the topic of topics: MIDI vs AUDIO ("what is music"?)

[H20nly]

so in summary: music is in the ear of the beholder.

except for 9V, for whom music is in the creation of a Fruity Loops pattern.

How can we be sure since ninsey volts won't play nice and let us hear the fruity loops pattern....
Wouldn't it be funny if he turned out to be yngwie malmsteen

it would indeed.

i do have to give him credit on some level... like with 3Phase, in that he takes it all in stride very well. meaning that he doesn't seem to lose his temper despite the fact that he is being dogged (because of his own stubbornness, whimsical implications and twisting of numbers, history, and reality) and sticks to his guns regardless of how he claims that they're fully automatic when in reality they are just pink water pistols filled with piss and vinegar. if he realized that his approach is what is making him loathed vs. his notions which have some merit (albeit small and easily attested as perspective rather than fact). so i have to give him bonus points for tenacity.

/random act of good will.

[aisling]

so in summary: music is in the ear of the beholder.

except for 9V, for whom music is in the creation of a Fruity Loops pattern.

How can we be sure since ninsey volts won't play nice and let us hear the fruity loops pattern....
Wouldn't it be funny if he turned out to be yngwie malmsteen

it would indeed.

i do have to give him credit on some level... like with 3Phase, in that he takes it all in stride very well. meaning that he doesn't seem to lose his temper despite the fact that he is being dogged (because of his own stubbornness, whimsical implications and twisting of numbers, history, and reality) and sticks to his guns regardless of how he claims that they're fully automatic when in reality they are just pink water pistols filled with piss and vinegar. if he realized that his approach is what is making him loathed vs. his notions which have some merit (albeit small and easily attested as perspective rather than fact). so i have to give him bonus points for tenacity.

/random act of good will.

Totally agree....It is the messenger that I am annoyed with, not the message. He has made some very astute, correct, and informative points throughout his voyage on the forum....

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear an old professor who had a line something like......"it is better to be assumed a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt......"

[9V]

But "the code" is not universal, as much as you want to believe it is. Musicological studies have long rejected the idea of a single musical "universal." The field of ethnomusicology is virtually based around the precept. There are cultures across the globe that use music as part of the social structure in ways that we simply don't have a direct analog in Western societies. For many cultures the idea of someone being a "musician" is completely foreign to them. They would say, "We call those 'people,'" because in their culture everyone is a musician. You can find tribes making music passed down through oral traditions and it is in no way "tonal" [...] This is why it is virtually impossible, even for a top musicological professional like Bruno Nettl to give one all-encompassing definition of music

This is just a cultural aspect, ("cultural antropology"), but I was talking about the neurophisiological aspects (brain areas). I guess you too believe all humans are created equal. I work with disabled kids as a psychoeducator and for sure I test every day music (the "code") is in our brain as a defensive/adaptative primary function, before language and cognitive development (in particular rhythm and intervals, that is to say the "core" of music language).

Cite some studies to back this up or give up and go away. Your choice, but a youtube video is not going to suffice. Neither is saying "it is obvious." Sorry that's not how science works and if you really are a researcher then you would already know that. I need some citations of some articles from peer reviewed journals to back up what you're saying about this "universal code," because the literature that I have read seems to indicate that while there are certain inherent rhythmic and intervallic "instincts" within humans, that the particulars of such instincts and how they may vary across cultural and geographical lines paint a different picture than this "universal code" you keep yammering on about.

