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Friday
November 11, 2005

Daily Linz 19 - Friday Miscellany by Lindsay Perigo

This week's topics: Reason/emotion; The Free Radical 69.

Daily Linz has been less than "daily" this week and last, on account, as explained, of my being immersed in the upcoming Free Radical. I can report that this issue will KASS even more than most! Lead article is an interview with the world's first "Political Correctness Eradicator." What a hopelessly confused weasel-worder he shows himself to be! There's an exclusive article by Casey Fahy, The Silence of Ayn Rand's Critics, guaranteed to cause wailing and gnashing of teeth. ...
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Discuss this Article (38 messages)

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 3:33am

I haven't tried them yet but here are some reviews for noise canceling headphones:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000_7-1017728-1.html

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 6:58am

Terrible place you must live in, Linz - here, if such noises, just call the cops - boy does it stop fast!! [and no, no bricks thru the windows yet ;-)] [and no, do not live in fancy neighborhood - indeed, used to be, perhaps still is, called 'suitcase city' for all the transients]

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 9:44am

Linz,

Do you want to know why you cannot convince SOLOists of the evil of the brand of popular music you despise? Simply because it is not evil.

It is simplistic and a great deal of it is mediocre to poor in construction - but performance is usually high level because of recording technology. Not many missed notes or out of tune stuff or poor timbres.

This music is based on tonality (in a very simple way) and on the 2 and 3 rhythmic patterns that the human mind organizes sound percepts with.

I would have to do some digging to find where I read about this, but automatic rhythmic pattern perception is backed up by the findings of controlled experiments carried out in Gestalt psychology. (People were given a series of identical ticks and over time they started perceiving them as groups of two or groups of three, perceiving physical emphasis to the starts of units that did not exist in the tones.)

Also, the melodies are usually extremely simple, and do not require the effort needed to learn a more advanced musical vocabulary. As background music for dancing (on an entertainment level), it could even be seen as life enhancing.

Nobody is forced to buy this stuff and it appeals to many on the billions of dollars industry level. That is a fact that should not be ignored. It appeals because it works in ways that human mind is made.

The real evil music is something like dodecaphonic music. There is no way on earth that the mind can perceive the constant reuse of all the twelve tones. It is not made for comprehension based on the conceptual integration of sound. The nature of sound has been dismissed and the integrative capacity of the human mind for numbers has been incorrectly imposed on the sensations of tone.

That is evil. Things more along those lines are evil because they are anti-mind, thus anti-human.

I do admit that loud volumes of the simplistic and mediocre to poor music is extremely irritating. As it severely interferes with anything else you want to think about when it is played at such volume, maybe a case could be made that the invasion by others on your aural space is evil. But notice that people who don't have a musical vocabulary for understanding opera can't stand to listen to that at loud volumes either.

So invasion of aural space might be evil. The music itself is not.

Also, I get uneasy with the lack of parameters in trying to gage a concept like "evil." Bin Laden to me is evil. Real here-and-now killing type evil. Punk rock is understandable but can be highly irritating. Dodecaphonic music is unintelligible and disgusting. Calling all of them equally "evil" merely waters down the term. It sort of lets Bin Laden off the hook a little.

Michael

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 9:59am

Michael, Robert, Linz,

"The invasion of aural space" is exactly right. And, until private developers are again able to enforce proprietary covenants, two cheers for "quality of life laws," and for police to keep the invasion of our aural space at bay.

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 10:06am

In other words, that music is - in its essence - neo-primitive musie, for all the technicalness of it... regressive in its primal nature...

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 10:46am

I sympathise, Linz, with the lack of a sound barrier. The volumes ARE insane, and I consider mega bass coming from a car trunk an invasion, which they are INTENDED to be (unlike, say, construcion site noise or street traffic, which are loud, but not intentionally so). Rap bass coming from a car is a signal to "keep away, muthafucka!". Same with rock played at blaring levels, it's a teen rebellion to keep the parents out of the room. Sure, you can turn up the volume to hear better, or have a loud concert so everyone can hear, but when done right, it's not ear-splitting and the tones are clear. At a rock concert, the volumes are dangerous (it's said that the volume can hardboil an egg, what would it do to your organs over time?).

