• How people like to find enjoyment in simple things (especially when they are outdoors and the weather’s nice). They were playing the same rhythmic pattern when I came back down!
• Being musical means, at the very least, that you must have some sense of rhythm. The perennially popular tam-tam events in Montreal are proof that music can do quite well without melody, thank you.

As for me, it’s the enjoyment part that really stuck, and led me to consider again looking at music in its simplest manifestations to better understand it.

musicians like simple english

Back on-line, I have a look at the basic definition of ‘music’ up on the Simple English Wikipedia. The current ‘sticky’ definition (as of midnight, June 26, 2008) is the following:

Music is an art that puts sounds together in a way that people like or find interesting. [...]

Music is sound that has been organized and made on purpose. If someone bangs saucepans while cooking, it makes noise. If a person banged saucepans or pots in a deliberate way (on purpose), they are making a simple type of music.

Though I wouldn’t strictly limit my definition of music to an art, the first sentence is a little hard to improve upon. At first, the words “like” and “interesting” seem kinda lukewarm. I’m tempted to change to:

Music is an art that puts sounds together in a way that people enjoy or find meaningful.

But actually the word “interesting” here has its merits. It is more encompassing in terms of possible reactions to music, and by placing emphasis on music’s attention-getting capacity it reminds us that music is essentially an art of “intentionally produced patterns”.

Caught by the human ear.

sounds made on porpoises

The second sentence, however, has a flaw which I addressed in a previous post:

Music is sound that has been organized and made on purpose. If someone bangs saucepans while cooking, it makes noise. If a person banged saucepans or pots in a deliberate way (on purpose), they are making a simple type of music.

If you read that post, you may recall that I took issue with the scope of this statement, that “sounds made on purpose” didn’t properly circumscribe the art of music within the general topic of aural communication. In fact, what’s missing from the example is a description of the type of organization you give to sound to “make a simple type of music”.

If you’re banging on saucepans to make music, chances are you are organizing sound rhythmically. Just like those fellows up on the mountain this morning.

trying to keep it simple. honest.

Seeing the issue more clearly, I’m going to jump in Simple English Wikipedia and add my own two cents. Here we go.

In my view, music is:

• making or organizing sound following rhythmic, melodic (and sometimes harmonic) ideas or patterns, for the purpose of expression and enjoyment.

My modifications, therefore, to the existing entry:

Music is sound that has been organized using rhythm, melody or harmony. If someone bangs saucepans while cooking, it makes noise. If a person banged saucepans or pots in a rhythmic way, they are making a simple type of music.

Let’s see how long my modifications stay up as is

still not convinced…

Overall, I find this activity of defining music to be challenging. Why is it so complicated for musicians to summarize their occupation using general language?

Here’s my theory.

1. We’re too close to it. Try describing the object of your love to someone who hasn’t met him/her, and you’ll see what I mean.
2. From my experience, the focused activity of music making is one where all senses are heightened and engaged. Music provokes altered states of consciousness. Logic no welcome hear.
3. Last but not least: our definition of music varies with our experience and knowledge of it. A folk singer might put self-expression at the center of her definition. A filmmaker might think of music as a way to communicate inner states and moods. An artist might see music as an opportunity to get an audience to pay attention to sounds in their environment. In other words: as purposes differ, so do definitions.

To summarize: it seems that the main challenge in coming up with a good, catch-all definition is that music is many specific things to different people, and that it’s hard to stand outside of something that’s so deeply part of ourselves, even if we’re not a “music lover”.

Or is it just me? Be happy to know your definitions of music. Here, or at the Simple English Wikipedia.

Favorite? Well, in the realm of learning I’m a sucker for clear explanations, using the simplest of terms. As a workshop facilitator at the N.F.B. in Montreal, it’s my job to find the best ways to explain stuff to youth audiences (film animation, for example). And simple always gets the best results, in terms of understanding and excitement generated for the subject at hand.

That said, if you’ve ever taught some basic concepts or skills to someone, you know that making things simple and clear… isn’t all that simple.

Take our favorite subject: music. As soon as I head over to the music department of the S.E.W., I get hit by a juicy paradox.

Damn it’s hard to define music

I don’t mean describe music. Most definitions of music actually describe music, and pretty well at that. For example, here’s what the S.E.W. lay savants have to say about music:

Music is an art that puts sounds together in a way that people like or find interesting. Most music includes people singing with their voices or playing musical instruments, such as the piano, guitar, or drums. [...]

Music is sound that has been organized and made on purpose. If someone bangs saucepans while cooking, it makes noise. If a person banged saucepans or pots in a deliberate way (on purpose), they are making a simple type of music. Blues music was a music that was played by singing, using the harmonica, or the acoustic guitar. Jazz musicians used instruments such as the trumpet, saxophone.

