Abstract

  • Every second of music is a puzzle: the pleasure of listening lies in vivisection.
  • Musical ideas infect those who do not use gloves: tools from music theory need not be sterilized.
  • Those who care must be quick to be fall prey and eager to spread these germs.
  • Listening cannot be regarded complete before the delivery of a new monster.

Introduction

In this article I aim to explain what “music” means to me. I recognize that some parts may seem a bit arrogant, so I emphasize that these are mere notes, and like all my notes serve me more than anyone else, and if you experience music-related experiences in a different way, more or less intricate than mine, that is fine.

Anticipation

  • Leibniz:

Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi.

That is

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn’t know that it is counting.

  • Bolciaghi (not verbatim):

Knowing the scales gives you the pleasure of re-encountering them in the pieces you play, already knowing what they will sound like and what keys you will have to press. You already know what is coming next: this allows you to experience many “Saturday Nights at the Village”.

For those unfamiliar with Italian literature, see “Il sabato del villaggio” by Giacomo Leopardi.

Novelty

  • I partially disagree with the idea that

If only I could listen to that song again as if it were the first time!

  • The more details you discover about a composition, the more pleasure you get from it.
  • It is impossible to discover all the details of a song after just one listen.
  • However, I agree that the process of deciphering, which to the first order is simply listening to the piece for the first time, is the source of pleasure.
  • In this sense tracks are puzzles that need to be unraveled.

Memes

  • Musical performances are memes, living beings that infect people and use them to reproduce themselves.
  • The proper way to express one’s appreciation for music is to reproduce it, to become its receptacle, like throwing gasoline on a fire.
  • If you like music, in the sense of a specific song, style, idea, “play” it and make yourself heard (more on “playing” later).
  • Passively listening to it is not enough.
  • Skilled musicians can be quickly infected with varieties of parasytes: see Bird quoting what he heard at the radio the very morning before recordings.

Listening and playing

  • Listening, taken to its fullest potential, is the same thing as playing.
  • To play in time/in tune you have to listen to others, okay.
  • But more generally you have to listen to your brain, you have to consciously decide what to play.
  • The concept of audiation: listening to the music in your head in the most concrete way possible.
  • This is the power of visualization applied to music.

Active and passive listening

  • Enjoyable listening that seems “passive” is actually “active” listening to a mind already used to it (cf. Leibniz).
  • The aim of active listening is to train the ear to perform passively increasingly complex calculations.
  • Passive listening can create a background feeling, but it’s far from getting the best out of music.
  • Listening is passive even when, despite any effort to focus, the brain’s sampling rate is not enough to distinguish notes, or the other varying degrees of freedom in the composition.
  • For example, bebop so fast that notes cannot be distinguished can be fascinating, especially live, but if you don’t follow it it doesn’t say much besides showing off raw skill.
  • Passive listening is similar to seeing a race or a marathon from a fixed spot: if you cannot run at the same speed of the contestants, or if you don’t have access to a moving camera, the show will last an instant.
  • Active listening is about using your ears to process audio signals in a non-trivial way, distinguishing between various tracks and “events”, to selectively amplify.
  • True listening enables one to repeat what you have heard, no matter whether on paper, on an instrument, even humming.
  • This is what true active listening looks like. Even grasping the topology, the direction of motion, is a big step, if not hearing intervals.
  • The pinnacle of this kind of transcriptive power is speech harmonization (Publio Delgado, MonoNeon…).

Degrees of freedom

  • A “degree of freedom” is something whose variation can be the core of a composition.
  • The basic degrees of freedom I recognize are melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre/dynamics.
  • I am focusing on melody: much of jazz improvisation can be summed up in the creation of melodies. Melody is also the single inalienable feature of a jazz piece.
  • The example I am most familiar with of music consisting entirely of harmonies are some excerpts by Jacob Collier. Speech harmonization also counts.
  • Harmony is obviously not one-dimensional: some internal degrees of freedom are light/dark (as in ascending fifths/fourths, or lydian/mixolydian), dissonance, key (as in key center jumps).
  • A drum solo or Djent composition may consist entirely of rhythm.
  • Noise music may consist entirely of timbre manipulation.
  • Band leaders tend to talk very concretely of an axis of “tension”.
  • There is also an axis Dick Turner describes, in a YouTube comment under String Quarted No. 2 by Brian Ferneyhough, as a sort of “event distribution”:

I think this piece is essentially classical and pretty straightforward once you get over the initial “shock” of having sound events instead of individual notes. […] The voicing is always clear as far as the “counterpoint” goes (maybe “counterevent” is a better term), meaning, each voice is always distinct. It’s never a mess, it’s just complex. I think that a difficulty arises in some listeners because they (and I think this is based upon the survival instinct we have as beings to identify things in our environment which could pose a threat) have a tendency to try to hear individual notes and when these" events" take place it creates a certain stress because they are hard to clearly grasp and picture in the mind as they rush by. But once you get used to a sort of listening in a general sense, it doesn’t seem as complex as it does at first. In fact, far from it.

  • This effort to focus on different degrees of freedom, for example switching from events instead of melodies, seems to me similar to the diagonalization of an operator. The change of basis can sometimes be drastic, like a Fourier transform.
  • Sometimes in order to understand even a single piece it is necessary to make many basis changes.

Universality

  • Making music may be universal, as is speaking, but music, the spoken, is not.
  • Neither it is to have something to say and to be able to say it clearly with a shared vocabulary.