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From: gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Mira Balaban (was: Re: Workshop on Artificial inteligence and Music)
Message-ID: <1990May31.020938.13816@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 May 90 02:09:38 GMT
References: <16283@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <10541@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <843@artsnet.UUCP>
Organization: AIR, Stanford Universit
Lines: 24

In article <843@artsnet.UUCP> mgresham@artsnet.UUCP (Mark Gresham) writes:
>I would say it is more likely that the existence of this community
>entails the *assumption* of the existence of musical semantics.
>(like a Flat-Earth Society assuming the that the earth is flat).
>The myth, then, is more persuasive it seems, and any other
>possibility hasn't been under close examination for very long; the
>assumption of semantics has been around much longer than the
>contrary notion.

Regarding the existence of musical semantics (ie yes/no question),
I will truely appreciate reasoning beyond claims from the perspectives
of Round-Earth Society's satellites.  On the other hand, I admit
that the details of meaning assignments, or associations, are much
more difficult and really a branch of study.  (Katharine Ellis's translation
of Nattiez in last year's Music Analysis seems to be a good summary.)

>Then, by golly, we'll
>have to do a double-take and look at language itself again, too.  It
>may not be what we thought it was.

The marriage with language study might not be a bad idea.  There have been
fine computing ideas and models on parsing (Earley, Kay, Tomita, Blank); 
grammar (Woods, Pereira & Warren); or memory (Schank, Minsky, Sowa)...
ie, good shoulders to stand on.  No?  Suggestions?