Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Thank you for joining us today. I'm Scott Schiff hosting the Atlas society, senior fellow Rob <inaudible> on iron Rand and the aesthetics of music. And this one is personal to me. I'm glad to hear your piano playing. I've been into music all my life. I actually sing in a band, so, and I was fascinated about the, uh, small bit Rand wrote about music. So we encourage questions as Rob is offering his thoughts. Feel free to raise your hand. We'll bring you up. I also want to encourage people to sign up for the Atlas society's weekly newsletter, which has some great weekly content. I'll put up a link as we get started. Uh, Rob, thanks for being here. Tell us about iron random, the aesthetics of music.
Speaker 1 00:00:43 All right. So this is one that again, it's like you, it has a lot of personal meaning to me. My, my story is that I, I played piano for about 10 years when I was a kid. And then I gave it up because I went off to college. I knew I wasn't good enough to be a professional. And I went off to college and I had many other things to do when I moved, like, you know, seven times in, in five years, like you do when you're in your early twenties and you don't want to move a piano around. And eventually 20 years later, I got into it because when I first son was born, I decided I didn't want my kids thinking that music comes out of one of these little electronic boxes in your pocket. I want them to know that you can make it.
Speaker 1 00:01:20 So I got back into piano and I've gotten very serious, much more serious about it than I ever was when I was younger. Um, and I'm a big advocate for being an amateur, uh, performer. You know, I, I, a lot of people do what I did. They, they study it when they're kids. And then when you realized you're not good enough to be a pro, you kind of give up on it. I think I'm a great advocate for being an amateur musician. Cause you understand the music so much better when you've actually tried to perform it. But I want to talk today about a little bit about the aesthetics of music. So in, in most should or traditional theories of art, now there's some 20th century aberrations, but emotive traditional theories of art. Uh, the idea of, um, is that art works through imitation. Art is an invitation of life.
Speaker 1 00:02:02 Uh, the usual philosophical term for this is mimesis and it's just the Greek word, meaning invitation or memory. So, you know, uh, a work of art is in some way, copying imitating, referring to a real thing. So talk about, you know, I'll use some examples. Everybody knows like, you know, Michelangelo's David or the statue of Liberty. You know, it's a, it's a statue it's mad at a copper or a fan of the stone, but it is clearly imitating the shape and the pose and the appearance of a human being, or, uh, you know, when in your pocket right now, you may have, um, uh, some, you know, if you still are, so old-fashioned just to carry old printed paper currency, uh, you have portraits of great Americans in there. And if you're lucky, you've got some Benjamins in there, right? And those are, you know, there are two dimensional lions on paper, but they're imitating the shape, the appearance of, uh, of a person and in doing so art is then saying something about, uh, about that particular person and also saying something about, about, uh, human beings as such, but in terms of how it chooses to portray them, how it chooses to represent and imitate life.
Speaker 1 00:03:09 It says something about life now I'm right. Had a more exact formulation of this. So rather than simply imitation, she said, art is a selective recreation of reality. And by selective, she means representing the artist's view of the world. I should use the phrase, the artists metaphysical value judgments, but basically it's your view of the world and your view of man and this place in the world. And, you know, going, representing your view of the world, you then, uh, that influences how you create recreate reality, how you choose to select the elements that you use to make a statue of David or the statue or the statue of Liberty or portrait of Benjamin Franklin or whatever else, you know, which aspects of reality do you choose to put in? What do you leave out? What you emphasize, what you DF size, et cetera. All right. So, but that all rate creates an interesting question when it comes to music, because what is music imitating?
Speaker 1 00:04:02 If mimesis imitation, if selective recreation of reality is what art is doing, how is music doing that? And it's not always very obvious. Now there is, uh, there are some examples that I can take up. Um, there are some examples where you do have something that seems more like straightforward imitation. So one example when we comp the music here, so you can hear it. Um, oops. I looked at my favorite piece of mind and it's called the Lark ascending, uh, by refund Williams. And let me see where the music is. Here we go, and this should be done on a violin, but I'm not good enough on violin to do this. So I'll do it on my piano, but the opening notes of the Lark ascending go like this.
Speaker 1 00:04:59 Now, if you know, the piece is called the Lark ascending, by the way, you can look this up on YouTube. There's a great version with Hillary Han. One of the great violinists of our era, uh, terrific. It was just a virtuoso violin piece. You should have listened to that one, but if you listen to that, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, um, it sounds like a bird call, right? So, you know, this is called the Lark ascending. You know, that he is imitating the sound of a bird call. So there's imitation. There's another way that invitation is also sometimes used in music. And that is by quoting an existing piece of music, not just to get the musical, the purely musical qualities of that music, but to get some association, it has. So a great example of this is, uh, the 1812 overture, right?
Speaker 1 00:05:40 We all know the same 12 overshare. Well, if you're listening to that, you'll know that at some point in there you get a pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, and this represents the, this is the, in the whole piece is about the pulling ins and invasion of Russia in 1812, and the Russians repelling the evasion. And so every time you hear that piece of music, you know, oh, that's Lamar, CA's, that's the French national Anthem that represents the French on the attack and the French coming in innovating. Now it's an acronystic by the way, because Napoleon never used Lamar CA's. It was a revolutionary song. And the last thing that the emperor of France wanted was people thinking about a revolution. Um, so, but it was, it, it was an acronystic, but it was what people associated with France. So Schakowsky put it in there and there's a lot more of that by the way, in the 18, 12 overture, uh, it's filled with that sort of thing.
