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M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E
A Publication of the
Society for Music Theory
Copyright (c) 1995 Society for Music Theory
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| Volume 1, Number 1 January, 1995 ISSN: 1067-3040 |
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All queries to: mto-editor@husc.harvard.edu
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AUTHOR: Smoliar, Stephen W.
TITLE: Musical Objects: Response to John Covach
KEYWORDS: object, signal, sensation, perception, cognition
REFERENCE: mto.94.0.11.covach.art
Stephen W. Smoliar
Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore
Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Kent Ridge 0511
SINGAPORE
smoliar@iss.nus.sg
[1] Having just delivered a paper entitled "In Search of
Musical Events" at the 12th IAPR International Conference
on Pattern Recognition in Jerusalem (1), I feel at least
somewhat qualified to comment on John Covach's work-in-
progress on the destructuring of Cartesian dualism. The
original working title of this paper was "In Search of
Musical *Objects*;" but the word "events" was substituted
at the advice of Al Bregman, who had solicited
contributions for this particular session of the
conference. Admittedly, I wrote this paper wearing an
engineer's hat, which rarely resembles any philosopher's
hat in either form or function. Nevertheless, I offer up
my antithesis to John's thesis in the Hegelian spirit that
some synthesis may emerge (unless the mass of memes goes
critical, setting off a chain reaction which blows us all
to bits).
========================================
1. Stephen W. Smoliar, "In Search of Musical Events,"
*Proceedings: 12th IAPR International Conference on
Pattern Recognition* Volume III (1994): 118-122.
========================================
[2] Actually, Bregman's suggested modification of my choice
of words very much reflects the Heideggerian spirit which
is the basis for John's thesis. However, without appealing
to such concepts as situation-in-a-context, we can still
appreciate the difference simply because of the temporal
dimension. Confronted with the stimulation of the retinal
field, eventually the cerebral cortex has to draw some
conclusions about *what* objects are there. While visual
perception is far from a static process, for purposes of
investigation and discussion, we can still "freeze" certain
visual stimuli, scrutinize their properties, and try to
relate those properties to models of the signal processing
which takes place along the path from the optic nerve to
the cerebral cortex. Such "freezing" is not possible in
the auditory domain: Freezing entails halting time; and
when time stands still, there can no longer be sound.
Events are products of the passing of time, and Heidegger's
spirit is honored because it makes more sense to ask *how*
events are perceived in the course of time than to ask
*what* events are, as if they were the sorts of Cartesian
objects which occupied Heidegger's critique.
[3] The consequence of this distinction is that we still
know far less about auditory perception than we do about
visual perception. This is because, at the level of nuts
and bolts, it is far harder to control the stimuli.
Consequently, experimental psychologists continue to work
with sine tones and only the most elementary of sequencing
patterns and tend to throw up their hands in despair when a
music theorist asks what any of this has to do with a
Beethoven piano sonata.(2) The problem is that we still
lack adequate models of time consciousness; and our
understanding of what Gerald Edelman calls the "organs of
succession" (3) in the brain is still preliminary. Because
hearing *requires* the passage of time, our knowledge of
how we perceive events will probably have to wait on better
models of how the brain processes time.
===============================
2. The alternative is to swing the pendulum to the opposite
extreme, as in Lucy Pollard-Gott, "Emergence of Thematic
Concepts in Repeated Listening to Music," *Cognitive
Psychology* 15 (1983): 66-94. Pollard-Gott jumps feet
first into the Liszt B Minor piano sonata, using it as data
for an experimental investigation of how different
listeners hear and recall themes. There are no reports of
any preliminary studies based on potentially more
"accessible" data, such as Mozart's variations on "Ah, vous
direz-je, Maman!"
3. Gerald M. Edelman, *The Remembered Present: A
Biological Theory of Consciousness* (New York: Basic Books,
1989), chapter 7.
===============================
[4] On the other hand, Heidegger's work is beginning to
have a positive impact on cognitive science (the discipline
in which those of us who wear our engineers' hats try to
think about questions of mind). To draw upon John's
vocabulary (which is generally far more accessible than
Heidegger's--particularly to engineers), the key word in
the whole story is "interact." Cartesian objects exist
independent of our interaction with them. Heidegger's
world is one in which we interact with a context in which
we are situated, and that context consists of many objects
interacting among themselves and with us. The role of mind
in this complex of interaction is now called *situated
cognition* in the cognitive science community.(4) While
once Heidegger was an inspiration to philosophers who
argued that artificial intelligence was an impossibility
(5), now he is viewed as providing an alternative way of
looking at computers.(6)
================================
4. Philip E. Agre, "Book Review: *Plans and Situation
Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication*," in
William J. Clancey, Stephen W. Smoliar, and Mark J. Stefik,
eds. *Contemplating Minds: A Forum for Artificial
Intelligence* (Cambrdige, MIT Press, 1994) 223-238.
5. Hubert L. Dreyfus, *What Computers *Still* Can't Do: A
Critique of Artificial Reason* (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1992).
6. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, *Understanding
Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design*
(Reading, Addison-Wesley, 1988).
================================
[5] Nevertheless, there is always a danger in trying to
sort things out by assigning them to one extreme or its
opposite, developing what Marvin Minsky likes to call
"dumbbell theories."(7) The issue is not one of whether we
perceive Cartesian objects or interact with Heideggerian
ones. Both are important; and this becomes particularly
evident when we try to talk about "measuring," as John does
in his paragraph [10]. Before we talk about "measuring,"
we have to recognize that there are different "things" we
can measure. My own proposal is that we distinguish
*signals*, *sensations*, and *perceptions*. Signals are
unabashedly Cartesian objects. For purposes of discussing
music they include bits on a CD or pixels in a score
image.(8) Sensation only exists by virtue of our sensory
apparatus, and no two of us are ever identically
equipped.(9) Sensory transforms, however, precede the
cerebral cortex and therefore precede that sort of
*interpretation* which only consciousness can provide.
Perception is thus the cognitive interpretation of
sensation, requiring the full resources of mental state
provided by consciousness.
================================
7. Marvin Minsky, *The Society of Mind* (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1986), section 11.9.
8. I regard an appeal to the "analog" nature of the world
as a red herring. We can always pack our bits into higher
resolutions as the situation demands. The important thing
is that those bits are about as Cartesian as you can get.
9. Gerald M. Edelman, *Neural Darwinism: The Theory of
Neuronal Group Selection* (New York: Basic Books, 1987),
chapter 4.
================================
[6] Once we bring mental state into the picture, however,
we discover that the concept of a "musical world" as a
source of a context for situation is too narrow. Indeed,
the context can never be narrower than *all* of mental
state. Put another way, a musical experience induces a
mental state which, in turn, governs the interpretive act
of perception. What is important is that the mental state
we are in may also be due to *extra*-musical inputs. We
may be just as influenced by what we just had for dinner, a
bulb flickering in the chandelier, or the conductor's
haircut as we are by the auditory stimuli we are receiving.
[7] In conclusion I applaud John Covach for undertaking his
work-in-progress and sharing his "progress report" with us.
However, the thing about progress reports is that they
often say more about what needs to be done than they do
about what has been achieved. John's agenda could
ultimately be as valuable to cognitive science as it is to
music theory; but mining that value will occasionally
require setting the philosophers aside and recognizing that
engineers have to worry about solving problems, too!
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END OF MTO ITEM