With the ongoing debate about “Math: Invented or Discovered” I saw an interesting side digression about music while reading Spider Robinson’s brilliant short story “Melancholy Elephants”
How 'bout music? There are only 88 notes on a piano. There’re more notes than that, but the vast majority of songs only use some of those 88. If you can cope with quarter-tones there’re somewhat more. Of those 88 notes (plus rests, etc), there is a large, but FINITE number of combinations. Of that finite number, only certain combinations will form something that the human ear will recognize as music (as opposed to noise).
Therefore: Bach, The Beatles, Gershwin…were they artists who created music, or were they just better at discovering tunes from the finite number of possible tunes that were already there?
Robinson’s lead character in the story is on the “discover” side of the arguement.
Yes, but how many notes are in a song? After all, if a song has three notes, there are 88 X 88 X 88 combinations, meaning there are 681,472 three-note “songs” you can play on the piano. But most songs obviously have way more than three notes, nor is there any upper limit to the number of notes–a “song” can last or five minutes (still a lot of notes) or an hour and a half. This means that the number of “songs” is essentially innumerable. Granted, there are restraints as well–many of those combinations are just going to be “noise” to everyone with a reasonably normal esthetic sense, and there are all sorts of formalized restrictions on the musical vocabulary (but you can also choose different sorts of musical “languages” other than the conventions of, I dunno, Western symphonic music, which itself has a lot of subgenres and styles and so on).
Definitely put me down for “invented” (or “created”).
(The same thing can be said of literature–or this post, for that matter–and letters, of course. There’s also the old joke about how sculpting is easy–just take a block of marble and remove all the bits that don’t look like a statue.)
Since music is spacial or mathematical by nature, I’m inclined to say that music is discovered. Music relies on formula when dealing with voicing and harmonics. An example of this is Beethoven being able to compose without “hearing” the notes. Our modern musical scale is much different than in the past, and would sound very dissonant to someone from the past.
In terms of pop music, the Beatles were masters of chord changes and alterations (use of 7ths), but I wonder if they really knew this. To us pop music listeners, it really was something new to the genre.
As a side note, I always got a kick out of that scene in “back to the future” when MJ Fox jumps up on stage at the sock-hop and hammers out a modern guitar solo, and everyone just stares at him.
One other addendum that Robinson makes: A song that is identical to “Rhapsody in Blue” with only a one-note change is still “Rhapsody in Blue” so a huge fraction of the possible melodic combinations are going to be gone once someone writes them down (The story deals with the reprecussions of extending copyright too far. The gimmick is that, what with recordings, music libraries, etc, we’re not forgetting music fast enough and are running out of new music to “discover” that hasn’t been “discovered” before in a substantially similar way. Robinson points to the George Harrison “My Sweet Lord”/“He’s So Fine” case as an early warning sign)
I like to think music is “invented”, but Robinson makes a persuasive case that it’s “discovered”(he also says it may be psychologically healthier to belive it’s “invented”)
Fenris
(Just as an aside, the first part of the story can be read free here, but there’s a fee to read the rest (or you can just choose the “banner ads” option and read it that way).
Let’s change the question slightly and ask whether literature is invented or discovered. After all, there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet (52 if count uppercase and lowercase seperately), and you can only arrange them (plus spaces and punctuation marks) in so many different ways. Most of those ways will be gibberish so you can only have a far smaller subset of actual arrangements that make sense. Also, a story that is identical to “Romeo and Juliet” with only a one letter change is still recognizable as “Romeo and Juliet”. So a person only has to discover the right combination of letters to be acknowledged as a great writer. Right?
[sub]That’s probably what James Joyce was doing when he wrote, er, discovered “Finnegan’s Wake”.[/sub]
True. Chord progressions and chord root movements are built into western music. Tonal magnetism, meaning no harmony, also is built into western music. Some notes naturally pull to other notes (active), while others do not (inactive).
dixiechiq quote:
“chinese music, as best i can recall, has a five-note octave and no harmony. individual tone is far more importatant than melody.”
While I’m not very familiar with eastern music, I suspect eastern music, like any language, has rules that do apply.
If a musician plucks middle “c” on an instrument, he/she has not discovered music, but created a sound. Once he/she adds a pattern to that sound through repetition, duration and movement, he/she will discover music. In this sense, artists (and mathematicians) have a defined languge. Some formulas work and some don’t. Some phrases work and some don’t. IMO, music, like any language, should not be confused with its grammar. It is the sum of its parts, which to me, is a discovery.
*Upperdeckfan’s opinions are solely his own. Any reference to musicians or mathematicians, either stated or implied, is coincidental.
upperdeckfan:
you’ll note that the chinese don’t have a middle c since their octave differs.
if music is discovered, where is it before someone plays it??
if music is discovered, why are there nearly as many opinions as there are people as to what is music??
if music is discovered, why do different cultures have such divergent musics??
i think music is music to our ears because of the background and emotion that we associate with it. we grow up with it, it is inured to us. perhaps music is tuned to our brains. but that would not imply discovery. unless you defined it as discovery that we enjoy something, which is not the form of discovery i understand to be argued for here.
i suppose the discovery vs invented argument cannot be settled. i suspect at the root of our personal definitions lies a difference that leads to varied conclusions.
aaaaahhh, I think I see what you mean. The basic melodic sounds were discovered, but it took the human element to turn it into music, very interesting.
