Music's Functions

Mason's article described Adorno's theories of autonomous music and how it can reveal social truths. This along with our class discussion has made me think about the function of music -- that is, what are music's functions?

The functions that I can think of are: social, entertainment, sublimation, emotional communication, religious, skill development, attention, and healing.

First and probably most prominent, music serves a social role. Whenever you go to a social event 90% of the time there is music involved one way or another. Music brings us together, and sure enough where there is music there are people. Social events like dances, parties, bon fires, sitting around playing cards with your friends, grocery shopping, sporting events, and more. In the book, When Elephants Weep, Jeffery Masson tells a story of a man who sits in the woods and plays guitar, and animals gather and hide behind the bushes, listening. This supports the idea that music bringing us together is innate. Or possibly that animals are curious.

Another function music plays is entertainment. This can include background noise when you are driving, concerts, or even just playing for yourself. Music has a way of stimulating our senses and attention and strays us from boredom when we are doing relatively easy tasks.

Sublimation is known to Freud as a way to take sexual and aggressive energy and releasing by creating a piece of artwork. Sometimes people create pieces of music or other art works to feel better, and to take their emotions and rid of them in a mature fashion. I know for me, whenever I have a bad day, playing piano or writing a poem especially, just lifts a huge weight off of my shoulders.

The idea of art serving as a mode of emotional communication comes from the philosophy of Tolstoy. He believed that like language communicates thoughts and ideas, art communicates emotion. Sometimes when you hear a piece of music, read a piece of literature or poetry, or see an visual artistic creation, you feel an emotion that the artwork gave you. Tolstoy claimed that the more "infectious" the better, that is, the more people feel emotion from a piece and are brought together in brotherhood, the more successful the work is. A subcategory for music under this heading would be ecstasy. Some songs uplift us, or make our brains, as I like to say, "go crazy." They make us pumped up or sometimes even feel beautiful. Emotional communication also connects with sublimation, one way being that an artist may try to take their feelings and share those feelings with others.

Music has been a part of most religions since their commencement. In the Christian religion songs and hymns about God and Jesus, as well as the member's praise to them, are played in church. Church mass is not the only religious ceremony in which music is played in. In native American gatherings, as well as, I'm sure, in Neanderthal times, chants to God(s) were preformed to music. Many other religions use music in their practice as well.

Skill development is a separate and a bit of a different function than the rest of these, or perhaps a different sub category under entertainment. Sometimes people compose or play music, not just to entertain themselves, but just because they want to be good at something. Several people more or less has a talent, maybe inborn or not, that they have and do not want to use to make money or to entertain anyone else, but just to have as a hobby and to say that they are skilled in an area.

Attention is a function that does not apply to everyone. For some people music helps them focus when doing school work or taking tests. Others, music distracts them when performing these tasks. Music usually functions to divide our attention, rather than focus our attention on the main task. When we are in certain social situations music serves as background noise, we really are not paying attention to it, yet it feels awkward if it is not there. Although, if the music was not there, our attention to the situation would be higher than with the music playing. This also applies to driving a car, the music grabs our attention and we are focusing on that rather than the road, since driving, if you have been doing it for a while is a implicit task, it does not take complete conscious attention.

The last function music serves is healing. Music as a healing tool has recently re-entered the western world with music therapy. Yet, other cultures have kept it around since caveman times. Shamans will sometimes use musical chants on their patients. In western developed societies music had a healing purpose in the classical period as well (possibly before). Many times when women were involved in music back then, it dealt with healing. One example is the glass harmonica, which women played and it was supposed to suppress "sexual desires" on the listeners.

Questions: Does music serve any other functions than this? Are any of these functions more important than the others? Which ones and why?

RE: Peter "Rap/Hiphop: true music?"

Peter's latest blog talked about Rap/Hiphop and its relation to music and slam poetry. He ended with the questions:Is rap fully definable as music? If not, what parts of it are? Why? Does this idea apply to standard practices when dealing with aesthetics, or does it deal with a de-definition of art?

Rap is definitely definable as music it has melodies, harmonies, rhythm, and it is organized. Just like there are different styles of poets within a specific genre, there are different styles of hiphop artists. My personal favorite is KiD CuDi, who has a much more laid back style than most hiphop artists. His background beats aren't as repetitive, tend to be unique in some way which I can't exactly pin point, and have a colorful melodic contour. The language he uses also isn't vulgar like Lil' Wayne, Asher Roth, and many other rappers. Just like most songs of the early-mid 20th century to today, hiphop follows the pattern of: verse 1, bridge, chorus, verse 2, bridge chorus, etc. I cannot think of any reason why hiphop would not be considered music. In a recent post I asked why poetry was not considered music, and the reason is because the words are not drawn out and slurred together. I've been writing slam poetry for about five years now, and I completely agree, yes, rap is slam poetry put to music, but there is more to it than that. It flows with the music and limits the linguistic phrase to lasting as long as the rhythmic phrase. And also, the words are sung -- drawn out and slurred together. The cool thing about slam poetry is you create the rhythm and can change it when even you feel like it, you are not held within the confides of temporal phrasing. As for the applications of aesthetics, we do not need to re-define or "de-define" art. Although when looking at lyrical music, I think that language needs to be a consideration when observing aesthetic characteristics. The way things are worded in a song changes everything, especially sense our vocal chords are our biological instrument, and everything down to our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions of the world sprout from our knowledge and use of language. Have you ever heard a song and thought, "I'd like it so much more it it had better lyrics"? The words are what we take meaning from unlike programatic or orchestral music where it is open for interpretation. Hiphop especially is lyrically driven, its main characteristic is that it is fast speech over a rhythmic beat. If the lyrics do not make sense, it is not as aesthetically pleasing as when they do. So, we do not have to re-define what art is, but we have to add the variable of language into our aesthetic perception.