You could start reading about prebirth music esperience (amniotic liquid: vibrations, noises, mother's heartbeat rhythm, breath etc.) in particular Spence and De Casper studies. Read Hepper studies on mother singing and different effects in 2 weeks old children. Regarding the brain areas, read about the so-called "blob cells" in the acoustic cortex (Weeks) and the results in the field of "neuroimage" (eeg, pet etc.). Studies about blind people are important, because they develop a strong spacial "image" of sound. This is a consequence of neural "plasticity". There are studies (see for instance Elbert) regarding the brain modifications in professional musicians (in particular the relationship between brain stimulation and left hand). Another interesting field of research: "absolut pitch" (a brain faculty, very rare) and the way to learn it. You could read Peretz, Colthear, Stewart for the research on brain areas and "musical" psychodeseases ("in italian: "amusia": people who cannot percieve "music" because they have no perception of "unity"), and "amusia" due to brain damage For the rhythm look at the studies of Griffiths (temporal area: heschl; right frontal cortex). Regarding tonal music and brain activation: Warrier (temporal area: memory). Regarding the relationsheep between music and language: Hauser (language units are symbols, musical units are math ratios: these elements are the "key" for pleasure when listening to music).

[stringtapper]

You could start reading about prebirth music esperience (amniotic liquid: vibrations, noises, mother's heartbeat rhythm, breath etc.) in particular Spence and De Casper studies. Read Hepper studies on mother singing and different effects in 2 weeks old children. Regarding the brain areas, read about the so-called "blob cells" in the acoustic cortex (Weeks) and the results in the field of "neuroimage" (eeg, pet etc.). Studies about blind people are important, because they develop a strong spacial "image" of sound. This is a consequence of neural "plasticity". There are studies (see for instance Elbert) regarding the brain modifications in professional musicians (in particular the relationship between brain stimulation and left hand). Another interesting field of research: "absolut pitch" (a brain faculty, very rare) and the way to learn it. You could read Peretz, Colthear, Stewart for the research on brain areas and "musical" psychodeseases ("in italian: "amusia": people who cannot percieve "music" because they have no perception of "unity"), and "amusia" due to brain damage For the rhythm look at the studies of Griffiths (temporal area: heschl; right frontal cortex). Regarding tonal music and brain activation: Warrier (temporal area: memory). Regarding the relationsheep between music and language: Hauser (language units are symbols, musical units are math ratios: these elements are the "key" for pleasure when listening to music).

Good, thanks for the tips. Now have you read anything I suggested for you?

[stringtapper]

From the 2006 article by McDermott and Hauser "Thoughts on an Empirical Approach to the Evolutionary Origins of Music."

First, there is no question that cognitive and neural processes such as those associated with music develop through an interplay between genes and experience.

There's the cultural anthropology that you wanted to throw out the window. Seems like you're not going to be able to.

[9V]

Why "throw out of the window"? These are only two different fields.

[stringtapper]

Why "throw out of the window"? These are only two different fields.

I don't know why you want to throw the cultrual aspects of the debate out the window. It seems your sources in fact wouldn't as per the previous quote I gave and from the conclusion of the McDermott/Hauser article from 2004:

Given the present results, however, we conclude that if humans and nonhuman primates share acoustic preferences for sounds, this capacity evolved more recently than the divergence with New World monkeys such as the cotton-top tamarin (i.e. some 40 million years ago). This conclusion stands in contrast to the many perceptual mechanisms shared between humans and tamarins (and other species as well), particularly with respect to speech perception and presumably also to the discriminability of consonance and dissonance. This contrast raises the possibility that some of the acoustic preferences observed in humans evolved as a specific adaptation for music.

So this would run counter to your assertion that there is a particular "code" inherent in humans, but rather that human tendencies to consider certain sounds pleasing has evolved over time as a result of musical practice. This is why an anthropological angle to this study should not be discounted, but is rather necessary to complement the neuroscience and genetic research.

[9V]

as i said, i work with children and cognitive disabled kids and i test every day the importance of music as an adaptive prelinguistic function. It has nothing to do with "pleasure" for particular sounds. It is something related to movement (of our body: voluntary; heart, breath, eyes: "spontaneous" rhythms) and brain elaboration of the environment. Different fields, your "controversy" is useless. As far as i am concerned "audio" is just a mean to transport prelinguistic codes, music included.

