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From: mgresham@artsnet.UUCP (Mark Gresham)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Semantics of music?
Message-ID: <850@artsnet.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jun 90 04:10:27 GMT
References: <13102@venera.isi.edu> <10293@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <16182@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <10340@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <16283@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <6303@ucrmath.UCR.EDU> <2364@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: mgresham@artsnet.UUCP (Mark Gresham)
Organization: ARTSNET  Atlanta, GA  USA
Lines: 77

In article <2364@aipna.ed.ac.uk> geraint@ai.ed.ac.uk (Geraint Wiggins) writes:
>In article <16283@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:
>
>>The idea that music has "semantics" is completely meaningless because
>>no music can be systematically explicated in terms of this function;
>>besides there's no authoritative meaning-conferring community that 
>>establishes these semantics. Music is privately experienced and there's
>>no way to convey that experience...
>
>Maybe this is a trite comment, but I've never seen a proof of this. Just
>because we haven't got a way of doing something doesn't mean we can't do it.
>In particular, the point about the meaning-conferring community seems
>questionable: looking at language, we can only agree that certain words denote
>ceratin concepts by supposing that our own interpretation of those concepts
>agrees with those of others. A good example of this is colours. If I say an
>object is "red" and agree with the person next to me on this, it is impossible
>to say whether the sensations leading us to make this claim are the same.
>
>Thus, the interpretation of the colour is "privately experienced" and there is
>indeed no way to convey that experience other than by pointing at the coloured
>object and assigning a label to it ("red" in this case).
>
>It is not clear to me that such an agreed labelling could not be applied to
>musical instances

Probably for the reasoning that it doesn't apply in colour either.

There is a Micronesian language, for example, in which the
division of the visible spectra into "primary" colours are very
much different from those of us of Euro-American backgrounds.
There is one expression of a primary colour which covers what we
call red, orange, and yellow; there are some seven words which
cover the range of primary spectra which we refer to as green and
blue.  One might note that the Micronesian environment might :-)
be somewhat responsible for the particular manner in which the
sensation of primary colour is conceptualized is such a markedly
different manner -- if you live in a blue-green world, you will be
more sensitive to making conceptual distinctions in that range of
colour.
  The interesting point about this, to me at least, is that it is
one example leading towards the idea that neither words nor even
concepts themselves are absolute models of divisions of "the real
world," but are tools which we form (one kind of "knowing") to
deal with the barrage of sensory material which we confront from
the inception of life.  (That itself a different story.)  That is,
there is no "redness" out there, per se.  A direct attack, if you
will on the Platonist notion of idealized whatevers, upon which
(and including a game of philisophical ping-pong with Atistotle)
our western, Cartesian approach to "understanding" the universe
is based.

I would like to suggest that the "privately experienced" which
Eliot is referring to is not something which is "subjective" but
is "non-objective" (in other words, simply not "objective" as
opposed to the various "internal" psychological associations which
the "subjective" term too often implies; but I also want to
suggest that it is, indeed, "out there" too.)

I also want to suggest that "meaning" is not the same as "definition."

(I do recall also that my grandmother and I had very strong
disagreements at times as to whether something was green or blue.
In as much as the agreement on "red" cited above intends to show
that maybe different stimuli produced conceptual agreement,
there is also the notion that similar stimuli could produce
a difference of concept.)


Cheers,

--Mark

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Mark Gresham  ARTSNET  Norcross, GA, USA
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