Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!eliot
From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: 2nd rate European Conference
Message-ID: <5507@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 19 Jan 91 03:15:09 GMT
References: <648@esosun.UUCP> <5419@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <16410@venera.isi.edu>
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Distribution: na
Organization: Princesspool University, New Jersey
Lines: 57

In article <16410@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@venera.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
;In article <5419@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
;Handelman) writes:
;>  A "scientific" 
;>statement about music tends to be of the order "8ves run through all 
;>musical cultures," and that's the sort of thing that Lerdahl gets away 
;>with (I'd give my money to Llinas).

;I assume you are using quote marks around "scientific" because it is most
;unclear whether or not the candidate statement you have posed is falsifiable.

It's most clear that such a statement can indeed be falsified, all you need is
a counterexample. I was contrasting it to the statement "music is the 
machine-language of the brain," which is not a scientific statement,
though it was made by an eminent neuroscientist. The 8ve biz has been
observed over and over again, and no one can say what its consequences
are; the machine-language statement is an untestable hypothesis, 
more a challenge to inquiry, a hot chestnut that begs to be fleshed out,
that begs to be taken up by someone to see whether it can be recast in
a manner acceptable to the scientific community, and which rests on an
obvious prejudice about the effectiveness of music. It conveys the sense
that the explanation is deep, and possibly not even possible with our
current knowledge, and that a proper explanation might have to include
a neuroscientific dimension. It also captures the idea that music might
somehow "operate" on the listener, in the same way that one is "moved"
BY music: one is being somehow run as a computer. Right there you
could bring in Sid Vicious, if you wanted to. It seems to me quite 
clear that this aspect of control is a component of a lot of musical
experience: whereas the emasculated "music pereception" theories
turn music into something that one is educated to, something that
you learn to appreciate, and that is meaningless until you do. When
people want to talk about music, they ought to stick to the music
they feel excited by, rather than the music they consider it proper
to discuss in polite circles. Whan I was 8 years old Back for
me was a chaotic abyss that drew me into its vortex, but for some
other people their basic experience may have been with Elvis or
the Stones. I want to feel that getting into their heads is
worthwhile, that there's something going on there. Probably it does 
matter when you get to this music, but only because many of us are
riddled with prejudices and categories, and at that point you can't hear
anything anymore: all you hear are "prejudices and categories," and
that, to me, is a very unlikely theory of what music is. So you have
to go back to your pre-category times, unless you're a good listener
with open ears, which most people aren't, and try to remember what
music once sounded like. The music can sometimes help you along.
Steve, for instance, thinks that music is a bunch of rehashed
remembering, and I can't doubt that that's how he hears: he remembers
what music once sounded like, and so he concludes that all music
is but remembrance. That's at best a theory of what kind of wax is
in Steve's ears. It's not a theory of music. 

There was supposed to be a tie-in with "scientific discourse," but
I'm out of steam. Let me just say that statements like Llinas' seem
much more suggestive and therefore valuable, especially as they come
from someone who ought to know better, than statements that manage 
to fit the falsification pattern, especially as these tend to come from 
people who obviously don't know any better.