Does that mean that a bird’s song is not “music”? Or that only the human ear/mind interprets it as music?
For example, anyone who read my horrendously long spiel on logic in another thread knows that A = A is true.
Now, that was true before anyone thought to write it down. If everyone forgets it then it will still be true.
However, this is the only way we have to represent those truths. There is pure logic and then there is the systematic representation of that logic.
I think music is the same thing. Yes, the harmony and balance and all that are ways in which to represent and play with music, but music itself exists in, like earlier said, a bird’s call or the wind blowing through some reeds.
Music and the ways in which we classify music are not the same thing.
Therefore I’d say that music did evolve, but the different ways of classifying and developing music were invented.
I’m gonna split hairs here. The 88-note thing would apply to Western European-descended music. There are as many notes as you are able to hear. Go global. Stretch your ears.
Back to the OP. Music evolved in different styles in different cultures. Are individual pieces of music composed or uncovered? That’s a different question and depends on the approach of the composer. Some work from music theory, some work from familiar shapes (chords, scales) on their chosen instruments. Some retune their instruments and compose from the new tuning (Sonic Youth, Swervedriver).
This is actually an ongoing, yet unusually simple debate in the philosophical community.
IMO it’s like this:
Either everything is discovered because the framework of the universe was present before man, or everything is invented because man is needed to formulate that framework into “inventions”. Ultimately, it’s all objective.
Chrome. I do listen to global music. I have stretched my ears, but thanks for the suggestion :rolleyes:. (Note the bit about quarter-tones (found primarily in Eastern music) in the OP) However, there are a maximum number of tones that the human ear can distinguish. While, yeah, there are an infinite number of frequencies, most people can’t distinguish E# over Middle C from E# over Middle C plus a 1/16th of a tone. Hell I have friends who can’t distinguish quarter tones. They just think music with quarter-tones sounds “off” a bit. There’re an infinite number of colors too, but the human eye can only distinguish varients that are a certain wavelegnth apart.
Yeah I tend not to see all the informatin in these debate threads. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.
Back to the OP. Some music is so derivative that it must have been rediscovered.
I guess my official position is that rhythm and tone were discovered, found to be pleasant, and then rules set in place to govern their use. Early man could hear rhythm in animals’ hoofbeats, etc., and tone in the sound of the wind and such. You still need to be able to describe what is happening (via theory, notation) to render it permanent, at least until actual recording techniques were invented (or discovered).
QUOTE]
(Just as an aside, the first part of the story can be read free here, but there’s a fee to read the rest (or you can just choose the “banner ads” option and read it that way). **
[/QUOTE]
here is the whole story (at least I think it’s the whole story, I’d never read it before today).
I have stumbled across this site, which argues that there are physical and psychological reasons for why people have chosen to use particular notes and intervals. There are some cool descriptions of an apparent 43,000 year old Neandertal flute and a playable 9,000 year old Chinese flute. Both of these instruments play notes that are easily recognizable even to the modern ear as being on the diatonic (“do-re-mi”) scale. Hence it could be argued that different peoples living at different times and in different places independently discovered certain pleasing intervals. For example, both Chinese and Gaelic music use a pentatonic scale (the black keys on a piano), which is a subset of the diatonic scale.
However, I would argue that actually putting the notes together is a process of invention, influenced by the cultural setting in which a composer finds himself. Both the Chinese and Gaelic peoples may have independently discovered the pentatonic scale, but then proceeded to invent different modes or styles of music, such that even a naive listener can hear a distinct difference between the two types of music. [As a semi-related aside, there is a scene in The Last Emperor where Peter O’Toole is being sent off, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” being played on Chinese instruments. This is possible because the song is on a pentatonic scale.]
Back to Fenris’s original thread- In ongoing debates such as Math: Invented or Discovered; Music: Invented or Discovered; how ‘bout jumping back a notch and looking at Language: Invented or Discovered?
Noam Chomsky has theorized about world languages conforming to an abstract Universal Grammar, or a built-in instinct in which we acquire language.
Author and linguist, Steven Pinker, brings up the parallel of language acquisition and music acquisition in his latest book, How the Mind Works. Pinker writes, “just as the world’s languages conform to an abstract Universal Grammar, the world’s musical idioms conform to an abstract Universal Music Grammar.”
If music is innate, with no survival advantage, where does it come from and why does it work?
Fenris The reason your friends can’t distinguish between quarter tones is because in Western music, quarter tones are generally not important, and our ear has a way of “rounding” them off so they sound consonant with the rest of the music.
For example, a lot of traditional Indian music is based around the concept of “22 sruti” in which an octave is divided in 22 segments. To many Indians, Western music sounds “jumpy” because of a lack of intermediate tones. Their musical culture places a higher emphasis on melody and distinction of frequency than the Western approach, and hence they are able to discern between notes that we may not be able to. Their ears are not different than ours. We are as able to distinguish these frequencies; it’s just our tradition places importance on 12 notes in the scale, so that’s what we know.
As to the main argument, I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s clearly a matter of perspective and definition, as Morrison’s Lament stated. That said, I can’t see why music is different from art or literature. If music is “discovered” than so is art and literature. Art follows many mathemetical properties in the same way music does. Compositional principles based on the “golden mean” or triangles or perspective lines, etc… Color schemes based on rules of complements or “hot” vs “cool” or secondaries, etc, etc, etc… It almost sounds like a chicken-egg argument to me.