New study: Musical talent linked to "Open" personality

[fmr]

But I kind of agree with everything you stated except for this part: "And he didn't need dice to come up with something new, since he was able to do that by simply sit at the piano and play. I'm sure you will agree that it's much faster and susceptible of producing much better results". If you listen to guitarists, Carlos Santana, for example, you will notice that his playing is very distinctive and doesn't seem to vary. I think this is because guitarists tend to practice scales and riff runs day in day out and those scales and runs get imprinted in their brain and become muscle memory. Carlos Santana may say "I am okay with that" but his guitar playing will remain "signaturial". But if you listen to guitarist Robert Fripp's body of work there is variance there.

Really? Comparing Mozart with Santana and Fripp? Come on. Risking to look snob, it's like comparing a Rolls Royce with Cadillacs (and I'm being unfair to the Cadillacs)

[jancivil]

I kind of agree with everything you stated except for this part: "And he didn't need dice to come up with something new, since he was able to do that by simply sit at the piano and play. I'm sure you will agree that it's much faster and susceptible of producing much better results". If you listen to guitarists, Carlos Santana, for example, .. is very distinctive and doesn't seem to vary. I think this is because guitarists tend to practice scales and riff runs day in day out and those scales and runs get imprinted in their brain and become muscle memory. Santana ... will remain "signaturial". Robert Fripp's body of work ... there is variance there. This is probably because Robert is left-handed but for some reason he switched to the right-hand way of playing the guitar.

My guess... the left-hemisphere of his brain is more mathy than the right-hemisphere and he was avoiding tendencies that can happen with staying with traditional ways of playing the guitar.

Well, what we have here is the same thing you were doing with the dice notion. You're seeking to justify your preconceptions by creating stories. I don't know why Fripp is less identifiable as himself than Santana. It would tend to be true that guitaristic idiom means a reliance on finger patterns vis a vis the fretboard. What is a more useful way to proceed here, if one wants to transcend obvious idiomatic tendencies, will involve devising actual strategies for it. Exercises. Playing a lot of music that was not created on the guitar.

As opposed to magical thinking such as Fripp through playing right-handed avoided tendencies because left-right brain. It may simply be that Fripp has more technique to call on.

[jancivil]

First, it is not that my blood is boiling. I'm finding that while you say you're open to these ways, you're not considering what is being pointed out at all. You'll just keep reiterating like nothing else happened in the thread. That is frustrating to me.

But hey I'm just being open to the ways beyond the basics and the tendencies. You can call it desire for the chaos way but at this point not really because I'm just a total beginner interested in "simple" pop music. Chaos may not be usable on tonal (as opposed to atonal) music, pop music to be specific? Or maybe it is? I aim to find out at some point.

No, I think what you want is something magical somehow. Here it's dice, next it's left handed playing righty. The language of a Mozart is actually quite restricted and specific. To fulfill the harmonic requirements of a popular minuet and maintaining the form - A B C A for instance - there isn't room for 'chaos'. So I put it to you, we're actually talking about Mozart (though it seems less than relevant to you), tell me where in his music you would find chaos will have made that piece special particularly. And that is of no interest to you.

The actual music, such as Xenakis, that really uses mathematics, statistics, is in terms of content (not to mention what he was thinking in terms of form; he was an architect btw) way, way past most musicians, let alone a beginner.

So at the beginning you need to focus on the basics and the conventions, not hope for an end-around and this magical thinking.

[jancivil]

To bring this back to the original topic, this openness can be a type of fallacy. In debate, there is a known fallacy of the open mind. It can be like a sieve. I'm not open like that to want to get derailed by randomness and chaos in Mozart. There is no use at all to it IME. You're wide open to it but you've been closed to information, facts about that style. I've been told I'm repressive basically for insisting on a useful definition in music 'theory'. In reality, I'm probably freer than most in music because of having 'facts' and knowing. Because focus. As a guitarist, I actually transcend idiom fairly nicely.

Music is a bunch of work if you want to obtain any mastery of it.

