#64

I think music requires a mind to perceive sonic order. It needn’t be a human mind, however.

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#65

Agreed: although I used the word “artificial” earlier, I think “order” better describe what I mean, and it’s definitely something that only exists in our perceptions. We see order in things that don’t have anyway, and often miss order that is there…

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#66

There’s always someone in a forest. :wink:

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#67

i like this one! but what is ‘order’ exactly? can sonic ‘disorder’ also be music? or does it only mean that sonic material is ordered by some active agent?

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#68

Order is largely in the ear of the beholder, but I like looking for clues in physiology. I’ve already related several biological mechanisms for detecting and creating rhythm earlier in this thread, that happen at many different levels of physiology, both in the central nervous system and elsewhere. I have less of a strong understanding about how we interpret pitch, harmony, and timbre biologically. But I imagine that would be an interesting line of inquiry.

I feel I learn more from looking at things from a biological perspective than from a more purely cerebral perspective. It helps me break out of the box of purely social definitions (and all their inherent historical biases).

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#69

This is what I think! But it may be easier to see the hand of the active agent when the result is orderly, as well…

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#70

I think I understand what you mean, and I would agree. It is very similar to organized, as others have tried. Perhaps this is the same too:

What I feel I’d like to poke a bit more at with this though, is that both “order”/“organized” and “artificial” might suggest that there is an author or active hand that “created” it somehow. Sometimes that order is not from the subject itself, but in the perception of the receiver. How can that be distinctly expressed?

I agree with this too, but I’d like to get a bit closer to exactly how that mechanism of perception works. The mind perceives something sonic, and sometimes it categorizes it as music and sometimes not. What are the bearing properties for something to end up in the music category? To me, a few things seem to be at play. The first being that the mind has to have some kind of idea about what the category of music contains, so that it can map the subject on it, to see if it fits. While the properties of that category can be both learned or be instinctual can be discussed, but the concept of representing it in language by the word music certainly is a learned one. As far as categorizing properties of the subject, I think it can either be something inherent to it, that makes us connect it to other things already familiar to us, as music. Or it is something in our own mind that makes the connection. That would answer to why some things are categorized as music by some, but not by others.

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#71

I don’t see this as important relative to the experience of music. We needn’t be consciously aware of and categorizing our experience in order to have it, to feel it, to groove with it.

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#72

I don’t think musical thought is “in the mind” at all, it’s all “out there”, in the artifacts deemed properly musical (recordings, performances, technologies) but also in the howling of wolves, the shifting moods of the sky, the dragons in the river, the gifts of the rain gods, – and once again in the little, spontaneous acts: the “let’s try this” patching of an oscillator to control its own frequency, the bits of buggy Max code that do more interesting things than the intended purpose… all of this can be thoughts within music.

Sadly, throughout much of human history, we have removed “thought” from its proper place in the world and dictated that it be strictly confined to the mind, in the form of “mental representations” that we then force upon the world. The broader context is that of servomechanism, of the “closed loop” which reduces the world to only that contained in the representation: I try something, compare my observation of result with my internal representation, and adjust accordingly. Agency becomes a fixed will imposed on the world, not the freedom to open oneself to the world, to work together to bring forth a mutual destiny.

Yet anyone who has climbed a mountain still recognizes the extent that we dwell in a world and yes, use every aspect of this world along with our bodies and minds as devices with which to think.

Some of this can be blamed on language, but not really. Language is also exteriorized. We define signifiers (words) only in relation to other signifiers (words). They circulate in a play that is sometimes fixed and sometimes free. One does not need to posit the signified, the hidden “idea” or “intent” within the mind. Simply follow on words with other words. We seem to do alright…

This reductive image of thought is not based in the human but in Man; one side of the artificial (Man/Nature) divide that passes through the human, and critically so.

A “mental representation” is simply a set point in a servomechanism that helps Man command Nature to use. In the initial positing of the tool, it was not needed. For millions of years, human ancestors evolved sophisticated stone tools through a set of socially-coordinated gestures, well before the origin of speech or any other evidence of thinking at a distance. The thought that went into the tools simply stayed there, in the form of the tools, and in the gestures that made them. It was not encoded anywhere as a design or plan.

However, in the perfection of the tool (motivated by co-evolutionary pressures, not yet any conscious plan, certainly not a consciousness of “servomechanism”), a servomechanistic conception nonetheless emerged. This falls out naturally from control theory, specifically the “linear quadratic regulator” (LQR): if I’m going to drive a state to zero with minimum (squared) error using a minimum (energy) input; i.e. extract the most from Nature using minimum effort, the optimal configuration introduces feedback; I make the input a function of the state (which I estimate using the output). This is the same configuration that operates a thermostat or that we use when we drive a car. So of course humankind had to evolve the thought-“of”; the set-point of the servomechanism, in order to optimize the tool, in order to extract the most from Nature using the least energy. This became what we call “mind” and precipitated the divisions that we now take as commonplace: subject/object, mind/body(world) and so on.

