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M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E
A Publication of the
Society for Music Theory
Copyright (c) 1994 Society for Music Theory
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| Volume 0, Number 6 January, 1994 ISSN: 1067-3040 |
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All queries to: mto-editor@husc.harvard.edu
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AUTHOR: Roeder, John
TITLE: response to comments
KEYWORDS: Roeder, semiotics, memory, computer models
REFERENCE: mto.93.0.5.roeder.art
Roeder, John
University of British Columbia
School of Music
6361 Memorial Rd.
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2 CANADA
jroeder@unixg.ubc.ca
Ordering and Logic in Music Signification
[1] David Lewin's comments about my article point out how the
codes we use to represent pitch -- either numbers of letters
-- impose order on the pitches. The impulse to order does
indeed seem to be at least a very deep cultural convention.
It presents some difficulties to children learning about
pitch classes, of course, when they must remember that A
comes "after" G. Even 0 coming after 11 is not immediately
intuitive to younger musicians (born into a culture which, as
Douglas Adams says, thinks digital watches are a pretty good
idea).
[2] However, to a certain extent we learn about pitches as
ordered irrespective of the conventions we use to name it.
For example, a fledging pianist learns about pitch structure
by playing with the *right hand* an *ascending* *white key*
*major scale*. Certainly there are pragmatic reasons for
some of these conventions. Playing white keys requires no
forward displacement, whereas black keys are forward and up
in physical space. (Anyone want to study how physical
motions required by the layout of keyboards correlate with
musical structure?) And most people have better motor
control over their right hand. But why play the "ascending"
scale going up? It's harder than "descending", and it is not
typical of closural musical behavior. (Many music majors I
teach prefer closing their soprano lines with a high 7-to-1
scale-degree succession, rather than low 2-1 or 7-1; I'm sure
this comes from practicing ascending scales; as non music-
majors that have less or no performing experience seem to
prefer low closure.)
[3] It also occurs to me, after reading Lewin's ruminations
about whether we can name things without listing them, that
musical relations, although not intrinsically ordered, can
help induce order on collections of nonmusical sememes. A
famous mnemonic for the kings and queens of England uses
musical (and poetic) properties of meter and timbral
association (end rhyme), among other devices, to induce
various partial orderings among the names.
Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three,
One, Two, Three Neds, Richard Two
Henry Four, Five, Six -- then who?
Edward Four, Five, Dick the Bad,
Harries twain and Ned the Lad,
Mary, Bessie, James the Vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again,
William and Mary, Anna Gloria,
Four Georges, William and Victoria,
Ned Seventh ruled till 1910,
When George the Fifth came in, and then
Ned went when Mrs. Simpson beckoned,
Leaving George and Liz the second.(1)
[excluding Lady Jane Grey, the kings and queens of England,
in chronological order, are William the Conquerer, William
II, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, Richard I, John, Henry III,
Edward I, II, and III, Richard II, Henry IV, V, and VI,
Edward IV and V, Richard III, Henry VII and VIII, Edward VI,
Mary I, Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I and II, James II,
William II and Mary, Anne, George I, II, III and IV, William
IV, Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI
and Elizabeth II.]
So while some of our sign systems impose orderings on music,
music systems are also capable of inducing ordering on other
semantic systems.
==================================
1. Susan Ferraro, *Remembrance of Things Fast*, New York:
Dell Publishing, 1990, p. 17.
==================================
[4] Stephen Smoliar expresses some justifiable skepticism
about semiotic views of music. I understand much of his
trepidation. Semiotic theory, by claiming that anything can
serve as a sign-vehicle for anything else, poses an apparent
challenge to the hegemony of positivist thinking upon which
much science and some music theory is founded. I take
comfort in the view that the *possibility* of a multiplicity
of denotative systems does not imply that they are all
equally valid or useful to a particular musical culture. In
my article I restricted my application of semiotic theory to
exposing meaning or misrepresentation. I do not claim that
Schumann's analysis is more meaningful to us than our own
approaches, only that it has more meaning that we might be
led to suppose by confronting the text that apparently
signifies refers to little musical content.
[5] Smoliar also says: "I find it a bit difficult to wade
through much of the arcane language of the semiotic theorists
when it seems to me as if it could all be articulated so much
easier in LISP. (This is not to say that LISP solves all
problems. Rather, it often helps us to formulate clearer
questions, even when answering those questions turns out to
be very difficult.)" Although I too have used LISP and
Prolog representations extensively to help formulate my own
and others' theories, I find myself disagreeing with Smoliar
that AI representations should be privileged. Symbolic and
logic-based representations have limitations that I have
discussed elsewhere. Briefly: "While [a symbolic logic
representation] of musical structure is based mainly on the
knowledge of event properties, the information in a mere
property list is insufficient. Just to represent all the
types of segments ... (let alone incorporate them into more
abstract structures!) we must also know which event relations
are transitive, which are commutative, and which induce order
(for example, pitch does, timbre doesn't); we must know the
boundary-defining values for various properties; we must know
how segment-defining collective properties of segments relate
to the properties of their events; and we must know of
segment-defining processes, relations, or properties external
to the sonological data at hand. [There are other] specific
weaknesses of a propertied-event representation of atonal
music, in which an event always has a given property and all
properties are equally available for determining a relation .
[The representation runs] counter to our musical intuitions
that registral lines have a different quality of coherence
from that of chords, intuitions partially expressed by the
distinctions we have made between various musical properties
in defining the other types of segment. Similarly, the
strength of segmental associations depends crucially upon the
nature of the event properties from which the collective
property of the segment is derived."(2)
==================================
2. John Roeder, "Issues of Representation in the Analysis of
Atonal Music," in *Proceedings of the First Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence and Music, St. Paul, Minnesota*,
Menlo Park: AAAI, 1988, p. 147. See also John Roeder,
"Logic-Programming Models of Music: A Semiotic Evaluation,"
in *Music and Science*, Seattle: Center for the Creation and
Interdisciplinary Study of Music, University of Washington,
1991, pp. 16-36.
==================================
[6] Smoliar's main point is that since "description is not so
much a matter of the describing agent passing a code to the
receiving agent as it is a matter of the two agents mutually
negotiating towards a point where they have some confidence
that they are both talking about the same thing," that
theories of music analysis should focus on the negotiation.
I agree that the negotiation process is important to
description, but what are the agents negotiating about except
the codes that they will use? We must still be able to
evaluate the agreed-upon codes critically, and Eco's theory
helps us do it.
[7] Some readers may wonder, in light of the current
discussion thread about the nature of the musical work, what
"music" is being modeled in the systems I cite. My article
was vague about the nature of the musical work; referring to
it only as the semantic plane, and to its contents only as
"psychophysical quantities". This perhaps simplistic term
reflects my belief that some of "the essence" of a musical
work is rooted in common way humans -- composers and
listeners -- perceive sound and sound relations. Some
intersubjectivity is genetically programmed. Certainly there
is also a strong cultural component to "the essence of a
work", because what we hear as essential can be altered by
experience and practice (we call it "ear training"). But
this problematizes the notion of an invariant essence that is
more than raw psychoacoustic quantities that "anyone" can
hear. However we understand the essence of the work, I hope
the point of my article is clear that we should be careful in
constructing sign-vehicles to represent it.
[8] Reader's interested in a more modern, and very complex
"literary" analysis should look at Anthony Burgess's
"Stendhalian transcription" of Mozart's K. 550 in
*On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang*, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1991, pp. 93-103. (Feminist scholars may also be interested
in the gender stereotypes in this narrative.)
John Roeder
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END OF MTO ITEM