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 1:33pm

Dodecaphonic music is unintelligible and disgusting.

12- tone stuff was an academic exercise. It's a lot of work to even know how to distinguish the different composers, even the good ones. It did, however, move the harmonic vocabulary forward some, and even the textural one. But in terms of pallette, most people just don't like it, it doesn't make them feel like anything and it doesn't make you think much after you hear enough of it either. I don't think it's "evil", but that' s because I don't think it was sprung from hateful thinking.

I think Elliot Carter did a few things with tone rows that are halfway listenable. In a way, it interested me because it pretty much makes you just listen for texture. And, it gives food for thought if you are looking at chromaticism as a compositional or improvisational tool (think jazz chromaticism).

But, yeah, it's pretty much like a dry fuck.

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 1:52pm

Rich,

Whenever you hear dodecaphonic music that is "listenable," you will find that there are other elements present that the mind can integrate (rhythm, motive outlines, certain harmonic layouts that repeat, competent timbre mixtures and so forth). So what you respond to is what you can understand, not the mathematical patterns of the tone sequence.

Wanna real wicked son of a bitch at the beginning of the dodecaphonism? Anton Webern. Complete mental anti-integration of sound with incredible mathematical complexity.

The only good thing about his stuff is that it is over very quickly. (And it is very hard to play "correctly," but even so, getting it wrong didn't seem to matter much at a concert I witnessed where an instrument came in at the wrong place. Nobody but me seemed to have noticed.)

Michael

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 1:57pm

"Whenever you hear dodecaphonic music that is "listenable," you will find that there are other elements present that the mind can integrate (rhythm, motive outlines, certain harmonic layouts that repeat, competent timbre mixtures and so forth). So what you respond to is what you can understand, not the mathematical patterns of the tone sequence."

Just like with fantasy writing - it is the reality oriented stuff in it which keeps the reader, and even the fantasy has to be given a reality orientation if to be acceptable to any degree... so - why bother with it in the first place...

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - 11:57pm

From my inaugural speech, Why SOLO, SOLOC 1, 2002:

________________

But there's a problem here. Talk in these terms ["headbanging caterwauling excrement"] & folk get very defensive & upset. First, they think you're attacking them personally & go into typical modern era cry-baby "I'm so offended" mode; second, they think you're arguing that the excrement be banned.

Well, I suppose you are attacking them personally, if you're attacking excrement & they like excrement. You're telling them they like excrement. By extension they might infer that you're saying they are excrement. Well, if the crap fits �

Luckily for them they have a fallback position, which, though they still go through the motions of being so offended, they seize upon gleefully. Ayn Rand herself. Did she not say:

"At present our understanding of music is confined to the gathering of material, i.e., to the level of descriptive observations. Until it is brought to the stage of conceptualisation, we have to treat musical tastes or preferences as a subjective matter -- not in the metaphysical but in the epistemological sense; i.e., not in the sense that these preferences are in fact, causeless & arbitrary, but in the sense that we do not know their cause. No one, therefore, can claim the objective superiority of his choices over the choices of others. Where no objective proof is available, it's every man for himself - & only for himself"?

Did she not say that? Well, yes she did. She also said that she was talking physiologically. She went on to say that there was, nonetheless, a great deal one could observe on the psychological & existential levels. For instance:

"The deadly monotony of primitive music -- the endless repetition of a few notes & of a rhythmic pattern that beats against the brain with the regularity of the ancient torture of water drops falling on a man's skull -- paralyses cognitive processes, obliterates awareness & disintegrates the mind."

And she observed:

"The products of America's anti-rational, anti-cognitive 'Progressive' education, the hippies, are reverting to the music & the drumbeat of the jungle."

Today, I would say the same of the MTV generation. And I have no hesitation in saying that anyone who says he gets an exalted sense-of-life reaction to that stuff is in that instance at least sub-human. I am the first one to ask, "Where is the animality in man?" when it comes to countering Objectivist flights of rationalistic fantasy, but to call this musical maggotry "animalistic" is an insult to animals.

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - 12:28am

Linz, take it over into the Music forum! ;)

Actually, I just started a thread featuring the musical preferences and influences of 4 world leaders. What are the figureheads of politics listening to? How does it affect world politics and societal mores?

