# The Possiblity of Neuroscientific Universal Music and Conducting



## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/the-neuroscience-of-music/

*Important claims in bold, if you want a short read.*



> In other words,* the abstract pitches have become a primal reward cue, the cultural equivalent of a bell that makes us drool.* Here is their summary:
> 
> *The anticipatory phase, set off by temporal cues signaling that a potentially pleasurable auditory sequence is coming, can trigger expectations of euphoric emotional states and create a sense of wanting and reward prediction.* This reward is entirely abstract and may involve such factors as suspended expectations and a sense of resolution. Indeed, composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena, and manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution to heighten the motivation for completion. The peak emotional response evoked by hearing the desired sequence would represent the consummatory or liking phase, representing fulfilled expectations and accurate reward prediction. We propose that each of these phases may involve dopamine release, but in different subcircuits of the striatum, which have different connectivity and functional roles.
> 
> ...


The comments rebel.



> So if it was just something physical, the effect of vibrations, i shouldn't have those stages. And damn actually we should, as people, enjoy or hate just the same type of music. But when you look at our beatiful colorful world you instantly see that's not the case.





> What explains our emotional reaction is not the simple relief at the resolution of a simple tension, but recognition that the complex pattern unfolding in the music is a *vivid transposition of how our complex life of feeling could unfold.* The composer is *telling a gripping story *and if we know what to listen for, we are transfixed from the first note.





> As a songwriter and musician with a BA in Music, I've long known music is the *universal language of mankind *(oh let's just say humankind!) I saw the best quote recently that explains in* simple layman (or laywoman) terms why music stirs FEELINGS inside us*: "Music enters our bodies, commandeering the pulse in our veins, and reminds us that pleasure isn't a matter of feeling good but of feeling more alive." ~ Holly Brubach, Writer, Journalist and Author





> But... music (or rather pure tonality) has been distorted since the abandonment of true harmonics to a "well-tempered" system in western european music.
> 
> This article is 4th rate; the author has no understanding of music.
> 
> ...


*Thesis: *Music is the most universal of the arts, it doesn't require cultural understanding, knowing a language, etc.
Antithesis 1: Music is the most particular, un-universal of the arts. While there is remarkable consensus on the *general meaning* (with slight variations) of literary works of art such as The Sun Also Rises, The Second Coming, The Wings of Dove, paintings such as The Sistine Chapel, Rembrandt's Self Portrait, etc, and while we may not agree with the *essence of the expression* (e.g. T.S. Eliot recognized Shakespeare's genius, but was not satisfied with the essence of Hamlet), we recognize great artistry.

*Antithesis 2: *The disagreement over music is more peculiar with the disagreement over literature because 1. literature is even politics embedded, and often times the disagreement over "aesthetics" is a disagreement over different moral systems and ways of life. "The Art of Fugue" has no such formal content whatsoever.

*Antithesis 3:* Music is the most violently particular art of them all. No one questions Shakespeare _to the same degree_ that Classical Music Listeners question the gods of the musical pantheon, for we have "Mozart: God or Garbage"? Anti-Wagnerism, the case of poor Gustav, Bach is boring and the contra: Mozart; The Greatest Genius of them All, Couchie and I, DavidMahler, and Bachians, etc.

*Antithesis 4:* To say that "music is a universal language" is like saying "bathroom signs are a universal language".

Thesis: Musical appreciation is a cultural construction and posterior to context. Culture hegemonically determines how the listener appreciates a piece of music, our listening is "Western-centric", etc.

*Antithesis 1:* Music is the *most resilient* of any art to cultural change because the formal content is so little tied with politics. Once it arises from obscurity of never-having-been-listened-to (Bach: Cello Suites, 1930s --, Mahler: Symphonies - 1950~ ----) to the having-been-listened-to-and-loved, it can never go back nor will its reputation decline significantly, and thus most resistant to accusations of social construction as the merit behind the work of art.

The Wagnerians alive today are just as furiously devoted to Wagner's work, in the same class as least, as the original Wagnerians.

"Moreover, apart from all irrelevant questions (as to what the use of this music can or ought to be) and on purely aesthetic grounds; has Wagner ever done anything better?" - Nietzsche



> Hugo Wolf was a student at the time of the 1882 Festival yet still managed to find money for a ticket to see Parsifal twice. He emerged overwhelmed: "Colossal - Wagner's most inspired, sublimest creation." He reiterated this view in a postcard from Bayreuth in 1883: "Parsifal is without doubt by far the most beautiful and sublime work in the whole field of Art."[28] Gustav Mahler was also present in 1883 and he wrote to a friend; *"I can hardly describe my present state to you. When I came out of the Festspielhaus, completely spellbound, I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life."*[29] Max Reger simply noted that "When I first heard Parsifal at Bayreuth I was fifteen. I cried for two weeks and then became a musician." Alban Berg described Parsifal in 1909 as "magnificent, overwhelming,"[30] and Jean Sibelius, visiting the Festival in 1894 said "Nothing in the world has made so overwhelming an impression on me. All my innermost heart-strings throbbed... I cannot begin to tell you how Parsifal has transported me. Everything I do seems so cold and feeble by its side.That is really something."[31] Claude Debussy thought the characters and plot ludicrous, but nevertheless in 1903 wrote that musically it was "I*ncomparable and bewildering, splendid and strong. Parsifal is one of the loveliest monuments of sound ever raised to the serene glory of music"*


No Beatle fan can look at Beatlemania without irony, but I read these comments with zero irony whatsoever, for they reflect perfectly my encounter with Parsifal.

In literature: Changing merit of Milton's Paradise Lost (downwards) after critiques by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. Changing merit of literature written by women, changing status of Wuthering Heights (upwards). Changing merits of Romantic English poetry (downwards) with T.S. Eliot and (upwards) with Harold Bloom.

In painting: The rise and fall and rise again of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. (I'm sure those versed in painting could give more examples).

*Thesis: *Judgment of the merits of music is subjective and influenced by circumstances. The passing popularity of one hit wonders, etc. From nothing to everything to nothing again.

*Antithesis:* The judgment of the merits of music is the most resilient of them all. Wagner is more popular now than he was when he was alive, and far more so for Bach.

Antithesis 2: People who like the same genre tend to like the same stuff.



> It's always seemed to me like another problem with the relativist position is that, if tastes are purely subjective and individual, there shouldn't be nearly as much overlap between the tastes of people who have been exposed to a great deal of a certain type of artwork as there generally is.
> 
> Let me put it this way: I've watched a ridiculous number of movies in my life, but I've read almost no books on cinema. I couldn't tell you what movies are canonical, but I could tell you pretty easily which ones I think were the best I've seen.
> 
> ...


http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/...to-call-me-an-elitist-snob-heres-your-chance/

*Thesis: *There is a universal neurological foundation behind music appreciation.

Antithesis 1: Most people find the Presto of Opus 131 to be little more than gibberish. Proof: low YouTube view count (even by classical music standards) of a *short, YouTube time fitting piece, 5 minutes*.

Antithesis 2: *The sound and fury over different schools of conducting, those conductors, and their fans.* The *same piece of music, with virtually the same notes* leaving one person ecstatic, and the other bored.

*Thesis:* People don't like classical music because of the length.

*Antithesis 1*: 




*Antithesis 2:* Long rock concerts and rock festivals, the absurd amount of time young people devote to music.

*Thesis:* Appreciation of conducting is subjective after 99% of the notes are played properly/errors aren't intrusive (i.e. 99% of records), can be reduced to "liking it slow" or "liking it fast" i.e. tempo alone.

*Antithesis:* People who admire both Furtwangler and Toscanini.

*Antithesis 2: *The small list of Wagnerian conductors considered to be "the best", Furtwangler, Knappertsbusch, etc (see: Birgit Nilsson memoir), the awe that people have when they speak of Furtwangler (his devotees: Barenboim).

http://www.bryanappleyard.com/wagner-madness/



> This effect - and many others, notably his harmonic innovations - has put Wagner at the very centre of the scientific effort to understand how music works. More than any other art, it puzzles scientists. Unlike literature or painting, it has no explicit content, it conducts an argument, as the poet John Ashbery has said, without ever stating the terms. The anatomy of our brains shows that the visual cortex is much larger than the auditory, so one would think the visual arts would have a more powerful impact. But one survey found that something like 80% of people admit to crying in response to music, whereas only about 20% have cried before a painting.
> 
> "For whatever reason," says John Onians, professor emeritus of world art at the University of East Anglia, "music clearly has a more instrumental effect on people's emotional systems."
> 
> ...


