Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. It is astonishing how little curiosity we have about so pervasive an "environmental" influence. What might we discover if we were to study musical thinking?
Have we the tools for such work? Years ago, when science still feared meaning, the new field of research called 'Artificial Intelligence' started to supply new ideas about "representation of knowledge" that I'll use here. Are such ideas too alien for anything so subjective and irrational, aesthetic, and emotional as music? Not at all. I think the problems are the same and those distinctions wrongly drawn: only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder. Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.
It has become taboo for music theorists to ask why we like what we like: our seekers have forgotten what they are searching for. To be sure, we can't account for tastes, in general, because people have various preferences. But this means only that we have to find the causes of this diversity of tastes, and this in turn means we must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Works Cited:
Minsky, Marvin. "Music, Mind, and Meaning."web.media.mit.edu. 1981. 27 July 2009
Whoa! I am completely blown away by this post! I have taken a hand full of psychology and sociology classes and my mind always wanders to subjects like these. I have pondered this particular question on occasion and, of course, have never come to a complete nor successful answer. If researchers could come to a reasonable conclusion, I would certainly be interested in viewing their results. The mind is a beautiful and CRAZY thing. Hope to see the product of this research in the near future.
ReplyDeleteSociety has long accepted the diversity in musical tastes. The variety of music available stimulates our moods, our curiosity and our intellect. New artists present the world with new variations in tone and rhythm at the same time recording duets with traditional artists from prior decades. I have noticed that some stores use technology to track the music that they sell. I noticed when I purchased several CDs from a certain artist at a Border’s store that during my next visit to that same store, Border’s had many more of my favorite artist’s music CDs. I, of course, bought every new CD by that artist that they had in stock. Was it coincidental that they happened to have a bigger selection of the previous music I had purchased? I don’t think so. I think they knew exactly how to read my musical mind. I think music vendors are using technology to follow our music tastes, no matter how varied or different from the popular mainstream music and stocking their shelves with what sells.
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