Thanks David! Most wonderfully argued.
And you too Andrew...
Music can have function but doesn't require function. Bird song does require function otherwise it wouldn't exist.
A better example is sex -- by Andrew's thinking everything on this good earth enjoys sex --- and I like that thought. But in every example, except man, sex is solely a function. For man there is function in sex but it is also an activity for pleasure -- myself for example --I have had a very full life of nothing but dis-functional sex!
Chomsky -- I'm not so sure Darcy -- but it has been a while since I read anything on the subject -- I'm pretty sure the last thing was a dis. ------- :)
No takers on the coral reef?
Jerry
On 6-Feb-05, at 6:33 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 6 Feb 2005 at 16:11, Andrew Stiller wrote:
Jerry:
Birds don't make music -- they use sound for function.
Music has no function?
Logical misdirection.
Sounds can have function without being music.
Animals don't make music, though they do make sounds.
Bird song is not produced for joy but for vigilance.
You are making the common error of confusing the function of a behavior with the subjective experience of the one behaving. . . .
Birds don't make or appreciate music.
. . . If you accept that birdsong is a conscious act, then birds do it because they enjoy doing so. . . .
Ah, so you have the brain of a bird, and that's how you know this?
Remarkable what you've accomplished in life with such a small amount of gray matter, then.
. . . This has the *effect* of attracting a mate or warning off rivals or alarming the flock or alerting them to a food supply (far more than mere vigilance, NB), but the bird does not consciously sing *for those purposes.* . . .
Nor does the bird sing for esthetic purposes (i.e., music).
It's like the difference between prose and poetry.
. . . I don't think that any thoughtful person can deny any longer that huge
chunks of human behavior (conventional wisdom says ~50%) are
biologically determined. The question of whether, and to what extent,
musical response is to be considered part of our biological heritage
clearly has a number of folks on this list quite exercised--to the
point of constructing straw men and intuition pumps.
Biology may dictate possibilities. It does not control anything important in the level of musical expression. It may explain certain basic underlying uncomplicated aspects of reaction to psycho-acoustic phenomena, but it doesn't explain the history of Western music, where there has been a constant march *away* from using merely the "pure" aspects of the acoustics.
If the pentatonic scale were important in the way that the biological determinists seem to want it to be, then why would any culture create music that is nothing but pentatonic?
To those who assert that music is a purely cultural phenomenon, I would point out that this idea has been put to the test, quite rigorously, by John Cage, who insisted that any sounds or combination of sounds could be construed as music if one merely had the will to do so, and spent 40 years of his life composing music on precisely that principle. Was this music as successful (moving, exciting, attractive) as other musics? Could other music, composed on the same principle, be more successful?
No, and no.
You have scientific proof that Cage was wrong?
I actually don't think much of Cage's work as music per se, but he had a lot of good ideas.
Music in all its *significant* aspects is a culturally constructed phenomena. All the psycho-acoustic underpinnings are of no importance whatsoever to actual musical expression.
Claiming otherwise is a debasement of both genetics and of music.
-- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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Gerald Berg
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