Artificial Symbol Systems Need Not Feel Artificial

I submitted my last ever assignment for undergraduate coursework here this afternoon, and, like everyone else who’s done the same, felt deflated rather than exhilarated. I have pretty much been staving off depression only through the adrenaline rush of constantly approaching deadlines, and now I have to find other ways of inducing that adrenaline rush. By way of tidying up my brain, let me expel some ideas left over from my much-missed coursework.

One thing that struck me as I was writing my philosophy of music final paper was a particularly weak argument made by Stephen Davies against the possibility that the expression of emotions in music is done through an abstract symbol system in which certain emotions are conventionally linked to certain musical features. Davies refers to such theories of how emotions are expressed in music as semiotic theories. His objection to them is that they do not fit the phenomenology of listeners’ experiences of emotions in music:

Registering music’s expressiveness is more like encountering a person who feels the emotion and shows it than like reading a description of the emotion or than like examining the word ‘sad’. While the dinner bell might, through association, lead us to salivate, we do not think of it as tasty. By contrast, we experience the sadness of music as present within it. Emotion is transparently immediate in our experience of music and our awareness of its expressiveness is not separable from, or independent of, our following the music’s unfolding in all its detail. moreover, the listener’s connection is not with some general, abstract conception of the emotions but with a specific and concrete presentation.*

Earlier in the same book, he puts the point more pithily: “The emotion is announced through the music rather than described by the music.”

The thing about this argument that makes it absurdly weak, to me, is that there is a too obvious objection to it. Language is an abstract symbol system, yet we do have phenomenological experiences with language akin to those we have with emotions in music: we do sometimes feel, for certain words or phrases, that they announce as well as describe their referents. The most obvious candidates are onomatopoeic words. But even words that have no phonetic relations to their referents can often be so strongly associated with a particular mood or atmosphere that we seem to immediately get a “feel” of their referents when we hear or read those words. “Library”, to me, is an example of such a word: I get an immediate rush of bookish mental associations and their attendant feelings when I hear the word. “Forest” is another. All the emotion words have the same kind of effect. It certainly doesn’t feel as though the word “sad” is merely a symbol for something lying outside itself — to me, at least, the word “sad” comes with its own halo of phenomenological effects associated with sadness. I suspect that when one is familiar enough with a word, then the associations with the word simply come with the word every time we hear them, without our having to feel that we need to expend extra “effort” in looking “outside” the word to spot things associated with it. In short, an unnatural symbol system can come to feel natural with enough acculturation. If such phenomenological experiences are possible with known abstract symbol systems, then Davies’ objection to semiotic theories of emotions in music is toothless.

*Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 175.

We Can Has Empiriczm

Excellent philosophy LOLcats at Brain Hammer.

Recently at Cosmic Variance, Blake Stacey offered some hilarious physics LOLcat slogans. My favourite, though, was Hank Fox’s: “Im in ur carpetz leavng dark matter.”

Hearing Agency in Music

When I explain to a friend who is completely unfamiliar with classical music exactly why the latest pop song he foists onto me has no dramatic development whatsoever, he immediately assumes that I’m looking for songs with a developing narrative attached to them. That is not, however, what I mean. Non-programmatic instrumental music has no verbal narratives attached to it. However, that is no hindrance at all to us hearing dramatic development in them. Sonata form, for example, has much more dramatic development than a typical pop song that has an ABAB structure, or something similarly blindly repetitive. That, of course, raises the long-standing “paradox” of how something can be non-representational while still eliciting reactions in humans akin to those elicited by representational art forms. People generally don’t like it if you attribute our normal reactions to music to primitive instinctual reactions to certain patterns of sound, ingrained in our psychophysics. They want an ‘ordinary’ explanation akin to how we explain why aspects of a verbal story excite us in certain ways. As someone who is still somewhat under the spell of science, I must say that I’ve never understood this demand. Plenty of non-representational stimuli elicit reactions in us that typically accompany only ‘narrative’ phenomena: our brains are over-wired to detect agency and storylines. There are, for example, the famous psychological experiments where people attributed agency to moving geometric shapes (I can’t remember who conducted these), but no one seems to find it a philosophical puzzle that we react to non-representational images the way that we react to human agents. Absolute music, to me, is not very far off from this. All you need is some sort of similarity across time that one can identify with an agent with a continuous existence in time, and some variations on that region of similarity, which are then interpreted as things happening to, or being done by, the agent. The shapes in the psychological experiment would be analogous to motifs, rhythmic or melodic or possibly even dynamic, in a musical piece.

