[Smt-talk] Aesthetics of Computer-Generated Music

[Arnie Cox]

On Apr 17, 2011, at 6:24 PM, Michael Morse wrote:

> But what could such research results actually tell us about musical experience? Or for that matter, musical learning? Do we now know enough about the brain to draw clear and intelligible inferences from the constitutive involvement of its different sectors in our conduct and behaviour? In other words, does it in fact tell us something useful about teaching skiing, cattle rustling, or symphonic conducting to know that learning the skill occurs in one sector as opposed to another? 

Here are a couple of thoughts, late-coming as they are: 

Imagine that music were processed in the brain in a way that did not overlap at all with, say, language.  This would tell us something about about the differences between the two processes and perhaps something about the bases for the differences in the phenomenology of musical and linguistic experience, as well as something about the bases of musical and linguistic meaning.  If music were processed *exactly like* language this would also tell us something.  It turns out that they overlap in some ways but not others (see, for example, Peretz and Zatorre 2005, below, or of course Aniruddh Patel's book), and the specifics can tell us some things about how music is like and unlike language - giving us, for example, a different basis for arguing about the relation between music and language.

From another angle, musical performance is at least somewhat like Michael's examples of skiing and cattle rustling, in that each involves planned and coordinated motor actions, along with the satisfaction and disappointment of success and failure in relation to the relevant goals.  If music *listening* were independent of the motor imagery related to planning and execution, this would be remarkable since this would suggest, without too many convolutions, that music listening is independent of the experience of planning and executing music.  (See, for example, Chen et al. 2008, below.)  Similarly, if simply thinking about music, in the absence of a present external stimulus, were independent of the motor imagery related to planning and execution, this would be remarkable:  Imagine that one could think of a suspension without imagining performing a suspension; or imagine that one could think of skiing without imagining skiing.  (See Aziz-Zadeh et al. 2006.)  

Of course, it seems to be fairly common to believe this very thing:  that one could think of a suspension without imagining performing a suspension.  "Imagining" here is a little tricky, but such imagined performance need not be conscious, and we can certainly be unaware that thinking of a suspension involves motor imagery.  This lack of awareness can then form the basis of personal and shared epistemologies, such as the implicit or explicit belief that thinking about music does not necessarily involve imagining performing music - with the implications that this bears for our understanding of the relation between bodily experience and musical meaning.  David Lewin's contra-Cartesian remarks in GMIT (pp. 158-159) and Andy Mead's notion of "Bodily Hearing" (JMT 43/1, 1999) suggest a different picture, and the brain imaging data of the past decade or so support an interpretation that their personal observations reflect processes that apply generally.  

Returning to computer-ish music:  An interesting question then concerns the extent to which such music is processed in the same way as non-computer music - and then how one might "mistake" a computer for a human (or vice versa I suppose).

Arnie Cox
Assoc. Prof. of Music Theory
Oberlin Conservatory

Peretz, Isabelle, and Robert J. Zatorre. 2005. Brain Organization for Music Processing. Annual Review of Psychology 56, 89-114)

Chen, J.L., Penhune, V.B., and Zatorre, R.J. 2008. Listening to Musical Rhythms Recruits Motor Regions of the Brain. Cerebral Cortex 18, 2844-2854.

Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa, Stephen M. Wilson, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Marco Iacoboni. 2006. Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions. Current Biology 16 (September 19), 1818-1823.  [This may be among the studies that have been criticized for exaggerating the data.]
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