thinking through music
In his book The Tao of Philosophy, Alan Watts (1915-1973) talks about resonance as a form of consciousness:
“when I tap on this crystal, which is glass, it makes a noise. Now that resonance is an extremely primitive form of consciousness…when you hit a bell it rings, or you touch a crystal and it responds, inside itself it has a very simple reaction. It goes “jangle” inside, whereas we go “jangle” with all sorts of colors and lights and intelligence, ideas, and thoughts…” (8-9).
“How did you make this?”
“I made it through making a series of small decisions, one after the other.”
“Oh. But how did you know which direction to go in?”
“Each moment prompted a small decision in need of making, which in turn suggested a path forward along which to travel.”
“Did it take a while to travel along the path?”
“It did actually. A fairly long time. After all, there were a lot of decisions to make.”
“When you finished traveling along the path, had you arrived at a place that you expected?”
“No.”
“Were you expecting anything in particular?”
“Not really.”
“So how then did you know you were finally done with your making?”
“It felt done. Plus I had a deadline and I just ran out of time.”
My article “Autechre and Electronic Music Fandom: Performing Knowledge Online through Techno-Geek Discourses,” is available in the journal Popular Music and Society. You can view an abstract of the article here.
A few years ago I bought a pair of monitors for my computer for working on music. Since limited desk space was a consideration, I chose a small size: the woofer speaker on each monitor is only about 4 inches in diameter. The sound of the monitors is uncommonly rich and powerful though, with a capacity to reach volume levels higher than I’ll ever need. Overall, they’re great.
But as I worked on various projects I realized that as I descended into the lower range of my keyboard controller, notes would start disappearing. I’d press the key but there’d be no sound. It turns out that my monitors don’t have the extended frequency response necessary to reproduce low notes. In other words, the small woofers aren’t very good with bass–an element of music that is becoming more and more important for listeners. (Read more about this topic here.)
And so I simply stopped working with bass. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but rather a wanting to make music that sounds decent emanating from these particular monitors despite their limitations. As I think about it now, a lack of bass became a constraint that steered me towards a higher-pitched musical register.
Maybe one day I’ll have huge monitors and be way into bass tones. For the moment though, I’m inhabiting the midrange.
1. An article about editing in electronic music.
“For me, making an edit is like going on vacation. It’s a way of getting out of your head, your usual creative process, and just doing something totally different.”
2. A brief article about why we listen to sad music when we’re sad.
“Listeners identify with the emotions expressed by the music or the meaning of the lyrics. They seek this kind of identification when they want to re-experience those same emotions.”
3. A six-part documentary about Japanese video game music. Here is episode one:
Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance is a splendid, rigorous, and brief (140 pp) book that makes a compelling case for something many musicians already know something about: groove. Groove is the feel of a rhythm–that quality of musical time that can make it seem as though the music is pushing ahead or laying back. How a single musician, let alone an entire ensemble, has groove is somewhat mysterious. In a way, the ability to produce and perceive groove is a kind of body knowledge and its feel aspect “is a musician’s datum” (105). Roholt designs his book around four propositions: first, grooves have a feel; second, grooves somehow involve the body and its movement; third, to understand a groove is to feel it; and finally, feeling and understanding a groove does not occur in thought or in listening, but through the body (2).
Roholt introduces his topic through a fascinating account of an early Beatles recording session and two versions of the drum track for the song “All My Lovin’.” The example serves to illustrate how an identical rhythm can sound radically different when played by different drummers with different grooves. Feel in music is the result of numerous nuances that musicians bring to their performances. In the case of grooves, small timing differences can make all the difference between whether a music sounds right or sounds off.
One of the most satisfying aspects of Groove is how Roholt draws on the work of other philosophers and music scholars to make his case that understanding how groove works is best approached not as an analytical project but as an experiential one. In particular, Roholt astutely draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), a French philosopher who wrote compellingly about the role of the body in perception. Here is Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception in a passage that could be describing how we respond to groove:
“A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at the things through it, or to allow one’s body to respond to their solicitation, which is exerted upon the body without any representation” (Merleau-Ponty in Roholt, 95).
To build his argument for how we perceive groove through “a practical, prereflective, non cognitive sort of understanding” (99), Roholt cites Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motor intentionality, which describes a non-cognitive way of knowing, a bodily understanding. Motor intentionality is “a kind of bodily feeling that informs our body’s practical grasp of its environment” (103). Though it may seem obvious, when we perceive and enjoy a groove we do so by grasping its feel through our bodies.
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In a way, Groove is part of a larger academic project over the past thirty-five years aimed at explaining, and more importantly, validating, groove across a range of musics. Some other books concerned with groove include John Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility (1978), Steven Feld and Charles Keil’s Music Grooves (1994), Anne Danielsen’s Presence and Pleasure (2006) and Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2010), among others. John Collins’s video Listening To The Silence: African cross rhythms also adds to this conversation. Groove–as much as melody, harmony, timbre, or song lyrics–conveys a lot information that we process on an almost unconscious level. Groove is the trace left by music as it moves through time, and it’s also a deep and reliable marker of both musical style and musical competence. It’s for these reasons that Roholt’s book is essential groovology reading for guidance on how to systematically think through musical time–to understand why groove is so groovy. Next time you’re listening to a musician or band play, pay attention to their groove. It will tell you a lot about things your body might have already begun to figure out.
1. An article about fade-outs in popular music.
“…the fade-out allows a song to live on beyond its physical self; the listener senses that it never truly ends.”
2. A video of a musician using an Elektron Octarack to improvise electronic music.
3. A video about a drummer who imitates machine-made patterns.
“People started to program things that a drummer could no longer do. They came purely out of the syntax of programming vocabulary.”
Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read: A Phenomenology With Illustrations is a remarkable study of perception in the experience of reading. Just his book’s title suggests, Mendelsund explores what exactly it is that we “see” in our minds eye when we read. It’s an interesting question or set of questions really–What do we imagine when we read words on the page? Does each word trigger a micro-vision in out minds eye, or does the triggering happen in the spaces between words? “Is it that we imagine the most, or the most vividly, when an author is at his most elliptical or withholding? (In music, notes and chords define ideas, but so do rests)” (30). This book is full of probing insights and musings like these that stop you in your tracks and make you think.
Mendelsund makes a few references to music in his book, no surprise given that he’s a trained classical pianist. This background in music and his general analytical mind may explain how he views characters in novels “like a set of rules that determines a particular outcome” (34) and how “we hear more than we see while we are reading (39). Page by page, What We See When We Read methodically yet playfully investigates the reading experience through examples culled from the Greats–from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky to Virginia Woolf to Joyce and Kafka. And each of these examples is graphically illustrated in a way that demonstrates the very concepts they embody. What do those and other authors actually tell us through their writing–as opposed to what we read and imagine through it? This engaging phenomenology by one the publishing industry’s leading graphic designers sets out to engage this territory.
Being musically oriented, I was most taken by Mendelsund’s discussions that offer insight on the musical experience. For example, when he talks of reading bringing one into “a liminal space”–a “polydimensionality” of being in many places at once (61)–I immediately thought, but of course, this is what listening to music is like too. Words are also like musical notes in that they each have contexts. In music, add a second note to a single tone and you generate the context of a chord by which to understand the two sounds together. And the element of time is key to both reading and music listening. Our perception in both depends on being able to time travel back and forward to help us make sense of the passing literary or sonic moment. “In order to make sense of a book’s words and phrases we must think ahead when we read–we must anticipate” (94)…At once, we read a sentence, read a few sentences ahead, keep track of what we’ve already read, and imagine events yet to come” (104). For Medelsund, reading “is not a sequence of experienced ‘now’s” (107)–it feels more flowing than that. And of course, that’s one of music’s supreme charms too: to make sequences of notes conjure a seamless and emotionally powerful virtual environment that makes ideal use of the passing of time.
So what do authors bring to our table? They orchestrate the experience and guide our imaginations: “The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much” (125). When the textual experience is calibrated just right, it feels so real because it’s as if all the details could be no other way. Or as Medelsund puts it, “My delight is my tribute to the author’s having paid close attention to the world” (136). But the reader is the other crucial part of how writing generates its meaning. In an illustration that depicts a conductor through whose transparent body we can see a concert audience, Mendelsund draws on the metaphor of performance to illustrate: “We perform a book–we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance….(As readers, we are both the conductor and the orchestra, as well as the audience)” (160). In other words, reading is an active process of meaning-making, obviously, but also an act of trust and of faith even: “When we read, it is important that we believe we are seeing everything” (162). There’s a lot at stake in the act of reading insofar as no matter what the subject, we get to inhabit the consciousness of another. “Books allow us certain freedoms–we are free to be mentally active when we read; we are full participants in the making (the imagining) of a narrative” (192).
***
By a certain point in Medelsund’s book, it becomes clear that he’s a believer in a view that novels aren’t really representational at all. In a passage that reminded me of the music of J.S. Bach, the author frames it thusly: “The relational, nonrepresentational calculus is where some of the deepest beauty in art is found. Not in mental pictures of things, but in the play of elements” (245). In other words, when we read or listen to music, “we don’t see meaning” (265); rather, meaning is something created out of the work’s component parts. Here, Mendelsund gets increasingly abstract, wondering whether we can “picture the medium or dimension in which things reside? (281), and muses about the role of memory in our imagining: “Memory is made of the imaginary; the imaginary made of memory” (299). He also returns to musical examples, drawing on American composer Aaron Copland’s three levels of listening–the sensuous, the expressive, and the semantic/musical (310)–to think through how we read through what is essentially a “nebula of illusory material” (342).
In the end, we read and listen and manage to make sense out of the words or sounds before us through an act of synthesis. “It is the synthesis that we know. (It is all we know.)” Writers and composers and readers and listeners are all synthesizers. “Authors are curators of experience. They filter the world’s noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can–out of disorder they create narrative” (402). Similarly, readers take what they can from the words, conjuring something the way eyesight merges two separate images into the illusion of one. “Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read” (415). In music too, something is said and that something is heard and interpreted by a listener. Hopefully–remarkably–meaning arises from this exchange. Mendelsund ends his delightful book with the same literary example he began with, pointing out that, as is so often the case, what is there–on the page, in the music–and what we perceive to be there are not the same thing. We think we see or hear something clearly, but it was always blurred.
1. An article about a search for a folk music in Greece.
“There is a belief among the people of Epirus that their music is deeply curative: that it reverses certain strains of heartache and expands certain joys, that it’s a panacea for certain existential and physiological ailments. Chaldoupis sees what is broken, he says, and begins the fixing. In Epirus, this is not some sort of reconstituted folk ritual, trotted out for curious, authenticity-starved interlopers, like the luaus staged in the manicured side yards of sprawling Hawaiian resorts. It is merely the way people think about music.”
2. An article about the Rorschach inkblot test. Isn’t it interesting that there is no analogous associational test for musical sound?
“…psychologists have frequently used the various aspects of people’s responses (e.g., inkblot focus area) to make judgment calls about broad personality traits.”
“As far as my silence goes, it was a gut feeling that it would be a beautiful action and a beautiful experience, but I went into it very blindly.”
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