Re: OT: Eskimo words for snow (Re: what's a "froplet"?)
Re: OT: Eskimo words for snow (Re: what's a "froplet"?)
- Subject: Re: OT: Eskimo words for snow (Re: what's a "froplet"?)
- From: Philip Aker <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 05:39:16 -0700
On Sunday, August 4, 2002, at 07:35 PM, David Meieran wrote:
Re: Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct"
I had to wonder at their literacy level with regards to music.
It just seemed to me that they're describing concepts much
better voiced through music, music notation, and music
theories. In that light, their explanations and
conceptualizing seemed rather juvenile.
for example? (the musicologists on the list will be interested)
For example their theory that memes (hope that's the correct
spelling) are evolving, superseding their ancestor memes and
attaining a new broader meaning, that current generations have
so much more to absorb, and express things which have a deeper
import than previous ones. All of this at an increasing rate so
that everyone in a major urban center talks faster than the
proverbial DJ from Buffalo.
That kind of notion doesn't strike me as anything different than
the natural evolution of languages in the proceedings of many
cultures. For thousands of years, the NeXT (sic) generation has
been reactionary to those which have preceded them and proposed
and acted upon the "new" thing. Compare icons on your desktop to
Egyptian hieroglyphs. How different are the notions in terms of
communication? A nutshell summary of a concept in a graphic that
in all likelyhood will be misunderstood by someone looking at
them four thousand years later. Anything new there?
What seemed to me to be missing from their theories were
ingredients common to musical thought but not unknown in other
areas of human endeavor. I'll try for an analogy with the
concept of a fundamental and resultant harmonics as applied to
thought processes.
If one sings a tone for any length of time, such that resonances
manifest themselves, a portion of the natural overtone series
can be realized. Once that happens, it's only a matter of
practice and development to extend the range and number of nodes
able to be sung. Maybe in yoga terminology called opening up a
few chakhras. In the process, some laws of music start to make
themselves apparent. The Law of Octaves for instance or the fact
that the twelfth seems highly related to the fundamental. By
using only those two items, scales can be derived. When that
occurs, so also occurs the audible fact that a natural twelfth
throws a spanner into the works by being a tad off for equal
temperment. Hence we learn to inflect the nodes so that it
becomes possible to think in terms of keys, key modulation and
beyond into atonalism.
The important word in the above paragraph is "inflect". In order
to consciously deal with the above with respect to equal
temperment, it's implicit that a musician be able to encounter
at least 12 "viewpoints" of the same idea in relationship to
some fundamental. When this is achieved, the kinds of analytical
methods I heard on that broadcast appear trapped in linearity
with little or no component/complement of circular logic. In
addition to which, I gotta say that none of them had any
resonance in their voices to speak of and for folks who seem to
be dealing a lot with what the spoken word conveys, didn't have
a heck of a lot of nuance in the pitch variance of their voices.
Philip Aker
http://www.aker.ca
'
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