Klarinet Archive - Posting 001275.txt from 2004/03

From: "Joseph Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Musical Hyperspace, et al (was, pitch perception)
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:43:32 -0500

Tony Pay wrote,
<<
I think it's more helpful to regard the 'random noise' bit, which is a new
idea due to Joe's friend Dante Chialvo, as a neural trick that is one way of
extracting useful information -- 'useful' in the sense that it has survival
value -- from incoming data. The trick may well be used in the visual as
well as the auditory domain, as Joe points out elsewhere.
>>

Yes, I agree on that. In fact for harmonic sounds (e.g. two tones in simple
ratio to each other) a simpler process than Dante's will do---some of the
more widely-known theoretical neuron models suffice. Dante's work extends
it to the inharmonic case. This sort of mechanism is probably *very*
generic in the brain. I would suggest that its "survival value" is related
to a *very* distant problem, probably when the very first, very simple
neural systems were evolving.

<<
Looked at on the next level up, the fundamental underlying fact which has
been known for some time is that our perceptual systems are tuned by
evolution to be more responsive to some things than to others.

That's so simply because creatures that weren't sufficiently sensitive to
something that might be (1) a meal, (2) a mate, or (3) a predator, didn't do
so well as those that were more sensitive to that something.
>>

Also, from an evolutionary point of view, we're sensitive to history.
Organisms develop certain features to deal with certain problems, and these
then turn out to be useful for something completely different at a later
stage. Now, if you were starting with the second problem, you might have
got something different, but as it is, you have the older equipment and it
works *well enough*---so it stays: it's too much of a hassle to change it.

It's rather like thinking about how a city develops. You generally have to
take into account the shape of what was built previously. So, for example,
in London there are parts of the city which used to be country villages but
got enveloped by the growing metropolis. If you go there you can see very
much the shapes of the streets and so on reflect those of a rural village.
If you had been designing from scratch this area, knowing that it was going
to be a suburb of a huge city, you might have done things differently. But
as it is you have to stick with the street plan that was developed for a
small rural settlement. You can also see this in the differences between
European cities such as London, Paris or Rome, and US cities like New York
or Washington DC---in the former you have many diverse street shapes and
patterns, whereas in the latter the fundamental shape is a grid. And that
has potentially big implications for how the city feels and works.

<< This argument is particularly powerfully developed in an essay called, 'A
journey into musical hyperspace' >>

What a wonderful pair of articles! Thank you so much for sharing those.

<< By the way, Mike is interested to know whether the 'hyperspace' article
would be at all useful to young composers starting to develop a technique.
Has anybody any assessment of that possibility? >>

One of the beautiful aspects of his article is how it provides an
explanation for certain things composers have already instinctively latched
onto. One thing that springs to mind is Barenboim discussing Wagner and
saying how, for example, there are certain moments which are harmonically
very uncertain, "lost", almost, but that this is not an accident but
deliberate manipulation, because they correspond to moments when the
*characters* are lost. Wagner plays with our natural harmonic perceptions
of "home" and "not home" to create dramatic effect.

Just as an aside, I found interesting the reference to the possibility of
36- or 72-note even-tempered scales. I had never understood before why some
composers chose to use 1/3 or 1/6-tone microtonal modifications; this
provides an explanation. It's also interesting to think of in the context
of multiphonics. For example a piece I am writing right now uses a
multiphonic produced by fingering low E without the LH index finger. The
notes produced are C# (just above middle C) and, almost two octaves above, a
note which is about halfway between C and C#. Yet the chord sounds
beautiful and very "consonant". Indeed I've been struck by how often
microtonal music sounds harmonically "right" to my ears. It seems to me
that this article provides an intellectual basis for trying to understand a
much wider harmonic universe than 12 even notes: why certain things "fit"
and why others don't. I wonder if your friend is aware of the work of Harry
Partch and Ben Jonson, which works very much around the tonal possibilities
offered by the high partials of the overtone series and would seem to fit
very nicely with some of the ideas put forward in the article.

The comments on atonal music are also very interesting. One of the things
I've thought for a long time is that there's something very utopian about
the music of the Darmstadt school. For example you have the notion of the
equality of all the musical elements, which seems almost like a musical
embodiment of democracy or, at the very least, a rejection of the
heirarchical system which in its most extreme (political) form is fascism.
I wonder if this by itself maybe is part of the reason for the rejection of
any reference to the harmonic series. But more than that I have the
impression that those composers really wanted to cut out any part of their
work which could be emotionally manipulative---a very understandable aim in
the wake of the Second World War. And it seems as if cutting out
traditional harmony, by removing the ear's natural structural reference
points, provides a means of doing this.

-- Joe

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