Music started many thousands of years ago. When early people first banged pieces of wood together and enjoyed the sound, they were discovering music. Early people also discovered that when they cut off the horns of animals they had killed and blew through them, they could make interesting sounds. People also blew into conch shells and made sounds that they liked. They probably started to sing or shout in celebration. (italics mine)

This is actually a pretty good definition overall, especially in terms of speculating over the discovery of music. Except there’s one pitfall. It assumes that organized sounds made on purpose – or even merely interesting sounds made on purpose – can be called “music”.

Does this make Morse code an example of music? How about shouting at a clerk in a supermarket? (Hmm… see next section…)

Yep, the purpose part of making sounds hasn’t been clarified in this definition.

Most music theory avoids this “deliberate-sound definition pitfall” by immediately calling to attention the elements of music – melody, rhythm, harmony – and by looking at the historical/evolutionary development each of these elements.

The end result of this approach is that it has produced a very rich understanding of the development of music genres (my favorite example is the UK Channel 4 series How Music Works, hosted by Howard Goodall). But not as much about the purpose of music.

psychology lab

In the 20th century, an experimentalist tradition rose in Western music to reopen the questions of music’s inherent ambiguity. This tradition decided that composing and performing music wasn’t sufficient in itself to fully realize music’s aspirations. Instead, it sought to probe music as an open-ended experiment in human psychology and perception.

Overall a good move. Only thing: the basic stance of most experimentalists was polemical – whether a modernist composer seeking to break conventions, or avant-garde musicians wanting to go free – and stay free all the time. In other words, “experimental” and “avant-garde” music today is widely seen as a rejection of – or rebellion against – “mainstream” music. This has meant that it has carved out its niche on the basis of people accepting or rejecting its “anti-establishment” stance.

Which means that the original questions on the nature and meaning of music kinda got lost during the process of bickering about the rules.

My own feeling is this: if the experimentalists did accomplish one thing, it was to test the assumptions that everyone had been holding for so long about what is music, and what isn’t music. It did this by taking what was considered culturally as noise, and by demonstrating it could be “music”, too.

How? By staging a noise event in a concert venue.

back to the beholder?

So far, we’ve seen that attempts to define music in the details has led to more argument than insight. So why is it so hard to define the human cultural phenomenon of music?

Here’s my hunch. At root, music is a subjective phenomenon.

In other words, in our attempts to define music we’ve too long paid attention to the object of interest/contemplation – the art of music – and not enough on mind/body of the composer, the performer and especially the listener.

Yet the more I look into it, the more music seems to belong to the the “beholder” part of beauty (i.e. “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”).

One good example of this is that everyone has a fairly clear idea of what music is – and what music isn’t – for him/her.

“This stuff is music to my ears… This other stuff is just noise, crap!”

try this!

Here’s an exercise: on a blank sheet of paper, draw a vertical line to create two columns. Title one column “music”, and the other “not music”. Then start to fill in with examples.

See if you can avoid putting music you really hate in the “not music” column

This exercise might not tell you that much about music, but at least you’ll have a profile of your tastes. For bigger kicks, try this exercise with friends.

Or family, yeow!

a fresh start

Beyond personal and critical debates, I feel that this difficulty of defining music should be taken as an important clue to revise our method of looking at things. Today, in a world awash with music, more than ever we need to look at why we invented music and continue to reinvent it.

My two cents: as previously stated, Philip Dorell’s arguments about “human musicality” might be the right place to gain a fresh perspective in our efforts to understand this elusive phenomenon.

So if you don’t mind, follow me back to square one. Humans, with instruments, making noise on purpose.

Person Howard Goodall

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The workshop? Listening to Experimental Music, presented by Anna-Luisa Daigneault. Here’s the write-up:

What does listening to music do to the brain? Why does certain music sound “pretty” and other music doesn’t?

We will be listening to many kinds of contemporary experimental music from all over the world, and discussing how this music makes us feel and think of.

Experimental music. Art music. Ancient folkways. Freeform music. I’ve often heard people ask: “why bother listening to music like this”?

That is: why listen to music that seems to be “unpleasant” and “unintelligible” by design? Isn’t the role of music to uplift the human spirit, to express emotions, to provide solace in a world of stress and uncertainty. In brief: to be beautiful and… recognizable? Kinda like the human face, in all its varieties of aesthetic (un)appeal?

Turns out there’s a rotten old cliché to sum up this controversy: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And as the workshop theme proposes: beyond the merely beautiful, can music also be a way of probing the lesser-charted areas of the human psyche, as a “spiritual” language unto its own?

Perhaps in this sense the label “experimental” is actually useful and descriptive: the “use of” music for psychological exploration. I say this because the term “experimental” in the art world has always seemed a wide open definition to me. For example, you’ll hear “experimental” as a way of invoking:

• “non-conventional” music, or music that “plays with musical conventions”
• “non-mainstream”music
• experiments in artistic form
• freeform/free improvisation
• technical experimentations

All these ideas typically point to revolutions and experiments in form. To me this position ultimately leads to an infinite regress, as form is constantly evolving in any musical tradition. So in the end I’ve come to see most stances of “formal experimentation” as being academic in value.

