From: Richard Dobson (richarddobson@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sat Feb 19 2011 - 13:14:34 EST
On 19/02/2011 16:54, hans w. koch wrote:
> i am sorry, but this is one of the most philistinistic comments i
> have read in a long while. one can hear the baroque whigs critisize
> mozart for his lack of counterpoint, beethoven for his fugues and so
> on...
>
> soundart and composition are both about ideas foremost.
It is all too easy to romanticise the idea of "an idea". If this term
simply refers to some distinguishable assembly of sounds, fair enough.
It has then no status beyond a convenient symbolic name. Stravinsky made
the distinction between "discovery" [of an idea] and "composition" -
literally, the process of putting things together. I think this
distinction remains both important and useful.
But if "idea" is understood to signify some construct in the mind of the
composer, such a thing is incapable of provable transmission to any
other mind. This notion is an instance of what Roy Harris[1] calls "the
language myth". And in the case of much "sound art", the "idea" scarcely
comes from the composer at all beyond a more or less trivial process of
selection - it is possibly some soundscape they have recorded. In the
case of my sonification work with LHCsound, there is no idea-conceiving
mind involved at all - the "idea" is merely the mapping into sound of
non-music data, in the hope of using the natural skills of the listener
to discover patterns in that data that reveal something of the physics
involved. This does not and cannot stop any listener from hearing
either "an idea", or even "a composition" in the results. Indeed, if
they are not told the origin of the sound, they will by almost by
default automatically ascribe the results to the work of some sound
artist, and even imagine in listening to it they are somehow "getting
into the mind of the composer" or following and appreciating "the
composer's ideas".
So let us not be under any illusion that any "musical idea" whatsoever
in the mind of one person can ever be transferred ("telementation") to
another. This is true of language (hence my reference to the
"integrational linguistics" of Roy Harris), and surely palpably true of
music and sound too.
Nevertheless, the evidence that music (and especially personal
~physical~ music-making) results in measureable physiological changes of
brain behaviour, via "brain plasticity", and is vital to the "training"
of the brain in general is now accumulated beyond any doubt [2]. It is
something that has long been suspected by musicians, but now known to be
much more than wishful thinking. The question must then arise, how the
"composer" exploits this. By invoking the romanticised unprovable notion
of telementation from composer to listener, what is perceived by the
latter initially merely as acoustical phenomena is reinforced and
ordered by a certain emotional effort or activity, and further
influenced by accumulated or learned cultural and artistic associations,
to induce a high level of attention, and ultimately to the extraction of
symbolic relationships between sounds that lead to "meaning". It is felt
that something has been communicated - also unprovable, but in a human
sense this unprovability hardly matters.
The skill which Kevin describes is prima facie that crucial stage of
"exploits" - the more the composer/sound artist is aware of how
listeners extract meaning from acoustic stimuli, the more their sense
increases of being able to direct, orchestrate and otherwise affect
(somehow) those listeners. The metaphor remains at every stage the
"communication of an idea". In the end the listener can no more get
inside the mind of the composer than the composer can get inside the
mind of the listener. Nevertheless, the ~feeling~ that they do - that
there is some exchange or communication going on - has a clear personal
and possibly social significance. This leads in turn to the whole notion
of defining and cultivating a learned art form, upon which is built the
whole edifice of recognised practice, "communication" and 'expression" -
something which can be taught.
Whereas if the process stops at the level of the "sound idea", so much
is bypassed that very little that is meaningful can be said on behalf of
either the composer or the listener. The result is simply the emitting
and the receiving of sounds, with no causal connection between them,
real or imagined. This is no different in kind from my sonification of
collision data where the only compositional attribution we can possibly
make is to the particles themselves; clearly a romanticised or even
mystical interpretation that again is unprovable. Whether you believe
there is a mind at work there, conceiving and conveying "ideas", is a
matter literally of belief.
The aural training on which Kevin places so much emphasis becomes in
effect "weight training for the brain", such that it can readily
discover ideas and meanings regardless of the nature of the sound or of
its originator. There is a hope that what is perceived bears some
correlation to what the artist intended' but it cannot in the end ever
be more than a hope. Certainly the fact that a listener perceives "an
idea" is absolutely no guarantee that that idea ever existed as such,
externally, at all, or that it in any way reflects the "idea" the
putative sound artist had to begin with.
Richard Dobson
References:
1. Roy Harris, "Mindboggling", Pantaneto press 2008. See also by the
same author, "The Semantics of Science", Continuum, 2005.
2. Iain McGilchrist, "The Master and His Emissary", Yale University
Press, 2009.
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