<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
Dmitri Tymoczko wrote :
<blockquote
cite="mid:7EF2256A-A37E-4562-BBFB-5EF3BC7B1932@Princeton.EDU"
type="cite">
<div><span class="Apple-style-span"
style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Typical
spoken English contains syntactic units that are about 13 words long,
as compared to written English, in which the syntactic units are 22
words long.<span style=""> </span>This contrasts with the length of
classical movements, which can be 20 minutes long, and can contain
hundreds of measures and tens of thousands of notes. Furthermore, the
accuracy of linguistic perception is significantly higher than that of
musical perception -- any way you slice it, there is an enormous amount
of information loss in musical perception, whereas linguistic
perception is remarkably accurate. The differences here are dramatic
and not at all subtle -- we're talking orders of magnitude, rather than
factors of 2.</span></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span
class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br>
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span
class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">If it could be
conclusively demonstrated that recursive perception in music
outstripped recursive perception in language, by an order of magnitude
or more, I believe it would literally be front page news, maybe even
Nobel prize territory. It would potentially revolutionize our
understanding of the mind's capabilities and about the evolution of the
species. I suspect that any cognitive scientist who thought they had a
chance of proving this experimentally would immediately drop everything
and hop to it. </span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span
class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br>
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span
class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">All I'm trying to
say is: if we really believe we have good evidence for such an
important claim -- that recursive perception in music far outstrips
that in language -- then we let's get serious and try to prove it
conclusively, and communicate it to the wider scientific world. <br>
</span></font></div>
</blockquote>
Typical syntactic units of language are sentences, typically 10 to 25
words long. Typical synctactic units of music are movements, at times
10 to 25 minutes long. This difference, which indeed is dramatic, may
suffice in itself to indicate a much higher capacity for long term
syntactic relations (including recursion) in music than in language.<br>
Also, what is characteristic of language is a <u>capacity</u> of
infinite recursion. It does not follow that all phrases include
recursion. One might surmise that recursion often is a stylistic
device, i.e. that it belongs to artistic usages of language; the mere
communication of information may be more felicitous without recursive
constructions. That recursion may be more frequent in litterature or
poetry than in daily language would afford an additional indication to
the effect that art in general and music in particular have a higher
capacity for recursion.<br>
Recursion needs not be perceived to exist: our capacity to perceive
it may vary a lot, and some large scale recursions may not be
perceptible at all in normal conditions. This does not permit to
conclude that they do not exist. Some very large scale-Schenkerian
Ursätze may have become perceptible for Schenker himself, but for many
of us remain inaccessible through mere auditory perception and must be
discovered through analysis. Once more, that does not mean that they
don't exist.<br>
<br>
I wouldn't recommend applying for a Nobel prize on such premises, and I
don't think the evolution of the species (or its survival) is much
concerned. To claim that large scale recursion cannot exist in music
because cognitivists were unable to evidence it seems to me ... hum,
let's remain polite ... to put excessive confidence in cognitive
science.<br>
<br>
Nicolas Meeùs<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:nicolas.meeus@paris-sorbonne.fr">nicolas.meeus@paris-sorbonne.fr</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.plm.paris-sorbonne.fr">http://www.plm.paris-sorbonne.fr</a><br>
<br>
</body>
</html>