Thesis: People like Wagner for the dissonance. 
Antithesis 1: Wagnerites are usually not Bartok-maniacs 
Antithesis 2: *Most people don't like Wagner* _at all._
Corollary to antithesis 2: Dislike of Wagner is not from "not trying hard enough" or "patience", as many members of our forum can attest.

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/11/11/neuroscience-cant-explain-wagner-or-b-b-king/



> You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you've also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you've got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that humans tend to find pleasant is called consonant, which are different from from unpleasant sounds, which are called dissonant.* Think of the difference between a Mozart sonata and fingernails on a chalkboard, and you're on the right track.* *Consonant notes sound - to the untrained ear - as if they were a single tone, while a you can identify multiple tones within a dissonant note.* This might be related to the human preference for harmonics, since in humans, the preference for consonant sounds are associated with preferences for harmonic spectra (harmonic relationships between frequencies), while dissonant sounds are not.


Thesis: ???????=X 
Antithesis: !!##$#@$!!!^**&$$#X=(Y)-????

*SYNTHESIS: All your explanations are belong to us.*


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

You really should make your posts shorter, but I'll indulge. 



brianwalker said:


> Antithesis 1: Music is the most particular, un-universal of the arts. While there is remarkable consensus on the *general meaning* (with slight variations) of literary works of art such as The Sun Also Rises, The Second Coming, The Wings of Dove, paintings such as The Sistine Chapel, Rembrandt's Self Portrait, etc, and while we may not agree with the *essence of the expression* (e.g. T.S. Eliot recognized Shakespeare's genius, but was not satisfied with the essence of Hamlet), we recognize great artistry.


This misunderstands what calling music "universal" really means. The search for universals is a common anthropological endeavour, especially comparing remote tribal societies untouched by 'civilization' with much bigger cultures. The reason for the search is that it is suggestive of innate neurological features. Another obvious example is that language is universal. Within these broad categories, you then have further questions - are certain phonemes universal? Are grammatical structures universal? The more you probe, the more you find what the underlying patterns are on which the complexities of English, French, and Russian are built. With music, because it is so unspecific compared to language, the further you probe, the more different cultures still have in common. We all have appreciations for rhythm and movement and timbre, etc. The question of a universal, therefore, is not about universal understanding and interpretation, but about universal occurrence in disparate societies.



brianwalker said:


> *Antithesis 3:* Music is the most violently particular art of them all. No one questions Shakespeare _to the same degree_ that Classical Music Listeners question the gods of the musical pantheon, for we have "Mozart: God or Garbage"? Anti-Wagnerism, the case of poor Gustav, Bach is boring and the contra: Mozart; The Greatest Genius of them All, Couchie and I, DavidMahler, and Bachians, etc.


This is a phenomenon of culture and history, not a phenomenon of music and literature more generally. It also has a great deal to do with education. The more someone reads Elizabethan literature, the more they are likely to appreciate Shakespeare's contemporaries as artistically similar in quality. The more they read from other periods, the more they might suggest Chaucer or Joyce usurp Shakespeare's position. The contention in music may be accounted for by the fact that music requires comparatively little time and effort. You don't need a beginner's course to understand Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, and the 'language' of music is constant throughout time, unlike the contemporary jokes of Shakespeare that fly over our heads. All of this allows a greater degree of engagement and conflict with music as an art form.



brianwalker said:


> *Antithesis 4:* To say that "music is a universal language" is like saying "bathroom signs are a universal language".


I'm not sure what this criticism is supposed to signify, but I guess it might again come from a misunderstanding of what "universal" means in this context.



brianwalker said:


> *Antithesis 1:* Music is the *most resilient* of any art to cultural change because the formal content is so little tied with politics. Once it arises from obscurity of never-having-been-listened-to (Bach: Cello Suites, 1930s --, Mahler: Symphonies - 1950~ ----) to the having-been-listened-to-and-loved, it can never go back nor will its reputation decline significantly, and thus most resistant to accusations of social construction as the merit behind the work of art.


To state that music is _more_ resilient to cultural change than the other arts is _not_ to say, therefore, that the thesis that musical appreciation is dependent on cultural context is wrong. It _is_ dependent on context, as evidenced by the fact that people most readily associate with the high, low, and folk music of their own cultures, which is why it may take a degree of effort before you can appreciate something from, say, Indonesian Gamelan. So, yes, it's less dependent on context, but it still is to an extent.



brianwalker said:


> No Beatle fan can look at Beatlemania without irony, but I read these comments with zero irony whatsoever, for they reflect perfectly my encounter with Parsifal.


I think many Beatles fans would probably disagree with you, and I would be wary of using this debate as a platform for you to look down on pop music culture, when, in all probability, you have little exposure to and understanding of it. This just demonstrates a certain agenda you have, biased towards the kind of music you like, and it weakens your position.



brianwalker said:


> In literature: Changing merit of Milton's Paradise Lost (downwards) after critiques by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. Changing merit of literature written by women, changing status of Wuthering Heights (upwards). Changing merits of Romantic English poetry (downwards) with T.S. Eliot and (upwards) with Harold Bloom.
> 
> In painting: The rise and fall and rise again of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. (I'm sure those versed in painting could give more examples).


These statements, I assume, are in defence of the notion that the greatness of musical works is more static than compared to the other arts. Well, I think your assessment of this is rather selective. For starters, although Wagner is highly praised, his reputation was hit by Nazi association (downwards). Mendelssohn's reputation increased once anti-semitism started to wane (upwards), and Bach's music took rediscovery and re-appreciation for it to be set on the pedestal it occupies today (upwards). Music is just as dependent on critique and fashion as the other arts.



brianwalker said:


> *Antithesis:* The judgment of the merits of music is the most resilient of them all. Wagner is more popular now than he was when he was alive, and far more so for Bach.


This slightly goes against the point you seemed to be making a moment ago. Instead, what you're suggesting now is that once opinion goes up, it doesn't come back down. Again, in the case of Wagner, it certainly does come down depending on who you're asking. Plus, there are an incredible number of composers who were stars while they were alive whose names are now obscure because of passing fancy. Music is very much dependent on circumstances and fads, as with all artistic movements, but this is all ridiculously difficult to measure anyway, so I don't think you can really substantiate anything conclusive.



brianwalker said:


> *Thesis: *There is a universal neurological foundation behind music appreciation.
> 
> Antithesis 1: Most people find the Presto of Opus 131 to be little more than gibberish. Proof: low YouTube view count (even by classical music standards) of a *short, YouTube time fitting piece, 5 minutes*.


Whoah, whoah, whoah! Slow down there, you're getting _miles_ ahead of yourself (lightyears, even). If you're going to start addressing the scientific realm directly, you first need to consider what good proof constitutes. YouTube view count certainly does not qualify, by whatever standards. Besides, I can't see how an almost unanimous consensus on a piece goes against the idea of universal appreciative abilities!



brianwalker said:


> Antithesis 2: *The sound and fury over different schools of conducting, those conductors, and their fans.* The *same piece of music, with virtually the same notes* leaving one person ecstatic, and the other bored.


This is a matter of taste. Taste is an _incredibly_ complex phenomenon that we can't yet account for scientifically. If, however, you wish to postulate that divergence in musical appreciation does _not_ have a neurological basis, you are charged with offering a replacement. A ghost in the machine, perhaps? A 'soul'?



brianwalker said:


> *Thesis:* People don't like classical music because of the length.


Well, obviously, the people who like classical music like it despite (or because of, even) its length, but I'm pretty certain that many people who dislike classical music would cite length as a reason. The comparison with long rock concerts is not really applicable, as such concerts comprise a multitude of short songs, whereas a classical concert comprises typically a small handful of pieces, each lasting much longer. The attention span required is much more significant, and some people are unwilling to invest their energies in it.