[harryupbabble]

Really? Comparing Mozart with Santana and Fripp? Come on. Risking to look snob, it's like comparing a Rolls Royce with Cadillacs (and I'm being unfair to the Cadillacs)

Well, Mozart was still a human. If he was playing his piano too much he should still be subject to what QWERTY typists call "muscle memory".

[harryupbabble]

Okay Jan. I thought you wanted to end this discussion? Or did you just want me to agree to everything you say? But obviously you want to continue. And I'm okay with that. So here we go.

Supposedly, muscle memory in QWERTY typists should be the same in guitarists, piano players, etc. Supposedly, you are programming your brain and finger muscles to automatically type or play whatever you practiced. Supposedly, If you practice nothing but, for example, Jimmy Page riffs, then you are going to play and sound like Jimmy Page. Supposedly, if you are going to practice music from a wide range of sources or music not made for guitar then you are still going to have muscle memory based on whatever you practiced.

That is fine. My favourite guitarist Jimmy Page, a session player who had to practice and record in the studio all sorts of music before he formed Led Zeppelin, must have done that too. But maybe some people don't want to do it like that. Maybe some people want to totally not be influenced by muscle memory when they create their music. What's wrong with that?

You said "As opposed to magical thinking such as Fripp through playing right-handed avoided tendencies because left-right brain. It may simply be that Fripp has more technique to call on."

Some kind of communication breakdown happened there. I wasn't saying that the switching of hands to play guitar was done by Fripp to get rid of tendencies. I was saying that he may have done that to tap his left-hemisphere brain's math capabilities. To lessen tendencies or muscle memory, he may have done something else. Maybe he is also a dice user who played and practiced what the dice generated hence lessening or maybe even totally ridding tendencies? I know for sure that David Bowie used chance on some of his lyrics and maybe even on his music, and this was about the time that he and Fripp collaborated on the "Heroes" CD. So somebody influenced David Bowie to use chance for creation, chances are it was Robert Fripp who did that (I am speculating).

Also, you seem to think that if one uses dice then the resulting music should be "not formal", like a John Cage composition? Well, maybe if the dice roller and snippets creator is John Cage. If it was me, I would create "poppy" snippets and the resulting music will be whatever I decided to keep or reject from what the dice generated and should sound "poppy" or whatever my definition of the word poppy is.

Okay I'll leave it at that. Good night.

[fmr]

Really? Comparing Mozart with Santana and Fripp? Come on. Risking to look snob, it's like comparing a Rolls Royce with Cadillacs (and I'm being unfair to the Cadillacs)

Well, Mozart was still a human. If he was playing his piano too much he should still be subject to what QWERTY typists call "muscle memory".

Except that, while your guitarists examples are of people that (supposedly) mainly composse through thair guitar, Mozart mainly composed using score, therefore, he would not be influenced by "muscle memory".

Trained composers, even when they use an instrument as na auxiliary tool (reportedly, Stravinsky did, for example), composse through their minds, and have a musical thinking that is not at all dependent on any instrument. It seems you are attached to a certain way of doing things that has nothing to do with that praxis.

[jancivil]

Okay Jan. I thought you wanted to end this discussion? Or did you just want me to agree to everything you say?

Sure, Harry, the way forward is to insult my integrity, when it's been you that just has no real interest in anything more than promoting these half-baked notions. This isn't much of a conversation, is it. I did say please stop talking, because you had yet to listen to one thing. Let me be clear then: I am not interested in your ideas here, there is no need to keep repeating them, there is nothing I'm missing.

You stand to learn something here but you're going to waste tons of screen space reiterating the same junk and doing this:

I wasn't saying that the switching of hands to play guitar was done by Fripp to get rid of tendencies. I was saying that he may have done that to tap his left-hemisphere brain's math capabilities. To lessen tendencies or muscle memory, he may have done something else.