And that’s my preamble. Indeed, I came to the workshop curious about what musical selections would be on the “experimental” play list. And esp. what issues would be open for discussion.

your workshop is your passion

As is often the case in ad-hoc educational formats, workshop offerings depend on the available expertise of a given community. Quirky workshops topics exist by virtue of an individual’s passion for a given subject, so attending a workshop means… getting to know someone’s passion.

Turns out Anna-Luisa’s passion for “experimental music” was both genuine and lots of fun. Anna-Luisa’s academic background is in linguistics (with a side serving of neuropsychology). Her artistic ambitions though seem pretty wide ranging, and she’s given strong consideration to her speculative questions on the nature and meaning of musical experience over the course of years of studying, performing, and especially listening to music.

Workshop highlights:

• how to research music, off the beaten path
• what are the most compelling questions one can ask of music
• music, language and the brain
• the human breathing and vocal apparatus, and pitch overtones. great Tibetan throat chant demo by workshop participant Marc Matatya!
• the philosophy of music
• listening to crazy stuff!

listening eclectically…

Here’s the workshop playlist (with a few mp3 samples).

Mansthurek – Oorjak Hunashtaar-Ool
(sample) [audio:mansthurek_sample.mp3]

Na Letnye Pastbishtsha – Kara-Kys Munzuk

Stage Fright – Carl Stalling
(sample) [audio:stage_fright_sample.mp3]

(2 selections) – Moondog

(2 selections) – Sun Ra and his Archestra

Diana – Comus

Parable of the Mustard Seed – The Trees
(sample) [audio:parable_sample.mp3]

beauty, for the mind unhinged

Reviewing the eclectic selections, the shared trait seems to be, from the point of view of conventional listener expectations: music that “unhinges the mind”, inducing altered states of consciousness.

In closing, for all your brain and soul spelunkers, I’d like to list Anna-Luisa’s research muses for further consideration:

• religious mode of language, or the poetics of ritual speech
• chanting, song, ritual, using a comparative cultural approach
• trance-inducing music and speech
• what is musical inspiration? where does it “come from”?
• poetry and sound
• voice and “possession”
• experiments in musical pitch: extreme musical intervals

It didn’t take long before I fell into of a frenzy of speculation (this happens when you think too much). I was playing music, now writing about it. But the more I played and wrote, the more it dawned on me I didn’t have a very strong grasp of “music” to begin with!

So I set out on a magical mystery quest, with my big question: “what is music”? And where does every magical mystery quest take you, in the end?

Ancient Egypt, of course.

So here I am, in front that sphinx – mysterious old Music. I ask: “Music, what art thou?” (you have to sound Elizabethan or the sphinx won’t even hear you).

Seeing no response, I tickle it under the paw: “Sphinx, why are we humans musical?”

Getting the same mute response, I decide to go to the Google Gods (right under the Cheops Pyramid) and throw my flippin’ keywords into their oracular search sandbox.

The best answer I come up with? This website on “music science” by a fellow named Philip Dorrell. I even wrote a blog post about it.

an itch you just can’t scratch?

All fine and well, but reading Dorrell just leaves me with more questions than answers. I’m a child of the age: I want answers! Right now (pant, pant)!

At some point, I start to get it: every magical mystery search worth its salt must have dead ends and fruitless avenues. Perhaps I have gone about it the wrong way all along.

Perhaps I should have not gone to the sandbox at all, but instead looked at the Sphinx.

the twist, the twist!!

So instead of Google, I go to YouTube (Oy vey, Gilles, YouTube is owned by Google…Hello!)

Lookie here. There’s a cat on the ‘tube, pretty famous, one of the most gifted denizens of the internet: Nora the Cat.

When you look at the Sphinx, what do you see? A giant feline! Nora, my sphinx!

So you’ve watched the video (and the second installment!), and resumed reading once the adrenalin rush of giddy discovery has subsided.

Bet you forgot the question that started it all (I did!)?

Think of Nora. What is Nora’s gift, evident to all? A “musical sense”? The discovery of pitch? An association of pleasure with certain sounds?

Indeed, it’s tempting to take the “behaviorist” route and explain Nora away with the pain-pleasure conditioned-reflex response. But watching her ears perk up as notes resound, I’m not so sure myself.

Nora seems a rather mystical cat. She’s got feel.

of cats and men

To be sure, Nora’s special gift raises more questions than answers, too. About cats. And humans.

Again, perhaps the answers we seek lie “hidden in plain view”. After all, how did the Ancient Egyptians portray the sphinx? A cat with a human head. What does that say about musicians?

‘Nuff said.