Speaker 1 00:06:29 Most of them, we don't recognize because we're not, thankfully we're not rushing. Uh, and a lot of them are Russian musical references, like folk songs, things like that, that are supposed to represent the, uh, the brave and courageous Russian people rallying behind, uh, bizarre, uh, you know, things never changed. Um, but you know, if, if, if we were rushing, if we knew that context, you would recognize all these different sort of Easter eggs that are, that are put throughout the, the piece of music where he's quoting another piece of music. Uh, another example I would pick up a VAD is if you know, the Appalachian spring suite by Aaron Copeland, he has a section about three minutes long. We're just these beautiful variations on an old Quaker song, a simple gifts, you know, thought out on
Speaker 1 00:07:15 And this is the old Quaker, uh, song. He's you bringing it up for its musical qualities, but also in the context of that song, he wants to evoke sort of 19th century, uh, the simple virtues of 19th century, agrarian America. Um, but that sort of adaptation kind of happens, but it happens in a lot of pieces and there's many different examples of it, but it's clearly also something going on that is more purely and strictly musical. Uh, and, uh, it's more about the tones and the relations of, uh, the pitches of the music and the relations between the pitches. It is more, there's some of these, the fact that, you know, when I play on the piano, if I play something like this, if I play an interval like that, you assess a relationship or this, and you recognize that that's different from something like, say this, this by the way is, uh, this interval
Speaker 1 00:08:12 Is known as the devil's tone. Uh, the devil's interval, excuse me, it's a tri tone or the devil's interval. It was given that name in the middle ages. And I thought, this is the most dissonant combination of notes that could find it sounded so hellish and harsh and unpleasant that it was called the devil's interval. And it was actually banned from music for a while during the middle ages. So it was clear that something is happening, not in imitating the sound of the bird or imitating, grabbing a piece of another song and putting it in. But there's something that's happening. That's purely coming from the relationship between the tones and Iran wrote a little bit about, and Ryan wrote some tantalizing hints about this, and didn't go in a lot of details. So what I want to do is talk a little about more of the details of that from my own understanding that I've gained to this from my research.
Speaker 1 00:09:02 And Ren talked a little bit about, uh, the, the nicest century German scientist Helmholtz at his work on the mathematics of music is she gets some vague indications. And I'm going to go into that a little more in depth as to how it is that the mathematics of music there's relation mathematical relationships between these tones, how that conveys a message and how that works through a process of mimesis or imitation. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do as an illustration. I'm going to do a very short piece here. It's um, can you hear me? So, yeah. Okay, good. I got cut off last time. I don't want to just play this piece. I'm going to be a little, I want to make sure I maintain my connection here. Okay. It's a short piece of Chopin's prelude in E minor, and it's got its bite by minute long or run through it. And then I do a little analysis of it, where we talk about what you get out of the relation to the pitches, that oats. So here it goes.
Speaker 0 00:11:47 Very nice. I didn't know you could play or sing that well,
Speaker 1 00:11:50 Well, I've, I guess I've been at it for about what my, my, I started with. My youngest son was born and he's 14 now. So I've been at this for about 14 years, giving it as much time as I can afford. Um, all right. So let's talk about this piece though. This is a nice short piece. It's one of Showpad has like three levels of pieces. There's one that anybody with basic piano skills can play, which is this, you know, a lot of the preludes like this one are in there, there are some that are difficult, but if you really apply yourself, you can do it. And I, I, that's where my bread and butter is. I do a lot of the Nocturnes things like that are like that. And then there's the stuff like some of the, most of the etudes where it's like, they should only be attempted by a trained professional with proper medical supervision. Uh, and I dab look, those, but don't get very far. Um, but, uh, this, this is a nice short piece. That it's a great illustration though, because it has a very simple structure musically. So if we ask what's going on in this piece, musically, so we have to take out, there's a lot of little things that are sort of ornamental. You know, the,
Speaker 1 00:12:49 These little subtle sort of sighing sounds that are supposed to be there. Those are kind of incidental to the main structure. The main structure is It's a series of dos. You know, we have the, So we have this series of notes that are going down. The basic structure is Now. Here's what I'm going to ask people. I want to have you, cause I've had you here in person. I would ask you to come along with me here. I'm going to have you humming along at home because I assume you're all muted. But if I do this suggested succession of notes, Those four notes, what's the fifth note,
Speaker 2 00:13:34 Uh,
Speaker 1 00:13:36 Everybody has at home. You're probably going to get, And that's in fact where this piece ends, there it goes.
Speaker 1 00:13:45 And then at the very last line of the, of the sheet music, we finally get down to that, that note, that note that we're heading down towards. Now, if you were humming at home, you probably went there without my having to prompt you. You knew where you were going to go. Why did you know that? Well, there's a couple of reasons, you know, it's a natural progression, but it, it's not, you know, absolutely certain that distance would be the next note there you could do a little bit, one way or the other. The main reason is because this is called the prelude in the minor, and you may not know what it means to have a prelude B and a minor you musicians have to know. The composer has to know is you may not know, but your ear can detect it and it can detect it for the very third from the action. The third note of this piece, this piece starts like this
Speaker 1 00:14:29 And this here, this is an easy, minor chord that's telling your ear. This piece is an easy minor, and your ear recognizes that. And so it knows that if I'm starting at this note and going to end somewhere, I'm going to end on the cause. That's the base note of an even minor chord. And this goes into this, one of the fundamental ideas of Western music, which is tonality. And it's the idea when we talk about there being a key of E what we're really saying is there is this tonic note as we call it, that is the base note for the whole chord and everything else is built around that. So every other note that you play is sort of experienced as being in relation to, and compared to that bass note. So, you know, and we call it, build the whole, uh, There'll be whole scale built, starting with Ian going up, uh, there'll be cords that are based on that. That's a major chord and yours you hearing on this piece. So we have this ability or our ear to figure out that here's this bass note, this tonic note and everything else in the piece is built around that. So we know that we'll go,
Speaker 1 00:15:46 We're trying to get down to that base note now, uh, uh, what does this effect, what effect emotionally does this give us when we're trying to, we're sort of sadly and slowly with these sort of sighing motions,
Speaker 1 00:16:01 We're going sadly and slowly down a minor progression to a home base. So as we go away from the home base and down to the home base where we're going to feel at rest. So there's a sense of we're, we're sad and we're slowly making our way down this progression and trying to get to the home base, trying to get to rest, trying to get to a state of being, you know, down at the tonic note where we feel like we're finally where we belong. Well, this is typically interpreted. This piece is typically interpreted as being a piece of a grief. It's about morning, not morning. Isn't at the beginning of the day, but morning, M O U R N as in you're you're you're, you've lost someone you love. Then you're, you're trying to go through the process of grief. And that's why we have the sad, slow going down to hit home base at home basis. You know, it's, it's being at rest, but not in a pleasant way to say it, but in the sense of having enclosure, right? That's what you're trying to do when you're, when you're grieving, you're trying to reach a sense of closure, a sense that it's all right, that you've processed the grief and accepted it. And the interesting thing this piece does is it doesn't let you get there though, is the very, very last note of the whole piece. So, you know, you go through this,
Speaker 1 00:17:13 We have a couple of spots where we go almost all the way down. And, but then we say, oh, no, we're not going to be there. We're going to go.
