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From: sandell@ferret.ils.nwu.edu (Greg Sandell)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: 2nd rate European Conference
Message-ID: <616@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu>
Date: 12 Jan 91 07:38:30 GMT
Sender: news@ils.nwu.edu
Reply-To: sandell@ferret.ils.nwu.edu (Greg Sandell)
Lines: 47

Eliot Handelman of Princeton writes:

> I'm not in awe of the scientific community. I don't think we musicians
> need busy ourselves with scientific-sounding agendas, or doing our
> things in any way consistent with what we know or understand of the
> sciences.

This has the sound of techno-fear to it.  Of all the work in musical
acoustics, musical psychoacoustics, music cognition, all that Mr. Handelman
seems to notice is that it "sounds scientific."  This does not sound like
the kind of reader who is really equipped to digest an article that
might contain some statistics, or refer to some signal processing analysis
methods.  If he hates the intrusion of anything scientific in the musical
community I cannot imagine why he chooses to read or post to comp.music.

I see no use in regarding SCIENCE as some sort of monolith, insisting on
some very pure usage of the word.  When the word 'science' is bandied
about among musical researchers, I believe it is used in different ways
in different circumstances.  Some of these ways are: 1) just an impressive 
sounding cognate for 'music theory';  2) a metaphor for the kind
of rigor of methodology associated with the sciences but not typically 
with music theory;  and 3) borrowing the apparatus and methodology
of the fields of auditory perception, physics, math, statistics,physiology, 
cognition (fields generally recognized as scientific) in the investigation 
of a musical question.

There's alot of stuff out there in category 1 that gets lapped up
by people who read a little of GODEL, ESCHER & BACH and like streamlining
their old analytic notions with phrases like 'semantic network' and
so on.  The same people are enamored of work in category 3 without
being able to critically understand it (unable to distinguish between 
good and bad work).  It seems equally sloppy to dismiss such work as
"busying itself with scientific-sounding agendas" prior to an adequate 
study of the work, and this Mr. Handelman has done in broad strokes, 
by dismissing all work in Music Perception and Cognition.  

The field of music research is certainly big enough to have topics
that aren't of any interest at all to me.  I've never cared much
for the study of manuscript authentication, and in an unguarded
moment I might say something disparaging about its aims and its
practitioners.  But who would care?

--
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* Greg Sandell (sandell@ils.nwu.edu)          Evanston, IL USA *
* Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University *
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