Re: math & music -- a relationship?

--- In crazy_music@y..., xed@e... wrote:
> What I'mn getting at in this series of posts, perhaps ineptly
> and with poor wording, is that the whole thrust of modern
> scientific and musicological and ethnomusicological evidence
> runs quite the other direction, tending strongly to disprove any
> kind of causal relationship twixt math and music.

Ah ha! Now that's a band wagon I can jump on. I'd been turning over
in my mind a few possible ways to say, validly, that math has nothing
to do with music. Every one had a catch. But this works: there is no
causal relationship between math and music. Finally it becomes clear.

> Music (oddly enough) seems to be one of the last of the great
> cultural taboos which remains in force in Western culture --
> it is one of the few completely untouchable subjects, whose
> udnerlying cultural preconceptions cannot be questioned
> and cannot be doubted. In Western cultures almost every
> other cutlural taboo has come under fire and become
> malleable -- adultery, once a hanging offense, now
> merely qulaifies the woman or the man for a shot on
> Oprah (if famous enough). Sex with women under the
> age of 21, once the ultimate forbidden horror in America,
> is now so common it does not deserve discussion. Drinking
> liquor, once forbidden in manys states, is pretty much accepted
> everywhere in America except Utah. Gambling, once the
> demon and forbidden scourge of North America, has been embraced
> by every state, legalized, and provides vast revenues from New York
> to California.

I see no need to associate the overthrow of traditional music theory
with the overthrow of morality. While I'm all for questioning the
music establishment, I cannot condone the general moral breakdown
occurring in Western culture. I believe that mankind's greatest good
and highest goal is to please God, and I believe that the Bible is the
Word of God. Math-based music theories don't have any direct moral
meaning, and so may be freely questioned or done away with altogether,
if need be.

> The great story in music theory over the last 15 years has
> been the increasing realization that ALL (and I do mean all!)
> prescriptive music theories are simply worthless. They
> consistently fail. They constantly blow up. They collapse
> into contradiction with the actual practices of real composers
> in the real world to a startlingly uniform degree.

Why didn't we all recognize this in music school (those of us who
went), when, upon trying to complete music analysis assignments for
theory class, we constantly ran up against inherent logical
contradictions? It was as plain as the nose on Beethoven's bust, but
we couldn't see it.

I think I see now, Brian, why you're swinging your axe so hard. You
have quite a massive wall to break down. Just the same, it might be
even more effective to plant little seeds in the cracks of the wall
and give them time to grow, destroying the wall slowly but invincibly.

David

A few short responses to the wayward over the last week or two

Notice that practically the only types of child prodigies are in math
and music. there couldn't possibly be a relation

to dismiss lattices as a tool is synonymous with a blind man attempting
to get sight by becoming blind drunk.
How is ignorance a beneficial . also lets hear where a lattice is a
problem and this have anything to do with bad music.
It is like saying that not knowing where major/minor chords are on the
piano
will make better tonal music

Since having no root in the nature of sound what could be more
mathematical and arbitrary than an ET. There is no culture on the globe
that has not developed it music along acoustical properties. This is
obvious when you consider they are tuned by ear not by the overheated
logic based minds of a civilization that no matter what the terrain,
places its fence post equally distant apart. ET is the imagination of
the cattle rancher.

30 years ago i remember hearing arguments how electronics could produce
instruments whose timbre was uniform from top to bottom. Once we had it,
it was horrible. Now we go through great lengths to create scaling
differances in volume and timbre over the instruments to make them sound
better. The same variation is necessary with intervals.

Why would you want a scale that you can't add or subtract to without
destroying
it very nature

To say that there are no JI intervals in nature is like saying that
because there are no absolutely pure geometric shapes in rocks crystals
they don't exist since in their forming, there is always some
distortion.

Likewise if we take recordings of people playing the drums, we will
notice that there are discrepancies that show that the beat is off, thus
tempo and beats are not based on whole number relations. ridiculous.

Notice that noone ever says they hear a simple ratio as a more complex
one. a matter of learning? why do i not mistake a 5/4 for a 12 et third
yet players if holding a chord will do the opposite.

Just as gestalt psychology has shown us that Squares , triangles, and
other geometric forms are natural products of the mind, why is the
notion that such forms in our sense of hearing such a threat.

-- Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria island
http://www.anaphoria.com

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