Speaker 1 00:17:22 I'm going to go back when I start up again at the top. Now, why would you do that? Well, when you're grieving, right? You don't want to get through the process of grieving too quickly, right? If it's just like, oh, I'm grieving. So I'm done. I'm over it. I've got closure. I'm ready to move on. You know, how little was somebody need to you? If, if, if, if it were that easy. So somebody extent you rebel at the process of coming to closure or coming to a sense of arrest or acceptance about grieving the loss of something, someone or something important to you. So you go, Oh, I got a rebelling against that. I'm going to go start up a day on at the beginning again. And then you go through the same process. You know, this piece goes through the same process again, then it has an even bigger, louder, more, um, uh, sort of we're angry rebellion against coming to closure, but then eventually it comes down And we're down to E but we're not at closure yet because when we get to the E we get to it with this cord, The problem is this cord. You can't see the music, but this cord is these G it's a, sorry, it's a C major chord. It's not an easy minor chord. And so you get this last part of the piece. You go,
Speaker 1 00:18:48 And you get all these different chords, a competing that, that E you're supposed to be at home-based, but you have all these different courts, but none of them is an email. Either mine or court, all of them are completely different courts. You know, whether this board and they're not right. And then you go through you pause and you go through three more, Oops, sorry. I, my notes off their Wrong board. And then finally the last part of the whole piece,
Speaker 1 00:19:15 Finally, the right cord. Finally, we're at home and we're at rest happy, cause it's a process of mourning or grief, but finally we have achieved that, that closure and we've accepted the grief, right? So that's the genius of this piece. The genius of Chopin is you tasted this process where you're going, you're, you're, you're doing the summer progression. You're seeking that, that E that tonic note, that bass note to try to leave, get a sense of closure. He brings you there, but it gives you the wrong chord and the wrong chord or the wrong port in the wrong chord. And then finally, the very last note of the piece that gives you the right chord. And you can feel like, oh, I'm finally there. I'm finally at home. And that's the process of briefing that you're going through Now That I think that's, what's going on with this piece. This is such that it's standard fairly well accepted interpretation. But the question we have to go over, I'm going to do a little bit more on this. Is that why would,
Speaker 1 00:20:14 Why would it have that effect? Why would we have this sense of a bass note and everything being built around the bass note? What's the underlying, uh, thing that's going on here. Now, the basis of that goes all the way back in the history of mathematics, it goes back to <inaudible> in the, the Greek Greek into Greek mathematician in the sixth century, BC who first identified some of this, uh, some of the mathematics of music and, uh, Humboldt that machine ran references Helmholtz comes much later and identifies it in more modern scientific terms, which I'll be referring to here and there, but what, uh, the rest, or at least the school, the Pythagorean school, nobody really knows who, you know, if he personally did it or somebody else did it, but what reamer came out of the Peggy in school was a series of experiments with, with what's called a monocoque word. And a mano court is just a one string guitar. And the idea is you take that string and you like, like, you do want a guitar holding it against the frets of the guitar. You hold it down at different lengths. And you see what happens to the tone and what they found is if you hold it down, halfway in the middle, and it's the same, let's say you pluck the one string when it's just completely open and untouched. And it sounds like this.
Speaker 1 00:21:23 Then if you hold it down exactly in the middle, so it's divided perfectly in half. You get this.
Speaker 1 00:21:34 Yeah. That we've all recognized as an octave. Right? And so what they discovered is, and, and, you know, when you think about Pythagoras, this is a guy, he was the great Greek mathematician. And more than that, he had this like cult of numbers. They actually had this kind of pre Playtonic idea that everything in the world was actually made of numbers. So you can see how they flipped out over this. You know, these are the most, the two most continent notes you can get on the, uh, in music. They, they they're. So they, they go so well together that we actually think of them as the same note, just higher, right? So this is a C and this is a C it's the same note, just higher. So these are the absolute, most consonant notes that you can get. And it's a perfect two to one ratio. So if there's, oh my God, it's a number. What you're hearing here is a number it's a two to one ratio. So they went farther. They said, well, let's take this, uh, Monarch word. Let's divide it in three parts and less go two thirds of the way over. And what interval do we get then? Well, we get a three to two ratio, which sounds like this.