I don't care if you were stating this for a certainty or not. My whole point is, that you, you say you are a beginner, would be well-advised to get a grasp of the basics, which by your statements you indicate that you find boring, instead of espousing concepts which we have zero evidence will do anything concretely (to serve for instance being less dependent on the fretboard and restricted to the most convenient fingerings). So I said something possibly useful; one will want to devise strategies, come up with exercises, and look to music that was not created with guitar in mind. (Ultimately one will want to deal in music more purely and hear it in one's head and strive towards a more transcendental technique in order to get that down with facility. But there is something to working from a standpoint of one's instrument in the realm of improvisation. So I devise strategies so as not to be boring myself.)

But you would rather talk about dice and left-brain right-brain even as there is nothing demonstrated that applies at all. I don't care, do whatever. But music takes work via actual musical modus operandi, you can trust me on this.

[jancivil]

Also, you seem to think that if one uses dice then the resulting music should be "not formal", like a John Cage composition? Well, maybe if the dice roller and snippets creator is John Cage. If it was me, I would create "poppy" snippets and the resulting music will be whatever I decided to keep or reject from what the dice generated and should sound "poppy" or whatever my definition of the word poppy is.

So, you seem to have picked up from what I said, that one will be prefabricating before the act of rolling the dice, even as you seek to conveniently redefine my statements in this argumentative way. (What I actually said was if Mozart was playing with dice in the act of making a typical pretty minuet he will have prefabricated the segments very carefully. The only reason for that I can feature would be to break the monotony of his regimen a bit. So, it's clear that I considered the story of Mozart using dice vis a vis that form as your webpage discussed but made a distinction between that and real 'chance' or 'chaos', ie., Cage and 'aleatoric' or whatever.)

While I feel you don't quite have the point of 'no room for chaos when it's this formal' and would rather leap to your next try at a statement than fully consider what was said, maybe my time wasn't 100% wasted as you have suited your notion of that m.o. according to my explanations now.

[Jace-BeOS]

He was creating his music like everyone else creates that kind of music. By working with musical materials. There is no magical process to look for. It strikes me that you want music to be like this, or more like scrabble, in lieu of what actually must happen, which takes years to obtain mastery.

This sends me off on another tangent on the psychology of human beings... still vaguely relevant to the thread...

i have to say this seems to be a common issue in the arts and sciences: People looking for a "formula" to produce successful/popular "hits". Believing there must be one, because ... "Math!!!"

There isn't one, but it continues to be sought. Formula gets more attention than exploration. Capitalism loves it.

As much as we can analyze the individual successes in the arts, and compare similarities between them, tastes change, fads come and go, and there's no magical process to guarantee someone a success. Presuming there to be such a formula leads to situations like the recording industry and Hollywood spewing out hastily assembled retreads of the successes that came before. It also defeats the purpose of artistic expression. But hey, so long as the majority shareholders are in charge at recording companies, that's all we should expect from such entities.

Any time a concept gets boiled down to math, someone will be there to suggest a magical math formula must exist to explain or unlock everything (look at the obsession society has with "hidden codes" to unlock the "'message of the creator of the universe", or the stock market, and countless other fantasies).

Such mystical codes/algorithms are particularly attractive to those that don't understand the concepts of whatever the subject is. Ignorance enables the imagination (not always bad, but the positives are often wrongly presumed in hard sciences where ignorance does NOT normally enable discovery).

It's like the way people are willing to believe in nonsensical magical technologies showcased in popular scifi. The ones most likely to accept these things as "might be possible some day" are those who don't have physics/technology training. They just say "who knows what will be possible in 20 years"... when some things are clearly never going to be possible if you know the physics.

It's easy for a person to assume something magical must be hidden in a thing when he/she doesn't really know the thing themselves. Such people easily make another logical error: they presume their level of ignorance is universal and that everyone else is as equally ignorant. If they don't know why a magical thing doesn't exist, they won't allow others to tell them that it doesn't and why. The why usually requires a level of expertise that cannot be imparted in the time available to converse about a topic. We get antiintellectualism ("how dare educated/informed people, when they try to correct people of ignorance!!") and idiotic politicians who seem to feel that actual facts are somehow politically incorrect :-p ... and we get wild (and difficult to extinguish) ideas in other areas

Anyway, I'm not picking on anyone in specific. Well, maybe certain political nutcases...

