From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Sat Feb 06 1999 - 13:44:27 MST
At 10:49 PM 2/1/99 -0500, Sean Parker wrote:
[...snip...]
>Now for a little whack-ass music theory, inspired by maddeningly complex
>drum n bass, a little house and a lot of funky breaks. Listening to
>underground dance music, I became aware of my mind’s inability to wrap the
>long tentacles of cognition around each distinct element, to fully encompass
>the sum and entirety of a song, always finding myself limited to the
>momentary perception of individual components. Take for existence a
>particular drum-loop. Let your mind latch on to it for a moment and it
>repeats; you can focus for just long enough to pick out its recurrence. But
>it is sporadic and unpredictable, and quite often your mind loses it in some
>other component, a bass-line or competing drum loop.
I think this simply requires training your hearing. I was raised on
baroque music (the structural predecessor of many genres of electronica)
and took piano lessons from the age of five years. I've been involved with
producing music in the dance/techno/trance/etc. genre for many years. I
find that I have little trouble deconstructing complex compositions in my
head; indeed, it is practically automatic.
The important factor, particularly with dance music, is that the number of
useable structure permutations per unit time is relatively small. Rather
than viewing a rhythmic note progression as a function of time, I tend to
view it as a single discrete object (think an arpeggiation function) which
takes far less brain power than remembering the progression itself. This
is augmented by the fact that dance music progressions are in base 2 time
and I deal with base 2 numbers frequently as a software engineer.
Therefore, your average 4 to 8 bar dance sequences typically never contain
more than 4-6 progression "objects" across all tracks, which makes it easy
for a trained ear to dissect. It is essentially removing the entropy from
the data stream.
>Most frustrating, the
>patterns of beats and samples, taken individually, are just that, patterns;
>clearly, recognizable as structured, layered, and arranged via some stroke
>of human intelligence. But that predictability is limited to the
>individual samples, to perceive the song as a whole requires a kind of
>detachment, a removal from the deep analytic perceptibility of sound
>patterns. So it follows that electronic music has the peculiar capacity to
>dissolve the immediate locus of thought and erect in its place a kind of
>detached imperception that is neither analytic nor emotional -- it simply
>is. Historically, this characteristic of beat oriented music was exploited
>by aboriginal cultures seeking communion with the spirit world via
>provocation of altered states of consciousness, generally through highly
>repetitive layered beats and frenzied dancing; a phenomenon commonly
>referred to as trance induction.
One of the most interesting features of rhythm-centric music is the strong
tendency of the mind to sync to it. Some genres, such as trance, are so
compelling that it is almost involuntary. The unfortunate side effect of
this is that it makes it difficult to think deep, complex thoughts while
listening to it. When I am working I tend to listen to more
texture-oriented forms of electronica because I find it has less impact on
my cognitive abilities.
[..snip...]
>What really scares me about this “connection,” ironically, is exactly what
>inspires others. We’re talking about something with a longstanding record
>for being used as a spiritual aid, a physical and psychological tool
>tailored to subverting the conscious mind and refocusing it entirely on the
>“spiritual,” - which like any religion, is a wholly irrational belief
>system. Spirituality was the dominating characteristic - the focus - of
>every primitive “aboriginal” culture I can call to mind. What does this
>mean for dance culture? I have a feeling we’ve hit on something big,
>something capable of squelching one’s inner voice, drowning it in a barrage
>of aural horseshit and inducing cognitive dissonance pretty reliably - in
>essence, the perfect form of escapism.
There is actually a field of study that revolves around the psychological
impact of sound. It turns out that sound, even at the most fundamental
levels, has a significant impact on our mental and emotional states.
Musicians often characterize the sounds of different instruments by their
emotional characteristics. For example, analog synthesizers (a favorite of
the techno/rave crowd) are prized for the "warmth" of their sound, while a
digital synthesizer generating the same type of sound is often described as
"cold" or "edgy". The difference in this case can be attributed to the
amplifiers: analog amps emphasize odd harmonics, while digital amps often
emphasize a particular subset of the even harmonics. The sound may be
virtually identical, but the feeling is different. Similarly, slightly
modulating the pitch of sound (below the threshold of detection in some
cases) tends to cause people to feel "uneasy".
Movie soundtracks often take advantage of many of these emotional cues to
enhance the emotional state of the audience. The subtle and subliminal
emotions are purposely written into the movie soundtrack with the intent of
inducing a certain mental state at specific times. Musicians often use
these cues to give a particular "feeling" to a piece of music (although I
suspect many musicians are not aware of the specific cues, only the results).
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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