Music is sound, sound can be music


It was hard to make a title that fit what I wanted to talk about. Reading the thread about the deleted Hip-hop/Rap thread was an interesting window on some of the mindset here (some of which was unfortunate and depressing too but that's the world we live in....). What struck me was the attitude that if it's not played on a traditional instrument it's not music, or it just "sucks" in some way.

First, many instruments today, lots of brass ones especially or guitars didn't exist until the last 100-200 years. Do they not make music?

But you have to learn to use it skillfully, so I read. Knowing how to read and write music surely qualifies one yes? Talented even, if your can write complex pieces?

Ok, then. 25 years ago I worked with early digital audio systems using sequencers and MIDI. My partner graduated with honors from Berklee college of music and was a composer. He wrote some amazing work without touching anything more than a mouse and keyboard. Was it music?

10 years later I worked with another person who did incredible work in sound collage and electronic music. They did use a controller that is essentially a piano keyboard but it only sends note data to the system. She could play wonderfully on a real piano but often used non-linear editing and manipulation to produce innovative soundscapes. Was it music?

There are other examples where people do all sorts of experimental things with sound and not a single traditional instrument is ever used. Is it art?

My point here is if you don't like something that's fine. It doesn't make you a bad, stupid, or ignorant person. Neither are you those things if you don't understand why people create things or how they choose to do it. Of course, you are free to say what you like, that's your right. But don't be surprised when you are considered ignorant and intolerant when all you have to say is negative and derogatory remarks.

Life is too short to spend energy on things you don't like. Move on past and participate in the things you enjoy and let others enjoy theirs. Or maybe open you mind and give something more than a cursory glance if curiosity gets you, explore, read, listen and learn. You may decide it really isn't for you, but then again you might.
jet88

Showing 4 responses by mahgister

Each act of perception seat on his roots and engender his own "history" and is relativistic in this sense...

But each act of perception could be re-enacted and opened to the revelation of an " absolute" content....

This absolute content is not the relative content of the perception but the awareness of the content and his conscious possible or potential meaning....His "openness"....

Then all perceptions even the more remote or different one could be translated at the right time and linked together...


The human perception of "sound" create music and music is precisely this conscious working translation and communication between cultures and perspectives...

Then relativism is only half of the story.....Like a particular road is half of the journey without the peak of the mountain....

All musical genres or cultures are justified and communicate between one another but some recapitulate conscious moments more easily than others and even integrate all the others more easily...

At the end, music is ONE universal phenomenon transcending and integrating history....


Someone explained that very clearly in the mid last century: Jean Gebser in the "Ever present origin" one of the greatest book ever written in the last hundred years....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Gebser





«If all is relative, the absolute posit itself,it is the relation»-Lanza Del Vasto

«Then there is a hierarchy in music like in all activities but it is not a hierarchy of power but a hierarchy of integrated and integrating vision»- Anonymus Smith

«At the end there is a "sound" that recapitulate us all»-Anonymus Smith

« By all chance, is it a gong sound?»-Groucho Marx 🤓

https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Appearance-Seriously-Dynamic-European/dp/0863159273



The physicist Henry Bortoft elucidated the Goethe vision in 3 books....

There is many way for a WHOLE to desintegrate itself in relative parts, but there is only one way for the parts to be reintegrated in the WHOLE they never ceased to be anyway.....We must transform ourself to perceive truth of the phenomena...They are not "objects" given to us in a passive distribution set for eternity...

Relativism is the error of considering the desintegration process to be the only one and unevitable because the WHOLE is considered to be ONLY the perception of ADDITIVE external parts...

This is a "vision" and consciousness disease, the WHOLE is in the part and shine through it, and to perceive it we must flow ourself with the phenomena and cease to use language and concepts always in an external participation to the phenomena reducing any phenomena to be an external objects, we must be included ourselves in the phenomena and like Goethe said the language and concepts must come and be born with and in the phenomena...

For example in music the "time" is never the time of an external clock ever....It is a flowing, sprouting, rythmical time where all is included even ourselves and the past and future...An internal time and an intemporal duration...The maestro conduct, feeling this time and transmitting it through the right timing wave of his body/soul to all musicians...In jazz improvisation, this is the feeling/perception of this internal time that is the act of playing together.... Then the improvisation reflect not a sum of accidents but a perfect convergence of synchronised events as feelings in each musician...And in the listeners...

The time of the "discovery" or the time of the observation is not always ONLY an external time either...But i already wrote too long post....
😊



«If all is relative, the absolute posit itself, it is the relation»-Lanza Del Vasto

«Creativity erased all relativism»-Anonymus Smith

«No relativism can write the ninth symphony or create infinitesimal calculus, an integrated perceptive vision could»-Anonymus Smith

«True skepticism is not relativism but the "suspension" of judgement»-Anonymus Smith





«If all is relative, the absolute posit itself, it is the relation»-Lanza Del Vasto disciple of Gandhi


Imagine a mountain where the peak could be attained by an indefinite number of roads... One peak and many roads...

Imagine now that the peak is a tone pitch, and each road a voicing of it....

The problem of the existence of the relative and of the absolute is simple, it is a geometry problem in projective geometry....In music it is counterpoint....In number theory the distribution of primes....In spiritual meditation it is a conscious vision....

"relalitivism" on the contrary is an ideological view which is not simple....

Then we must learn to distinguish real problem among unreal one and political agendas....We must also distinguish science and technology, selected roads, going or not to the peak, from the mountain....

 

Music is a way to use sound , taking the awareness level and the emotion level and raising them to their highest conscious possible point...

Music can be used also destructively...

Music of all age and cultures is also an history ,circling around the spirit...Music is not "arbitrary" it is something encompassing the rational and the irrational in a bigger whole....Then a spiritual phenomenon more than a sensible phenomenon...

Ernest Ansermet wrote a thousand pages book on that matter....In french , i think it is not translated ... One of the great book of the century.....


«Music is an hologram of consciousness»-Anonymus Smith

«Even the distribution of primes is pure music»- Physicist Michael Berry in marcus du Sautoy book the music of primes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duVyBVNX3D8
Or this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1FqnfrcWA4
or this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI8T774ygNM

The distribution of primes could be "interpreted" as an hologram of a universal memory, it is not surprizing then that a link with music could be possible...

All memory is music and music is related to the deepest memory and elicit it.... Rythm is universal habits or laws in musical clothes...

In India the tabla player with each part of his palm invoke and provoke a cosmic movement... Rythm is more powerful than meet the eye...Anyway all music is geometry....