[Jace-BeOS]

I liked the discussion of muscle memory and the familiarity with certain patterns being a possible constraint to make an artist's work into a recognizable signature. I think there's validity to it. I do see it in guitar players and vocalists. Comparing Mozart to guitarists might seem ludicrous but I get where the comparison is coming from.

[Jace-BeOS]

Really? Comparing Mozart with Santana and Fripp? Come on. Risking to look snob, it's like comparing a Rolls Royce with Cadillacs (and I'm being unfair to the Cadillacs)

Well, Mozart was still a human. If he was playing his piano too much he should still be subject to what QWERTY typists call "muscle memory".

Except that, while your guitarists examples are of people that (supposedly) mainly composse through thair guitar, Mozart mainly composed using score, therefore, he would not be influenced by "muscle memory".

Trained composers, even when they use an instrument as na auxiliary tool (reportedly, Stravinsky did, for example), composse through their minds, and have a musical thinking that is not at all dependent on any instrument. It seems you are attached to a certain way of doing things that has nothing to do with that praxis.

This was something I was wondering about. There seems to be a very big difference between those who create music as composers working in notation for various instruments they don't necessarily play, and those who create via playing specific instruments. The former is way more involved with the theory, while the latter is influenced by what the instrument is suited to (I wonder how many session musicians are ranting on some forum somewhere about how "wrong" a piece of musical scoring is that they were handed at some recording session).

Then there are those of us that can't really do either, but we make music anyway... I can dabble on a few instruments. I cannot dabble with notation.

Also, on open-mindedness... There's a limit before it becomes credulity. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ENNQ4ZUw4d0

[harryupbabble]

Let me ask you this then, are you 100 percent sure that Mozart didn't use chaos in his compositions? And if you are... why would you be?

I've rather well articulated why I would be. You clearly aren't reading what I write, which tends to be irritating to a person. Why don't you go through Mozart's repertoire and select for us which compositions you believe would have employed 'chaos', and why.

I'm too busy trying to improve my language weaknesses and playing speed scrabble and trying to write basic pop songs to listen to Mozart's entire music catalogue to determine which ones may have been treated with chaos. Besides, I think it's just as unprovable as determining which of his music was NOT treated with chaos. Probably even the super-experts and super-softwares could not determine whether chaos was used or not.

I mean let's take Fernando's example of KNOWN chaos composer Iannis Xenakis. If you didn't know that Xenakis used chaos to compose his music... would you know he is a chaos music composer or just someone who is using ultra-advanced mathematics to compose the music, or just someone that thinks super-differently?

But in the case of Mozart's dice game, the sequencing combinations that is available is definitely chaos to me. Even if the resulting music is not chaotic... 14 million possibilities, at least. How could that not be chaos or chaos-based?

Mozart's dice game may have been the equivalent of a crippled VST Plugin where the actual paid version has waaaaaaaaay more functions. And some VST Plugin developers may have tools that they only use for themselves and never release to the public. For example, I think xoxos has a waaaaaaaaay better version of his "blewm" software that he hasn't released do the public. Of course, I could be wrong.

Can you be absolutely sure that Mozart didn't have a waaaaaaaaay more sophisticated version of that dice game that he kept to himself and used on his compositions?

[harryupbabble]

Also, on open-mindedness... There's a limit before it becomes credulity.

That makes sense. I mean how can one be open to one thing and be also open to the opposite of the first thing? Maybe "open" means "hear it out" but not necessarily agree, as opposed to "I don't agree with anything about everything".

[fmr]

Can you be absolutely sure that Mozart didn't have a waaaaaaaaay more sophisticated version of that dice game that he kept to himself and used on his compositions?

Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure he had it. It's called brain, and had a virtually unlimited capacity to combine and vary many different aspects of music simultaneously, and an astonishing big memory capacity (although I believe it was not unlimited)