Speaker 1 00:22:36 This is known today as the dominant note. So this is a tonic and this is dominant, and these are the next most consonant, uh, interval. And it's also known as the fifth. Um, and so then we keep going to say, well, what about a free to four, a four to three ratio? Well, there you get, what's called the subdominant or the fourth, which is this. And by the way, this one was, was very popular in the middle ages. And it's used to this day, people will use it like writing soundtracks. You put a lot of fourths in there. The music sounds more believable. You know, if you have a historical film, you put that in the music suddenly sounds more medieval. And then you go to a five to four ratio and you get this, Which is the third. And then later on in the Renaissance, as they were experiments around of all this, they said, well, what if we wanted to make a collection of those that went really well together? So we take the tonic, we have the octave, we have the dominant, this sounds great. We throw in the, the, uh, the fourth that doesn't get along so well with the dominant. But how about we go to the next one, the five to four ratio. We have this,
Speaker 1 00:23:51 Which is called the major triad. It's the, we, you know, we think of a major chord. This is what we think of As, so they came up with a whole system of harmony built around a base note and a series of notes in the court that go with it. And there are variations in the chords and the biggest variation that came up with this. I said, well, what if we take the next one, a six to five ratio? And we get this, Which you recognize as a minor chord or a minor triad, and what that six to five does, is it introduces a little hint of dissonance. And what does that? It's not enough to be really, you know, jarring. It's not this right. It's that really jarring. It's just a little dissonance that helps you know, that. And the way we usually think about it is the major chord sounds happy because everything's continent. We're all one big happy family of notes. But if we throw in this one, There's a little bit of something, a little it's still, it's not totally descended, pushed a little hint of dissonance as enough to convey sadness. So we think this is one big happy family. This is just a little sad. Now. It's not just sad. There's all sorts of range of things. Uh, when I was testing this out, playing it, I played a Chapin, knocked her in that goes like this.
Speaker 1 00:25:16 Now that is a B flat minor doctrine and B flat minor. It's a minor key. It doesn't really sound sad. It's more, it sounds mysterious where similarly I could play.
Speaker 1 00:25:34 So that's the opening bars of the Moonlight of the first movement to the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. So, you know, it's not so much sad as it is, has a sense of mystery because there's something that's unresolved. Uh, and so you could see that you, these, all these, these, the mathematics determines all these relationships determines this idea of there being a whole note and then a series of other notes and how they relate to it. So if we go back to this Chopin prelude, I was playing few that the basic thing is the basic progression is, sorry. Well, this is the D you're going from the dominant, and you're going down the scale, the tonic. So it's, it's really determined by it's the mathematics of these relationships that determine the emotional effect that you're getting out of this music, uh,
Speaker 0 00:26:29 Um, for remembering helpful. It's tied it more to frequencies.
Speaker 1 00:26:33 Well, yeah, so, uh, uh, oh, you put a perfect response of this in terms of ratios and where he's dividing up this motto cord, cause that's the technology he had, how it would help most identified is that when you have a string, that's, you know, when you divide the string in half, half the string vibrates at exactly twice the frequency of the full string, and generally speaking, the shorter, the string, the higher, the frequency at which it vibrates when you pluck it. And so his eye, you know, and so he's able, if you, if you represent that as a wave form, right, if you have a wave of, you know, 440 vibrations per second, and then you have one of 880 vibrations per second, what you'll see is that those waves line up perfectly, that, you know, for every two waves and heterogeneity at the active, you know, here's what a is supposed to be a, if this is four 40, and this is eight 80 for every two vibrations here, there's one vibration here, they line up so perfectly, and that's what your ears detecting.
Speaker 1 00:27:35 Now, the interesting thing that's fascinating to me is that this, the mathematical relationships that we are reacting to in music are ones we're not conscious of. You know, you're not conscious of this being a prelude and a minor necessarily when you hear it, you're not, you know, you're not hearing this, oh, of course that's the minor you're, you're experiencing that. Uh, it's, it's all this relationship. All you have multiple relationships are analyzed and resolved and compare to one another automatically in our brains from the mechanical functions of the ear and from the, you know, the, the way that the, uh, the way that we've wired our, uh, auditory centers in the brain to be able to, to re respond to sounds. And we have just tremendously sophisticated ability to understand sound. You can understand, know billions of years of evolution, uh, being able to determine sounds and resolve the pitches of sounds and figure out what sorts of things make.
Speaker 1 00:28:27 What kinds of sounds it means you'll be able to escape predators. It means you're going to be able to, to identify and hunt down prey. So you can see that we have this, you know, billions of years of evolution gave us this incredibly fine ability to analyze and resolve sounds and tell the different scene different pitches. Um, and I've actually heard her argue that there's actually no such thing as being tone deaf, that hardly anybody is actually tone deaf because you know, the, the things, the abilities that you use to determine the differences in different notes are the abilities that you use to determine, you know, what Scott's voice versus Jag's voice, right? Your ability to determine one person's voice from another. It depends on exactly the same, all the different things of analyzing the pitches of notes, uh, and analyzing the wave forms that you automatically in your brain that you would use and understanding music.
Speaker 1 00:29:22 So the experience, the music, it comes to the fact that our, our minds, our perceptual mechanism of our minds is automatically performing this analysis and making these comparisons and, um, trying to resolve the, uh, relationships between these, these pitches is doing that all automatically. And the experience of music as a, how that resolution happens. You know, if it's, if we delay it, if we keep, and if we draw it out, like we do in this Chopin prelude that I displayed, um, then it has a certain effect. If it's a minor going to, uh, uh, uh, if it's a dominant, resolving to a tonic, a minor resolving to a major, those are all things that adds to the emotional experience of the music. And they're based on these mathematical relationships. So the question we started out with though is what is this imitating? Well, my view, and I ran hints at this a couple of spots, but I want to spell out a little bit more.
