Category: Music

Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

Mark Davis1 Comment

Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.

Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced.… Read the rest

The Art of War

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I was moved today by images and video of Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against Russian aggression. I contrasted those images with a drier, intellectualized stream of essays and opinion pieces from WaPo, NY Times, CNN, BBC, Atlantic, and others. I now know the history and conflicted consequences of NATO expansion, as well as how it was blocked in Georgia and now Ukraine by corrupted roadmaps for implementation. I expanded my understanding of Taiwan and colonial states’ self-determination after World War II. I read up on how Javelin missile systems work. I dipped into Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” because, well, it was waiting for me. I bought Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and watched half of it because Sally Kellerman died recently. It was all war, security, brutality, hopelessness, idealizations and global order, plus a layer cake of 19th-century Parisian capitalist critique wrapped up in interminable verbiage to resemble a short story (I stumbled along in French, truly, as well. It didn’t make it better.)

What was left to do?

Music, clearly. There must be perfect pieces and composers for this moment. First, we start with Ukraine itself, and Lysenko. Qobuz gives us Solmia Soroka and Arthur Greene’s Mykola Lysenko: Complete Music for Violin and Piano. Lysenko was an ethnomusicologist who specialized in Ukrainian folk music and represents the Romantic trends of his time, doing for Ukrainian fiddling what Brahms did for Hungary (cultural appropriation much?) or Dvořák and Smetana for Czech sensibilities.

But what of war, invasion, and resistance? We can start with Sibelius’s Finlandia because a day with Sibelius is always an epic adventure, and winter ups the ante. Finlandia served as an artistic attack on Russian censorship and russification, performed using alternative titles and lyrics.… Read the rest

A Southwestern History of Western Music

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Growing up in New Mexico I had an unusual collection of childhood experiences. My father was a professor of engineering at New Mexico State but had done post-docs in astrophysics at the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. after a doctorate at University of Wisconsin at Madison. I rode along to cosmic ray observatories high in the mountains and joined him at Los Alamos National Laboratory during summer consulting gigs. He introduced an exotic young fellow professor and his wife to me after I became fascinated by insect vision and ideas for simulating how bugs see the world. That, in turn, led to me living with the couple (he with a doctorate in EE and graduate students in evolutionary biology; her with a doctorate in plant physiology doing cancer research) after my father died young. I slept under a workbench while they started a business and built early word processor systems, pivoted to commercial time sharing, then to consulting on weather monitoring systems for White Sands Missile Range.

I was always in special programs and doing science fairs, taking art classes at the university, and whatnot until it became uncool for me for some reason. In a perhaps not unexpected series of intersections by high school I had a collection of friends who were bright and precocious in their interests in a way that I thought perfectly normal at the time. They graduated early, investigated radical ideas and movements in the special collections of the college library, and we variously started university while still in high school. Later, in grad school, an equally creative collection of souls poured themselves into performance art projects and shows that were poorly attended but perhaps only because they were so radical and innovative that even the arts community felt at sea with all the new media forms we were inventing.… Read the rest