There is still, though, the fact that we don’t necessary hear agency in a musical work. We may hear a story, but I’m not sure there’s actually an agent. Sometimes it’s more like an evolving scene rather than an evolving [auto]biography.

Hype

As far as real-world bookstores go, the Seminary Co-op is as good as any for new books, but with much lower prices available on the internet, I wonder why people salivate for the Co-op’s annual 20%-off book sale. If 20% makes such a difference to you that you await the occasion eagerly, then why not save a lot more than 20% by buying books online? I took a quick browse through the philosophy section today to further procrastinate on my final papers, and, having purchased the vast majority of my books online ever since I entered the US, was shocked at the prices. Since when could a normal-sized paperback cost $55? I shudder to think how much the first edition hardcover must have cost. To think that a few years ago, I balked at buying the paperback version of E. O. Wilson’s monumental (in terms of both size and content, and you can say that of it ignoring the last chapter entirely) Sociobiology because it cost $40.

Book Haul

I spent just $17 at the Reg’s sale of withdrawn books and bagged the following:

Relativity was actually a volume of conference papers from the 60s, which I will probably never read, but I bought it anyway, because it had the following inside:

Of course, immediately after I started worrying about being irrational in buying it: I doubt I could sell it for much, and why should I be “thrilled” at the idea of owning a book with Chandrasekhar’s signature? But I couldn’t get too upset at my own irrationality, for it cost me only $3.

The Damasio was also autographed, although I do actually want to read that book.

I have to say, Lutoslawski beat Bruckner for me in Tuesday’s CSO concert. The first three movements of the Bruckner 7th were actually excellent. But I just didn’t take to the last movement. There had been warning signs before: I’d listened to it several times before the concert and had never found it a suitable capstone to the preceding movements. The theme, which is appropriated from the first movement, sounds as though it’s being forced to appear lively, when really it is much suited to the slow, expansive tempo of the first movement. Another aspect of the last movement that grated on me was the part near the end where there is a startling modulation at the end of an ascending melodic line, and then he just leaves us there and starts a new ascent from below (I’m sorry, I’m too lazy to check out the score and isolate that part). A side effect of Bruckner’s generally slow pace is that it can be difficult to have climactic feelings at the climaxes that he plods up to, and I certainly felt that for the last movement. And a flat ending disproportionately colours one’s memory of the experience of the entire piece. The first two movements were the best done, in my opinion. The third movement seems tailored as a CSO showpiece: where better for the brash brass to show off? And by and large it was well done, but one detail annoyed me: the trombone, which would “echo” the trumpet’s refrain, was significantly louder than the trumpet, so it no longer sounded like an echo. Maybe that was intended, but I found it inappropriate. I loved the trombone’s nasal call: every time I listen to the low bass of the CSO, I am stunned anew even though I know they are outstanding. The same applied last night. If I had a recording of just that trombone call I could play it over and over again — the penetrating, clear, yet round sound cut right through my guts whenever it sounded. But even if I found it immediately pleasurable for it to call out so loudly and aggressively, I thought it was odd in the context of the music.

I loved the textures in Lutoslawski’s Chain 2. And, as someone who has long been marinated in the tradition of well-defined, stable harmonies, I am always delighted to hear how modern composers can gesture outside of the language of tonal harmony. The orchestra sounded fabulous, as did Robert Chen. I always found the CSO’s timbre and technique to be especially appropriate for modern music, which is why I was surprised to read that most of the musicians are as prejudiced against modern music as their audiences.

Was also at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert on Wednesday night. Standard fare: Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn, and Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. The Mozart was fine. I found the oboist a tad bland myself, compared to Alex Klein when he performed the same piece with the CSO last season. But otherwise very well done. The Tchaikovksy was excellent, especially the first and third movements. I’ve heard that symphony so many times that sometimes the waltz just sounds old to me, but they made me want to sway to it again. The strings were outstanding in the first movement. Eschenbach had an annoying habit of slowing down at huge climaxes, though, which broke the forward momentum. Except for the principal horn, the horns were also below par: too loud in the last movement, to the point of drowning out the woodwinds when they were only supposed to accompany them, and often ragged.

