Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!isi.edu!vaxa.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: ICMC reaction Summary: to phrase or not to phrase Message-ID: <15085@venera.isi.edu> Date: 22 Sep 90 01:31:22 GMT References: <27974@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <2645@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Sender: news@isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Distribution: comp Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 106 In article <2645@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes: >In article <27974@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> maverick@fir.berkeley.edu (Vance >Maverick) writes: >; You touch on two classic music riddles: (1) >;Can there be music without phrasing? [Perhaps a piece consisting of a >;single event.] (2) What's the difference between sound effects and >;music? > >;the one >;about phrasing is a transformation of the (equally pointless) conundrum >;"Are the first two chords of the /Eroica/ the same?", asked in my >;composition class by no less earnest a theoretician than David Lewin. > >That's not exactly a "phrasing" issue so much as a Stanley Fish-like >"is there a text in this class" piece of rhetoric (the answer to both >questions must be "no," since to answer "yes" is to revert to a world >poorer in conundrums and self-doubt, where that question could not >have been posed, yet it was). The experience of the second chord is >flavored by the experience of the first. I forget if that's what Lewin >was aiming at. Score one for Eliot. While I have never take a composition class with David Lewin, I have read his key publication on this matter. I think the issue can be summed up in the following little scenario: Lewin says, "Can you identify the following?" He then plays a tape recording of a single chord. You respond, "I'd know that sound anywhere! That's the first chord of the EROICA!" Lewin then retorts, "Fooled you! That's the SECOND chord of the EROICA!" The point of this little exchange is not whether or not those two chords are the same. (They are not the same by the argument that you cannot put your foot in the same river twice.) It is not even meant to address the question of whether or not some particular approach to phrasing would allow you to distinguish the second chord from the first if you were obliged to hear each in isolation. The point is simply that you cannot talk about there being a SECOND chord except in the context of it being the successor of a FIRST chord. Therefore, if you want to try to abstract the information associated with a particular musical experience, then the experience of that second chord MUST have, as part of that abstraction, some means of representing the chord it has succeeded. As I say, this really is not a question of phrasing; but it brings us close to one. Let us now decide that we want to play Lewin's game of abstraction. Being good computer programmers, we want to design data structures to capture those units of information which he wishes to associate with musical experiences. We should then be able to represent an individual's behavior in listening to some musical performance in terms of some collection of instantiations of those data structures. Those are the rules of the game. Now where do we start? What are going to be the units which actually get coded in those data structures? This is no simple matter. Among other things, Lewin has made a case that there is probably a very rich collection of these units with considerable overlap. Also, if you are listening to orchestral music, you may wish to have a unit for a flute solo and another unit for the accompanying bassoon. You cannot simply equate these units with slices of time . . . the way you might splice up a tape. What, then, are the units in terms of which you can describe your listening experience? Albert Bregman calls the search for such units "auditory scene analysis" and argues (not too well, for my money) that this process is just like the sort of decomposition (read "segmentation" if you feel better about that word) of visual data into objects. Even if Bregman does not make his case very well, there are some interesting consequences which may be relevant. Visual scene analysis has been around in the computer world for some time. However, as has been observed by Gerald Edelman, computers can only do scene analysis if they have some A PRIORI description of the objects they are looking for. Humans, on the other hand, at least when they are children, do not have such A PRIORI information. (A little bit of calculating on the back on an envelope should make a case that there are going to be more bits in trying to code up descriptions for all our "familiar" objects than can be accommodated by our genetic code. In other words it is very unlikely that we are born with the ability to recognize, say, cubes or bagels.) Therefore, there are some very serious problems which must be confronted in the matter of how we LEARN how to take our field of view and begin to reason that there are OBJECTS in it. In this respect I think it is fair to say the same sort of thing about what we hear. There is nothing sacred about "notes" which endows them with the property of being universal sound objects from which perceptual entities are made. Consequently, there is nothing sacred about phrasing, either. We listen on the basis of how we have listened in the past. What we choose to call music is more a social question of what we are told music is than it is a matter of any universal qualities of perception. Most likely, those universal qualities do not exist. Also likely is that no two of us ever have the same perceptual experience. If we accept these conclusions as ground rules, we can then get down to the business of talking about how we communicate information about our musical experiences among each other; and, in my opinion, that is what Lewin really wants to talk about. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "It's only words . . . unless they're true."--David Mamet