captblaze
Headphoneus Supremus
There are a lot of headshrinkers in this thread!
not really, but there is a case study in tribalism afoot
There are a lot of headshrinkers in this thread!
The one extreme is the believer of personal perception without question; I hear it therefore it’s true. The other swing determines all perception somewhat false or questionable. We may never have ever gain the answer to our quest to understand the placebo and the expectation bias?
alright, I can spin this back into the topic. cool.The one extreme is the believer of personal perception without question; I hear it therefore it’s true. The other swing determines all perception somewhat false or questionable. We may never have ever gain the answer to our quest to understand the placebo and the expectation bias?
That's not what any of us said.We have the group who sincerely does not believe anyone has sound quality memory
Understanding perception, or at least finding out about our ideas of perception is fascinating. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud both kind-of share the right and left pillars of modern day psychology knowledge and respect.
Of course, all this can be solved by applying the scientific method such as DBT et al., but since you folks refuse to do it, without testing, well..........
Regardless of how Jung or Freud are regarded today, I'm not sure psychology is the right place to be looking, unless you're looking for why some people have completely irrational beliefs and argue them so vociferously, even when presented with obvious facts! Psychology is a very broad field which has difficulty fully explaining even how we perceive the real world around us, let alone our particular situation, which is effectively: Listening to an aural illusion (an audio recording) of a thoroughly abstract entity (music).
As music is essentially the manipulation of aural expectation biases, the place I'd look would be those responsible for manipulating aural expectation biases (composers) and where I'd start would be the "Ars Nova" movement. Literally meaning "new art" (or style), it was a quite sudden and shocking departure from the previous style, as it incorporated polyphony (chords/harmonic progressions) which allowed a far greater range of musical expressiveness (aural biases manipulation). It was intended to be performed by specialists for connoisseurs and was actually offensive to most of those who weren't, but it formed the fundamental basis of all the western music that followed. Machaut (1300-1377) is a defining composer of "Ars Nova". From there on to Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg, Cage and Stockhausen. Even by the time of Palestrina (~200 years after Machaut) the complexity of aural manipulation was impressive and a good understanding of Bach (another ~100 years later) is only really covered today in Degree or higher courses, even though it's ~300 years ago! The last 3 mentioned are interesting because they didn't just bend the rules and advance the manipulation of aural expectation biases but threw the rules out the window and completely broke them (or tried to!). Obviously, there are numerous other notable/great composers between these few but these are arguably the most important/pivotal/influential.
Who says we refuse to do it? I've repeatedly measured numerous bits of kit over long periods, from first use to about 20 years in some cases. Both solid state and electro-mechanical (my monitors). Every piece of solid state device I've ever measured has always measured identically (or at least to within a margin of error which was inaudible), up until the time it failed. The difference between brand new and 20 year old monitors was so tiny as to also be within a margin of error (and could be nothing at all, just down to a different measurement mic). Of course, I can't extrapolate that to every piece of consumer kit ever sold, even though various colleagues have similar measurement observations to mine, but I would need some reliable evidence and a rational explanation of how/why burn-in should occur (to audible levels), neither of which I recall ever seeing. Is this not applying the scientific method?
G
Who says we refuse to do it? I've repeatedly measured numerous bits of kit over long periods, from first use to about 20 years in some cases. Both solid state and electro-mechanical (my monitors). Every piece of solid state device I've ever measured has always measured identically (or at least to within a margin of error which was inaudible), up until the time it failed. The difference between brand new and 20 year old monitors was so tiny as to also be within a margin of error (and could be nothing at all, just down to a different measurement mic). Of course, I can't extrapolate that to every piece of consumer kit ever sold, even though various colleagues have similar measurement observations to mine, but I would need some reliable evidence and a rational explanation of how/why burn-in should occur (to audible levels), neither of which I recall ever seeing. Is this not applying the scientific method?
G
Speaking of new and offensive, Varese was given the job of making music for the Philips Corp.
I've been at classical concerts where they'd have Brahms or Beethoven in the first half and Varese or Cage afterwards and a lot of the audience ran out of the theater at intermission.
At the extreme of human expression and “art” could be the most offensive example of “behavior” used as communication of style and coolness. This form of out-do-man-ship is still in use today and appears to create even more value regardless of how garish it all is.
People on stage biting live birds, gyrations of hips, breathing fire......the list of antics is long and would make Barnum and Bailey proud. Yet somehow this offensiveness shows little regard for mainsteam acceptance or approval? It’s the rebellious nature which could actually be pinned on Stockhausen, Cage and the likes of Varèse.
