Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!eliot From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Emergence and Static Vs. Dynamic properties (was: Re: Another letter to the New York Review) Keywords: homomorphism, logical structure, music, implementation Message-ID: <14648@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Date: 18 Mar 90 02:08:12 GMT References: <12143@venera.isi.edu> <14431@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2cSD02rC93BD01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> Reply-To: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) Organization: Princeton University, NJ Lines: 133 In article <2cSD02rC93BD01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: ;(Eliot expanded on this question via E-mail:) ;>. . . The idea that music, sed Langer, is the "logical form" of emotions ;>would mean, in your terms, that there is a homomorphism between music and ;>emotions. I'm curious to see if this is what you're saying, and why you ;>think this might be. ; ;It's important (at least for logical purity) to distinguish between ;the claim that music is the logical form of emotions (which neither ;Langer nor I believe) and the claim that music and emotions have the ;same logical form (which is closer to the position I have adopted from ;her work). I seem to remember Langer having endorsed the former view. I can't find my copy, but I have the following Wagner quote she used as an introduction to the relevant argument: "What music expresses is external, infinite and ideal; it does not express passion, love or longing of such-and-such an individual on such-and-such an occasion, but passion, love or longing in itself, and this it presents in that unlimited variety of motivations, which is the exclusive and particular characteristic of music, foreign and inexpressible in any other language." This, she writes, is "the most explicit rendering of [a] principle" that she describes as "the most persistent, plausible and interesting doctrine of meaning in music [...] "(219-220) Langer is trying to show, among other things, what music actually does, and among the things it appears to do is not merely to communicate emotion (a term that she's trying to get away from) but even to induce it. The historical context of her argument was the work of Wundt and his school, who thought the proper way to subject music to scientific scrutiny was to figure out which sounds were "pleasing" and which "less pleasing," treating music as a succession of physically pleasing and less pleasing moments.Langer opposed this impoverished account of musical experience in favor of a transcendental view, motivated by the Wagner excerpt above, that promoted the perception -- here one really should say "cognition" -- of form rather of sound. The conundrun here is how music, which, as she says, is nonpropositional, is able to communicate anything at all, except in the uninteresting sense of drawing upon associations (military music, etc). Her answer is roughly that music is an acoustic rendering of the shapes of emotions, and that the listener is drawn into the emotion by virtue of being in the presence of the artifial emoting organism that is sound. The point is very much that music IS, according to Langer, a "logical" (meaning transcendental) form of the emotions. ;It makes some sense to talk about the logical structure of music or ;emotions by extension - a true description of a musical performance ;has (literally) a logical structure, which may then be attributed ;to the performance. Likewise, a phenomenological description of an ;experience, emotional or otherwise, has a logical structure. (Again, replace "transcendental" for "logical." She's being idealistic, not empiricist, which I assume is what you're promoting when you say a "true" description.) ;So the homomorphism of logical structure exists between the descriptions, ;rather than between the phenomena. The analogous relation which obtains ;between the phenomena is *resemblance*. The concepts of logical ;structure and homomorphism serve to analyze resemblance. Ken, I think you've just negated the whole value of introducing musical approaches to the study of emergent processes, unless you're using some terms here in ways that I don't understand. "Logical" means to me (roughly following Langer's usage) "abstracted to its bare but vital properties." You are using the term in the "what you see is what you get" approach. Even if you mean "logical" in my sense, I still can't see in what way a description of a performance has to do with a phenomenological account of listening experience, unless you think of the listener as a sort of box into which music is poured, and to open up the box to discover the experience is to rediscover the music sitting inside him. ;The role of descriptions in this analysis introduces a number of serious ;problems. Langer does *not* take this approach, and avoids most of the ;problems. That's your approach, I suspect. Let me try to explain Langer's idea in a way that Langer may not have actively pursued, but wehich is, I think, germane. You may or may not be familiar with the James-Lange theory of emotional response. It says that an emotion is the perception of bodily responses, avoidance reactions and the like. It was discounted in the 20's I believe and in the past few years has been revived by experimenters who have found high correlations between facial expressions and associated emotions -- if you are forced to smile a lot you start feeling happy (tell that to the Japanese, but nevertheless). Let's suppose that there's some sort of bodily MOTION whose perception is the eMOTION -- acupuncturists seem to believe thsi. Let's assume, futher, that the determining motion can be provoked by external means -- specifically by vibratory means. Then you have a theory that music physically evokes this motion, which then becomes emotion. Note that Langer is decidedly not saying this, sinmce music is for her NOT sound, whereas in this theory music is ONLY sound. In any case the idea that physiological response to sound may be part of music can no longer be challenged -- effects of noise haved recieved some attention since Langer. My point here is that if any of this theory is at all true, and some small part of it is, I think, then tensions and movements are being established in the listener that must correspond to physiological encodings of emotional experience. Langer is suggesting something similar, though not necessarily quite as mechanistically as in this particular theory. I am primarily interested in philosophy of science and ;metaphysics, so I prefer to highlight the problems of descriptive ;abstractions. This makes my analysis more cumbersome in application ;to the experience of music - the selection of a descriptive abstraction ;becomes a central theoretical issue, rather than a practical matter to ;be decided according to the interests of a composer, reviewer, or ;listener. Well, maybe the point here is that you can think of music as a descriptive abstraction of more general experience. Not one that does anybody any good except for trained musicians. ;On the other hand, selection (or invention!) of a descriptive framework ;is naturally a central issue for physical sciences, AI, and psychology ;of perception. So I think the concept of logical structure and ;homomorphism organizes the problems in a useful way. In particular, ;phenomenology and physics each purport (or at least strive) to offer a ;general descriptive abstraction, adequate for the expression of any ;insight or hypothesis in their respective domains. The theory of ;computation makes a similar claim within its own domain. ;I propose that AI is the attempt to find an "alignment" (or, better, ;*implementation*) between these three domains, such that the truth of ;each claim is simultaneously shown to be true. I regard it as a very ;happy accident (but not a very surprising one) that Langer, whose thought ;is motivated largely by the aesthetics of music, provides the concept ;that just might do the trick. Of the general concept I have no doubt. How the concept is to be worked out is a little bit trickier.