Given the nature of improvisation, especially in a group context – two or more sentient beings with experiences and tendencies of their own, the unpredictability of the sound generator and the medium, myriad possibilities of acoustic and/or physical interference – it is inarguable that music lies in planes derived by quantum physics, akin to certain rays and waves and their places within the electromagnetic spectrum. Conceivable, yet incomprehensible. Some basic rules of quantum mechanics:
Just as there are colors that have a natural “calming” effect, there exists noise or sound that, given certain environments, moods, whatever, will have repeatedly similar effects on the listener. Likewise, combinations of simultaneously viewed colors or heard sounds will produce measurable, even predictable, results on the subject. As the body can become immune to certain hazardous airborne particles, or viruses can adapt to and overcome established immunities, a listener can “learn” to absorb foreign, atonal or abrasive noise or music and accept it into the brain’s catalog of appealing catalysts. Heavy emphasis should be put on the medium and environment. Other values such as amplitude, interference, background noise, and mood should be considered.
For the purpose of this discussion, we will use my dad as the object. We are the observer.
Dad has incredibly limited tastes in music that don’t fly much beyond Nat King Cole, Willie Nelson, Johnny Mathis and Linda Rondstadt. What would it take to successfully introduce Dad to music by someone like Le Quan Ninh, Albert Ayler or Varese? Success does not necessarily mean Dad has to appreciate or even fully understand what he has heard. Our grounds for success would be Dad’s abandonment of all preconceived notions of what music should, or even has to, sound like. Success would also include some plausible synopsis of what he has heard, with comparison to other similar from his own experiences, perhaps a creepy film soundtrack. Phrases such as “What kind of shit is this?” “You’re kidding me, right?” “Are they just warming up?” And “Ok, turn it off,” uttered during or after the listening experiment would deem the results unsuccessful. So we have loosely based criteria for this controlled experiment. But as you might guess, any predictions or hypotheses laid down prior to the experiment taking place have a yak’s chance in a meat farm of having any worth beyond wager placing.
What happens in the process of a listener’s genre-crossing? Consider the creak of a door. One person may associate the sound with a scene of suspense in a film, while another may experience the creak as a subconscious connection to childhood, say, the elation she experienced when Father would return home from work. With the film, the intensity or anxiety associated with the creak may exist simply as elevated heart rate, accompanied by, aside from emotion, a natural high resulting from the release of hormones. Put into another context, let’s make the creak an element of music. Hormones are more likely to be released listening to the same segment of music in a return sitting, rather than during the initial experience. This could be a result of anticipation and its physiological components – I love the middle segment in this tune, I can’t wait to hear those strings. Or, of equal likelihood, anticipated sounds reconnect the listener almost every time with a prior experience, related only by sound and certainly not by context.
Jenny likes Mariah Carey. Jenny loves the dog whistle noodling Mariah sometimes embellishes her choruses with. She also likes the hip-hop backbeats. Life is good when Jenny cruises in her convertible, “Daydream” blaring away. Boyfriend Nigel churns away the work day to Dead Meadow and Peter Brötzmann. Nigel likes his anger music. Nigel wishes Jenny would abandon Mariah and come to appreciate the complexity and muscle-driven emotion of Gush. He takes her to a few shows at the glitchprov festival. Jenny vomits and shakes her head no.
What number of events would have to take place for a deliberate, conscious conversion of either Jenny or Nigel to the other’s brand of entertainment? Try to think of every catalyst, every event that accompanied and steered you toward your current taste in music. How did you gravitate there? Did you gravitate at all? Surely a friend or two along the way turned you on to music you hadn’t heard prior. Was this by complete accident? Is there the possibility that you listen to Penderecki as a result of someone else’s devious grand design? Would you feel betrayed if so?
Jenny and Nigel have a problem. Western sociology would probably determine that they come from completely different backgrounds, Point A, based on their musical preferences. However, the same sociologists might surmise that Jenny and Nigel might, at age 78, end up at precisely the same location in their social and cultural evolution, Point Z. Given their current tastes, what is the possibility that along the way Jenny and Nigel share points F, M, Q and R in their aesthetic timelines, musically speaking?
Jenny might one evening tune in to Nightline and hear Ted Koppel denounce Willem Breuker as “devil music.” She might associate his comment with a bad experience with Nigel years prior involving tequila, needles, and the Kollektief. Is her conversion more or less likely at this point in her timeline?
Now consider Schroedinger’s Cat.
One of the rooms in the school I teach at is close to the boiler room, the door to that boiler room is very heavy, closes slowly (then opens again, all by itself), and creaks a lot. It sounds very, very similar to the sounds trumpeter Jamie Coleman gets when he mutes his trumpet with a $10 ballon stretched over a steel bowl. Similar enough that I walked out of the room I was in and around the music department, looking for what I imagined would be a trumpet student who had independently discovered this technique. Never occurred to me it was the door creaking until I looked out the window and saw it move in time with the sound I was hearing. True, it's not your father's door creak - this is an unusual one, but it shows where conditioning can get you.
