Author: brycon
Date: 2019-03-05 21:15
Quote:
I like that, "vibrations creating emotions". It sort of focuses on the process, and not so much on roles or context or content.
But notions of what is and isn't art are always contextual--again, they're more or less agreed on by the people who participate in the process (artists, critics, readers, listeners, etc.). A train whistle, for instance, is noise. When it's spliced together with other sounds produced by trains and then played in a museum or concert hall, however, it becomes a piece of music (Pierre Schaeffer's Etude aux chemins de fer).
I don't think this process of train noise becoming music says much of anything about a composer's intentions. Rather it says something about the way we listen to sounds in particular spaces. That is, because a concert hall or museum is a place where art is made and interpreted, we listen in a different way, looking for things like organization, expression, etc. when we hear the train sounds in these new contexts. The problem with abstract definitions of music (e.g. "sound producing emotions") is that they also abstract the artform, make it a thing (what philosophers call reification). Art, however, cannot be abstracted or severed from its time, place, politics, and so forth. It makes for a far messier definition of art, but so be it.
And again, when you try to bind art to a single trait, exceptions immediately arise. My cat meowing for its food, for example, is a sound vibration (with a distinct pitch no less) created with intention (the cat is hungry) and creating an emotion (annoyance) in me. But it ain't music.
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