gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung) (05/25/90)
Let's device a hypothetical experiment to prove the "NO SEMANTIC" nature of music. We will use some pop symphonic music for the listening. First we want to find subjects that have not been "influenced" by the dry academic studies, and furthermore, it will be best to find subjects with no knowledge and experience about western music -- the kind that we've decided for listening. So we go around the world and find some people. But that doesn't seem adequate, western music is a cultural activity and very much associated with other aspects of western culture, we want "clean" results! Somehow we find a better batch of subjects. Wait, don't sound events sometimes associated with human emotions, e.g. you hit a table when you're angry and you hear a big "bang". Let's device a laboratory so that we can isolate these two. Since there cannot be found persons with no such correlations, we bring up a bunch for the experiment. (Let's assume we don't make them "learn" a different sets of associations. It's quite impossible but say we manage to do so.) After much sweat, we finally achieve the state (let call this the differentiation state). This group of subjects with "purity" of experience start to listen to, say Mozart's 39th Symphony or Tchai's #6. We record all the physiological and psychological differences of each individual during their listening. (Oh, we should have them undergo a diet plan to make sure the uniform state of their physique.) When we compare the results, if the record correlates, we may say there is indeed some common grounds, or if not, we somehow prove the "NO SEMANTIC" nature of music. Right now we can start finding sponsors to finance this experiment. But let's backtrack, ...away from the differentiation state. Along the way, we observe assignment of emotions (well let's say physiolgical and psychological states) to some sound events...further we backtrack, no more simple assignments, now we have function calls, recursive calls, procedure passing, walawala... further we backtrack... macros, multiprocessing, paradox, contradictions, walawala... further we backtrack... ( When I first travelled to the States, there's a lot of anxieties. The emotion might be primitive, but the trigger was highly complex. Leaving one's country, a lot of unknown ahead, obligations, duties,... Not at all primitive. Yet the emotional state is quite similar when I broke my father's antique once... Is it possible to study intelligence without the ability to produce and control a physiological-psychological equivalence? The first time I heard a Bach piece, it's impressive. What do "concerto" means? What are the numbers at the bottom of the score? ) walawala...further we backtrack... We're back to now (despite the time to bring up the bunch....) Now there's hierachy after hierachy of associations. Can't be translated to english, darn. We are going to decode and recreate Tchai's #6. Not only the notational details, also tempo rubato, minute timing, dynamic changes, balancing voices, use all "learned" idea, methods procedures to approximate what he would have done. And there is meaning, seemingly, even more correlations, assignments, syntax and grammar creating and varying on-the-fly. Interesting thirds, decending scales, what jokes... Classes I took seems to make more sense as the approximation goes further... Has music all along been as a syntatic-grammatical-semantic-walawala entity? Or the notion of "NO SEMANTIC" a true revelation? Or is it a failure to capture the language? Yes, "LANGUAGE". Rosetta stone.