Klarinet Archive - Posting 000760.txt from 2004/03

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@------.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Biology, music and ways of thinking
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:25:44 -0500

I will respond ONLY to the musical portion of this post ON-list. My
response to other parts will be off-list.

At 09:45 PM 3/12/2004 +0100, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
>(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*.)

This could well be true. I have often wondered if the color I see as "red"
and what someone else sees as "red" are in fact the same visual image. The
other person may, in fact, see my BLUE, but since he has learned to
identify it as "red" we still both know to stop at the traffic light.

>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.

The question as posed was rather wide open, and your last sentence here was
basically what I had in mind with my response. Substituting tenor saxes for
basset horns in the Gran Partitta would be musically incorrect. And
downright DANGEROUS if Dan Leeson was anywhere around! :-)

Bill Hausmann

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is TOO LOUD!

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