------------------------------

My general reaction to the piece: yes, of course music is explicable in wholly scientific terms, and in terms of brain function. _Everything_ about humankind is explicable in terms of brain function, because that's what we are, that's what consciousness is: an expression of our brains and bodies in relation to our environments. Obviously, some people might suggest that we are something else, something 'more'. Well, as witnessed by the airy-fairy, fanciful and fantastical comments in reply to the piece, no one has a shred of evidence to the contrary - it's just deceptive human intuition that cannot be substantiated. Don't tell me that music isn't about neuroscience until you've got some data to the contrary. Neuroscience is far, far, far from explaining music completely, but it's already done more than any spiritualist theory.

I would also urge people to understand what a cultural universal really is. The field of cognitive linguistics, for example, has had a huge focus on universals in recent decades (see Steven Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ and _The Language Instinct_ for introductions to our innate language capacities). It is beyond doubt that the brain comes readily equipped for certain grammatical and syntactical structures, because, as much as it can be difficult to see at first, all languages studied have various things in common. However, just as these universal neurological predispositions don't give rise to modern rural French across the world, so universal neurological predispositions to music understanding and appreciation don't necessitate that all manifestations of musical culture must be the same. There is an immense amount of room for individual variation based on the complex environmental factors we interact with on a daily basis, but this doesn't undermine the central theory of a universal.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

I havent the time nor willpower to respond to anything in your post, but I definitely enjoyed reading it.

Oh, and one thing:


> "music clearly has a more instrumental effect on people's emotional systems."


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

<< My general reaction to the piece: yes, of course music is explicable in wholly scientific terms, and in terms of brain function. Everything about humankind is explicable in terms of brain function, because that's what we are, that's what consciousness is: an expression of our brains and bodies in relation to our environments. Obviously, some people might suggest that we are something else, something 'more'. Well, as witnessed by the airy-fairy, fanciful and fantastical comments in reply to the piece, no one has a shred of evidence to the contrary - it's just deceptive human intuition that cannot be substantiated. Don't tell me that music isn't about neuroscience until you've got some data to the contrary. Neuroscience is far, far, far from explaining music completely, but it's already done more than any spiritualist theory. >>

(had to quote _something_)

Hey _Poley_, That is a focused, intelligently argued post. I am not surprised, but I am delighted.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Hilltroll72 said:


> Hey _Poley_, That is a focused, intelligently argued post. I am not surprised, but I am delighted.


Thank you. :tiphat:


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Quote Originally Posted by Hilltroll72
Hey Poley, That is a focused, intelligently argued post. I am not surprised, but I am delighted.



Polednice said:


> Thank you. :tiphat:


Shortly after I sent that post, I realized its condescending aspects. Notwithstanding my status as a geezer, as it stands it is beyond the Pale. I apologize.

(I learned this way back in Air Force basic training: No excuse, SIR.)


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Hilltroll72 said:


> Shortly after I sent that post, I realized its condescending aspects. Notwithstanding my status as a geezer, as it stands it is beyond the Pale. I apologize.
> 
> (I learned this way back in Air Force basic training: No excuse, SIR.)


Was it? I thought it was nice. Were you being sarcastic?


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Polednice said:


> Was it? I thought it was nice. Were you being sarcastic?


No, and I'm glad you took no offence. However, it assumes a privilege that does not exist. Appalachian hilltrolls have some oldfashioned notions.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

> The search for universals is a common anthropological endeavour, especially comparing remote tribal societies untouched by 'civilization' with much bigger cultures. The reason for the search is that it is suggestive of innate neurological features. Another obvious example is that language is universal. Within these broad categories, you then have further questions - are certain phonemes universal? Are grammatical structures universal?


1. Is what is "universal" must be true *across all cultures?* Is there a difference between a phenomena holding true for say, 99% of cultures but not true for the 1%? 
2. If I'm "misunderstanding" of the meaning "universal", then everyone who touts music as a "universal language" is, because English, French, etc, can all be learned by any human being of any ethnic group, so calling "music" the "universal language" is meaningless then.



> The more you probe, the more you find what the underlying patterns are on which the complexities of English, French, and Russian are built.


1. Really? The more you probe, the more you realize that there's an underlying pattern? According to whom? 
2. What if something "upsets" the universal theory? 
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto



> Everett, who this past fall became the chairman of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures at Illinois State University, has been publishing academic books and papers on the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) for more than twenty-five years. But his work remained relatively obscure until early *in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã," which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe's living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few"-terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett's most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts ("the man is walking down the street," "the man is wearing a top hat") into a single sentence ("The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street"). *Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.
> 
> Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto#ixzz1mmfpNDcL


3. According to your criterion of universality, does this incident disprove Chomsky's theory? 
4. Why is only what's "universal" in disparate societies the most important? Wittgenstein showed that there is no "universal" definition of "game", does that mean that "games" don't exist?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
5. If the assertion "every culture has music" is the only logical deduction of "music is the universal language", that begs that question of the definition of music.

I'm referring to the uses of "universal" in the link i.e. I am not using the word "universal" in the sense of anthropology, but in the colloquial sense.



> And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle *some universal nerves.*





> As a songwriter and musician with a BA in Music, I've long known music is the *universal language of* mankind (oh let's just say humankind!) I saw the best quote recently that explains in simple layman (or laywoman) terms why music stirs FEELINGS inside us: "Music enters our bodies, commandeering the pulse in our veins, and reminds us that pleasure isn't a matter of feeling good but of feeling more alive." ~ Holly Brubach, Writer, Journalist and Author





> Ultimately, I would like to write music that specifically portrays an emotion even if the listener does not understand the language. Do you know or have there been any studies where certain major or minor keys or certain rhythms affect brain activity? Recently,* I wrote a post about how music is universally understood *because we as humans perceive music the same way.


6. My argument is that for a particular work of music, it is far less universally accessible than works of literature. Even if you hate Shakespeare, you can get a good idea of not only what Hamlet was about, but what the individual words and phrases, the plots, themes, references, drama, etc, is about. You can't "explain" the "expressive" and "expression" of a music in the same way. For example, a Bach fugue, although it doesn't require learning a language "to know" or "to get", it is ultimately far more inaccessible for many people who can listen to it for eons and not "get it".



> This is a phenomenon of culture and history, not a phenomenon of music and literature more generally. It also has a great deal to do with education. The more someone reads Elizabethan literature, the more they are likely to appreciate Shakespeare's contemporaries as artistically similar in quality. The more they read from other periods, the more they might suggest Chaucer or Joyce usurp Shakespeare's position. The contention in music may be accounted for by the fact that music requires comparatively little time and effort. You don't need a beginner's course to understand Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, and the 'language' of music is constant throughout time, unlike the contemporary jokes of Shakespeare that fly over our heads. All of this allows a greater degree of engagement and conflict with music as an art form.


1. Can you elucidate what you mean by "phenomenon of culture and history" and "artistically similar in quality"? Do you mean "artistically similar in quality" to Shakespeare? 
2. What does the fact that you need little time to understand it have to do with the violent disagreement over merits of relative works and the inaccessibility of music relative to literature?
3. Do you think this relationship holds true for music? How do you explain the fact that although DavidMahler is well acquainted with Romantic era music and likes Schumann and Mahler he dislikes Wagner intensely?

You missed


Antithesis 2: The disagreement over music is more peculiar with the disagreement over literature because 1. literature is even politics embedded, and often times the disagreement over "aesthetics" is a disagreement over different moral systems and ways of life. "The Art of Fugue" has no such formal content whatsoever. 

Attribution of disagreement over literary merits is often attributed to 1. aesthetic philosophy 2. political philosophy 3. personal experience/resonance with the formal content of the poem or novel, etc. These three categories of the sources of disagreement are non-existent for most music.



> I'm not sure what this criticism is supposed to signify, but I guess it might again come from a misunderstanding of what "universal" means in this context.


I think you're misunderstanding my appropriation of the word from the article. They claim that there is the possibility one day that every piece of music can be explained in terms of "universal nerves", but I said that methodologically impossible because the same piece of music evokes wildly different reactions.


