complex simplicity - Page 2

 

Edited by Orubasarot - 1/10/11 at 10:11pm

Right on!!

Wow!! You are insane. I love it.

periurban: That's the whole point, isn't it? No art form or sub-genre or individual piece can be said to have anything about it that makes it intrinsically of greater worth or value than any other.

Art: It is a matter of percentage of the good in any genre. Is 75 percent of the "best " in pop as good as 75 percent of the "best" of classical? There is bad and good in both, or any, genre.

periurban: There are a huge number of reasons why one person finds one piece of music appealing and another not so. The complexity of the music (even if it could be said to objectively exist) has little to do with it.

Art: Not really. Experience in music listening, some personality variables such as intellectual and evaluative ability, one's memory bank of all their life's experiences, as well as the characteristics of the music stimuli as played, determine the appeal of the music.

Musical complexity could be mathematically assessed and ranked as to number of melody lines (main and supporting), interactions among these, and changes within any one such melody line. Those of lesser intellectual ability to integrate complex stimuli would be less likely to like complex music than others.

This is a fantastic thread. If I had gone about things in a different manner, my "Classical is best" thread would have began with statements instead of questions, and the statements would have been akin to this thread's Original Post.

Great insight, periurban, I applaud you.

It's nice to see people agreeing here instead of arguing, too. After the Classical thread fiasco I had assumed people on this site were hopeless when it came to issues such as this, but perhaps not. They just needed someone more articulate than I. Enter periurban!

actually, i disagreed with every single one of periurban's points. still do. but i don't consider either myself or periurban 'hopeless.'

genres and complexity are irrelevent to one another. complexity, regardless of genre, can indeed be benchmarked. music is a mathematical endeavor, therefore, its complexity can be objectively quantified. it can even be argued that john cage's 4'33" is based on a formula.

your valuation of music, unlike the complexity itself, is subjective, not objective. i made this argument originally. complexity absolutely can be applied to the listening experience. when i hear stereolab seemlessly shift from a 5/4 beat to a 6/8, i appreciate the mathematical concept as well as the relative complexity as compared with a straight 4/4 beat. my intellectual appreciation is heightened further when i listen to Eric Dolphy's free jazz. In fact, my applied value increases in proportion to the increase in complexity, especially because the complexity of dolphy's music is something beyond my current capacity to understand it.

you say that "complexity has nothing to do with the value of a piece of music." that's a purely subjective statement that i happen to disagree with. i place a high value on complexity. that's not to say there isn't simple music which i enjoy and value, but that value is measured independent of its complexity, not because or in spite of it.

it could be argued... and in fact it was argued. by me. in my original post.

you seem to be equating randomness with complexity. chance is an interesting device by which to compose music, but any complexity arising from it is purely, well... by chance. if, however, something such as chaos theory and fractal geometry is applied to a music composition, complexity in that case would indeed become a factor. but randomness and complexity are not related.

meaning for the listener arrives through the listening process... meaning for the composer can arrive through the composition process. a piece of music can indeed exist exclusive of performance of it, albeit only in part. a transcription, like a an artist's sketch, is in fact a piece of art, even if it isn't a fully realized one.

sculptures, paintings, and again... life itself... are all things to be consumed uniquely by the consumers. however, all of these things have concrete, indisputable elements that are objectively complex to varying degrees, and that are present whether or not the experiencer observes/values/experiences them.

so there you have it. i pretty much disagree with the entire concept.... but i still have hope for you.

Yeah, most people did Ah well, it happens.

Well I for one don't understand Art's rationale at all. I love some rap music, I love metal, I love techno and psychedelic trance, and my IQ is quite a bit higher than 80 I also scored above 90th percentile on every test I took except the SAT.

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Well, my personal experience has been that there's many types of complexity. Rythmic, harmonic, melodic, etc. Classical is more harmonically complex than most Prog Rock, but Prog Rock is going to be way moer complex with its time signatures than many classical pieces. I spoke of this in my CLassical thread, but of course no one responded to it.

prove this.

A formula for silence? I highly doubt that.

Yes, *you* place a value on complexity. But you are not God He was saying that, objectively, a piece isn't "better" just because it's more complex. This is fact. Simple music is just as "good" as complex music, whether you have an opinion otherwise or not. Music simply exists. It's humans who put value judgements on it. Now, certain music may be more complex than others in certain ways (see above), but again that simply means a difference in complexity, which really has nothing to do with enjoyment or value. It's we, as the listener, who put the enjoyment and value into the music when we listen to it.

That's ridiculous. You are claiming that complexity has to be *intended* for it to be valid? And who says whether or not it's "valid"? you? Again, who made you God? lol. all music is valid on it's own grounds. period. That is not arguable... complexity is what it is, whether or not it was intentionally derived.

I was under the impression that based on our knowledge of Quantum mechanics, the very nature of existence changes when observed by a conscious entity. "objective" is quickly becoming an archaic term when it comes to the discussion of physical sciences. Much, much , much is based upon the subjective experience and processing of the individual human consciousness, or even human consciousness as a whole (string theory). not many things (if any) are disconnected from that fact. The observers of a painting can be as much a part of the work of art as the painter. It just depends on the situation.