Oh, and I still say you need a home gym. ;) Seriously though... you can't be the only one, has no one thought to create an gym environment that caters to a different crowd? (I don't want to say older, because I am not sure if age is the issue...however, I wonder how many older people would go to gyms if the environment was less geared to the tastes of younger people?
Seems like there's a business oppurtunity there. The Tower Records I used to work at is one example; most of the stores in the chain focus on the teen demographic, but because of our location in the business district and City Hall in Philadelphia, we were able to focus on an older crowd (ok, yuppie music and older R&B, jazz and classical) successfully, it was different from the typical record store environment in that older people didn't feel threatened to shop there (and of course, rock has that "don't trust anyone over 30" attitude...). We proved that teens are not the only demographic.

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - 3:58am

80% of all art is garbage in any medium you want to look at. Music just happens to be the hardest to get away from.

We live in the Age of Entertainment. As Neil Postman says, we have Amused Ourselves to Death as a culture with decades of lightning-fast television images. The depth and intensity necessary for Rachmaninoff and Victor Hugo is not encouraged.

Cryin' won't help ya and prayin' won't do ya no good.

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - 5:44am

A lot of Led Zeppelin still rocks, for all of Linz's reasons. He just doesn't know it yet. ;))

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - 4:51pm

Lance: "80% of all art is garbage in any medium you want to look at. Music just happens to be the hardest to get away from."

But how much of that is due to either lack of competency versus limitations in the form?

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - 6:56pm

Damn it Linz-

The appeal of something like "I'll Walk With God"? First, the magnificent quality of the singing, to be sure. But over & above that, as far as the lyrics are concerned, I remember Rand's words to the interviewer just after he had got her to say, "Thank God for America." She said, from memory, "I may not mean literally a god, but I like what that expression means. God bless you. The highest possible."

There goes the neighborhood. Don't you know there are those here who will refuse to understand what Rand was saying. She used the word "benevolent" once or twice in describing the universe and these people want to bestow sainthood upon her in the First Unitarian Evasionists Church of Ephemisms. And now you go and quote her saying "Thank God."!!??

On another note, as usual a great article. ;)

Monday, November 14, 2005 - 2:56am

Linz,

Have you finished Degrees for Everyone yet? (And given it back to Bernard?)

Noting Lanza's biggest fans from the previous page of posts (and James K is no longer here to add his name to the list), I can only say Bob Jones was pretty well on the money with that Lanza-fan observation.

Monday, November 14, 2005 - 3:24am

Lance: "80% of all art is garbage in any medium you want to look at. Music just happens to be the hardest to get away from."

But how much of that is due to either lack of competency versus limitations in the form?

Hey Joe Joe, well it's all lack of competency if we are talking Art with a capital "A". None of the mediums are so limited as to be impossible.

Or do you mean forms specific to music? Like rock music, classical music, hip-hop, and shred metal? If that's what you mean...

I don't believe in those as forms. They are convenient categories that refine the conversation. But they are too rough to have much use. Again, it's lack of competency. Today's artists attempt to re-invent the wheel. And they'll go back to the Stone Age to do it if they have to.

It's a general short-sightedness. They have no awareness of the centuries prior to the year 2000. Certainly nothing before the 60s. They have no awareness of (and no respect for) Aristotle, Plato, Phidias, Dante, Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, Cervantes, Beethoven, Hugo, Nietzsche, Rachmaninoff, Rand, etc. These creative minds were anything but short-sighted. It's laughable for a genuine artist to be unfamiliar with them.

Lack of competency.

Are they immoral? That's a tough call because they're brought up in such a harsh environment. TV's blare, cell phones ring-a-ding, they gotta check email every 5 minutes. The culture doesn't encourage familiarity with humanity's greatest minds. Too many distractions.

Monday, November 14, 2005 - 5:41am

Ever consider the possibility we might be reaching a diminishing returns in consequence?

I'm refering more concretely to this constant head-banging, the continual posturing of 'music' in our ears all the time - overloading the system, so to speak...

or do you see this as a continuity which will only get more pronounced?

(Edited by robert malcom on 11/14, 5:52am)