Drawing the Right Crowd

After yesterday’s percussion-cum-piano recital by Aimard, Stefanovich, Ciampolini and Gramley, I’m beginning to suspect that the shit sandwich is the wrong way to win people over to contemporary art music. I expected that the all-modern programme (the oldest piece on there is the Bartok) would result in a smaller-than-usual crowd for a Sunday afternoon recital featuring a well-known pianist like Aimard. What I didn’t expect was that it would be one of the best audiences I’ve encountered so far. The effect of having an all-shit programme, as it were, rather than a shit sandwich, was that the people who turned up weren’t there to merely tolerate the music while waiting for the familiar slices of Mozart/Beethoven/Brahms. They were there because they actually wanted to listen to the meat. This resulted in the most positive atmosphere at any concert I’ve been to. I could feel people being stunned by the ethereal mixtures of sound created by the unusual ensemble. I would be surprised if a significant fraction of the people there were already familiar with those pieces by Eotvos, Kurtag, Ligeti, and Nancarrow (they might have been with the Reich and Bartok though).

As a result, the applause (and there was a lot of it) and “bravos” felt a lot more sincere than your usual standing ovations for a Mozart recital by Alfred Brendel (nothing against Brendel; I know he’s a proponent of modern music, but his Chicago recitals always seem to be standard fare) or a Mahler symphony by the CSO. There is a kind of “let’s stand up because the musicians did such a nice job, and we should give them a warm fuzzy feeling for that!” feel to the way the entire main floor ends up standing up after a standard-repertoire concert. This could just be what I’m projecting onto the audience from my own distaste for the antique snobbery of “the usual crowd”, of course, but overhearing too many sweet and empty pre- and post- concert conversations amongst older audience members has lowered my opinion of their music appreciation skills. The same pre-concert conversations also all too often reveal that the appearance of a modern piece on the programme induces in them pre-judgments of the “oh well at least the second half is Beethoven” sort. If you listen to a piece expecting that it will be bad and thinking of it as a bitter pill to swallow so that you may be delighted with an old favourite, then it will be a bitter pill. So long as most people who attend shit sandwich-concerts do so only for the bread, I suspect the effect of such programmes on perceptions of modern music will be very limited. They might even have the negative effect of reinforcing preestablished judgments on modern music. Aimard’s one recital probably initiated more enthusiasm for modern music than all the shit sandwiches in one CSO season, because he was preaching to the right audience. Which is not to say that he was preaching to an audience of confirmed Ligeti-lovers the way the CSO programmers preach to an audience of confirmed Mahler-lovers: as I said, I suspect that most of the audience, like myself, were unfamiliar with Ligeti but curious about him. So, unlike a standard Beethoven piano sonata recital, Aimard’s recital probably had an evangelical effect, as such.

On the recital itself: I confess that I fell asleep at some points, not because I was bored, but due to alcohol and lack of sleep from Saturday night. The middle portion, though, meant as a tribute to Ligeti, was fabulous and had my full attention throughout. I particularly enjoyed Aimard and Ciampolini’s improvisations on Ligeti’s etudes; Ciampolini injecting a tinge of jazz into them. The Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes was mesmerising even with only eight “metronomes”, and it boggled my mind trying to imagine how each of them kept their own times. Ciampolini also did a short solo improvisation on a strange instrument which I’ve never seen before — it looked like two metal bowls welded together to form a clam-like shape which emitted different xylophone-like pitches depending on where he hit it (with his hands), and it was connected to an amplifier. Ciampolini essentially stole the show towards the end of the tribute with his virtuosoic accompaniment to Aimard’s relatively simple suggestions on the piano.

Speaking of shit sandwiches, Tuesday’s promises to be a classic one: Beethoven-Lutoslawski-Bruckner. CSO bassist Michael Hovnanian has written approvingly of Haitink’s rapport with the orchestra, so one hopes that translates into a special evening of music.

