Klarinet Archive - Posting 000733.txt from 2004/03

From: "Joseph Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling@------.net>
Subj: [kl] Biology, music and ways of thinking
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:45:22 -0500

Hello all,

Since it was my post on "Biologically correct ??" which sparked off the
whole resumption of the gay marriage debate, perhaps I should apologize to
the list.

I was hoping that what would be recognized was that I wasn't really talking
about the rights or wrongs of homosexuality or associated issues, but about
*ways of thinking*---ways of approaching ideas and issues and information in
order to understand them better. I hope you don't mind if I take the time
to try and explain these ideas a bit better, because I think it's actually
potentially important from a musical point of view too.

What motivated me to reply to Bill Hausmann in the first place wasn't so
much the opinions he was displaying but more the inclination to try and
justify himself with statements like "biologically correct" which, when one
examines them, simply don't add up. Bill has tended to say that these
things are "obvious" to him.

This "obvious" is a dangerous thing. Dangerous because of what it means
about the thinking process: everything has been explained in terms of
existing knowledge. So it begs the question, "How *much* knowledge went
into the construction of this 'obvious'?" If we know little, it's easy for
things to be "obvious" when in fact if we examine our ideas in detail we
don't know enough to make any definitive statement.

Take, say, "The visual system was designed to SEE". Well, you do see with
your visual system, it's an undeniable fact. So based on this knowledge,
it's perhaps "obvious" that the system was designed to see. But if you
examine the problem in more detail, it's not obvious at all. There are
various things the visual system does where it's not at all obvious that
this was what the system was "designed" to do.

For example, a friend of mine is working in the field of computer vision,
designing computer programs that can interpret data from a camera. One of
the problems he is working on is the question of how we perceive *texture*.
How do you go from simply a pattern of many different colours to a 3D sense
of surface? The history is that I met this guy at a computational
neuroscience conference last August, which I was attending along with a
colleague. Because the pair of us were concerned with how biological neural
systems work, my new computer-vision friend started bombarding us with
questions on how the brain might solve this problem of texture-perception,
and more, *why*---what evolutionary advantage might it have been to perceive
texture?

What my colleague pointed out to him was that it's actually unlikely that
there is a direct evolutionary advantage in this regard, and that he should
be thinking, not of the problem itself---texture perception---but something
much more basic. Biologically speaking, what is likely is that the
processes in our brain which perceive texture were developed to solve some
other problem entirely and simply *happened* to have this effect when they
were plugged into the visual system. The various sonic and visual illusions
we perceive might well also be artifacts left over from the fact that the
processes at work weren't originally developed to handle visual or sonic
data.

(Forgive me, but I can't resist a plug here: and it is the first obviously
musically relevant part of this discussion. The colleague I mentioned has
published some recent research on perceiving the pitch of complex sounds.
What his model suggests is that perceived pitch is less a representation of
the waveform and more an "artifact" of stochastic processes inside neurons.
More loosely, it suggests that we hear things different from the actual
sound wave because the systems we use to hear *weren't designed for the
purpose of hearing*.)

... Back to the Plot, which concerns the word "obvious". This rather
long-winded discussion of biological issues basically comes down to
something simple: it is important to be aware of how much you know before
you start drawing conclusions. I've illustrated this in terms of biology,
because that was the impetus for this whole piece of writing, but I think
it's also important in music.

Take, say, the Copland clarinet concerto. Now a simplistic approach to this
piece is to say, "Well, the finale sounds like jazz." Next thought: "It
sounds even more like jazz if you swing it." Conclusion: "It's meant to
sound like jazz, so obviously you should swing it."

... But if you examine the musical text properly, it's *not* obvious,
because not only does Copland not write it swung initially, but later on
there is a passage where it is *explicitly written out* with the rhythmic
values of "swing". So if *this* passage is written swung, and the previous
passages *aren't* ... ?

Another example is that of editors of musical scores who have taken it upon
themselves to correct "obvious" errors on the part of the composer, and have
done this *without* acknowledging what they have done. This has left us in
a situation of having works where we simply don't have an adequate idea of
what the composer really wrote.

The other issue I wanted to raise in my original post to Bill was to do with
the term "correct". Wayne T. said that a scientist doesn't make judgements
about "correct" or otherwise, but that wasn't really the fundamental point I
was trying to make. What I think is much more important is that judgements
are about "correct" are inherently context-dependent. Biologically
speaking, what seems like "incorrect" behaviour from one narrow viewpoint
may be very sensible from another point of view. For example there's one
seagoing organism that spends the first part of its life floating about in
the sea, and the later part attached to a rock. When it finds the rock and
attaches itself, it does something almost unbelievable: it *eats its own
brain*. Yet this is biologically very "correct" because from the moment it
attaches itself to the rock, its brain is of no more use to it and is simply
consuming extra resources.

I posed this in the context of music: "Is there such a thing as 'musically
correct'?" Again, the simplistic view is to say "Of course there is!" But
when you examine it in detail, it's not so. What is "musically correct" in
Mozart is not so in Brahms or Handel, still less so in Stravinsky or Boulez,
or in jazz, or in Gamelan or rock music, or the different styles of African
drumming. "Musically correct" is only possible relative to individual
performance situations.

(Paul McCartney was asked a few years back why he had started writing
"classical" music. He replied something along the lines of, "Well, in the
music I play, if you're playing a D chord and someone plays a Bb, that's
wrong. But in classical music, you can have a D chord and a Bb and it can
be right and you can do something interesting with it.")

As a practical example, consider this: when I was starting to play the
clarinet, my first teacher told me that the "correct" way to play low E was
to hold down the F key with the RH little finger and the low E key with the
LH little finger. (Never mind that switching the little fingers would have
worked just as well. In fact I originally tried fingering it just with the
RH low E key and she told me explicitly NOT to do that.) She told me that I
should do it like this because if I didn't, the holes wouldn't close
properly. It took me a long time to get out of the mental block this
instruction placed on me, mainly because I didn't even start *noticing* it
until I'd reached a relatively high level of performance. Think about the
difference between saying, "This is CORRECT" and saying, "Well, if you do it
like *this* it's useful for xxxx, and like *this* is useful for yyyy, and
..." I think this difference is actually worth remembering when one thinks
about *any* situation in life, but especially in music.

Anyway, my apologies for the extreme length of this post; if anyone actually
reaches the end, I probably owe you a pizza! But I hope these ideas might
be worthwhile.

-- Joe

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