Speaker 1 00:30:13 I think what music is doing is it's using one mental state to, uh, imitate another mental state. It's using the mental state. It's using a perceptual, oh, sorry, one mental activity, I should say, excuse me, one mental activity to imitate. Another mental activity is taking the mental activity. That's happens automatically on the perceptual level and using it to imitate the same sort of, um, mental process that would happen consciously on the conceptual level. So if you're trying to figure out a problem, conceptually, uh, you would have the same experience of starting with something that's unresolved and unknown, something mysterious or dissonant or contradictory. And you would go through the process of resolving it into something that is not contradictory, something that is understood and orderly and harmonious and, and mentally, uh, conceptually harmonious that experience on the conceptual level is being imitated by the experience on the perceptual level of having something that is dissonant, that resolves into a, uh, into something that's that's that's consonant or having something that's away from the main own resolve into something that finally reaches the base tonic note.
Speaker 1 00:31:34 So my view here is that what you have is illustrated in this piece is you have the perceptual process, mental process of resolving the relationships between pitches and music being used to imitate and to, uh, call to our mind, to evoke a conceptual intellectual or emotional state. Uh, and that is the way in which, uh, art imitating life in music. Uh, so we go from, you know, that's why, you know, major versus minor have these emotional associations, why going from tension to resolution from going away from the tonic back to the tonic, why it has this, uh, spiritual and emotional overtones is that we are imitating the conceptual, uh, uh, processes. We would go through to resolve contradictions or to come to a state of, of mental peace and understanding, right? So that's the basic approach I want to take, and then I've gone probably longer than I intended. So let's go open it for questions.
Speaker 0 00:32:41 Yeah. We do want to invite anyone up with questions that has them a great time for my dogs to start acting up, but I just want to touch on a few things. Um, you know, one is, uh, you know, she talked about how, uh, music hits us all at once, unlike the other arts where we experienced it directly.
Speaker 1 00:33:01 Yeah. It has to, I think that because it has that imitative function of using one mental process to imitate another, and actually it doesn't just imitate the other mental price process. It actually sort of calls it into being, I think that that music has this huge ability to like reach straight into your brain and do something to your brain. It's sort of like, you know, they talk about how, um, I'm not a great expert on the science of perception, but one of the things that I've read about is that when you remember something, uh, when you remember seeing something, you remember somebody's face, uh, that the, uh, same neurons that, uh, fired when you originally perceived, uh, that person's face the same neurons will fire, uh, will fire up again, that you're actually like re perceiving it in a way when you, when you remember it, you are like, refiring up the same neurons that fired when you were perceiving it. So you were going through again, you're recapitulating the experience of perceiving it. And I think music works in a similar way by giving you this sort of, uh, mental process of, of experiencing, you know, dissonance versus, uh, versus continence. It is actually inducing the parallel, uh, the experience of the parallel of the mental state that is imitating.
Speaker 0 00:34:23 Yeah. I, I think that's true, you know, I, I can't help, but think there were these memories, Devante, Marilu, Henner was one where they tied historical events to like things happening in their life. Music does that to some extent, to a broader range of people. And that that's part of what's happening, you know, where we know where we were when we experienced that.
Speaker 1 00:34:46 Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, yeah, that's also, I do think also music because of that, it has this weird thing that, you know, there's, I, I'm a big class music fan. There are, so there's the popular music that I also enjoy, but I always have to be careful that with popular music, especially there are some certain stuff, especially from the early eighties that, you know, I know that, like, I can't recommend this as necessarily an objective thing that other people are going to like it, because part of the reason I like it is because it has an association, right. It recalls a certain time and place of my life. And so, you know, it's not that, um, that particular musical group was, was great and their music was deathless. It's may be just more that, uh, I have positive associations with what was going on in my life when I was listening to it.
Speaker 0 00:35:32 Sure.
Speaker 1 00:35:35 I'll plead the fifth as to which musical groups they are.
Speaker 0 00:35:39 I still like a lot of popular music, but, uh, we'll get into that in a moment.
Speaker 1 00:35:44 I I'll go to bat for Hugh Lewis and the news as objectively. Good. But some of the others, not so much,
Speaker 0 00:35:49 That's pretty good. I'm a Beatles fan. I also like Billy Joel's, so,
Speaker 1 00:35:53 Yup. Yup. See, I, I, the Beatles people, I always like I have problems with, but like usually the digitals people are people who are like five to 10 years older than me. Maybe people come to a different circumstances at different ages. But my, my general perception is that if you come with a hardcore Beatles fan, this is somebody who was around in the seventies, what was like a teenager in the seventies, which is
Speaker 0 00:36:21 No, I, I think I may have just skipped a, you know, I'm more, I'm 51, so
Speaker 1 00:36:30 My age, but, um, uh, yeah, so it just depends on how you came across it and in what context, and yeah, it has, uh, how it affects you.
Speaker 0 00:36:39 That's true. Lawrence, thank you for joining us. You have a question for Rob.
Speaker 7 00:36:44 Yes, I do. I love low. Thanks for doing this, Rob, a very interesting sort of discussing of notes and the reactions that the mind sort of has in response to that. And I'd be curious to hear your take. So, you know, European music, we have the 12 different notes, so to speak, but then you have the sort of, when you go further eastward sort of like in middle east or into Asia proper, you have those, uh, semitones like, so they have 24, which elicit pretty different noises or sounds, and sort of elicit a different response. And I'm curious if that's indicative of a cultural development or if there's something else going on with sort of this discovery and adoption of tone.
Speaker 1 00:37:27 Yeah. So it's interesting that there is a certain degree of universality in musical reactions. Like one thing that I've, uh, one of the big mysteries, actually, I don't have a good answer to this, but why is it that we see, they said that this note is higher than this note, why higher? Right. So, you know, we know physics is that this is more frequent vibrations and this is less frequent vibrations. And we might say, might associate it with, uh, you know, there's a smaller, thinner wire in the piano, the speaking this note and a, uh, longer and thicker wire, this making this note. So we might associate with bigger and smaller or longer and shorter, but why up and down, why do we perceive this progression from that Chopin etude shape on prelude is going, why would perceive that as going down rather than up, it's a great mystery and I don't have a good answer to it, but the thing about it is it actually seems to be universal.
