Subject: Re: On "learned" A/P, lattice / grid, and what it means From: Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 11:18:15 -0400 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>I am not proposing that Mozart's melodies are accidental, or that Ulysses was written based upon Markov chains and information theory. I don't think the "strings of pitches" was attributed to Mozart; more likely, "pitches of strings". Until I was 40, Joyce's Ulysses, when I tried to read the book, seemed to be "a string of words". Now through (what I call) 'unmediated perception', I hear it entirely differently, and most of it makes sense. For me it is now the same for the Berg Lyric Suite, or Stockhausen's Gruppen. My point is partly that (1) I can now organize these sounds I hear, and (2) this may not be the same way in which someone else, or the composer has organized them. Was it not Copernicus who said that "chaos is but unperceived order". In watching a 100-car freight train go by (the strings of gritches from the Rose of Castille, cf Ulysses), I may not be able to perceive the structure that was used to sequence them, but I do not attribute this sequence to accident. My proposition starts to seem to be that the perception (sic) of the order, is related to memory, and that if the memory does not have enough 'experience', the stimulus will be moved from one category to another in order to make sense, or it will not "make sense" (carry meaning); this is after all -- as far I as I have read on this list -- about what it all means. "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves ...” Freud believed this, but Oedipus had learned differently. Kevin On 2009, Sep 3, at 10:53 AM, Eliot Handelman wrote: > Kevin Austin wrote: >> >> My view is that perception (and the organization of perception) is >> uniquely individual. In this way, it may be that I have an >> experience called "melody" of which someone with AP has no concept >> of, in the way I perceive it. > Sure, but the point is that if APers don't hear a melody > relationally, then why should they compose relationally? Is the > proposal that the structures of Mozart's melodies are accidental, > because all he ever heard were strings of pitches? > > > -- eliot