Re: [Fis] Music Session, kickoff text

Dear Juan,

Many thanks for the insightful opening!

I think you have synthesized the skeleton of a full 'info approach' to the
phenomenon of music. However, entering into concrete responses to the
themes you raise is quite difficult, maybe because of the dense mixing of
biological, cultural, and abstract properties that are interacting within
the global phenomenon of music. At least, I suggest adding a previous
question to your three ones (below): WHY IS MUSIC SO PERVASIVE IN HUMAN
SOCIETIES?

As a brief thought experiment let us deprive contemporary societies of any
music at all. No lullabies, no children songs, no groupal singing, no
ballads-folk-rock-rap..., no dancing... no orchestras, choirs, marches,
anthems, etc. (movies, TV, etc.). Quite many bizarre situations (more than
usual!) would arise. And let us also deprive human societies of two special
instinctive 'musics' of our species: laughter and crying. Indeed social
life would become quite difficult --as it really happens in some daily
environments, but fortunately we can run to appropriate 'refuges'.

What I mean, going to the emotional context and the relationship with
language also addressed in the kickoff, is that music relates to the
emotional support of our social life: making possible the very complexity
of our species 'sociotype'. Our flickering groups --into how many different
groups is each one immersed every day?-- are more or less viable thanks to
the exchange of emotional information that keeps the human interactions
open to other types of pragmatic info.

So, music --like some other arts-- represents in my opinion an enlargement
of the primate emotional textures ('endogenous' social information, so much
developed in our species).

Music may have an abstract development of cultural roots (perhaps like
spoken language, when it gets 'written', allowing a flurry of further
conceptual developments), but it is only after the development and social
accumulation of quite many other info inventions: instruments, specialized
performers, counting, writing, geometry, musical notation, symmetries, etc.

>WHAT IS MUSIC?
>WHY IS THERE MUSIC?
>COULD THERE BE MUSIC ELSEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE?
>
>
>Finally ... I will also speculate on the possibility of musics based on
>carriers other than acoustic waves, e.g., "optical music" with
>electromagnetic waves, and show that it would not be possible to have the
>variety of fundamental attributes so essential for our own musical cultures.

In that regard I wonder whether the 'Visual Arts' (eg, classical painting)
may be considered as genuine forms of 'optical music' and respond to
similar sensory processes and interactions with memories (and partake some
related abstract 'forms').

In further exchanges we should try to progressively fill-in this rich
catalog of open questions (not to forget the relationship of music with
dancing, either)!

best regards

Pedro

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Received on Wed May 7 13:05:11 2003