Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!ames!pasteur!fir.berkeley.edu!maverick From: maverick@fir.berkeley.edu (Vance Maverick) Newsgroups: ba.music,comp.music Subject: Re: Review of NOVA this Tuesday - What is Music?" Message-ID: <24012@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 14 Apr 90 20:45:57 GMT References: <3757@uudell.dell.com> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: maverick@fir.berkeley.edu (Vance Maverick) Lines: 46 I thought the psychological material on the Nova was pretty weak. This may reflect the skimpy format rather than the work of Clynes and Palmer. In article , marvit@hplpm.hpl.hp.com (Peter Marvit) writes: > The elusive concept of musical style is exemplified by a brief comparison > of "straight" and "stylized" performance of the Messiah Overture by > Handel. Caroline Palmer, at Cornell, then explores some of the > parameters of "musical" playing style, compared with "unmusical" playing. > A demonstration using a snippet of Brahms underscores her points. Does Palmer have a definition of unmusical? Or is she relying on her subjects' concept of unmusicality? If I had to pick someone unlikely to produce an unmusical performance, a career musician like Malcolm Bilson seems a good bet. Isn't it likely that, for him, "unmusicality" is a musical style, rich in all the things he's been taught to avoid? So aren't her conclusions about the nature of musicality just a digest of what modern classical musicians have been taught to do? > The final major segment follows Australia's Manfred Klynes investigation > into emotion in music. He worked on simple gestures which could > "universally" be interpreted in various simple emotions (e.g., joy, > anger, sorrow) and then translated them into sounds. Subjects who > learned the gestures could later easily identify the associated emotion. > The sounds were likewise easily paired. Most surprising was the near > perfect agreement of Aborigines in Australia with the more conventional > subjects -- demonstrating the cross-cultural effects of these apparent > "universals." Was his experiment really conducted under the circumstances shown in the program? The subject we saw was given a slip with the seven universals written out, and asked to match to them the gestures he had been taught. If this is what Clynes did, the reality of the universals is pretty dubious. If one of the gestures reminded me strongly of broccoli and faintly of sex, I would only have one choice. Does anyone out there know this work? I trust there's more to it than we saw on Tuesday.