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

The dogmas of empiricism are still alive and doing well. Quine be damned.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

> These statements, I assume, are in defence of the notion that the greatness of musical works is more static than compared to the other arts. Well, I think your assessment of this is rather selective. For starters, although Wagner is highly praised, his reputation was hit by Nazi association (downwards). Mendelssohn's reputation increased once anti-semitism started to wane (upwards), and Bach's music took rediscovery and re-appreciation for it to be set on the pedestal it occupies today (upwards). Music is just as dependent on critique and fashion as the other arts.


1. That was Wagner's political reputation, it had nothing to do with the quality of his music. This is *qualitatively different* from the shake up in the quality of Milton's work. 
2. Mendelssohn's reputation have been pretty steady.
3. I accounted for the change in Bach's reputation.

Once it arises from obscurity of never-having-been-listened-to (Bach: Cello Suites, 1930s --, Mahler: Symphonies - 1950~ ----) to the having-been-listened-to-and-loved



> There can be few classical music lovers who are not familiar with the true fairy-story in which, in 1890, the thirteen-year-old Pablo Casals, newly enamoured of the cello and foraging with his father in the back-street music-shops of Barcelona, happened across the Grützmacher's edition of Bach's lost "Cello Suites" on a dusty shelf. Prodigiously talented, Casals was already studying by day in the Escola Municipal de Música and moonlighting in a café trio; the re-discovery of Bach's neglected suites changed both his life and the course of twentieth century music for good.
> 
> He practised them assiduously for another thirteen years before finally feeling able to perform them in public. To do so, he had to evolve new techniques and arrive at an understanding of this remarkable music. He came to espouse a philosophy of performance based upon the principle that no matter how abstracted, stylised and removed this music had become, it was still essentially the music of dance and as such required the performer to invest it with a Terpsichorean vigour, vitality, elegance and grace. It was another quarter of a century before he could be persuaded by EMI to record them.
> 
> Casals released these suites from the fate of many a Bach masterpiece over two hundred years, of being considered a dry, technical exercise of no particular value beyond its use as practice fodder to engender facility and flexibility. Such was Casals' emotional investment in this music that he found performing and recording them physically exhausting - though in later years he would willingly perform from them for grateful visitors such as Rostropovich. The recordings here were made two at a time, first at Abbey Road, then in Paris between 1936 and 1939; it must surely have been an additional emotional spur to Casals, fierce Republican and champion of liberty, that they coincided with the ghastly events of the Spanish Civil War.





> I think many Beatles fans would probably disagree with you, and I would be wary of using this debate as a platform for you to look down on pop music culture, when, in all probability, you have little exposure to and understanding of it. This just demonstrates a certain agenda you have, biased towards the kind of music you like, and it weakens your position.


1. My only contention is that neuroscience has to distinguish between the 1. sociological historical elements and 2. the "true" content of the music and 
2. Distinguish between music whose relative stature is 1. stable and 2. unstable. Of course the question of measurement becomes problematic, but there are all sorts of sources and information that makes things very clear, record sales, etc.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

> This slightly goes against the point you seemed to be making a moment ago. Instead, what you're suggesting now is that once opinion goes up, it doesn't come back down. Again, in the case of Wagner, it certainly does come down depending on who you're asking. Plus, there are an incredible number of composers who were stars while they were alive whose names are now obscure because of passing fancy. Music is very much dependent on circumstances and fads, as with all artistic movements, but this is all ridiculously difficult to measure anyway, so I don't think you can really substantiate anything conclusive.


My point of contention is that the neurologists cannot explain why 1. some music is resilient and 2. some music isn't. 
2. Wagner's aesthetic reputation NEVER went down, it was the intrusion of moralism; people still don't play him in Israel, but this has nothing to do with their aesthetic judgment of his music. I'm talking about a concrete demolition of the artistic quality.

Examples include.
1. Nietzsche critique of Wagner (In Nietzsche Contra Wagner)
2. Stravinsky's critique of Wagner (Poetics of Music)

Both of which had very little impact whatsoever.



> To state that music is more resilient to cultural change than the other arts is not to say, therefore, that the thesis that musical appreciation is dependent on cultural context is wrong. It is dependent on context, as evidenced by the fact that people most readily associate with the high, low, and folk music of their own cultures, which is why it may take a degree of effort before you can appreciate something from, say, Indonesian Gamelan. So, yes, it's less dependent on context, but it still is to an extent.


1. I never said that music was entirely culturally independent. 
2. My claim is that the attribution of the aggregate regard with which certain works of art are held as entirely or almost entirely the result of "cultural coincidence" or "cultural hegemony" or "imperialism" to be a false one and refers to the commentator who said that the article was too "Western-centric".

*You assume that I have a universal theory of music, but this is merely negative dialectic. When I contradict, in no way do I imply that the opposite is true. Just because it's not a square doesn't mean it's a triangle, it could be three dimensional instead of two dimensional, for instance.*


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

> Whoah, whoah, whoah! Slow down there, you're getting miles ahead of yourself (lightyears, even). If you're going to start addressing the scientific realm directly, you first need to consider what good proof constitutes. YouTube view count certainly does not qualify, by whatever standards.


1. Am I light-years ahead or light-years behind? 
2. "Good proof" - that's the question, science has the burden of proof, it's not my job to disprove it with an even more rigorous method. 
3. Why sin't YouTube view count indicative of popularity? There are exceptional cases, but isn't it the case that higher view counts = great universality/popularity?



> Besides, I can't see how an almost unanimous consensus on a piece goes against the idea of universal appreciative abilities!


1. The audience is self-selecting. 
2. Most people have never heard of it. 
3. The self-selecting nature of people who would find this piece and listen to it on YouTube means that its universal acclaim on the comments is as indicative that obesity is attractive in women in a forum devoted to fatty chasers.

What would constitute proof? Well, we would need to have a randomized study where hundreds of people, or thousands, would listen to a series of pieces in sequence, and have this piece as somewhere in the middle, and have them rate it in various ways, numerically.

On the contrary, the unanimous consensus on this piece by the self-selecting audience proves that taste isn't subjective, because among this audience there is consensus on what the piece expresses.

YouTube count is the closest proxy for popularity of a piece (save in bizarre scenarios such as viral, funny videos, Rebecca Black, etc).


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

> This is a matter of taste. Taste is an incredibly complex phenomenon that we can't yet account for scientifically. If, however, you wish to postulate that divergence in musical appreciation does not have a neurological basis, you are charged with offering a replacement. A ghost in the machine, perhaps? A 'soul'?


1. I didn't posit any theory to replace it with. You shouldn't posit it for me. 
2. I don't know why I have to offer a replacement theory. 
3. There's no epidemiological justification that the "best scientific theory" at the moment is the true justification. (see: Ptolemaic astronomy. At the time it was invented and for hundreds of years it was 1. the most scientifically rigorous theory and 2. it was the most pragmatically useful theory and 3. With epi-cycles it was initially more pragmatically useful than Copernicus'). 
4. I didn't mention a "ghost in a machine" (that's a hackneyed phrase, you have to be more specific". 
5. "Soul" is also a hackneyed word that has zero meaning outside of a specific theological system, which I didn't posit. Again, you're putting words into my mouth.

A methodology has foundations, it only examines certain aspects of the music, and there are only certain properties it can analyze. For example, biologists and archaeological study different elements/aspects of the object of study, but there are limitations to their method.

Under the present method of 1. correspondence between a note/a sequence of notes/harmonic units such as consonance/dissonance/balance of the two.

The studier of Op. 131 studied the text of the music, the notes. To use his methods to study the performance is as silly as applying Harold Bloom's observations on Shakespeare to the performance of his plays.

The radical difference between drama and music is that drama can be read, and there is a radical bifurcation of the lines and the performance of the actors via facial expressions, timbre of speech, some people even prefer reading the drama to watching it (such as the Romantics - Shakespeare was strictly to be read), but in music there is a radical unity of the two, and you can dislike a performance of Shakespeare but still love the text, but if you hate the performance of the music you also hate the music (assuming that that performance is the only performance. Obviously you can say that "I like recording X" better, but that would be tantamount to saying that I like Laurence Olivier's performance better than random actor X. When the music is played badly, the music itself is bad and unloveable.



