Mr. Johnson is a low church musician, yet his musical ability should satisfy even the most high church among us. He’s on anyone’s list of the world’s greatest living guitarists. Shema and I saw him last year–I first saw him in the 80’s– and he was top-notch, a true musical pioneer who refused to play his hits and rather played all new music, with few exceptions. This angered a few in the crowd around us, but I thought it spoke well of him.
Regardless, did you notice the astounding range of tone in the clip above generated by one musician limited to one setup? Let’s dispense with the standard joke, first.
Do you know how to shut a guitarist up? Give him sheet music 🙂 Read More
Scita>Scienda has posted its response, a very genteel and mannerly response I might add, to the first installment here of Music and Mathematics. Since, chronologically, I am forced to utilize the word response with regard to the S>S post, it’s going to lend a modicum of credence to CD’s insistence that she is simply reacting to the gauntlet cast by the mean ol’ Areopagus. Oh well, I did say that music is not about mathematics. So, before we move on to part II, let’s do some housecleaning…
CD’s come to our hapless engineer’s defense…you remember, the one that said everything could be explained by mathematics. Now, CD’s a clever person, intelligent, and one the very best writers around. No kidding. Despite her valiant effort, however, our hapless engineer is still, well, hapless to explain everything through mathematics. The proffered formula is:
Unfortunately, we haven’t explained anything with this formula. It’s really no different than saying X=X. We’ve designated a symbol, a mathematical symbol no doubt, to represent everything and then simply claimed that it equals itself. If I were to state in English everything equals everything, you would no doubt agree, but still want to know what everything means or is. You would want an explanation, in other words. I’m still waiting for a demonstration of explanation of everything through mathematics. And I’ll wait forever, because not even God can explain everything through mathematics. To demonstrate this, let’s reduce the request from everything to a subset of everything: love for instance. Or laughter. Or the beauty of a sunset. Or music. Or to really be a philosophic pain, God himself. Any takers?
Secondly, the idea that coolness is a property of music was utilized to make and have fun, not to be a formal part of the argument. It worked, too. You go to Youtube and search for the worst musical memories of the past. It’s great fun. Nevertheless, I’m not certain it’s not an interesting argument. There’s certainly an objective correlation in the real world. Consider the following: the term cool is generally thought to have arisen in the 1930’s in conjunction with the American jazz scene. Though the specifics are arguable, the general historical fact is not. Thus, we have objective evidence of a term and a movement correlated with specific musical forms: jazz, blues, R&B, etc. This would tend to argue against the relativity of coolness, as CD has suggested. She’s within her rights to consider whatever she wants as cool, but to do so she’s relativising the definition of the term, not identifying a relativism inherent within the word itself, which has objective grounding within a historical context. Granted, there are a hundred factors at play within the historical context, so this is probably a book’s worth of study and not a blog argument.
We also have objective evidence of other musical forms that pre-existed jazz, blues, R&B, etc., for centuries. Fact is, classical music simply never engendered coolness as a movement. These guys understand that. But notice the interesting thing the guy on the left says at the 30 second mark: the interesting thing is that Luther has not changed the notes, just the rhythm’s a little different, so it’s exactly the way Bach wrote it, with a little swing to it..isn’t that nice?
The difference is obvious, even down to the foot tapping at the 145 mark, the dixieland blaring of the horns, the movements and body language of the horn players, and the runs at the end. Now, here’s the interesting thing, as mentioned in the video. The notes haven’t changed. If we insist on considering coolness as part of the argument from here on out, this probably represents the best launching pad from which to proceed.
Music is a sound. It’s the vibration of air particles at various frequencies and wavelengths. However, it’s not unordered, random sound, nor is it strictly repetitive sound, so its physics fail to sum it. It is a sound with intelligent design behind it. At the same time, it’s not a transmitter of specific information, such as the phrase, “this is cool.”
So, I’m in general agreement with this statement. I’d like to alter the word information, however. Music does in fact transmit mood; we may argue how specific this mood is, but it seems to me that mood is definitely transmitted by music, or, better stated, mood often occurs in the confluence of music and our perception of it. Consider the following two videos, not chosen for religious relevance, though the clip is one of the best:
I know there are some extra variables involved and some significant differences between the two clips. But…did you feel the difference? Where does this difference arise from? Is it a property of the music itself? Do we as observers lend something to the music? Does God add something? This question should prove critical as we proceed. In fact, S>S seems to indicate so, in a very genteel and mannerly manner:
The ultimate question is one of that ineffable entity, beauty, and its presence in a world which, in its naturalistic quantifications, does not account for any such thing. However, I intend to demonstrate that to claim certain qualitative properties as essential to music is in fact a naturalistic expression…
With this in mind, let’s try another set. This time try to ignore the pictures. Actually, try closing your eyes…
I’m going to assume we all acknowledge the difference in mood that occurs when we listen to different musics. So, the question is, why? I have three potential candidates that should represent a fair range of possibilities. If there’s another good candidate, let me know:
1. The mood is created by God in our minds according to some sort of occasionalism. I don’t expect to encounter any occasionalists, so let’s move on.
