How/why music causes emotion?

Ryan_m_b

To sidestep the (possibly legitimate) argument that the act of taking the picture made the art and that the picture, not just the subject, is the art we could propose that said person carefully picked up the mess and put it in the Tate.

BenG549

Yeah that makes sense... I was just trying not to directly copy your example lol.

Ms Music

I would like to throw my two cents in the hat for the topic, although I have only read the first page so I have no idea if someone else has stated this yet.

I see music as no different than color. We have settled on specific color frequencies, and have color wheels that show what colors go well with each other. If you like the color combinations an artist used on a painting, you will find it appealing. If you like the tone combinations in a music piece, you will find it appealing.

I remember a couple of years ago seeing an article about an ancient flute, and the scientists had made a replica that they had played and posted the mp3. I was amazed at the modern tones, it was "in tune" with any hand made modern flute might use. I think it is something in our brains, where we find the frequencies in color and music as universally appealing.

BenG549

Given the name Ms Music I would imagine your 'two cents' are worth a lot more than that in this discussion!

I agree, but I also made the case that what we find appealing is learned behaviour and things 'foreign' to us will be less appealing because it's different, not because it is objectively worse. I used example such as Gamelan music.

The basic physics of most traditional instruments (particularly ones involving subtractive synthesis; woodwinds and brass i.e. make a noise source (lips) and a cavity will 'filter' this noise) has not really changed. It's just resonance and you change the length or size of the cavity to change its resonant frequencies, and hence, harmonics (over tones). Dissonance in music can however be used to invoke emotion as much as nice harmonies. Not so pleasing though.

I tried to find articles on testing different musical intervals on infants i.e. blank un socialised canvases, to see if there was any truth in the idea that we are inclined naturally to appreciate 'nice harmony' over clashing tones, but couldn't really find anything.

Ms Music

Hi Ben. Certainly, you learn to like certain music styles because of familiarity. I was going for a more fundamental aspect, but there is nothing wrong with your point. FYI I listened to Rachmaninoff the other day. His music makes me happy.

And BTW, I found the article with the mp3. 35,000 years ago this flute played tones that modern man still find appealing.

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2...r-cavemen?lite

Now that I find amazing. My brother makes native American flutes, and it is basically the same tones, 35,000 years later. Awesome.

zoobyshoe

To repeat, "Pretty" stands for whatever reaction. I specifically said "pretty" earlier because it fit the biological stain, but we could have a huge range of aesthetic reactions depending on what we're looking at. You are conflating art and...(insert aesthetic reaction here).

The Magritte was not posted to illustrate "pretty" anyway. It was posted to illustrate that the thing you draw is not the art, the drawing is the art. "This is not a pipe" is true because it's a painting of a pipe, not the pipe itself. As Magritte said, you can't fill the painting with tobacco and smoke it. Likewise, the pipe is not a painting, even if you have an aesthetic reaction to it.
Agreed. Here I think you understand that your reaction to a thing is not what makes it art. You've stopped defining art as 'something one has a strong aesthetic reaction to.'
Doing biology entails a lot of peripheral activities that aren't, specifically, biology. It's the same in all fields. In order to do particle physics you have to get out of bed in the morning, get dressed, and drive to work. Those activities aren't particle physics, though.

If you want to define those peripherals as part of doing biology, consider this: Biologists and artists have to clean their glasses. Since cleaning one's glasses is part of the process of biology, I am, when I clean my glasses, a biologist, am I not? I must be at least partially a biologist since I do one thing that is part of the process of biology. No?

zoobyshoe

Complete fiction. Nothing created this way ever ended up in the Tate. Jackson Pollock did not accidentally drip paint for hours and hours off the end of a stick onto canvas.

It could well happen that an accident would produce something that was cool to look at. Here again though, just because you have a positive aesthetic reaction to a thing doesn't mean it's art.
Art certainly doesn't have to depict what is beautiful, but, when it doesn't, it has to depict what is ugly in some way we might call "beautiful" in the sense of 'with astonishing skill" as in: "Jack Nicholson did a beautiful job of depicting an arrogant bastard in 'A Few Good Men'." The beauty is in the way the beauty or ugliness is communicated.

Physics and scientific theories are certainly not ever considered art. Art allows for complete fiction, fiction as the ultimate goal of a piece. Science absolutely not. An artist may pour his soul into depicting the way he wishes things were. The most a scientist can do is construct a gedanken fiction in the service of illuminating the way things actually are.

atyy

I think that is such an interesting distinction. My inclination is to accept it. Yet in both art and science, truth and beauty are ideals. Truth first even in art, yet one hopes that the two are somehow fundamentally united.

fuzzyfelt

I hope this might clarify some things-

"The choice of Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock," said art expert Simon Wilson. "But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm
The person responsible for the snow shovel, urinal and “Nude Descending a Staircase” was Duchamp.