Thus was born the thought-“of”. Unfortunately, it requires a [transcendentally] constituting subject, a definitional structure of ‘givenness’ through which music is given. The human animal, like the wolf, does not require such givenness. She remains within immanence, producing acts that are consubstantial with thoughts, thoughts liberated from their confinement within a servomechanism called “mind”.

The liberation of music from “mind” appears when the human ceases to be Man, and becomes the animal he always has been.

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#73

Beautifully expressed, again, thank you!

I’m definitely a proponent of concepts of embodied cognition and extended cognition (although “cognition” here chafes a bit as it once again implies “mind” and ultimately “thought” when awareness requires neither).

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#74

Have you read Tim Ingold? You’re very much in line with his thinking! (which I like very much)

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#75

All very cool. I think I’m mashing together embodied/extended cognition with Derrida’s idea of exteriorization (archi-writing), but with “text” being the entire milieu, the radically immanent “out there” that provides the “within” for thought, which need not be restricted to the human. That is, I don’t think extended cognition goes far enough in grasping the scope of a truly exteriorized consciousness, it’s not just about (as I understand it) “offloading” thinking onto the immediate environment or tools ready-to-hand but something with a truly “cosmic” dimension…

Re-reading my own argument, I guess I do believe “mind” has its place, but not in the privileged position it has enjoyed vis-a-vis other ways of being in the world. I see it merely as a closed-loop (feedback) structure that can co-exist with other (feed-forward, or more simply organized) structures. The more primal structures are still within us, we just need to awaken ourselves to them.

I’d like to de-privilege “mind” further though, because it performs a closed relationship in which we force the world to conform to our image. Certainly, one implication is disembodied cognition, where perception exists only “for” cognition (as mental representation), which exists only “for” action (to achieve the pre-cognized effect). But there are deeper, philosophical implications, if we don’t remain open to the world’s unfolding (and our unfolding within the world), then everything indeed becomes a human construct, we indeed encounter only ourselves and remain trapped in our own thoughts. Crises like climate change become unthinkable because we cannot get outside of the way we have constructed the world to understand what a radically different (warmer) world actually is like.

One way to open ourselves up is to recover the animist conception of personhood – which cannot be simply a projection of human qualities back onto “inert” nonhumans, but a deep, reciprocal relationality in which trees, stones, and rivers are spoken “to” rather than “about”; where they give gifts (rather than participating in the economic calculus of use-value and/or exchange-value), where other persons, human and nonhuman, are gathered in the exchange, and from which a merely human conception of person derives only as a special case, and certainly not as the master of the world.

But the animist relationality also provides a (Derridean) exteriorization of thought back out into the world, an exteriorization that also finds echoes in apophatic mysticism but perhaps most properly the Zen concept of hishiryo (“without-thinking”) – here I will quote a passage by Douglas Mikkelson which is especially beautiful:

(source: http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/DogenStudies/Who_Is_Arguing.htm)

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#76

No, I’ll definitely check him out, thanks so much!!!

#77

music ===== ear food

#78

Well said! …

#79

My ear is hungry. Sonic fast food?

#80

I agree with you completely there, but I was referring to the definition of music, not the experience of it. For the definition of the word music, what concept the word music represents in language, we need to look at how the word is used in the community of language users, and derive a meaning from there. How we feel as individuals, or what intuitively happens in the mind or the body are all interesting topics to dive into, but they are secondary to which concepts words represent in language.

#81

I do not think that the inherent properties of music are in the mind either, but the synthesis of those properties to be connected to a communicative representation, such as a word, is most definitely a process of the mind.

#82

As someone already mentioned earlier in this thread, maybe it was you @Erik, there is a difference between trying to come up with a definition of music and thinking about what music is or isn’t in a deeper philosophical sense. This last exercise is far more interesting in my opinion. Although the first one cannot exist without the other and visa versa.

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#83

I agree that it is more interesting, at least from the perspective of depth and insight. Untangling the meaning of words is more of a social/cultural exercise. But if it is language that we wish to use in order to discuss something philosophical, we are stuck with words and their respective meaning, according to the group of language users of the used language. We can wish, hope and discuss that words had deeper meaning, but we do so with the set of language that existed before us, whether we like it or not. Therefore it is of great benefit to understand language and the meaning of words as distinctly as possible, if we wish to communicate with clarity.