On Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:25:48 PM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > > Reflected eternal song(s) dressed in the illusion of time. As far as I can > see: proportions, relationships, ratios.
That's what I mean by "a conceptual sculpture of abstraction". It's not real though. Proportion of what? Relations between what? When we think of these things we can conceive of them abstractly as-if-they-were-real, but only because we are borrowing the concrete reality of our own neurology to do that. Just because we can imagine how a song would look as a graphic representation doesn't mean that there is an independently real mathematical spirit which is clothed in different forms. It is the math which is derived through experiences of form, not the other way around. We are informed by experiencing forms, not by composing in silence and then hoping to discover sound. > Time makes them appear to chat and sing; but in some sense every song has > already been sung, even if they've never been voiced or heard. > I almost agree, but I think that in the same sense that every song has already been sung, it has also already been voiced and heard, only not in the 'small now' of ordinary waking human consciousness. When I heard the song Street Spirit for the first time, I immediately knew that it was the song that I had heard in my mind often as a child. Not the exact Radiohead recording, but the tone and mood of the song, foreshadowings of the notes. They had found what I found and recorded it. What I heard as a child had nothing to do with ratios and pitch - it was pure aural psyche. A melancholic science fiction embodied as music. Music is a feeling that turns math when you play it or compose it...when we touch things with our fingers (actual or mental), they become as fingers: digital, distant, objects to be controlled. > Beethoven was almost completely deaf while he composed/dreamed the 9th. > Mahler wrote/dreamed his later symphonies in a hut by a lake in Austria. No > Piano, no reference pitches. He never even "heard physically" his 9th. > > Some are amazed by this. I am not. > I would be amazed if they were born deaf though. Once you have heard music it is not too surprising that you could still compose or perform. Remarkable, but not surprising. Even if someone was technically deaf, they still might be able to feel the vibrations and rhythms. I think there is a famously deaf drummer I heard about. But to truly have no way to experience music at all, there would be no point to composing it. As a mathematical curiosity it would be pretty boring - simple repetitions for the most part. > > You're probably gonna state that they needed experience hearing in the > first place, which leaves me unconvinced as I have read the scores: > whatever is being coded there is not "dead information" but entities, > portals into dreamworlds. I agree with portals into dreamworlds, but I see that as psyche, as sense, not as math. What does math care for mood or timbre? If you don't need experience first, then why not compose music-equivalents in a sensory mode that doesn't exist yet? > Note how in festival culture from woodstock to burning man: music > functions as portal, a kind of carrier wave, to other loci of being and > perception => physical sound strings point towards some dream, mind of the > festival goers do the introspective traveling. > No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis. > > Their use of similar adjectives, hyperbole and superlatives to describe > their experience points towards kind of eternal universality of music, when > removed enough from "consumer of music", "User of music" through the usual > list of consciousness altering practices, substances, and plants. > I think that music gives humans access to a kind of human universality - to point the antenna of the psyche to different places that it wouldn't be able to point on its own perhaps. Dogs and cats don't seem to care too much about it though. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/FELLNMcQEq0J. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
