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From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: MUSIC AND AI
Message-ID: <11273@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 27 Jun 91 02:56:36 GMT
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In article <3191@lee.SEAS.UCLA.EDU> bsmith@turing.seas.ucla.edu (Brian Smith)
writes:
;In article <10936@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
;Handelman) writes:
;>
;>It's much more interesting to focus on the listener, because apprehension
;>is the simplest act of creativity.
;
;Listening is pretty fascinating stuff, but I think that composition is a much
;more interesting problem since one can't compose without listening.

First of all I don't get this line of reasoning, since one can't compose
without being alive (unless you know how to contact Rosemary Brown),
and therefore composition is a much more interesting problem than the
problem of life? Second of all I don't see what the "problem" of composition
is, composition is not problem solving. Third of all, listening, as 
our friend S. Handel points out, is not the same thing as hearing, 
which apart from its ontology, suggests something machine-like, 
a registration of acoustic facts by a set of more or less dependable 
receptors. You will hear this sound as louder if I do that, that sort 
of thing. But listening is about the construction of reality, actively 
probing the environment, intentionalistic echolocation, bouncing attention 
off the mirror of your own disposition and carving yourself into 
multidimensional virtualities.  Listening means to me in the first place 
your self-awareness, your hearing yourself think or toss around idle 
imagery, it is the fundamental capacity and insistence of the mind to 
engage itself with itself. And last of all "composition" is dead, 
significant music is not made that way anymore.