2. We as humans add something to the music itself through our perception of it. In some sense, this most assuredly must be the case, but will be able to account for the correlation of our moods so consistently to different types of music? We could posit cultural and learned influences, but it seems evident to me that people of all tribes and nations in all eras will not be dancing joyfully to the eerie clip above. I can’t prove that, but it seems intuitively the case, much more so than the notion that that clip could inspire frolicking, dancing, and joy. It’s the sort of thing we might attribute to devils.
And in the absence of any good reason to think there might exist a sane, rational, and sober human culture that would dance and frolic to morose, slow dirges and become saddened by upbeat, bright tunes played in major scales, option two does not seem plausible. [EDITOR’S NOTE: lawyers never ask questions they don’t know the answer to, and arguers never assert things they don’t know or believe strongly to be true. If I know CD, she’s got some weird culture socked away that does this very thing. Well, so be it…just some advice in case you’re engaged in a non-genteel, non-mannerly argument.] Note the weirdness that ensues when happy music is played behind videos of deranged clowns;–a staple of the horror flick–a sort of vertigo sets in. Why? Because it’s not natural. The music has been altered with conflicted visual cues that contradict what the music indicates by its essence.
3. There is an inherent property of music that is the best explanation for the phenomenon of mood. There is designed into the intervals, chords, scales, and I’d argue the rhythms, a property that affects us in certain ways, not much differently than the manner in which the wavelength of red strikes our perception. The flatted third and sixth (in context with the correct key, mind you) creates the minorish mood because it is minorish. The blue notes are blue notes because they were created that way; here they stand, they can do no other. It was created to be that way, and when we experience it properly, we act in accordance with God’s design for us.
Interestingly, there are mathematical expressions for intervals, chords, scales, and rhythms. The salient point is that the mathematics do not cause mood. Math is a descriptor of a physical reality created by God, much in the same way that red can be represented mathematically as a wavelength.
Now, we escape naturalism easily enough. God created music as it is to affect us as it does. No naturalistic dead-end there.
Another benefit of this view is that it answers the age-old question of which musics are good, and which musics are evil. Accordingly, none of them are evil. Even the eerie piece above seems to have an appropriate place in describing evil, say behind the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness perhaps, or maybe for portions of Revelation. And, well, if there are pieces that are highly sexual, and there are, you can answer for yourself if there are appropriate places for those. What we know for sure is that they’re not proper in the teen-age Sunday meeting hall. It’s lyrics that do the dirty work, through specific information, if I may cite a top-notch blog. And, of course, our sinful application of the wrong musical forms to the wrong situations.
It seems to me, lastly, that option three indeed offers us the best avenue to a non-naturalistic view of music. If we add the mood through our perception, it may perhaps be accounted for by a quirk of our neural firing, or a merely human conception of the physical universe that is not quite adjusted correctly, though we would still face the consistency challenge. But if three is correct, and the property arises from within the intervals, it appears plausible that it be a property that is extra-physical; one that cannot be adequately accounted for by physical means. Non-specific information on the medium, so to speak…
At any rate, option three appears to be the most promising at first blush to me. Next time, let’s look at tone, that most beautiful and inexplicable property of music.
I once had an engineer tell me that everything could be explained by mathematics. I promptly asked him to rephrase his assertion in a mathematical formula. I’m still waiting…
Here, I’m answering a similar question: Can music be explained by mathematics? I think not, and I intend to offer a couple of posts why I’ve come to this conclusion.
Admittedly, while I have great respect for classical music, I’m a “low-church” musician. To that end, consider the Lightning Boy:
There may exist a handful of cool mathematicians; what’s certain is that their mathematics are incapable of describing to us what is cool and what is not with regard to music. The property of coolness–one that is attached to certain musics but not all–does not reduce to equations. Nor shall it. As we proceed with this discussion, I’ll identify other properties of music that are not reducible to mathematics as well, and I’ll argue that they are just as important to music as the mathematically described properties of rhythm and interval. For now, though:
