[Fis] Reply to all

Dear FISers:

I am in a difficult situation in this round of discussions (as I already
had anticipated to Pedro). I am presently again at the Intl. Centre for
Theoretical Physics in Trieste, having to do the work of three weeks in
just one, and I am about to leave for Moscow for a meeting and lectures
during the next ten days. I will be back home in Alaska only on June 5.
Before leaving, however, I do want to make a few statements, hoping that
the discussion will still be going on early June.

I find it difficult under this pressure of time to react clearly and
meaningfully to the various comments and statements made thus far. Much of
what has been said, quite frankly, I do not understand. As I stated in a
previous round last year, I am a humble space physicist and
psychoacoustician who is able to work only with clearly defined (and
directly or indirectly measurable) concepts. For instance, I am not sure
what is meant by “genetic music” or “the relation of the genetic code
structure with music”. I could think of many other sequences and
superpositions of signals in nature for which one can trace analogies with
music. In space physics, for instance, we often take the magnetic tape
record of a given signal (magnetic, electromagnetic, Alfven wave, etc.) and
speed it up or slow it down passing it through a speaker, in order to “hear
out” from among the noise possible periodicities, harmonics, etc. Indeed,
our auditory system is, at least qualitatively, a far better periodicity
detector than any FFT or related computer program! I can well imagine that
if we appropriately code the DNA sequence and “play it” into our ears, we
will be able to discover “musical” structures. My question here is: So
what?? Our auditory system has evolved to discover and identify
periodicities and structures in a very sophisticated way. But if we want to
relate them to music, we must first try to define objectively, and
independently of a particular culture, WHAT MUSIC IS (or, as Rafael says,
answer the question “When do we perceive a sound as music?”). In my
background FIS paper I try to pin down some defining characteristics of
music---please refer to them.

So I ask anyone participating in this FIS discussion to try to address the
following defining questions:

1. Can you explain the role of the almighty octave and chroma?
2. Can you explain the role of scales and the reason why musical tone
sequences proceed in quantized steps?
3. Can you explain the decreasing sense of consonance as one goes from
octave to fifth, fourth, third, etc.?
4. Can you explain tonality and the sense of return?
5. Can you explain why “abstract patterns of music shake hands with
emotional reactions” (Pedro)?

I think that today all of the above can be linked with the particular
information-processing operations of the physiological and neural acoustic
system (1-4 above) and with the cooperative, coherent interplay between the
cognitive (cortical) and affective (subcortical) functions of the human
brain (5 above). I would welcome any challenging counter-opinions.

One more remark that would fit into the above, concerning a statement by
Luis Serra. He mentions the effect of major hemisphere stroke traumas
leading to loss of speech but leaving unimpaired the perception of music.
He views this as an example in favor of the thesis “music first, language
later". Well, there are abundant examples of amusias, caused by traumas to
the minor hemisphere in musicians who have lost many or all their musical
abilities with no impairments of speech and language! Each cerebral
hemisphere has separate, but cooperating, information-processing strategies
(sequential vs. integral), which, if impaired, have different effects on
either speech or music. There is ample literature on this (see also my book
Physics and Psychophysics of Music, Pringer Verlag, 1995, last chapter).

I look forward to participating in the discussion when I return form Russia.

Cheers,

Juan

-- 
Juan G. Roederer
c/o Director's Office
The Abdus Salam 
International Centre for Theoretical Physics
Strada Costiera 11
34014 Trieste
Italy
+39-040-2240232
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