Posted by: Nathaniel Catchpole at August 29, 2003 5:49 AMI'm not sure we need to go to the quantum level to get to the unpredictability of improvisions. I mean, even if Heisenberg had been wrong and Newton's theory had been correct and complete in every aspect, only God (or maybe that phenom Waxman) would have been able to handle Nat's boiler room issue. Certainly not us garden variety listeners. Too many events involved.
Posted by: walto at August 29, 2003 6:52 AMI knew not paying attention in 7th grade science class would catch up with me one day. Al, you should shop this treatise to Scholastic; they might be interested in publishing it in pamphlet form so we can get kids thinking about this stuff at an early age. Thanks to your orphic ruminations I can’t get the sound of Dolphy & the birds out of my skull. I’m also reminded of John Fahey’s comments recalling the first time he heard a Blind Willie Johnson record. He was so disturbed by the otherworldly angst borne out in Johnson’s lye-parched voice & string-spindling slide guitar, he threw up.
But getting to the grist of your elaborate query. For me it all starts with 8-track tapes of Neil Diamond, Cat Stevens & Abba in my parents purple Ford Econoline van, a willling captive on cross-country road trips. Tributaries though Oingo Boingo and INXS in my early teens led to Jimi Hendrix, Living Colour, Black Sabbath & SST/Dischord bands in high school alongside first flirtations with jazz thanks to my mom’s modest collection of grooves-worn Blue Note LPs. With college came the real blossoming into a semblance of the tastes I have today. As far as circumstance & fate having anything to do with it, I suppose so, but I do think we’re all pretty much pre-wired to dig what we dig. Not that this wiring can’t be rerouted and tinkered with, just that it’s basic schematic is set at an early stage & later shaped by what we come in contact with.
Also, I wasn’t aware that the signifier ‘phenom’ granted its recipient(s) powers of omnipotence. When Ken comes back from the mountaintop bearing the sacred tablets maybe we should ask him.
Oh yeah, one more thing, Newton is SO 17th Century.
Adducing cause and effect or intent -- individual and collective -- from a given piece of music is tricky, isn't it?
I would prefer to think about the postulates thrown out there by "complexity science" (enclosed in quotes as there are some critics who question the scientific nature of the theories at work, which, I must admit, mainly iterate some some groaningly obvious concepts in new-fangled ways), which focus on chaos as a necessary condition for the generation of what we call order. To paraphrase from an article I just found the web by one M. Mitchell Waldrop:
"Like all complex systems, then, the overall behavior of [a given musical collective's] operation emerges spontaneously from myriad low-level interactions."
http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue121/5799.html
But I can be a lazy thinker, and I can much more comfortably appreciate the algorithms of complexity science in the abstract than I can slog through the ponderous computations requried by quantum physics.
Then again, music IS math at some level, no?
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at August 29, 2003 8:21 AMAnd math IS art?
Posted by: derek at August 29, 2003 8:40 AMDerek, if you're not going to take this seriously...
"Like all complex systems, then, the overall behavior of [a given musical collective's] operation emerges spontaneously from myriad low-level interactions."
This idea is what I'm getting at. There is a science of consciousness, and to a later effect, destiny, that somehow plays into all of this. FWIW, there is no slogging as far as I'm concerned when dealing with this subject. Quantum mechanics is fairly simple to understand. Like religion though, there is a large element of faith that these ideas rely upon. One might begin and end their appreciation of the subject with the link in the original post to those classic experiments. The wave-particle duality, for instance, might account for Derek's insisting that everything, including right angles, is subjective.
Nat's creak experience is something to think about.
Posted by: al at August 29, 2003 9:19 AMAl, I am taking this seriously, just trying to have some fun in the bargain. You can’t tell me parts of your original post weren’t written with tongue in cheek. My last question wasn’t rhetorical. There are many mathematicians who consider their manipulations of numbers & formulas art. Sometimes aesthetic patterns and symmetries can be found in the most surprising places.
Posted by: derek at August 29, 2003 9:25 AMJust jivin, man. To answer your question:
Posted by: al at August 29, 2003 9:28 AMThere’s no such thing as a perfect right angle except in theory. For instance, breaking down the apparent 90° angle formed by the meeting of a desk and a wooden floor reveals microscopic imperfections in each surface that effectively destroy the integrity of the angle from a nakedly observational sense. Yet we still consider the angle ‘right’ for all intents & purposes. By this definition there’s no such thing as a truly straight line either. Just because the numbers fit doesn’t make something universally so.
Additionally, the concept of destiny can be either intensely scientific (as in everything is predetermined by an infinitely complex series of systems working in tandem & opposition) or non-scientific (synonymous with fate as a force that operates independent of scientific principles & cannot be controlled by them, guiding anything & everything in an ultimately unknowable fashion). Either way it’s a human construct designed to make heads & tails of the universe.