Speaker 1 00:38:24 I've never heard any report of some of some, you know, obviously your tribe in the Andes who thinks that this is going up, right? So there are some things that are universal, but there are also some things that are cultural. And, um, I recommended a book written by an old friend of mine. Um, uh, Matt Johnson, Emissary Corey Johnson, did a book called dancing with the muses where he talks about some of the history of this and the ancient Greeks had their, their original, uh, scales and things like that. As best we can reconstruct them. We're somewhat, we're very different from what we have in modern Europe, but he also taught, he also goes into great detail about some Indian classical music where a lot of the things that we have in Western music have their own corresponding aspects in Indian classical music, um, with, you know, with, with cultural changes, but they have some parallel to them.
Speaker 1 00:39:10 Uh, so there is a cultural aspect to it. But one thing I think people underrate is that Western classical music is not just, this is my case for Western classical music. Is that the argument that Western classical music is not traditional because it actually emerged from a long series of experimentation. And a lot of the stuff, you know, with a musical notation, a lot of the talk about tonicity and the intervals that we use, most of the concepts that we have in classical music when Western classical music come out of the age of enlightenment and this just, you know, they come out of the 16 hundreds of the 17 hundreds and this great, tremendous period of, of musical experimentation and scholarship and scientific discovery, uh, that happened in the, in the Renaissance and enlightenment. So these are like, you know, some of these things that don't have parallels and other types of music are actually there, they're in there, they're sort of like they're new progress, they're new inventions, they're new musical relationships that were discovered that went beyond what anybody had discovered before. So I'm a great partisan for the fact that this is, this is not just a, a, we have different cultural preferences. It's also the fact that these are the products of science and experimentation and, um, and have a tremendous growth and discovery of knowledge, obviously.
Speaker 7 00:40:34 Good. Very interesting. Thank you for that. It's funny, you mentioned Zachary Johnson because he actually taught me music for a few years, so,
Speaker 1 00:40:41 Ah, okay. Yeah. I know him from a long way back. I, I was able to play one of his pieces for awhile. I don't, I'm not in practice on it.
Speaker 0 00:40:48 Even in that short run, I heard a little bit of godfather to the immigration theme. This is more the, uh, well, I won't have it right now, but, uh, John, thank you for joining us. Do you have a question for Rob John? I don't know if you can hit your mute.
Speaker 4 00:41:15 John's new an old friend of the Atlas society, John Lang. So John, you just need to, uh, unmute yourself.
Speaker 1 00:41:27 So the lower right on the app for me, at least
Speaker 0 00:41:30 That's right. I can unmute him, but I'm to do so to someone that may not be ready.
Speaker 4 00:41:37 Why don't you try to do that?
Speaker 0 00:41:38 Okay. Let's see. I thought I could do it. I don't appear to be able to do it, but, uh,
Speaker 4 00:41:52 Yeah. So while John, while you're figuring that out, why don't we go on to our
Speaker 0 00:41:56 Great Allen?
Speaker 8 00:41:58 Yeah. Hi, thanks. Thanks for that, Rob. That was a rather concise and well put way of describing, uh, the mathematics behind it, where you going to talk about equal temperament because what you alluded to it, and maybe I can lead you into it. But before, um, there were in LA and Lawrence, you were talking about the other tuning systems in Western music. There were different tuning systems such as just tuning or mean tuning and the problem, and this relates back to Pythagoras. The problem is, is when you complete, you keep going up by fifths like, like PI and figuring the, um, in mathematics, the circle, you don't end up exactly back, um, where you want to go in terms of tuning. So equal temperament was the kind of compromise.
Speaker 1 00:43:10 Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 8 00:43:11 Well, I was just going to point out that, uh, you know, in terms of Western music, that tuning system is used throughout the world. Yeah. That, that even like Lawrence was saying in middle Eastern music, you still find it at this day and age, they're now using equal temperament. You know, even I even looked up, there's a Mongolian band called hu H U and they're doing the throat singing, but they're still using Western, you know, equal temperament. So if you could talk about that as well.
Speaker 1 00:43:54 Yeah. Strangely enough, I'm actually a fan of throat singing. It's this, the weirdest kind of style of music, but it's, it's, I'm fascinated by it. Um, so the, um, yeah, getting equal temperament, just getting into the weeds a little bit. So I wasn't going to get to that. But the basic idea is that you have the fat greens figured out that you could actually all, you know, all the white
Speaker 0 00:44:10 Notes on the keyboard.
Speaker 1 00:44:13 Was it? Oh,
Speaker 0 00:44:15 That's all right, Joe. I just found my way. Okay, go ahead. I've interrupted.
Speaker 1 00:44:22 Yeah. I'll say something for about three minutes. I'd go to John. Um, so all the white notes of the keyboard, Those were all developed, uh, very early on by the Renaissance. And they could all be developed by the peg, this Pythagorean method where you start at, if you start at a, all the way down here and you go up by fifth,
Speaker 1 00:44:44 You generate all the different notes. You go from a, and you, if you go up a perfect fifth, that's an E and you'd go put on a perfect fifth. That's a B, and you keep going and you, you can generate all the notes, uh, all the white notes on the scale. And then they discovered that he'd gone beyond that. You generate these other half intervals, which turn out to be all the black notes on the keyboard. So you can basically generate the entire, all the notes of the keyboard. All of the notes in the musical scale are part of what's called the circle of fifths. You should keep going up by perfect fists. They will get to all of them, but this is what Alan was referring to. This is a win for the Aristotelians over the place of the planus here, because what you find out is that reality is not perfectly mathematical, but like the pathetic Rian thought that if you actually go through that whole cycle and you get back to the end and you get back to an a, you're just a little bit off the tuning doesn't quite work out.