Not uncommon. The same would probably have happened at an Ars Nova performance 700 years ago, except that as far as I/we know, the repertoire was exclusively Ars Nova and the invited audience had a good idea what they were letting themselves in for. We also have to consider that audience "expectation" evolves, Beethoven's 9th Symphony is about as institutionalised as it gets, there's hardly a more quintessential piece of classical music in existence but that's just according to today's (and a century or so's) "expectations". In it's day (1824) it was shocking/revolutionary, some did not even recognise it as music, Ruskin famously commented that it "sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer. ", while some other critics believed that the "wild frenzy" was due to Beethoven's deafness or a madness caused by his deafness!
Today, Ars Nova music sounds pretty boring and it's almost impossible to appreciate how revolutionary and offensive it was. The only clues we have is that the Roman Catholic church (which was all powerful at the time) was so outraged that it eventually made certain aspects of Ars Nova illegal to compose or perform, on pain of death.
Although closely related, I think we have to separate outrageous behaviour of performers from offensiveness of the composition itself. The earliest example of outrageous performer behaviour I can think of is Paganini, who at the end of a performance emulated the "braying of a donkey" on his violin, an insult aimed at the noisy, unappreciative audience. Audiences at the time were accustomed to being respected and took none to kindly to being insulted by a lowly musician. Pretty tame by today's standards but 200 years ago the audience were so outraged they rushed the stage and Paganini had to run for his life to avoid being lynched! Far more recently, we have the famous hip girations of Elvis, the antics of The Who, the irreverence of the Sex Pistols (both their behaviour and their music), Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Beastie Boys and numerous other examples.
The big thing with Rock and Roll was that for the first time a music genre was specifically aimed at a much younger audience, which resulted in the "rise of the teenagers", who in the 1950's had started to become, for the first time, a large and potentially powerful commercial and cultural demographic. Although rebelliousness had been a part of western music evolution for centuries, the "rebelliousness of adolescence" was reflected in the music and often deliberately avoided "mainstream [older generation, "the establishment"] acceptance or approval" purely for it's own sake, rather than as a (realised) consequence of musical innovation.
The music of Hendrix is an excellent example. Many at the time could not appreciate it as music, thinking instead it was just noise. In fact he had to come to Britain for recognition, after years of trying in the US. Of course later, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists ever to have lived, but that was later. He's also an excellent example because he brings us full circle. The opening of Purple Haze is a tritone, a known and usually avoided "unstable" polyphonic device in Ars Nova (and even earlier), that was eventually outlawed by the church for several centuries. Later, in the Romantic Period, it's use became fairly common, although only in specific circumstances but it was used far more freely by the early C20th modernisists.
What I find interesting is that the general public has such an archaic understanding of music theory/harmony. Of course, most have heard of it but don't know what it is but even those (of the general public) who do know what it is, appear stuck at a surprising point in time. This is probably due to the way music theory/harmony is taught in school and the fact that Rock and other popular genres (though not all sub-genres) employ incredibly simplistic harmony and harmonic structures. Off the top of my head, I can't think of another area where the general understanding of something (where there is some) stops at a point reached by 1400's! Of course, music theory and harmony itself did not stop in the 1400s, in fact, that's just the start of it.
It might seem that there's a massive gulf between the music of say Debussy and Varese but really it's just a fairly small step. Although it’s might sound fairly conventional and pleasant enough, Debussy (and the other impressionists) had pushed the rules of harmony right up to their breaking point and even, for very brief moments, just beyond. So, the next step was inevitable and is far more like "the straw that broke the camel's back" than the huge gulf that it appears. To many, it might seem that Cage, Varese, Stockhausen, et al., got completely lost in some drug fuelled madness of mathematics, cutting-edge philosophy, technological toys and acoustic experiments that had little or nothing at all to do with actual music. But, that's not what really happened, it just appears that way because they effectively see Debussy et al., as more closely related to C15th composers than to the composers of just a couple of decades later, due to the fact that they don't appreciate 400 years of development of music theory/harmony and exactly how complex it had become. Asking a degree music student to harmonically analyse a piece by Debussy (et al.) is actually akin to a "trick question"! Good fun to watch them try though
G
Anyone else notice this forum has started to smell like pachouli and clove cigarettes?
[1] Hymnen actually has a German title which translates directly as national anthems; as part of the underlying score was found recorded national anthems, sounding like they were recorded off the radio, then mixed with music concrete and electronic elements.
[2] How experimental music scientist Pierre Henry could put such a song together stands out among the many electronic and electronic serialism composers? Surly Arnold Schoenberg would have never found anything like this music? But here it is.
[3] Still it has to be Terry Riley mentioned of course. Attending a rare piano only concert at UCLA.......... a complete 360 degree return to politeness and conservative musical form, yet still abstract.
[4] Back onto the off topic topic, probably this list simply shows that creativity is always new. That it somehow can’t reflect back but has to cut a new path,