> Well, obviously, the people who like classical music like it despite (or because of, even) its length, but I'm pretty certain that many people who dislike classical music would cite length as a reason. The comparison with long rock concerts is not really applicable, as such concerts comprise a multitude of short songs, whereas a classical concert comprises typically a small handful of pieces, each lasting much longer. The attention span required is much more significant, and some people are unwilling to invest their energies in it.


1. My argument is a refutation of the "net time expenditure argument". Of course musically, a rock concert is different than a classical concert because the music is different and a short song is qualitatively different from a long one, but since there are 1. short classical songs held in the highest regard and 2. they are nowhere as popular as short pop songs, the attribution of 1. it takes more effort/time to absorb classical music and 2. classical music is unpopular because you need to be rich/refined leisure to access it its false. 3. The attention span argument is false because of the fact that 1. popular music fans are willing to expend a lot of time/energy/effort at their concerts and 2. Many Classical songs that are *held in the highest esteem* (lots of Schubert, some Mahler songs, the Vivace from Op. 135, despite their short length, cannot catch the popularity fire.

To reiterate.

Thesis: Appreciation of conducting is subjective after 99% of the notes are played properly/errors aren't intrusive (i.e. 99% of records), can be reduced to "liking it slow" or "liking it fast" i.e. tempo alone.

Antithesis: People who admire both Furtwangler and Toscanini.

Antithesis 2: The small list of Wagnerian conductors considered to be "the best", Furtwangler, Knappertsbusch, etc (see: Birgit Nilsson memoir), the awe that people have when they speak of Furtwangler (his devotees: Barenboim).

1. If science were ever to account for what makes "good conducting", it would be of a model radically different from analysis of the notes.
2. Slowness and fastness are parts of it, but it must also explain why people who plays things fast and slow (Kleiber, Solti, Reiner vs. Furtwangler, Celibidache) can be equally held in high regard, in addition to explaining the reactions to the notes themselves (as if that were possible, since the notes are always mediated through the instruments).


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

To reply generally, I have found music therapeutic esp. in hard times in my life. I usually like music with some light at the end of the tunnel, or even ambiguity (but leaving to the listener to take from it what he wants, be it optimism or pessimism or in-between). 

So I think music does have an effect on the brain, but we know so little about the brain (neuroscience is still it's infancy, it's not an exact science, we are still in the dark about so many things to do with how our brain works - well compared to things like our heart or liver, etc.).

Composers whose music, or most of it, consistently give me a boost are Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Weber, J. Strauss II, Lehar, instrumental works of Bizet, Gounod, etc. & even some 20th century guys like Bartok, who usually ends on a big high. I do like Sibelius, Bruckner, Mahler, but go for their less angsty/dark/gloomy works. I avoid Wagner, one reason is he's quite dark and heavy (also, opera is my least favoured genre). However, his "children" like R. Strauss in his final years, the Viennese atonalists, Zemlinsky, Messiaen, and many others I do like, maybe because I do like 20th century music a lot...


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

brianwalker said:


> 1. Is what is "universal" must be true *across all cultures?* Is there a difference between a phenomena holding true for say, 99% of cultures but not true for the 1%?


By definition, it must be 100%.



brianwalker said:


> 2. If I'm "misunderstanding" of the meaning "universal", then everyone who touts music as a "universal language" is, because English, French, etc, can all be learned by any human being of any ethnic group, so calling "music" the "universal language" is meaningless then.


You still misunderstand it, and anyone who makes that analogy misunderstands it too (note that no scientist would make that analogy, because they actually know what the term means!). I'm not quite sure what's difficult to grasp about what I said earlier. English, French, Russian etc. are _not_ universals because they don't exist everywhere. However, they all share grammatical and syntactical structures - the units of language that they are built on. Therefore, it is the underlying _grammar_ that is universal, not the emergent language. We're not talking about things that people can learn, we're talking about things that are coded inside the brain from Day 1. One of them is a universal grammar, another is a set of musical parameters.

It is true that when people say "music is a universal _language_", they often mean something that is not quite true. It is normally intended that because music doesn't carry information, it can be understood and appreciated by anyone from any culture. Well, that's not strictly true - there _are_ learning barriers, as evidenced by the point about Western listeners understanding Gamelan and vice-versa, they are just more subtle and more easily overcome. It is only the things that we do not have to learn that count as universals, and it is _not_ a piece of music or a musical system that will be a universal, but an underlying neurological capacity for understanding and appreciating pitch (for example).



brianwalker said:


> 1. Really? The more you probe, the more you realize that there's an underlying pattern? According to whom?


In relation to language, which is what you quoted me on, every sane linguist on this planet in the last few decades will tell you that there are underlying patterns to all languages. It's an established fact, and you can read any number of introductory books on the subject to find out more about it. You, like other laymen, may not see the similarities between English, Russian, Afrikaans and even American Sign Language, but they _do_ exist, and we even know the regions of the brain in which they function.



brianwalker said:


> 2. What if something "upsets" the universal theory?
> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto


If something upsets the universal theory, then, as with all science, the theory must be revised. This isn't dogma we're talking about - this is the scientific process. I haven't looked at the full article yet, but I'm not convinced how much it affects Chomsky's views. There are two brief things to say on it: 1) I would be surprised if the man's research is thorough enough to fully discount the things he says he can discount, but that's just my intuition for the moment so I'll with-hold judgement; 2) Even if the things he discounts are genuine, that does not mean therefore that _all_ universality goes out the window. It is beyond any doubt whatsoever that the brain comes into the world with predispositions to certain kinds of linguistic structures; it would just mean that what we consider as universals would have to narrow.

Again, I have to ask you, if you're trying to suggest that universals don't exist, _then explain how language exists at all_. The only other explanation that has been proposed is the one of the blank slate - that a mind is utterly bare, and can be shaped in any way by any thing. That has been thoroughly debunked, demonstrating that children are born with innate capabilities, and these capabilities affect emergent culture.



brianwalker said:


> 4. Why is only what's "universal" in disparate societies the most important? Wittgenstein showed that there is no "universal" definition of "game", does that mean that "games" don't exist?


I didn't say that was the most important, I just said that the evidence is most compelling there. If you compare the U.S. and the UK, your basis for asserting a universal is going to be slim because of the cross-cultural influence. As for your Wittgenstein example, you again demonstrate that you don't really understand what is meant by a universal. Wittgenstein's contention is in fact _in favour_ of the idea of universals. The analogy here is that the individual games are to English, French and Russian, as the common rules, intents and 'family resemblances' are to grammar and syntax. This second tier is the level of the universal. You keep making the error of assuming that the universal is at the level of the complex, emergent cultural feature - it's not. The universals are at the level of the unconscious, pre-cultural predispositions. If you drew a ven diagram of everything all those games have in common, it is where every circle intersects (one example, with games, being the spirit of competition) that would signify the universals.



brianwalker said:


> I'm referring to the uses of "universal" in the link i.e. I am not using the word "universal" in the sense of anthropology, but in the colloquial sense.


Well, I'm afraid whatever sense you're using is unhelpful, and, having followed Jonah Lehrer for some time, I know he is not using "universal" in the colloquial sense. You're just being taken along by the misapprehending masses. This is evident from the fact that two out of the three quotations you used after the above statement were NOT from Lehrer. Lehrer does not use the phrase "universal language", and he would not agree with the poster who says that music is "universally understood". You can't attempt to interpret Lehrer's article by relying on the comments of people you don't know.



brianwalker said:


> 6. My argument is that for a particular work of music, it is far less universally accessible than works of literature. Even if you hate Shakespeare, you can get a good idea of not only what Hamlet was about, but what the individual words and phrases, the plots, themes, references, drama, etc, is about. You can't "explain" the "expressive" and "expression" of a music in the same way. For example, a Bach fugue, although it doesn't require learning a language "to know" or "to get", it is ultimately far more inaccessible for many people who can listen to it for eons and not "get it".


