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Musical vs everyday listening



I think it -- 'aesthetic vs functional' listening was proposed much earlier than than 1993.

There is the anecdotal (?) John Cage quote: "Music is all around us, if we only had ears, we wouldn't need concert halls. "This was cited by the narrator of the Everest LP of Variations IV from a 1965 recording in Los Angeles. Luc Ferrari in Presque Rien http://emfinstitute.emf.org/exhibits/ferraririen.html is only one of many 'soundscape' composers who propose to hear the universe in a drop of sonic time. (There is also a 1971 (?) Broomhilda comic strip with the single caption about 'music' appearing in the environment ... "It's always there, you just have to know how to coax it out.")

Composers and writers have spoken / written about this for a long time, and my experience is that music from a radio can either be a 'musical' experience or an 'everyday' experience. Most of my early life was lived with sound as an aesthetic experience, but there again, I have also not seen a definition or description of 'musical' proposed on this list.

http://cec.concordia.ca/electrobox/sonus02/Feist_Diptych.mp3
Nobody 'na lissen, one crazy ol' birrd.
http://www.sonus.ca/app/ui/more.php?Language=en&MediaID=109

As I recall, in a more general sense, the idea of 'aesthetic perception' as distinct and contrasted to 'functional' perception occupies in about 35-40% of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, which means about 400,000 + words, perhaps not a concise formal proposition, but one well documented across the senses. A madeleine anyone?


Best wishes for the New Year

Kevin



Brian Gygi wrote:

Peter -

... this distinction between "musical" and "everyday" listening was first formally proposed, as far as I know, by Bill Gaver in What Do We Hear in the World (1993).
Best


Brian