From: Kevin Austin (kevin.austin@videotron.ca)
Date: Thu Apr 07 2011 - 09:52:37 EDT
I think two of the major starting points at the research level in this investigation would be David Cope and Eliot Handelman <eliot@colba.net>, as both have been deeply involved in the field for a long time, and both have practice and theory about it.
And to frame the question regarding audience response to computer-generated [anything]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTXO7KGHtjI
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_gBSWE_KYE&feature=relatedeen deeplya
While researchers may want to run controled tests on 20 or 30 listeners, there are several tens of millions of responses already.
Kevin
On 2011, Apr 7, at 8:06 AM, Sandeep Bhagwati wrote:
> Thanks Richard
> you have the same hunch as myself as to the result of such a study - but why would researchers in music perception and cognition worry whether composers would like or not like their results ? It is not as if the league of composer's would send their enforcers to mess up their lab.....
>
> I do not yet give up the hope that some researcher has done such work. I have posted this question on two other listservs, too one music theory, the other music perception and cognition...let us see.
>
> One important point: I am not asking WHAT people who produce music/sonic art think or believe.
>
> I am just assuming (perhaps erroneously) that they believe they are engaged in doing and making something meaningful - otherwise they could as well kill people, write a book or travel to Japan to work in disaster relief. Some of the meaning may be in the social framing (as in " At least I do not kill people"), but some of it must also be in the product, e.g. a "love" for specific sounds or for their specific combination. At the very least, they must declare that what they have done or selected should be understood as music/sonic art intended for human consumption - and not, e.g. as a technical transmission intended to unambiguously convey data to another machine.
>
> I am not ready to assume that e.g. a neural net that produces sonic events has any belief as to the meaningfulness of what it does - or that it "loves" what it does. Or that it makes any such declaration. Its programmers might have or do all that, but usually they do not actually control the specifics of the output, and thus their possible meaningfulness.
>
> Then there are people who listen to what these musickers (a beautiful term by Christoper Small) make or have made. They again do this for reasons of their own, and some of them are concerned with framing (e.g."As a person concerned with the welfare of humans on this planet I should be interested in acoustic ecology" or "The symphony orchestra is the most complex achievement in human music making and I therefore must go to symphony concerts so that it will not disappear like the polar bear") while others really listen to these products/performances only because some of them give them some kind of sensual, direct pleasure, while others provoke disgust or boredom.
>
> For these last group of listeners (those who make aesthetic choices based on what they HEAR - not by what they KNOW ABOUT the making/context of the music/sonic art they listen to)*: Is there any aesthetically relevant difference in their emotional reaction to music/sonic art that has been made a) by a process without any intention versus b) with some kind of aesthetic intent ?
>
> You say there would not be any difference. I think that you may be right. But these are just educated hunches.
>
> Do we really know this ? Has this problem been studied ? My initial question.
>
> Best
> Sandeep
>
> * given the fact that very few of the decisions we social animals make are free from social manoeuvering, such people may actually be a dwindling minority - regardless of the fact that the dominant pop ideology of western culture claims that musicking is predominantly about transporting emotions.
>
> 2011/4/7 Richard Dobson <richarddobson@blueyonder.co.uk>
> On 07/04/2011 06:38, Sandeep Bhagwati wrote:
> James
> Ok now I understand, you are in a contrarian mood. It is late...
> Well suit yourself. I was hoping for a bibliographical reference not a
> discussion.
>
>
>
> But, er, this is a discussion list. Such a study is probably avoided as too risky - too many composers may be disappointed with the results.
> time and attitudes change.
>
> Consider the notion of "the beauty of Nature". The notion cultivated [sic] from the Renaissance onwards, and perhasp especially during the "Age of Enlightenment" was that the randomness of nature needs to be trained, harmonized, rendered more perfect by becomsing symmetrical, ordered. Nowhere was this more powerfully expressed than in the concept of the landscaped and formal garden. In endowing raw nature with this ordering, it more effectively reflected the order of the divine Creator. Thus it was that landscaped gardens became beautiful, and offered Meaning to the observer.
>
> Where this did not satisfy, artists of each epoch created images of imagined Elysian landscapes, with waterfalls, grottos, a few costumed people, and a carefully placed ruined temple; to achieve within the walls of a building a very similar effect.
>
> Then the notion of "raw" nature" became slowly transformed into the idea of the "untouched landscape" where the absence of the hand of Man, especially as perceived by those living in urban areas surrounded by buildings, was valued above all. So the city person would go out into the countryside and enjoy being "out in Nature". They imagine that the seemingly random hedgerow-enclosed fields were part of that "Nature", oblivious to the degree to which it actually reflected the hand of man. The trees that once covered it ware cut down to build ships to defend against the Spanish armada. The hedgerows were built to "enclose" the now open fields, under the Enclosures Act. They became havens for wildlife; but that is not why they were planted. So they became part of "nature", and their arbitrary removal now gives great angst.
>
> So the read hard-core naturalists now seek out the genuinely (?) unchanged wildernesses, from which they obtain the necessary Meaning.
>
> So in landscape, so in music. We have moved from the epoch of the formal garden, where the shapes and patterns are prescribed and familiar, to the wilderness of the soundscape. The absence of the perceptible "hand of man" being an essential aspect thereof. Since the "sound artist" / composer (we already had that debate) seeks to reflect that same idealised untouched and unordered "natural" wilderness, it follows that any purely computer-generated piece that reflects the same wild unorderedness will likely inspire similar senses of Meaning to those intended (or not) by said artist; because we have learned to appreciate the wilderness as being (even) closer to the Creator than the formal garden. This is despite the problem that we are by no means sure such a Creator exists. Therefore, being unsure whether a sound was created by an artist or by a computer is irrelevant, as either way it merely reinforces the same quintessential existential uncertainty, without which Life would have no Meaning.
>
>
>
> I offer this sound for any such blind test study:
>
> http://people.bath.ac.uk/masrwd/asorted-e2p.mp3.zip
>
> Richard Dobson
>
>
>
>
>
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