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Re: Shape Recognition

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2011-11-18 02:18

I think the main difficulty in equating verbal reading processes to musical ones isn't found so much in the melodic/pitch realm but in the area of rhythm and its notation, which is something to which most verbal languages I'm familiar with don't have an analog. We learn the rhythm context of the words we use in speech by rote, by aural experience in which we're immersed from the day we are born.

Our relatively rigid, arithmetically-based system of notating musical rhythm is notoriously inadequate and is the source of a great deal of interpretive dispute (and variety), but even with its considerable limitations, there are relatively few genuine rhythmic patterns that can be used in ways analogous to words in verbal language. Beyond basic combinations of regular divisions of regularly recurring metric divisions, there aren't really rhythmic analogs to scales, modes, chords, clusters or any of the other pitch-based vocabulary components we learn and rely on. There's a seemingly infinite variety of irregular durational and metric units and larger combinations of them that simply can't be anticipated and must be read almost note-for-note, certainly unit-for-unit. These must be made sense of and given meaning from scratch by the performer because nothing like it may ever have been written down before, and nothing recognizably similar may ever turn up again in the player's experience.

Karl

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