[Smt-talk] the impossibility of listening

[Eliot Handelman]

> "that kind of information, although relatively easy --- with training 
> --- to extract from a score, is virtually impossible to extract from 
> listening to or attending an opera."

I notice that in responses to this phrase, "music" has been substituted 
for "opera." There are obvious differences,
eg opera is a kind of theater and music generally speaking is not. 
Consider the innovations of Maurizio Kagel's
"music theater,"  where instrumentalists are also performers, e.g. 2 
cellists behave as if they were ping pong players
playing under a referee who is a percussionist. What is it to attend to 
this? May I just
listen to, or comment on the music, say I have detected a row, and then 
say I am speaking of the
instrumental theater of Kagel?

The question that comes up is whether music analysis as practiced in theory
departments  is about listening. This is a basic credo at present, but 
it  arouses some grumbling
-- to use a Carolyn Abbate term -- among  music cognition & music 
computing people. Consider the
question---frequently asked---of the "genre" of this music. This 
certainly is related to
listening since people easily distinguish all sorts of different music, 
eg Rap music & Gamelan.
Therefore we would like  analysis to make such distinctions as well. I 
leave it to everyone
to see to what extent their listening analyses approach an effective 
algorithm for this
problem.

In musical pattern recognition writ large,  the questions  asked must 
first of all concern what the naive
listener will hear.  What is obvious in this piece? A scholarly
music theory analyst might find the "obvious" "obvious" and not worth 
commenting on.
(Milton Babbitt would pull out abstruse stuff and say "this is 
completely obvious.") But probably
this is where listening begins. The sort of theory that must evolve to 
answer questions like
these probably centralizes rhythm, motion and texture. Pitch analysis 
would be primarily about inducing
motion so that it can be understood as rhythm. Harmony, in this picture, 
is displaced
from its position as foundation to later-cultural add-on, a secondary 
elaboration.

As everyone knows, analysis is all about what you're interested in. If 
analysis is about sharing ideas
about how to hear a piece, then something comes out of that. If it's 
about opera, a different
sort of analysis is implied. To ask about listening without context is 
probably not a meaningful
question. The "normal" situation is probably one where people listen to 
the same stuff over and over on
their iPods., ie they have already learned the piece.  One of the big 
problems in cognitive analysis is
trying to work out what kinds of things are at all learnable, what a 
listener knows when a piece is learned,
and this implies a completely different sort of analysis. Learning music 
only takes place when one is
intrigued to learn, and the analysis of what constitutes that intrigue 
is again different.

-- eliot
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Eliot Handelman
Montreal QC