This argument is confounded by the fact that you're using an extremely unhelpful metaphor. You are trying to equate accessibility with the ability to communicate thoughts in language. The fact that you cannot express the nature of music in words has no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. It's utterly irrelevant. This is about _the neuroscience_ of music - we're considering this _at the level of the brain_, NOT conscious discussion. What is meant, at the level of the brain, is that you take people from all across the world and expose them to Bach and their minds will be much more collectively capable of understanding the music than if you took people from all across the world and handed them a book of Shakespeare. That's obvious, it's intuitive, it's common sense.



brianwalker said:


> 1. Can you elucidate what you mean by "phenomenon of culture and history" and "artistically similar in quality"? Do you mean "artistically similar in quality" to Shakespeare?


By "phenomenon of culture and history", I mean that your example is a quirk of our particular cultural heritage. Given a different culture and different history, it is quite easy to conceive of some literary greats being more contentious than a monolithic musical figure. By "artistically similar in quality", yes, in comparison to Shakespeare, many well-read people would say that he had his equals, and even his betters!



brianwalker said:


> 2. What does the fact that you need little time to understand it have to do with the violent disagreement over merits of relative works and the inaccessibility of music relative to literature?


The little time needed to understand is related to my point about education levels ('education' being both traditional education, and self-education). You can become familiar with the oeuvres of the musical greats much quicker than you can with the literary ones. Because of this, people are much more likely to form hard, contentious, intuitive, visceral opinions, because music does not have the intellectual and cerebral qualities of spending hours over a written text.



brianwalker said:


> I think you're misunderstanding my appropriation of the word from the article. They claim that there is the possibility one day that every piece of music can be explained in terms of "universal nerves", but I said that methodologically impossible because the same piece of music evokes wildly different reactions.


Yes, I'm misunderstanding your _mis_appropriation. *But here's the 'rub'*: why do you think that a single piece of music evokes wildly different reactions in different people? Is it because we have 'souls' that inform our aesthetic values? Is it because we have a ghost in the machine controlling our free-will? No, it's because of brain structure, it's because of pre-natal environment, it's because of childhood exposure, it's because of cultural exposure, it's because of peer groups, it's because of a complex array of environmental factors, all of which will one day be explicable in empirical terms. A Chinese man assesses Bach differently to you _not_ because he has some mysterious ethereal quality within him that prevents him from hearing it the same way, but because he is a product of a different culture, with different understandings. In other words, place any other person on this planet in an _identical_ life-history timeline to you, and they would have near-identical reactions to the same music, the variation being accounted for in individual physiological variation.

Once again, you fail to offer a replacement. You say science can't do this, or this, or this - well what _is_ doing it then?!

------------------------------



Dodecaplex said:


> The dogmas of empiricism are still alive and doing well. Quine be damned.


Sometimes, the intentions behind comments like these are unclear, because I think I understand you fairly well, and they don't sit right with my idea of your worldview. It seems to me that you hold a remarkable set of cognitive dissonances, and you perhaps rely too much on using philosophy as a way to rebel against prevailing human endeavours and opinions.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

You answer yourself on at least one point. 



brianwalker said:


> 3. Why sin't YouTube view count indicative of popularity? There are exceptional cases, but isn't it the case that higher view counts = great universality/popularity?


--->



brianwalker said:


> 1. The audience is self-selecting.
> 2. Most people have never heard of it.
> 3. The self-selecting nature of people who would find this piece and listen to it on YouTube means that its universal acclaim on the comments is as indicative that obesity is attractive in women in a forum devoted to fatty chasers.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I only saw your second post when I responded, so some of the things I raised in my last post have already been countered by you (in all instances with: "it's not my job to think of that"). It's clear that this will go nowhere new, so I'll leave my comments as they stand. The only thing I will say is that it's very misleading and disingenuous to try to sully the value of modern scientific consensus with criticism of Ptolemaic astronomy given that the scientific method on which we base our current scientific thought has only been around since the time of Galileo.


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

Polednice said:


> Sometimes, the intentions behind comments like these are unclear, because I think I understand you fairly well...


You don't.


Polednice said:


> ... and you perhaps rely too much on using philosophy as a way to rebel against prevailing human endeavours and opinions.


I don't.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Dodecaplex said:


> I don't.


Hmmmmmmmm.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

You still misunderstand it, and anyone who makes that analogy misunderstands it too (note that no scientist would make that analogy, because they actually know what the term means!). I'm not quite sure what's difficult to grasp about what I said earlier. English, French, Russian etc. are not universals because they don't exist everywhere. However, they all share grammatical and syntactical structures - the units of language that they are built on. Therefore, it is the underlying grammar that is universal, not the emergent language. We're not talking about things that people can learn, we're talking about things that are coded inside the brain from Day 1. One of them is a universal grammar, another is a set of musical parameters.

The search for a universal grammar presupposes that there is a universal grammar, but hitherto none have been found. Of course there will be commonalities, since relations stop nowhere, but what makes no commonalities the essential, paramount aspect of language? All human beings eat and sleep, but we can't derive what's paramount about human beings or particular human beings by those facts. It presupposes there there is something built into the brain, and all study is confined within that presupposition since anything that isn't universal is discarded as irrelevant.

It is true that when people say "music is a universal language", they often mean something that is not quite true. It is normally intended that because music doesn't carry information, it can be understood and appreciated by anyone from any culture. Well, that's not strictly true - there are learning barriers, as evidenced by the point about Western listeners understanding Gamelan and vice-versa, they are just more subtle and more easily overcome. It is only the things that we do not have to learn that count as universals, and it is not a piece of music or a musical system that will be a universal, but an underlying neurological capacity for understanding and appreciating pitch (for example).
By point is that music is less universal than language; all Americans without seriously cognitive deficiencies can learn English, but most will never appreciate Brahms to the minimum degree.

Music transcends geography and language insofar as people who speak different languages and come from different cultures can appreciate the same word-less music, but that doesn't make it universal.

In relation to language, which is what you quoted me on, every sane linguist on this planet in the last few decades will tell you that there are underlying patterns to all languages. It's an established fact, and you can read any number of introductory books on the subject to find out more about it. You, like other laymen, may not see the similarities between English, Russian, Afrikaans and even American Sign Language, but they do exist, and we even know the regions of the brain in which they function.

And any sane professor of philosophy in 1920 in the Anglo-phone world that Nietzsche didn't have anything important to say. This presupposes the authority and veracity of present academic linguistic research. Of course you could say, "who are you to say that the linguists are wrong?" and I will reply "who are you to say that they're right? Because they hold tenure at esteemed institutions?" But the same people who held these positions before have had their asses handed to them by the next generation.

It is beyond any doubt whatsoever that the brain comes into the world with predispositions to certain kinds of linguistic structures; it would just mean that what we consider as universals would have to narrow.
A dog, a cat, also eats and drinks. Again, there's no reason why the universal aspects are paramount. If Chomsky's views are disproven that means that certain aspects of language which are the most paramount are not universal and thus while the brain does come into the world with certain predispositions it doesn't mean perforce that those predispositions determine everything or everything that is important and that all we need to know can be found by looking into what's universal.

Again, I have to ask you, if you're trying to suggest that universals don't exist, then explain how language exists at all. The only other explanation that has been proposed is the one of the blank slate - that a mind is utterly bare, and can be shaped in any way by any thing. That has been thoroughly debunked, demonstrating that children are born with innate capabilities, and these capabilities affect emergent culture.

Science isn't a competition for the best alternative, since often times it takes thousands of years for the right theory to come into being; for example, Ptloemaic astronomy provided the best explanation for the movement of the heavens, and with the help of epi-cycles it was pragmatically also the best to use. There's no reason why I have to provide a counter explanation and no reason why the absence of a counter explanation justifies a faulty explanation. I only have to point out that the current theories don't meet the rigorous standards the true science must meet and have historically met.

You presuppose that language must necessarily "exist" and could be pinned down and examined like an object; you are making a philosophical error, because you suppose that a metaphysical ontology.






http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH2a


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

brianwalker said:


> The search for a universal grammar presupposes that there is a universal grammar, but hitherto none have been found. Of course there will be commonalities, since relations stop nowhere, but what makes no commonalities the essential, paramount aspect of language? All human beings eat and sleep, but we can't derive what's paramount about human beings or particular human beings by those facts. It presupposes there there is something built into the brain, and all study is confined within that presupposition since anything that isn't universal is discarded as irrelevant.