Speaker 1 00:45:32 So they had to come up in the Renaissance. They came up with the system of tuning where you, you adjust the tuning of all the keys just a little bit, so that it'll all work out. Uh, so you just fudge it a little bit by a couple of, you know, a couple of, uh, of a couple of, uh, vibrations of frequency off a little bit here and there. And the ear doesn't really notice the difference at all. Sounds good to you, but you ended up everything works out in the end. So it's a win for the, it's a win for the year. Sealients over the Platonists because it shows that it's actually not just the pure mathematics, the ear is the reality is a little bit messier and it's like, it's like pie, you know, you can't, you'll never quite get a perfect ratio that represents pie, but it's okay. Cause reality is messy. And so we have to stick to reality rather than sticking to the perfection of our mathematical models. Uh, we have to be able to adjust our mathematical models where reality doesn't quite match up when they don't quite match up to reality. All right. So, John,
Speaker 9 00:46:29 Um, thank you. I'm sorry. Anyway, I was really falling on Lawrence's comment or relates to what I think of, and one of my pet projects is sociobiology and the philosophies of Liberty as an natural law or, um, biologically originated. So, um, I, I agree Robert that, um, uh, there's this connection, there's a, there's a hardwired connection between, um, the aesthetics of music or art generally and, um, biology. And, um, there's also a cultural crossover that is in terms of epigenetics, for example, um, lactose intolerance is a, a change of the genetics that resulted from a change in culture that is we began dairying using milk from mammals, and that allowed a certain percentage of the population to reverse evolve, to be able to digest the lactose in mammal's milk, uh, which generally speaking, most of the population loses the ability to digest lactose at about the age of weaning that is built into our biological clock. But some percentage of us were able to reverse evolve and enjoy the extra caloric value of the lactose in the milk of cows and sheep and horses. And that was a, an example of how culture affected our biology similarly, um, uh, sickle cell anemia is a,
Speaker 9 00:48:26 An evolutionary step that humanity took in order to deal with the malaria that is associated with agriculture. When you start agriculture and you begin digging irrigation ditches, you create a perfect habitat for mosquitoes. There's no fish in there to eat their eggs or to eat the mosquitoes when they land near the water. So, right. And so music and, um, uh, biology that as I think that there's probably in our history, a continuous circular loop of this type of thing going on, which explains the variances, or might explain the variance that was referred to about the difference between, uh, Occidental music and Oriental music that is, there may be some slight genetic differences that, um, then the evolution of the music has an interplay with. And, uh, and so on. So that's, that's the end of my comment. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:49:31 Y Y think you aren't really beyond this. Something is, I think we developed this tremendous, uh, we developed a tremendous ability to perceive and to, to, to, to make fine discriminations in our hearing for evolutionary purposes, you know, to avoid getting eaten by a tiger essentially. Uh, but on the other hand, at some point, you know, the natural ability that, that the animals would have that, that the lower animals would have to hear these very makes these very fine discriminations of solids. I mean, my, my, you know, my dog has excellent hearing, uh, and can, and can make a finer discrimination so I can, but they, the ability to make pure tones and to turn that into and to make music is not something that you can say we just got from the animals, is something we developed and, and started on our own. And we started it a long time ago, I think, uh, uh, in maths, in Matt Johnson's book, he talks about some early, uh, um, pollutes that have been discovered that are from like, you know, 30,000 years ago or five, or it's at least 7,000 years ago.
Speaker 1 00:50:36 It's a long, long time ago, thousands and thousands of years ago, very early humans were doing this and they were doing it by the way. They've been able to reconstruct these few flutes. They were doing it with roughly the, some of the same intervals and same, uh, pentatonic scales that we still use today. Um, but so clearly we, we evolved with aid ability with this ability to hear, and this ability to resolve and analyze sounds. But I also have to wonder to what extent our ability to make pure sounds and make instruments and, and, and to sing and to, to make music is something that sort of had this genetic, uh, this, this evolutionary aspect to it where, you know, it's like, like I like being able to digest, uh, milk products that once people started using music, the spiritual and intellectual values, that value survival value that came from being able to, uh, be a musical species.
Speaker 1 00:51:33 And the, the mental development that that would have helped to spur may have, then increased our ability to be able to hear and distinguish these tones and to, and to make musical differentiations. Now as to the epigenetics of, maybe it might explain orient, Occidental music versus, uh, other kinds of music. I'm more skeptical of that because, you know, I have kids in violin lessons, and if you have kids in violin lessons in America today, you will find that about half of the other students are of Chinese or Indian extraction that they're, you know, they're the parents of immigrants, because this is a typical, it's dry. The immigrants has strivers kind of thing. What they do is they, you know, you go, you want your kids to rise up the ladder. You want them to become cultured. You send them to piano lessons or, or string lessons.
Speaker 1 00:52:21 Um, so, and, and, you know, some of the great musicians, some of the great artists and great musicians are from every continent, uh, on the earth. So I think there is a, there is a greater universality to this than I think people in this day and age, there's a certain, uh, uh, you know, where everybody's supposed to have their cultural heritage is supposed to be tie in with race or, or, uh, or you, or, or, you know, what content you're from this, there's a tendency to overemphasize the differences. I think there's a lot more universality, uh, to it than, uh, than, than we sometimes acknowledge. Uh, so, and, and that too, also, I was mentioning the Lark ascending earlier. And the interesting thing about the Lark ascending is it begins. And I'm trying to see if I can find that music again, I, I'm not gonna be able to do it in time, but it begins with the figures of court from the orchestra, uh, that are in a cetera, Penn attritional pentatonic scale.
