SOME
NOTES
including an extract from a
paper given to a conference of music research students at Hull, 1992
This isn’t an essay. It’s just a few ideas, put together randomly; so don’t expect each paragraph to lead from the last (though some do!)
Study consciously; play in a
trance.
Don't listen to yourself.
Listen to the other guys. Trust your musical system to respond to them.
Whenever we are subject to the same stimulus over a period of time, we tend to learn to ignore it. We become habituated to it, and it fades from our awareness. So, to maintain attention in the music, we need to change things about how we lead that sound through the three dimensions. Too much repetition, and we will get bored. But no repetition, and we cannot perceive a pattern. There has to be a balance between repetition and the introduction of new material.
It is important to realise that players are listening as well, and have to maintain their interest in what they are producing, both for themselves, and whatever musical partners are playing with them.
Let us say that music is the art of taking a sound,
and moving it through three dimensions. Those dimensions are Loudness, Pitch,
and Duration. You could say each dimension has two extremes (silence and very
loud, bottom tone and top tone, the longest notes to the shortest). We can
play:-
Table 1.
|
loud high fast |
quiet high fast |
|
loud high slow |
quiet high slow |
|
loud low fast |
quiet low fast |
|
loud low slow |
quiet low slow |
Of course, these are the
extreme states. We can play in between any of these extremes. Taking simply a
state of "medium", we add many further combinations (do the maths).
Using different instruments at the same time, means
we can keep the patterns and lines separate in our perception. Where the
instruments are the same, it can be difficult to tell which notes are from
which patterns. In the Piano and Violin duo, we have quite different timbres to
play with, so the sounds shouldn't get mixed up.
There are four combinations: violin solo, piano solo, violin leads with piano accompaniment, piano leads with violin accompaniment. For each of these combinations, each instrument can be playing in any of the states shown in table 1 (extended to include in-between pitches, loudnesses and durations).
There is another dimension, which is that of density.
This is a subjective description of how much space there is in the music. It is not only about the balance of
silence and sound (punctuation), but also about complexity. When you combine
the dimensions of Loudness Pitch and Duration, you bring out the dimensions of
Tonality and Rhythm, both of which depend on all three dimensions. Tonality is
the quality of how the tones relate to each other, and we tend to determine tonal
centres for any sequence of tones, based on the number of times we hear the
tones, their pitch, relative loudness, and position in a sequence. Rhythm is
the perception of cyclical patterns through time, and is determined by
repetition of pitches, of note duration and metre is provided by cyclical use
of loudness patterns
There is no such thing as atonality when using the twelve chromatic tones of the western diatonic pitchset. We might have rapidly changing tonal centres, so that it hard to keep up with the root tones of the phrases being played. Or we might have multiple roots simultaneously, with varying degrees of consonance between these roots. But there is still a set of tonal relationships between the tones being played.
Equally, the term 'arhythmic' doesn't mean much in this context. There are still cycles of time, sometimes longer than we can hold in our minds at one go, sometimes just too small (e.g. birdsong). So, as the avoidance of rhythm or tonality is impossible, I am more interested in finding the tonality and groove wherever I can.
David Leibman discussed the concept of 'slack' in his book, Lookout Farm'. The idea is that there is a set amount of tension at any given time in a performance, and one member of the group releases their tension, someone else takes it on. So, if I having been playing some fast lines against a straightforward groove, and then I start to play big long fat notes, someone else might want to 'fill that space'. The pianist might play more insistently, or the drummer double up his cymbal work. Whatever it is, the group dynamic is such that we cover for each other in the building of the work. Equally, we might get in each other’s way. It doesn't always work so well if we both play high fast and loud at the same time. We 'interfere' and clash. In some way we should be in different places in the 3D soundspace.
Tonality itself can also be analysed into three dimensions: the linear, or melodic, the vertical, or harmonic, and the temporal, that of root movement through time. Each dimension has its own units. For the melodic, the unit is the step, or adjacent tones in a scale. The unit of Harmony is the third, and that of Root Movement is the fourth. Emphasising these units makes the listener perceive movement through their respective dimensions
My basic hypothesis is that music perception is a
set of unconscious processes:–
(When listening to music, we respond to
the sounds we first hear by bootstrapping ourselves into the perceptual world,
guessing, very fast ,what it is we are hearing. gc 2001)
Then:-
i) We generate internally a set of potential musical
events,
ii) We assign different probabilities to each
potential event, according to our prior knowledge of music and of what has
happened in the piece so far.
iii) We anticipate what is going to happen next.
That means making informed guesses based on those probabilities. You could
think of it as gambling, and the probabilities of each event are the odds
iv)
Finally, our interest in, and attention on, the music is maintained when a
balance is struck between our predictions being correct, partially correct, or
wrong.
Eugene Narmour, in his book "The analysis and
cognition of basic melodic structures. The implication-realisation model",
has suggested that there are two "universal hypotheses":-
1) Repetition implies continuation of repetition.
This can be expressed formally as A + A A, where = implies.
2) Change implies continuation of change, expressed
formally as A + B C.
He suggests that the realisation and denial of these
two hypotheses is what underlies the entire perceptual structure of music.
Stated thus formally, it would seem that the realisation or denial of these
"universal hypotheses" is an all or nothing choice, but I have
arranged this process of implication and realisation into a four-level
hierarchy:-
1) Total realisation. Playing exactly what the listener expects.
2) Semi-realisation. Playing
something similar to what the listener expects
3) Substitution. Playing
something that is different from, but formally related to what is expected.
4) Denial. Playing
something without formal relation to what is expected.
From
this arrangement, realisation and denial can be seen as the extremes of a
sliding scale. I am suggesting that it is the balance between these
expectations or predictions, being fulfilled or not that holds our attention.
Always fulfil the predictions, and we find the music banal and boring. Never
fulfil them, and we find the music too difficult, inaccessible. We cannot get
into it. Note that the distinction between the last two levels of the hierarchy
are dependent on the musical sophistication of the listener. Some people will
miss formal relationships that others can hear, either because they do not know
the style, or because their ears are not developed enough to perceive the
patterns.
_______________________
Helmholtz said perception is "unconscious inference",
R L Gregory says it is "unconscious hypothesis-testing". I say it
is "unconscious interpretation". But the key
point of all three statements is that the processes of perception are unconscious.
So, if we can trust these unconscious processes to make sense of the
information coming in from the world, we can trust them to produce the
cognitive media that take our information from us, out into the world. Words,
spoken and written, come without our knowing how, or whence. So do images in
our minds. And so do our musical improvisations. Just as we trust our inner
systems to deliver the right words when speaking, we have to trust our systems
to give us the right notes and phrases to play.
What do I mean by "unconscious interpretation"?
That we make sense of new packets of
information by defining how they relate to the current informational context of
our minds. When applied to music, this just means that different notes,
intervals, and phrases have different tonal functions when heard in different
tonal settings. For example, the note A sounds different against a Dm7 from how
it sounds against EbMaj7.