Scav Hunt

I’m too lazy and antisocial to participate in Scav Hunt, but the item list is always a good laugh. My favourites from this year’s list [pdf]:

27. A Turing Machine. [1,000,000₂ points]

63. Sail a wee little boat on a lake of sulfur hexafluoride. [23 points]*

78. A 1st Grade Fun With Science book with age-appropriate instructions for the following: a baking soda volcano, Millikan’s oil drop experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, and the Milgram experiment.
[14 points]

74. Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land.
[18 points]

87. Schroedinger’s dick in a box [0 or 1 points. Maybe both if you don’t open the box]

166. A Chunk of Pure Evil. [5 points]

185. Please inform the faculty that Friday is Bring your Liberace to Work Day and document that they are complying. [15 points]

213. Break glass with your voice. [50 points]

221. The team member whose physique most closely adheres to the Golden Ratio. [φ points]

267. A sofa that looks like it escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture, the first pages of a novel about the Titanic told from the perspective of the iceberg, and a performance of “Come on Eileen” on squeaky dog toys and a bathtub. It’d all better be good enough to make us shit tiny vampires. [5 points, 2 points, 13 points]

280. I wish it would rain, rain on me. No really, I do. A mobile thunderstorm. [45 points]

281. Nail Jell-O to the wall. [3 points]

[ScavOlympics Item] 4. Foot race. Only your feet are watermelons.

I have to head to the quads to see that foot race.

*The raid of Searle Laboratory should come in useful for this item.

Focus: Not What It Seems

Sean Carroll tells of a true experience where a borderline applicant to a physics PhD program at a major research university (since he spent seven years at the U of C, it could be here) is denied admission partly on the basis of having an M.Div. I posted a comment (which seems to have gone into a black hole) mentioning that

1) I’ve had three positive reactions and one negative reaction from physicists to the fact that I am acquiring a second major in philosophy. However, one of the positive reactions was from a physicist who has worked in foundations of physics and is pals with many philosophers of physics. There are very few physicists in his mould. And another positive reaction was from my de facto advisor, for whom I had done good work, and who is unlikely to criticise me outright for something not egregiously foolish. The one negative reaction was enough to trouble me, since if I were on the bubble anywhere, one bad word from someone like that professor could tip the balance.

2) In contrast, philosophers seem to be approving of multi-disciplinarity, ceteris paribus. And it seems to me that it is not just that applicants who claim to specialise in philosophy of science can boost their chances of admission by having a science degree, but that excelling in another field, especially a quantitative field, is seen as an indicator of general philosophical potential.

3) Contrary to the heuristic the professors in Sean’s anecdote are going by, I think people who have switched fields actually are more focused than those who have little experience outside their specialty. From my own anecdotal experience, those who have switched fields are those who have given the most thought to their eventual choice of specialty, and too many of those who have a “focused” record simply happen to have one because they followed the crowd throughout their educations and never tried stepping outside the conventional track. I have much more respect for someone who has deliberated on why he/she should go to physics grad school than for those who went to physics grad school because that’s what all their classmates were doing.

Today

I was introduced to a possible limiting case of disorder in an academic’s office. There were actual walls of piles of papers and boxes forming a narrow passageway (barely wide enough for a person of normal width) from the entrance of the office to the desk. The desk itself was even more mind-boggling. It is normal for people to have stacks of books and papers on their desks. I have that. My roommate, who is in the last stages of his dissertation, has stacks of books all over the apartment, including on the living room sofa and window sills. But they are clearly differentiated and organised stacks. What this academic had, in contrast, was a 30cm thick layer of papers over the entire surface of his desk. These were not even stacked; it was clear from the cross-sectional view I had of it that the papers were just sort of placed on top of one another in random positions and mashed by pressure into a layer of roughly uniform height over the entire surface. It was surreal following him to the corner of his office where his desk was through that paper-walled passageway, then sitting down across him at his desk with that barrier of dead trees between us. I wonder how many years it’s been since he last saw the surface of his desk. He’ll eventually need a high chair to use his desk at all.

—

Quote: “I took more physics courses because I wanted to learn more theory, but all I got was more math.” A very common gripe with physics undergraduates. And I would say that it’s not even learning more math. It’s learning more techniques for evaluating increasingly elaborate equations.