whence music's syntax

bachus · Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 5:50 am Post subject: whence music's syntax

A bit slow to load:

http://raven.dartmouth.edu/~larry/music1052008/readings/Patel_2003_Nature_Neuroscience.pdf

worth the reading for the references alone.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sun May 23, 2010 3:30 pm Post subject:

Thanks for this one! I have had the subjective experience of music production, particularly improvisation, as working as a precursor to the mechanisms involved in language production, a kind of pre-verbal language. Being so does not make music necessarily more primitive, but in fact rather more fundamental than language. I have a hunch that when you project music into more jagged beta-wave brain classes of cortical activity, you get language. Phrase structuring alone suggests the relationship, without any observation of cortical activity.

This relationship between language and music motivates my interest in scrabble-to-midi and more generally in mapping hierarchical verbal structures into hierarchical musical ones.

bachus · Posted: Sun May 23, 2010 5:08 pm Post subject:

I think highly of Lerdahl's work and ordered a copy of Tonal Pitch Space as soon as I saw it's title in that article. That said I remain sceptical of some aspects of generative musical theories. And I take the suggested distinction between representation and process as a caution against taking deep structured harmonic representations too literally. I find it hard to believe that many listeners, at least those without absolute pitch, maintain the kind of tonal context implied by large scale generative trees. Perhaps over the span of a short phrase it is done but more than that I doubt. In any case that such research is being done is exciting and eventually science shall make known the truth Smile

A E J O T Z · Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 12:26 pm Post subject:

Vocabulary is handled by the left cerebral hemisphere while vocal inflection is interpreted by the right cerebral hemisphere.

Music is a poor medium for communication of information but a superb medium for communication of feelings.

And then there are songs in which the lyrics say one thing and the music quite another.

Does this relate with my idea that music can be fiction or non-fiction?