Csound Csound-dev Csound-tekno Search About

Re: [Csnd] Re: Re: Xenakis etc

Date2011-01-21 03:25
From"Partev Barr Sarkissian"
SubjectRe: [Csnd] Re: Re: Xenakis etc

--- badmuthahubbard@gmail.com wrote:

From: Chuckk Hubbard 
To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
Subject: [Csnd] Re: Re: Xenakis etc
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 10:31:20 +0200

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Martin Peach
 wrote:
> On 2011-01-15 15:04, PMA wrote:
>
> ratiocination.

Wow. Good one! :)


>
> And music is not science (where are the testable hypotheses?), so 'theory of
> music' is really ideology. Perhaps a theory of pleasant sounds could be
> scientific though, testable by measuring brain responses of different people
> to sounds.

Well, from what I've heard, psychology can be science, and there's a
decent community interested in music cognition, but I haven't seen
much interest in this from musicians. I tried to replicate an
experiment in college where I played intervals generated by Csound for
musicians and non-musicians and asked them to describe them, and got
similar results, e.g. "a sharp major third" when I played a 12-tET
major third.
======================================================================
^
^<== "The Psychology of Music" by Diana Deutsch is really good reading 
regarding psychology and cognition in music. She does psych at UC San Diego
and does some seminal work on the subject and uses something she calls 
"the tritone test". And she looks at right-handed/left-handedness and how 
it relates to right brain/left brain. And a whole lot of other related stuff.

======================================================================


I see now that "theory" is used in the arts with a different meaning
than in science, and it's used to describe absolutely anything that
isn't "actually doing it". So I've dropped the theory/not-theory
thing, but I still believe modern musicians studying traditional music
theory is like the blind leading the blind. But I'm happy when I hear
good music, one way or another.

-Chuckk