Week 14 – on The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures by David Temperly

I have to admit to finding it simultaneously alienating and comforting to read of mathematical mappings of music, (which seems to be the stuff of Temperly’s work – though of course that’s a gross oversimplification to his efforts).  The ambiguity of response is in large part because of the usual classification of music as within ‘the arts,’ which are acknowledged (and in education, certainly funded) very separately from science, technology and mathematics.  Of course, we’re all familiar with math in art (like Leonardo da Vinci’s Virtuvian Man), and even the most oblivious is at least generally aware of a correlation between math and music, but culturally we seem to very firmly distinguish the fine arts from mathematics and technology.  This merge of what I would have otherwise considered distinct subjects—music and mathematics, or music and computer modeling based on math—is the crux of what is both alienating and comforting, as mathematics means quantification, and measurement is intended to make something knowable. To that end, I derive comfort from the work of Temperly in attempting to map how we perceive aspects of music. The same input, math + music, also results in a strong feeling of skepticism and alienation, though, probably for exactly that same reason: having always perceived something mystical or unknowable about music, this dissection through measurement and analysis leads to a fear of too intimate of knowledge of the mystical. Although it’s a sloppy comparison, I feel the same tension in reading of Temperly’s work as in reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, both acknowledging the compulsion to shine light all dark spaces and feeling an instinctive pull away from that action because perhaps some spaces are better left unknown (or uncolonized, whether by Western colonial powers or by mathematics!).  Temperly (2001) himself acknowledges the primacy of focus on cognition when doing research on music cognition, (pp. 4-6), and also acknowledges the limits or difficulties on computer modeling of music (pp. 44-47) – both of which elements provide some reassurance about what remains my humanistic interpretation of music.  While I can understand an impetus to explore music via music cognition, and to attempt to reach conclusions about the structure of music and its relationship to varied human understandings or reactions, I admit to a long-standing bias against this sort of knowledge and application.  Throughout the few chapters I read of Temperly’s work—and its final section—I repeatedly asked myself of the ultimate effect of, or purpose for, this research, and could think of only (1) a want for an increased assumption of knowledge about something, (in this case, how we perceive music as correlated to identified structural elements), (2) perhaps a will to either connect apparently dissimilar musical compositions, or to construct/predict responses to all new musical compositions as based on identified structures and correlating responses. While of course this is interesting, I admit to worry over the final product – in short, I love and react to music on mostly an instinctive, visceral level, so when I hear Skip James’ blues, I feel the life, pain, and sadness that lives behind his music; I’m not at all enthusiastic about the possibility of modeling and deconstructing a song or type of music as a means to make musical production both modular and predictably manipulative of audiences, (any more than it already is, I suppose).

References

Temperly, D. (2001). The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.