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siiky
2023/09/27
2023/09/27
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Andrew Kania states a subjective approach to defining music leads to counterintuitive results. As an example, he says that if I'm listening to a radio and I deem that the sounds it is playing are music, then they are music. However, if there's noone listening to the sounds the radio is playing, they cease to be music. This is indeed counterintuitive. But why do they cease to be music?
It may be that music is so as long as anyone would consider it to be so, whether they listen to it or not (even whether they ever existed, or no longer exist). From this perspective, the difficulty, I expect, would be greater at disproving that something is music, than at determining that it is music.
To me this seems analogous to other kinds of knowledge: if I heard somebody speak Kurdish on the street, I wouldn't recognize it as such (I don't know Kurdish, and don't have a "good idea" of what Kurdish is); but I would know it isn't English, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, French, ... and a few other languages I have SOME idea of. Nonetheless, the spoken words are still Kurdish -- its essence is not dependent on me, though it is on those who speak and understand it.
Another example Kania provides is that the Mona Lisa doesn't cease to be the Mona Lisa if I decide it's not the Mona Lisa -- a certain piece of music doesn't cease to be music just because I don't recognize it as music. Whether it is music or not to me, if somebody recognizes it as music, then it is music. And, on the other hand, something being music (i.e. somebody recognizing it as music) doesn't force me to recognize it as music!
Jerrold Levinson on his turn, believes that an individual chord played ephemerally quickly by itself, should not be considered music due to the short time interval. Ignoring for now the subjective definition above, and analyzing instead according to some criteria, methinks it's music. One of Levinson's criteria is that music is "organized in time". Since time is not discrete, and sound would be inaudible if it occured through an empty interval of time, then it is trivially organized in time. Another one of the criteria is that it must have "motion". At first hearing, a constant sound played through any interval of time seems motionless indeed, without going into technicalities.
Notwithstanding, I would probably consider it music. Going into technicalities, it seems obvious to me that there's motion: consider the starting and stopping of the sound -- it's not constant, it doesn't "become" or cease from one instant to the next. If not for that, consider the sound waves (feeble, this one, I know). And who's to say a certain sound is not actually a sequence of several even shorter sounds, such that we cannot tell them apart, nor the boundaries between them? Then they wouldn't even be individual.