everyone defends their personal definition of love; cultures go to war based on it.

so how about we call it, instead of music:

(...)

?

;-)

rachMiel

[whyterabbyt]

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....

[rachmiel]

> 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. :-)

[emdot_ambient]

> The heat pipes are creaking in my office; it is a lovely sound, but not music.

Well, music is a deliberate act and a human invention, for better or worse.

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.

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. Why? Well, I've written a manifesto on the subject but let me see if I can abbreviate the idea.

It starts with human physiology. Because there is such a huge amount of sensory data coming at us every second, our brains tend to filter out incoming signals that are not important to us. Parents of newborn children are notoriously good at hearing noises their children make because that child's safety and wellbeing are their prime concern. I, on the other hand--with no children of my own--will not notice a child crying unless it's noise is interfering with my concentration.

The point is that your brain is hardwired to make subconscious judgments about what sounds are being heard and whether it's worth your while to pay attention to them.

So what happens when you are listening to the radio? A song comes on there is an almost instantaneous mental process that happens. You know it's supposed to be music (intentionally created as such), but your brain starts categorizing it to see if it's worth listening to. What genre is it? Is that a genre you generally like/hate? Is it by (or similar to) an artist you like/hate? And then your brain leaps from categorizing to judgment. If the genre is wrong, or the instrumentation is wrong, or the artist is wrong . . . you might very well just tune it out and ignore it altogether.

And so I say that the templates we consciously use when composing often interfere with the aesthetic appreciation of sound. So the very fact that we arrange sounds intentionally--whether you call it music or not is irrelevant--can result in a failure to achieve the stated aesthetic end.

On the other hand, when a sound sneaks up on you and circumvents this automatic categorization and judgment, the aesthetic experience can be almost transcendent.

Music is a distillation of sound, to suit our inclinations, and the description of a process, not a label of quality or aesthetic beauty. Music is something we do with sound, in the same way bunnies dig holes in the ground. But sound exists without music.

And I'd counter that by saying music is not something we do with sound, but it is the way we react to a sound. Composition is something we do with sound, but composition does not always result in music. Just like painting does not always produce art.

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