Speaker 1 00:53:18 And then should think if you look at it, some people say, this sounds, sounds like a Japanese music. It sounds like Japanese music, because it uses a very similar scale, but that same pentatonic scale is also something that's from English folk music. So it's this thing where there's a pentatonic scale that has this sort of old fashioned sort of archaic quality to it. It has a folk music quality to it, but it's something that's shared by Japanese folk music and English folk music. So it shows there's a lot of universality to this. And a lot of, a lot of things that, you know, from different ends of the world that all ended up being, uh, variations on the same thing.
Speaker 0 00:53:54 Do you think the universe that salady, uh, applies more to like the notes and the scale of the notes, or can it apply, you know, something with iron Rand, it was like she almost half expected everyone to like the same music,
Speaker 1 00:54:10 You know,
Speaker 0 00:54:11 As it is some music objectively better than others.
Speaker 1 00:54:14 Well, I, to think you can say some music as objectively, better than others, but you can have, you can talk about the complexity of it and, uh, um, the degree of mental activity. It, it demands from its, um, uh, uh, from, uh, from his hearer, from a solicitor. I, by the way, all of this is I'm planning, I'm sort of doing preliminary explorations and I'm planning to actually do a little podcast on the side, on classical music where I'll play some of these pieces and talk about them and analyze them. So this is a preview of that. Um, but one of the things I wanted to talk about in that was, uh, the differences in popular music and classical music and the big thing, and the differences in popular music and classical music is in popular music. What you tend to get is you get a melodic line, oftentimes it lasts like 15, 20 seconds.
Speaker 1 00:55:02 And then what do you do with it? Will you repeat the same thing over and over again? And you might change the lyrics, but you know, you think of, uh, uh, you know, Beyonce or something like that. It's, you know, there's, I was listening to one of these songs, I think all the single ladies, uh, Beyonce, and it's like this actually 15 seconds of actual music in the, in the whole song. And all of it is just repeated, you know, uh, everything is just pure repetition, whereas in classical music, you never repeat anything. When you repeat you, you do it once, or you rarely repeat something, you do it once. You might do it twice, just because, you know, you want the audience to hear it again, and then you immediately start varying it and, um, uh, developing it and doing something more complex. And you, you keep changing the music and finding new things to do with it.
Speaker 1 00:55:45 And that's sort of the, the DNA of, of classical music and what differentiates it from popular music. And I'm not saying that to disparage popular music, but to say that the, the, the difference between classical music and popular music is classical music sort of requires a greater degree of focus and mental engagement and provides more material for the brain to work on. Uh, generally speaking that than popular music does. Uh, so that's sort of my case for why I think, uh, popular music has, I was to say better in that respect. I mean, it's not, you know, I'm not, again, I listened to popular music. I love got some, there's a great pop, popular music I love, but you know, it, it has, it has a different effect, but the way in which I would say that a costume makes us better in one respect is that it has that higher degree of complexity. It is generally speaking, more demanding, uh, than, than popular music. And I think is sort of, uh, provides, uh, a greater scope for everything that the human brain is capable of.
Speaker 0 00:56:49 Perhaps being a singer. I appreciate music with the some sort of song or some sort of lyrics. Yeah. But that's the thing, I mean, there are people that are going to have different opinions. I mean, you know, and, and some of it is, uh, I think classical music was the popular music of its day.
Speaker 1 00:57:13 Oh, it was. But yeah, there was always something of a difference, like, um, I've mentioned Ray fund Williams before the, uh, um, then the LARC attending. He also was famous for an English folk song suite, which is a big favorite of mine. I love it. It's a great piece of music, but what he did is he spent his, uh, he was, uh, an advocate for English music and trying to manifest in particular English fields whose music and he actually went out with some other people and, and collected thousands of, uh, traditional English folk songs from the countryside. This was in the early 20th century, a point at which the radio was coming in popular music coming through the radio was replacing all of the old folk songs. So he was starting, trying to France and trying to record all these old folk songs before they disappeared and were chased out by the radio and then took them and turn them into a suite of English folk songs.
Speaker 1 00:58:01 But what he does with them in the suite is he then takes, you know, John Barleycorn must die these great, uh, English folk songs. And he then puts them in counterpoint with each other. So he has, uh, was it the first movement has John Barleycorn in counterpoint with another song called 17 next Sunday. And it's this beautiful, incredibly. He found this incredible match-ups where one of these English folk songs would perform form a perfect counterpoint that if you played them on top of each other and they would, you know, they, they would emerge into something that's greater than the, than the, than the sum of the parts. So it was an example of how you could honor folk music or popular music while at the same time, then doing something that sort of goes above and beyond what the pocket of music is able to do.
Speaker 0 00:58:48 Well, you're a scope of music. History is very impressive. Uh, thank you. This was a very fun discussion. Um, thanks to everyone who participated. Uh, the Atlas society is back on clubhouse tomorrow at 6:30 PM. Eastern with senior scholar, Steven Hicks, doing an ask me anything on ethics. Then a Thursday here on club house at 4:00 PM. Eastern senior scholar, Richard Salzman will be doing an ask me anything. Uh, it's great that so open to questions, but, uh, in the meantime, again, Rob, thanks for doing these, uh, on behalf of the Atlas society. I'm Scott Shu. Thanks for joining us. And, uh, it's not too campy to quote Madonna. Uh, please don't stop the music.
Speaker 1 00:59:37 Oh, also I want to add Scott that as of next week, I'm moving to 7:30 PM for
Speaker 0 00:59:43 Prime time.
Speaker 1 00:59:44 Well, it's an experiment because the powers that be thought there might be more people able to tune in at seven 30 Eastern. So, so that's what we're doing starting with next week where I'm talking about Iran's, uh, theory of property rights.
Speaker 0 00:59:56 Great. Thank you very much. And uh, we'll see you next time.