Reading on further down the page that included Zoobyshoe’s quote-
“In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition only to have the piece rejected. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some as one of the most recognizable modernist works of sculpture. The committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it "the most influential work of modern art."[15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

“Anti-art”, if you get the joke, in denying artistic boundaries, denies itself (or it affirms both boundaries and itself, or in achieving a redefinition or lack of definition of art makes the term in that application obsolete). The term has been described as a “Paradoxical neologism”, and is like the ironical term “postmodernism”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art

“The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.” Claims denoting clear boundaries suggest an agreed definition. Some definitions of art are too narrow to include “the most influential work of modern art”, and many other works considered art. There are various definitions here.
Definitions of art-
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

Formalist definitions (elements of design, etc.) combined with intentionalism was one way of allowing for Abstract Expressionism, in that formalism allowed for non-figurative works and placing importance on intention helped distinguish their expressions from “kitsch” or wall-paper. Greenberg had been regarded as a leading promoter of this idea, but distances himself in a quote here-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(art)

Intention might not be important, e.g.-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

Although I don’t consider them necessary, some examples come to mind. I relinked this recently, exhibited at the Hayward and Serpentine Galleries-



Or there were the working diagrams by theoretical physicists who were invited to show their images on the walls at the RA.
(http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/)

BenG549

OK, yeah that's fair. Until I can find a 'real' example. I'd be surprised if there is no example out there of someone creating something widely considered 'artistic' by accident though, especially in the tate modern, I'll have a look.

Hmmm I'm inclined to agree actually. Unless I can find a reasonable example not borne out of fiction, it might be reasonable. The only problem here is that if I fall over and spill/drop a bunch of stuff, we can agree that is not art because there is no artistic intent, and that if someone were to, for purely artistic means, create a scene exactly the same (not outrageous given that the tate modern has mounds of clothes on the floor and the like passing for art) there is no visual difference between them but one is definitely art and one definitely is not... that's difficult to accept, two man made things that look exactly the same but one is art and the other isn't.

Disagree, things don't have to be aestheticly beautiful (beauty in a traditional sense or beauty as a way of appreciating the subtleties of a great 'dark' performance or peice of visual art) the piece below is by Kazimir Malevich entitled "Suprematist Composition: White On White" 1918, Museum of Modern Art New York. It couldn't be more neutral, it's white, on a white background.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...White_1917.jpg

Yeah ok I can accept that, I wouldn't necessarily describe science as art (possibly some areas of engineering, I know my electronics engineer friend always describes PCB design as art more than science. Certainly architecture, but not science in general) I was just asking if creativity in general was a qualifier, whether is be creative use of colour patterns or creative use of knowledge... I can see why people would think it isn't.

BenG549

First of all, very good post! Pretty much covered all the bases. Some of those links are pretty interesting as well.

And there in lies the problem or trying to objectify something inherently subjective. Still, can be fun to try!

That is very interesting, particularly the wiki page "Death of the Author".

zoobyshoe

I'm not aware of any aspect of science in which beauty is an ideal. What is it you mean by that?

Something art and science share is their investigative nature. In that they're united, I'd claim. However, art allows an individual to investigate his own psyche and present the results for consideration. The truth he tries to unravel is something like, "This is how my mind operates." Every psyche is valid here. The success or failure lies in how effectively the artist manages to communicate whatever part of his psyche he's working on to his audience. A scientist, on the other hand, is not permitted to explore how he wishes the universe operated and present it as science. What we want from a scientist is someone who more accurately explains the external, objective truth.

zoobyshoe

Your confusion arises from equating the Tate with art: 'The Tate is an art museum. Piles of clothes are displayed in the Tate. Piles of clothes must therefore be art.' Really, the Tate's function is merely to present what enough important people claim is art. The thought, "That which appears in the Tate must, automatically, be Art," is wrong. That would be like saying, "Those theories that appear in peer reviewed journals must all be correct." as if appearing in a peer reviewed journal made them bullet-proof.
What's not beautiful about that painting?
Let me just address the concept of there being an art to something not usually considered an art. What is usually meant is that there is no set 'algorithm' or procedure in certain cases, and so the person is free to develop their own. You amass a collection of rules of thumb and then 'artfully' apply them as needed, operating on informed intuition more than anything else. Engineering is not one of the arts, but it's perfectly OK to say there's an art to it.

atyy

To me the subject of study is often beautiful, just as the view from across the Golden Gate bridge is. Here's a bunch of quotes that show that scientists consider beauty important.

"This result is too beautiful to be false; it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." -- Dirac

"It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell." -- Steven Weinberg

"The emergent physics laws (such as the law of dipolar interaction and the law of non-interacting phonons) are simple and beautiful" -- Xiao-Gang Wen

Of course it's harder to see why cancer might be beautiful, and similarly there are subjects in art which are not beautiful such as war, which is why I agree that truth comes first both in art and science - but I think we do hope that at some deep level truth and beauty are allied.

This book is not about heroes.
English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might,
majesty, dominion, or power, except war.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may
be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets
must be truthful.

~Wilfred Owen
http://www.illyria.com/poetry.html

zoobyshoe

Here again, though, a physicist can't construct a law that is beautiful and have it accepted because it is beautiful. It has to be true. I think you can compose music that is extremely beautiful but ultimately pure fiction, and it will represent successful art: it tells the true story of someone's desire. Beauty may be desirable in science but it is an occasional incidental perk. Dirac, in saying beauty is more important than fitting with experiment, sounds a little crazy in that quote if you ask me.

zoobyshoe

How/why does this sucession of notes convey such a sense of anxious fury? Such furious anxiety? I get all tense listening to it, and my heart rate goes up.

atyy

That's a difficult question to answer because the basic data aren't universal. I fall asleep every time I hear that. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed a lot of her playing, but not this.

This performance is not note-perfect, but the variety of appropriate articulation is much greater, don't you think?


Let me ask a counter-question: are there things that don't evoke any emotion? What is the physiological basis of flat affect?

Also, would fear conditioning using sound be an appropriate simplification of the OP question?