What do you mean no universal grammars have been found? Yes, there are no universal complex structures like subject + verb + object with specific inflections, but all languages appear to be recursive, and have various fundamental syntactic features.



brianwalker said:


> By point is that music is less universal than language; all Americans without seriously cognitive deficiencies can learn English, but most will never appreciate Brahms to the minimum degree.


This is a very bad example. You could compare all Americans without serious cognitive deficiencies learning English and learning to listen to or sing any variety of music, or you could compare some Americans appreciating the works of Dickens with some Americans appreciating Brahms, but you can't cross those categories.

My most general point in response would be that you are underestimating the advances of the field. There are no grand suppositions going on in modern linguistics, and, unlike the sciences and linguistics of the past, current established knowledge is far less likely to be overturned because it has not arisen out of armchair philosophy, it has arisen out of proper scientific research. Although I have pointed to it, the chief evidence that certain language features are universal is not that we can enumerate the features in all known languages, it is because of linguistic neuroscience - we know of brain areas and brain structures that specifically deal with language processing and nothing else. This necessitates that humans are born with certain linguistic capabilities while cats and dogs are not. It is beyond doubt that there are universals, just as it is universal that the pituitary regulates certain hormones. The hard task is finding _what_ the universals are; no longer _whether_ they are.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

I didn't say that was the most important, I just said that the evidence is most compelling there. If you compare the U.S. and the UK, your basis for asserting a universal is going to be slim because of the cross-cultural influence. As for your Wittgenstein example, you again demonstrate that you don't really understand what is meant by a universal. Wittgenstein's contention is in fact in favour of the idea of universals. The analogy here is that the individual games are to English, French and Russian, as the common rules, intents and 'family resemblances' are to grammar and syntax. This second tier is the level of the universal. You keep making the error of assuming that the universal is at the level of the complex, emergent cultural feature - it's not. The universals are at the level of the unconscious, pre-cultural predispositions*. If you drew a ven diagram of everything all those games have in common, it is where every circle intersects *(one example, with games, being the spirit of competition) that would signify the universals.
:lol::lol::lol:

Let me take this out in bold.

*If you drew a ven diagram of everything all those games have in common, it is where every circle intersects *

_*This is exactly what family resemblance is NOT. *_

Wittgenstein said

*For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all,*

http://books.google.com/books?id=wm... see something that is common to all"&f=false

Well, I'm afraid whatever sense you're using is unhelpful, and, having followed Jonah Lehrer for some time, I know he is not using "universal" in the colloquial sense. You're just being taken along by the misapprehending masses. This is evident from the fact that two out of the three quotations you used after the above statement were NOT from Lehrer. Lehrer does not use the phrase "universal language", and he would not agree with the poster who says that music is "universally understood". You can't attempt to interpret Lehrer's article by relying on the comments of people you don't know.

I'm not referring to Lehrer's use of "universal" - Lehrer is quite modest and uses his language carefully, but of the person who 1. quoted and 2. his commentators.

I'm critiquing the notion of universal as being used by the masses, that's part of it, yes.

This argument is confounded by the fact that you're using an extremely unhelpful metaphor. You are trying to equate accessibility with the ability to communicate thoughts in language. The fact that you cannot express the nature of music in words has no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. It's utterly irrelevant. This is about the neuroscience of music - we're considering this at the level of the brain, NOT conscious discussion. What is meant, at the level of the brain, is that you take people from all across the world and expose them to Bach and their minds will be much more collectively capable of understanding the music than if you took people from all across the world and handed them a book of Shakespeare. That's obvious, it's intuitive, it's common sense.

This is patently false. If you give me 10,000 toddlers at random from across the world and let me raise them with the English tongue and have them all listen to Bach from an early age, the disputes on this forum would indicate that in the last they could agree on what Romeo and Juliet means to a degree far greater than they could agree on what a Bach fugue means or whether Bach is even worth listening to. You mistake what I mean when I say universal, I'm using it in a different sense than you're using it; you assume it's universality in the present, while I mean potential universality.

My argument is that many people who are raised on classical music and come from a musical culture still cannot "get", say, Wagner, at all, but anyone with a competent grasp of English can read Romeo and Juliet and get a sense of what it's "about", even if they don't appreciate it, so while music can transcend language and geographical barriers, music has more intrinsic barriers that cannot be crossed, and is thus less universal than language.

The little time needed to understand is related to my point about education levels ('education' being both traditional education, and self-education). You can become familiar with the oeuvres of the musical greats much quicker than you can with the literary ones. Because of this, people are much more likely to form hard, contentious, intuitive, visceral opinions, because music does not have the intellectual and cerebral qualities of spending hours over a written text.
But disagreements don't cool when people become more experienced, they rise in fact. Contempt becomes more acute with the rise in knowledge and experience.

http://medicine-opera.com/2009/10/anything-but-wagner/
http://www.soundsandfury.com/soundsandfury/2009/10/anything-but-wagner-a-response.html

All this shows that music is less universal than language.

But here's the 'rub': why do you think that a single piece of music evokes wildly different reactions in different people?

I honestly don't know, and I have examined all hitherto theories and found them unsatisfactory. There's no reason why I have to proffer up an explanation or that I must have "an answer".

Suppose we have a black un-transparent box, steel and impenetrable, a thousand pounds, 100 meter cubed, and you make up some theory about what's in it that sounds better than any other theory; the black box is of a certain size, of a certain weight, and you make conjectures and theories about the object in the box that doesn't contradict the size of the box or the weight of the box. That doesn't mean that just because I haven't come up with a better explanation for what's in the box means that your theory is true, and if there is a single part of your "theory" that doesn't "fit" the facts we know about the black box your theory is _*false*_ even if I don't come up with an alternate theory of what's inside the box.


Is it because we have 'souls' that inform our aesthetic values? Is it because we have a ghost in the machine controlling our free-will?
"Souls" and "ghost in the machine" doesn't explain the divergence in taste either. Again, "souls" don't "explain" anything.

No, it's because of brain structure, it's because of pre-natal environment, it's because of childhood exposure, it's because of cultural exposure, it's because of peer groups, it's because of a complex array of environmental factors, all of which will one day be explicable in empirical terms. 

That's a materialist presupposition; you have no evidence that proves that those things are all that there is.

*all of which will one day be explicable in empirical terms. 
*

Again you have no way of knowing this, this is a philosophical presupposition and not an empirical conclusion.

A Chinese man assesses Bach differently to you not because he has some mysterious ethereal quality within him that prevents him from hearing it the same way, but because he is a product of a different culture, with different understandings.
People brought up in the same home, born of the same mother, assess the same music differently, so it's false to attribute all differences in assessment to geography and culture difference.

In other words, place any other person on this planet in an identical life-history timeline to you, and they would have near-identical reactions to the same music, the variation being accounted for in individual physiological variation.
Except that this is empirically false. People who go to the same school and the same workplace, speak the same language and are of the same race have wildly diverging taste in music and understand music differently.

Once again, you fail to offer a replacement. You say science can't do this, or this, or this - well what is doing it then?!


Again, there's no reason why I have to offer a replacement; the question at hand is that "what is the best theory" but "what is the *true* theory".


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

Polednice said:


> What do you mean no universal grammars have been found? Yes, there are no universal complex structures like subject + verb + object with specific inflections, but all languages appear to be recursive, and have various fundamental syntactic features.


1. We have found a language that is not recursive - see the New Yorker article. 
2. If you find everything in common and then say that define those commonalites as universal then you can find universals among anything; you can say that cats and dogs are the same because they are mammals and all mammals share trait X. If you define language as what is common to all languages then you assumption presupposes that your end.

This is a very bad example. You could compare all Americans without serious cognitive deficiencies learning English and learning to listen to or sing any variety of music, or you could compare some Americans appreciating the works of Dickens with some Americans appreciating Brahms, but you can't cross those categories.

I didn't cross categories, I'm comparing language and music, not literature and music; see: 10,000 children example.

My most general point in response would be that you are underestimating the advances of the field. 
I have not because I have not given an estimation of the advances in the field, I have merely stated what the field in its current direction can and cannot do.