Now back to the Reverend Gary Davis’ “Buck Dance”…
It would be foolish to build a suspension bridge using measurements taken from a desk.
Posted by: al at August 29, 2003 9:47 AMI'm new here, so......Hi.
Well, math has certainly been used effectively in the service of arts outside of technical apparatus (perspective, acoustics, etc.) Worth looking at are Raymond Queneau's "The Foundations of Literature (after David Hilbert)", which takes a set of geometric axioms and subverts them in the favor of literature, and his "On the Aerodymanic Properties of Addition", where he does the opposite, both to great comic effect.
Derek, do you have a citation for the above Fahey paraphrase? I'd love to see the context it appeared in.
Posted by: Nirav Soni at August 29, 2003 9:49 AMnot much to add to this discussion: I'd just like to welcome Nirav, and point out that it's odd that the Red Herring site is still online even though they folded six months ago.
Posted by: Jon Abbey at August 29, 2003 9:58 AMNirav, hey, welcome. Where can I find those Queneau texts? Are they shorts? I'm intrigued.
Posted by: al at August 29, 2003 10:07 AMThey are both shorts, "The Foundations of Literature...." is in the Oulipo Laboratory book, published by the Atlas Press, and "On the Aerodymaic Properties of Addition" is in the Stories and Remarks collection. Both are still in print, and well worth reading, as is pretty much everything written under the Oulipo umbrella (at least from my fairly limited experience.)
Posted by: Nirav Soni at August 29, 2003 10:23 AMFWIW, Mathews' CIGARETTES is, for me, one of the finest and most subtle works to come out of this movement.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at August 29, 2003 11:14 AMAl, good point on the suspension bridge-desk comparison. But while they vary enormously in terms of complexity, both objects do operate on the same basic principles of measurement, just applied differently.
I think there’s a lot of lee-way built into the imperfections of things. Just because they don’t match up precisely with their mathematical approximations doesn’t necessarily spell disaster. For example take atmospheric re-entry during space flight. All of the myriad of calculations regarding trajectory, angle, velocity, etc. have to be extremely precise for such an exercise to be successful. These measurements aren’t absolutely exact when applied to all the variables (they can’t be), but they’re still close enough to ensure that a craft doesn’t burn up.
Nirav, good to have you here. I’m not sure about the exact origin of that Fahey anecdote, but I remember reading it in an interview with him years ago. Here’s another one that touches briefly on it.
Where the hell is Ted? You guys are talking about Oulipo & he’s missing out.
Damn, my attempt at coding that interview link fizzled. Here’s the cut & paste equivalent:
http://freespace.virgin.net/paul.richards/ie4/johnf/jfbjd.htm
"These measurements aren’t absolutely exact when applied to all the variables (they can’t be), but they’re still close enough to ensure that a craft doesn’t burn up."
It depends on your definition of precise. This conversation is happening because a hummingbird beat its wings in Missouri.
Edward Lorenz's butterfly phenomenon? It's a favorite of mine to ponder when hit with all of those bombs that make up a day of chaos in everyday life. Lorenz was a meteorologist who made his own computer program to simulate the weather. Using 12 variables, he found that the slightest change in his inputs would result in an often enormous change in the output of his weather-generator. In his first script, all 12 variables were set to 6 decimal places, producing weather of a certain intensity and origin. In changing only two of the variables to have only 3 or 4 decimal places, he noted outrageous changes in his computerized weather patterns. Lorenz thus came up with the idea that a butterfly beating its wings somewhere in the world had the string probability of causing a hurricane elsewhere. I like that.
Me too. Lorenz was on to something.
I was under the impression that our conversation stemmed from sound of that giant redwood oak that fell in the woods this morning.
My definition of precise is: close, but not perfectly absolute (is this phrase redundant?). What's your's? Do you believe a measurement can be absolutely precise?
Posted by: derek at August 29, 2003 12:14 PMAl and Derek -- surely you remember this old review?
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at August 29, 2003 12:20 PMFondly. That’s one of my favorites of your essays for OFN- it made my head hurt in the best possibly way.
Between redwood & oak in the post above, I choose oak.
Joe, yup. I remember thinking "holy fucking shit" at the size of it. Great piece of writing.
Derek, yes, I believe there are things that are absolutely precise. The area of a rectangle, for instance, will always be a product of its length and width. Not to mention countless other shit Archimedes thought up milleniums (millenia?) ago.
Math is fun.
Posted by: al at August 29, 2003 1:05 PMSho’ nuff is.
Hmm. You got me. I should’ve asked you if you believe measurements in the physical, tangible, ‘real,’ whatever-you-want-to call-it world can be absolutely precise. The area of rectangle as measured by the formula length x width will be precise, under the assumptions inherent to the equation. But my doubt originates from the component measurements used in the equation’s computation, not the equation itself. These measurements can only be approximations if we’re dealing with actual 'real' world applications (objects, distances, etc.).
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