Question: What role do you think language plays in music? Would you say that, to the untrained ear, the lyrics are the most important factor to whether a song is aesthetically pleasing or not?

RE: Wesley, Value and Skill

In Wesley's latest post he asked if the Civic musical highway had less musical value than other music that takes more skill to create and if the value of music be measured by the skill requirement?

First I want to ask how does this take less skill to create? That took hours of mathematical formulating, designing, and constructing to create this road. Yet, I would say that skill is a factor in the value of a musical piece. Surely simple songs can be valuable as well, but for many sonatas and concertos I can think of, the most beautiful ones take the most skill. Let's take trumpet for example, with more practice and skill one is able to achieve higher notes. The first few months you can only play about an octave, but with time you are able to play two or more. The more notes you can play, the more complex songs you can play. The more one practices the better tone quality and technique they achieve as well. The music played by a professional trumpet player is considered more aesthetically valuable than anything played by an amateur.

Skill and value apply for any instrument as well. Piano involves more skill than just the right notes at the right time; technique is key. If a certain piece is extremely difficult and requires someone with 30 years of experience to play it, it is more valuable because not everyone can do it and a lot of time went into it to acquire the skills necessary to play it.

Question: Can musical skill be objectively measured?

Catharsis

In today's class we talked a lot about the idea of catharsis, the idea of an emotional release by means of evoking unconscious feelings. This is a much spoken topic in the psychology realm. The idea of catharsis as it relates to music would say that listening to a scary song will release the fear that is deep inside of you, listening to a sad song will release sadness from you, and listening to an angry song will in some way release anger. I've never been a big fan of the idea of catharsis, it seems a bit pseudo scientific for my taste. Although I am considering the idea and how it relates to music.

I will make the argument that if you are sad and listen to a sad song, you will probably feel worse not better at the end of it. Another emotion that some people may think catharsis works for is anger. Many people have a go-to song that they listen to when they are angry and when it is over they feel better. I will make the argument that they are probably not just sitting there listening to it. They are singing along, punching something, or pacing around. If you are angry you are not going to just sit there and listen to an angry song, you are going to do something else physically along with it, and that is what releases the tensions.

Questions: Can you think of a situation or argument where catharsis is valid?

Re: Wesley's, "Sounds from the past"

Wesley's blog post was about his fascination with Shepard tones, and he questioned whether to call them sound art or music.

In Super Mario 64, the never-ending staircase level is accompanied by Shepard tones which creates the illusion that it keeps rising by overlapping ascending scales. The base part (which is barely audible), and the sudden contrast in dynamics allows this illusion to take place.

It makes sense to have Shepard tones playing with the never-ending staircase, because it is referred to as the auditory version of the Penrose stairs, a never-ending stair case. It is an optical illusion that is used in various artworks.

These Shepard tones are used as a scale, and as the Philosophy of Music article described, scales are not music (because although they are organized "their aim is not to enrich and intensify"). Just like paints on a pallet are not art, but the components that make up an artwork, scales are the building blocks which music is created from or a tool used in it. Yet, we do not call scales sound art either. Perhaps there is to be a new category that is not sound art or music. I would call it musical tools, things that are not musical on their own, yet also not a piece that is interdisciplinary/ thrown together in an 'artistic' fashion. Along with scales, maybe this category would include silence.

Questions: What do you think about Musical tools as a new category? What would it include?

Poetry

The article, "Philosophy of Music" stated that poetry was excluded from the definition of music. Yet, poetry's beauty lies in its meaning as well as the procession of each syllable sound. What differs poetry from any other written paragraph is its expression, metaphoric language, musicality (in my opinion). Syllables have soft and hard sounds and well as sharp, dull, tinny, dark, bright, etc. sounds. This as well as the use of intonation and inflection when reading poetry gives the words melodic contour in a sense. Rhythm/meter is also a tool used in poetry and gives the poem its shape and temporal characteristics. Finally, poems also use dynamics, emphasizing certain words and phrases, stressing importance, or simply used to illustrate emotion.

Question: Since poetry can have melodic contour, rhythm/meter, and dynamics what does poetry lack, that makes it unqualified to be considered music?

Blog post 3

There has been some dispute over the meaning of sound terms. I think it was set straight that noise is an audible vibration that may or may not be heard. A sound is an audible vibration that is heard. Silence is the absence of sound and noise. Music is something beyond organized sound.

The dictionary defines noise as an undesired sound, which contradicts our definition. I'm sure everyone's heard the phrase, "that's not music, it's noise." This raises the question: Can something considered music objectively, not be music subjectively? If a piece of music is undesirable to an individual, does that mean that it is subjectively noise? This can apply to art as well, some think that a urinal is not art, but a piece of junk in an art museum. That was not art until Duchamp labeled it so. So, is something only music when the composer calls it music?

I'll leave you with the questions: Can something considered music objectively, not be music subjectively? Is something only music when the composer calls it so?