There are no grand suppositions going on in modern linguistics, and, unlike the sciences and linguistics of the past, current established knowledge is far less likely to be overturned because it has not arisen out of armchair philosophy, it has arisen out of proper scientific research.

Everything rests within the "proper".

Although I have pointed to it, the chief evidence that certain language features are universal is not that we can enumerate the features in all known languages, it is because of linguistic neuroscience - we know of brain areas and brain structures that specifically deal with language processing and nothing else. 
Again, what does that say about language? That says something about biology, but if we want to study what music is we study music and not the section of the brain that processes music; we can't derive milk from the human stomach.

This necessitates that humans are born with certain linguistic capabilities while cats and dogs are not. It is beyond doubt that there are universals, just as it is universal that the pituitary regulates certain hormones. The hard task is finding _what_ the universals are; no longer _whether_ they are.
And the field presupposes that language is an object that can be studies in the way that physicists study atoms. Yes, it makes "advances", but it's a mistake to think that these advances mean that the ultimate goal can be achieved or that the present advancements are all there is to know.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

And this is where my part in this grand play ends.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

Hilltroll72 said:


> << My general reaction to the piece: yes, of course music is explicable in wholly scientific terms, and in terms of brain function. Everything about humankind is explicable in terms of brain function, because that's what we are, that's what consciousness is: an expression of our brains and bodies in relation to our environments


Again, this is a philosophical conclusion, and not a scientific or empirical one. [I know you're quoting Poledice].

Obviously, some people might suggest that we are something else, something 'more'. Well, as witnessed by the airy-fairy, fanciful and fantastical comments in reply to the piece, no one has a shred of evidence to the contrary - it's just deceptive human intuition that cannot be substantiated. Don't tell me that music isn't about neuroscience until you've got some data to the contrary. Neuroscience is far, far, far from explaining music completely, but it's already done more than any spiritualist theory. >>

(had to quote _something_)

Hey _Poley_, That is a focused, intelligently argued post. I am not surprised, but I am delighted.

Again, I didn't say that spiritualism has "explained" anything, or that it competed with science at all, but that the current research cannot meet its own goals.

If you posit that all of human behavior is explicable in terms of diet you will find lots of evidence, correlations, etc, findings that link diet to various human behavior, but if you suppose and limit your research to diet only then you'll of course find "evidence" that supports that what you have for breakfast "determines" your behavior, but that fact that correlations exist is no proof that that's all there is.

*Neuropsychology presupposes its own success, and that presupposition rests on philosophical grounds, and is in no way the result of research. It's as scientific as phrenology. *

http://www.sentimentaltoday.net/CUP...losophy.Volume.1.Selected.Essays.Jun.2006.pdf

An agent, for example (my example, not Hegel's), may ﬁnd himself
performing a set of multifarious individual actions. Becoming conscious
of the character of these, he becomes aware that his over-all conduct is
jealous, let us say, or cowardly. But now he is able to place, indeed cannot 
but place, his conduct qua jealous or qua cowardly in relation to what
Hegel calls "the given circumstances, situations, habits, customs, religion,
and so forth," i.e., in relation to the relevant norms and responses of
his culture. But to do this is to provide himself with reasons, perhaps
decisive reasons, for altering his conduct in the light of those norms and
responses and of his own goals. It is of the nature of the character traits
of a rational agent that they are never simply ﬁxed and determinate, but
that for the agent to discover what they are in relation to his unity as a
self-conscious agent - that is, what they are in his personal and social
context - is to open up to the agent the possibility of exchanging what he
is for what he is not.
Moreover, the agent who does not change his traits may change their
manifestations. Indeed, for him to become conscious that he manifests
certain traits and so appears in a certain light, is to invite him to do just
this. The relation of external appearance, including facial appearance, to
character is such that the discovery that any external appearance is taken to
be a sign of a certain type of character is a discovery that an agent may then
exploit to conceal his character. Hence, another saying of Lichtenberg, in
Uber Physiognomik, which Hegel also quotes:* "Suppose the physiognomist
ever did have a man in his grasp; it would merely require a courageous
resolution on the man's part to make himself again incomprehensible for
centuries."*

What would the corresponding theses about dispositions be? Let us consider points from two of Hegel's examples - those of the murderer and of the poet. A given murderer, for instance, commits his crime because he fears his own humiliation by losing his beloved. If we are to look at the traits and other qualities manifested in his action, they do not include a disposition to commit murder, but such things perhaps as a general intolerance of suffering, a disposition to avoid speciﬁc kinds of humiliation, his love for the young woman, and so on. The same dispositions might explain to precisely the same extent the same person's outbidding others in giving to a deserving cause in order to impress the same young woman. But just this fact puts in question the use of the word "explain." Hegel makes this point in relation to phrenology: "And again his murderous propensity can be referred to any bump or hollow, and this in turn to any mental quality; for the murderer is not the abstraction of a murderer . . ."

It concerns the question: if history is not a matter of general laws and of
theories, in what sense does it give us understanding at all? The Hegelian
reply is that the self-knowledge of a self-conscious rational agent has
always to be cast in a historical form. The past is present in the self
in so many and so important ways that, lacking historical knowledge,
our self-knowledge will be fatally limited. Moreover, this type of selfknowledge could never be yielded by theoretical sciences that aspire to explain behavior in terms of physiological structures and processes. It is in
fact just because our history constitutes us as what we are to so great an
extent, that any explanation that omits reference to that history, as did
and do the explanations of phrenology and neurophysiology, may explain
the aptitudes and conditions of the human body, but not those of the
human spirit.

Again, I'm not ruling out that neuropsychology cannot explain music, but that under its current sphere of research and with its current vocabulary regardless of the empirical correlations they can explain very little, and that it amounts really to sociology and not neuroscience at all, for all the "antinomies" given in the OP that cannot be explained in terms of any neuroscientific terms.

*My objections to the neuropsychology of music are empirical ones. Your justification for its success for philosophical ones. In this instance I am decidedly the more scientific one, for I did not reject neurospychology tout court, but surveyed it and concluded that it cannot meet its own standards, the standards necessary for it to prove the conclusions, any conclusions, that it seeks.*


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

If all you want to do is state very verbosely that current scientific theories do not explain everything, you might find that everyone already knows that...


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

Polednice said:


> If all you want to do is state very verbosely that current scientific theories do not explain everything, you might find that everyone already knows that...


What I'm saying is *not* equal to the generic "science can't explain everything", but that the current neuropsychology doesn't explain why we appreciate music *at all* and is nothing more than sociology, and that they arrive at "truths" and "Findings" that could've been arrived at through thoroughly unscientific means and that these "findings" in no way validate that there are universal traits in music that corresponds to certain neurological "states" and that music has quality x, y, and z and can be explained biologically.

Chemistry doesn't "explain everything", but it explains what it deigns to explain. Our current "scientific" analysis of music *fails on its OWN terms.*

Everyone knows that science can't explain *everything,* my point is that neuroscience cannot explain music at all and that it fails to achieve and if it remains on its current course it will never achieve its goal.

The rub is that it bites off more than it can chew.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I think you're accusing the neuroscientific community of making claims that it doesn't actually make.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

All the math and physics applied to study of how the bumblebee flies have, to date, only determined:
1.) the creature cannot fly
2.) if it could fly, it could only fly backwards.

I'm waiting for the fuzzy logic now being sought in hardware / software computing to catch on with the Science and literary logic folk, since that is what is really needed to get anywhere near a grip on what music is and how it works. 

The math / science crowd truly believe EVERYTHING can be reduced and explained using the language and principles of those disciplines, and therefore will forever be 'outside' of art until they realize their disciplines will have to also come up with revolutionary maths and scientific principles to 'catch up' to what music is, how it is made, and the impulses which make us make, consume and respond to it.

A friend of mine put on a CD of a Messiaen piece for his four year-old niece to listen to. She said, "It sounds like BIRDS."

Regretting not a whit my eternal shallowness, but reading along in this sort of 'dense' textured treatise and stumbling across the word 'song' where piece was surely intended had me discount the entire body of the text by about 70%.


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## Cnote11 (Jul 17, 2010)

The opening of your posts, PetrB, is factually incorrect.


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