As far as I know, pleasure for music is due to intervals (melodic and harmonic) because they activated mirror-neuronal reflections related to math ratio, our brain reacts producing endorphines (like with velocity, movements, jumps, falls, alternate phases of light-shadow, etc.).

[mbird21]

as i said, i work with children and cognitive disabled kids and i test every day the importance of music as an adaptive prelinguistic function. It has nothing to do with "pleasure" for particular sounds. It is something related to movement and brain elaboration of the environment. Different fields, your "controversy" is useless. As far as i am concerned "audio" is just a mean to transport prelinguistic codes, music included.

As far as I know, pleasure for music is due to intervals (melodic and harmonic) because they activated mirror-neuronal reflections related to math ratio, our brain reacts producing endorphines (like with velocity, movements, jumps, falls, alternate phases of light-shadow, etc.).

For which personal differences aside, i admire you for, helping disabled children or anyone is something i admire so maybe i owe you a apologie for earlier and before that, you arent the moron i thought you were, just the post is still stupid to me but on a personal thing i take it back, for whats its worth.

[mbird21]

Btw agree wow with one point, intervals both melodic and harmonic are what is the harmony with music, harmonic i.e. chords at same time especially for me, what i love about it most

[docprosper]

9V - A great example that challenges your "dogma" is sidechaining, which is embedded in a number of the standard effects that come with Ableton Live, among other standard DAWs for electronic music production. One of the more commonly used types would be sidechain compression, where the peak signal from one audio track is used to modulate the amount of compression on another track. In this simple case, an audio signal rather than midi is used as the control for an effect (the comressor), and this is far more commonly used than some of the (also valid) M4L examples given earlier to challenge your assertions.

When used sparingly, as is often the case in electronic music by "ducking" the bassline - compressing the bassline with the kick drum as the control, primarily to remove "mud" from the mix - one could argue that this is simply sound engineering and not composition. When used more dramatically - overcompressing many/all elements to create a strong "pumping" sound, this technique IMO falls into the realm of composition. Simply put, the entire french house genre is built around this effect, and it is primarily implimented by controlling an effect, in a sequencer, with an audio signal.

[docprosper]

...still?

I know, I know, I just couldn't help it; it seems like such an obvious & simple example that I can't believe it wasn't brought up earlier. Or maybe it was, things got a little fuzzy for me around pg. 30.
-h

[rote fahne]

from chapter XVII Theory of Harmony by A.Schoenberg.

I come now to one of the weakest points of the old harmonic system, to the point where it suddenly abandons its usual procedure and, as I said in Chapter I, is patched up with another system, which is not a system, in order somehow to include the most familiar harmonic events. It is remarkable that this point has not yet occurred to anyone: Harmony, its theory, its pedagogy, is concerned with non-harmonic tones. But non-harmonic matters have just as little place in a textbook of harmony as do non-medical matters in a textbook of medicine. (Significantly, the word medizinfremd is not used.) Whatever belongs in such a textbook is there precisely because it is not non-medical: if it were, it would not be there. The expression, "non-harmonic" tones, I can interpret only to mean that a number of tones are declared unsuitable, or under certain conditions unsuitable, for forming harmonies; that such tones, because they intrinsically lack the ability to form harmonies, i.e. chords (Zusammenklaenge), are designated as having nothing to do with music and consequently are thrown out of the art and out of its theory. For the theory and pedagogy of harmony can deal only with harmonies, tones sounding together (Zusammenklaenge), and could say nothing about what is non-harmonic, or nothing more than that it does not deal with non-harmonic matters. Either there is no such thing as non-harmonic tones, or they are not non-harmonic.

Written in 1911.

[myrnova]

UP (in my opinion this is the only interesting topic, together with the random pics thread). Since the old threads get removed after three years, I think an "UP" can be useful to let it alive.

[Steve Ballmer]

BUMP (in my opinion this is the only interesting topic, together with the random pics thread). Since the old threads get removed after three years, I think an "BUMP" can be useful to let it alive.

FYFP