Sound and music

As an aside...

the best book i read about music/sound for decade is a book by a nigerian acoustician studying Yorumba talking drum and speech  at his beginning ..

It was painful for him and very hard to be published his doctorate thesis about "sound sources" the title of his book, Akpan J. Essien ...Too much original and too much out of the main common  walked road...

This book is astonishing, after being rejected In UK universities it was accepted at the Paris Sorbonne as thesis of the highest interest ...

Very interesting criticizing 2500 years of acoustic theory from Pythagoras to Helmholtz...

And i think he is right...hIs book tell us about the missing link in sound which is the vibrating sources  and this book is not far from new hearing theory based on ecological Affordance theory as J. J. Gibson created it for the visual field  and based on the non linear structure of the ears/brain working in the natural ecological niche of natural sounds perception in the time dependant domain , excluding any abstract frequencies based theory of hearing as unsifficient as explained by Magnasco and Oppenheim  ... Sound sources with their qualities are as real as the  physical sound waves they generated and our body is synchonized to them by our ability to produce sound with speech act or with our  integral body ...

https://www.academia.edu/54667709/The_Unfounded_Foundation_of_Hearing_Sciences?auto=download

Western culture in general admit and claim with his reductionist bias on the one hand and also with his Platonic opposite bias on the other hand, disconnected from one another that music is in the "physical waves" or /and in the abstract numerical ratio...( Goethe, Husserl and Whitehead are not in this game for example )

Music is in the vibrating body sound sources and in the productive gesturing body acting on it in some way to let him speak his own language ... Qualities come in time and in pre-conscious sensation way before the reflective post thinking or theorizing conscious moment ...

This drum TALK because the "drummer" a master, listen to his instrument and do not merely play it for another reason other than talking with it...

The source of music is in the productive gesturing body...But it is true even in piano interpretation of written classical music ...Musical time is a dual dimension of his own, completely different of physical metronomical unidimensional time...Pianist must play and interpret or better said EXPRESS themselves and the written score in this dual time dimension where the emotional body live and it is not written in the score how to do it...

Nobody taught the heart how to beat or how to talk ...Human speech gesture is born with music gesture...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4oQJZ2TEVI

Then you are right...

@mahgister

I suspect this physiological/vibrational aspect tends to be overlooked in western culture!

You have a point here...

Music is organized sound by an expressive gesture ( of the musician ) recorded not only a s playing memory in the brain but engrammed in the body as a "wave" of emotion answering by the body gesture of the listener to the playing body of the musician...

Music is sensible meaning incarnated in sound body which live in time more than in space...

it’s as if the music is playing me,

If you hear a melody on a recording and later "re-play" it in your head, does it lose its "significance"?

Music is way more than connecting the written notes...

Musical times had two dimensions and two flowing directions not one dimension and one direction as physical time...Thermodynamic dont govern musical world...

No written score can display the method and the means to translate these two interacting dimensions...

The artist must touch the vertical time with his heart , going there or/and coming from there , for the melody to be born and live without dying in the horizontal metronomical measurable time ...

This pianist plays with his pulsating heart sounds coming and going from physical time into vertical time.... The melody surge from his hand/heart not from the written score at all and anyway dont grow in the horizontal time as all Scriabin piano works...very diffricult to play , not so much by the virtuosity asked for but by the pulsating vertical dimension which must be manifested...

For me as i feel it, rythm is in the horizontal time direction but expressive pulsation is on the vertical direction...Rythm flow but varied pulsations dont flow they surge as the playings grow... It is difficult to put in words... 😊 I am not a distinguished musician as the OP but a listener... It is my experience only...

For sure when we live in musical time feeling it, the sound quality dimension is secondary...Music is meaning embodied in sound, as our soul is embodied here...it is better tob have a beautiful body with a beautiful soul...  

Joseph Vila playing Scriabin :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prLYVTBOPPk&t=309s

A thread is what we do with it...

It can be boring with a post like this :

This topic has been discussed adnauseum just titled differently

or it can be interesting if someone add positively his contribution..

No other thread about this matter refer as in my post to the two dimensions of musical time by the way...

Then this thread can become interesting with interesting posters...

It is better to thanks the OP for the discussion instead of writing negative meaningless boring  post...

Great question and a good one...Thanks for asking...

For me my goal was all along my life , because i love music, reach a more than just good level of S.Q.

Because every classical works in particular, win to be listened at the best S.Q.possible...

For example, one of my favorite works is the eight book of madrigals by Monteverdi...

My favorite version is with Miroslav Venhoda, i listened to it for 50 years... Believe it or not, i only hear it completely with my speakers/acoustic room completed and now with my TOP headphone system...I waited 50 years...

Now i was never in the game of purchasing as many in  audio hobby... My hobby was acoustic for 2 years... My journey is now completed...

Music is now  my hobby with books and riding bicycle...

With music we dont need S.Q. but it is better with, even with bad recordings because we are able to catch more of the playing "hues" ...

I am happy beyond anything i ever dream about, because i succeeded with a low cost system to reach the top... I come here to discuss with friends but i am not in the audio upgrading game and i never was...Once realized  a very good S.Q. music is the only focus...Each evening music session is an ectasy, nevermind the musical choices...

My very best to you....