Scene: Dimly lit record label office, smoke curling through the air. Peter Coyote lounges at the head of a massive leather couch, cool, calculating, sizing up the young band sitting across from him. The musicians look equal parts excited and nervous, caught somewhere between awe and dread. Coyote lights a cigar, gestures grandly for them to sit down, and gives them a warm, almost predatory smile.
Peter Coyote: (smoothly, leaning back, puffing on the cigar) Come in, come in. Take a seat, dear boys. You know, I’ve got a feeling. A very good feeling about you lot. You’re going places, places you haven’t even dreamed of.
(grins, eyes twinkling)
They’re gonna love you. You’ve got that look, that edge—raw, unpolished, a little hungry. They eat that up. And, if you play this right, you’re gonna fly, fellas. You’re never gonna die. You’ll be immortal.
(the band members nod, glancing at each other, unsure)
And you know why? Because you’re special. You got… I dunno, what’s the word… (snaps his fingers) integrity. Not like those other acts. You’re real. Hell, I’ve always had a deep respect for artists with a little edge, the ones who mean it. That’s you, right? You mean it.
Band Member 1: (clears his throat, hesitant) Uh,
Peter Coyote: (laughs, slaps the table) The message! Exactly! The message. We’re on the same page here. And that’s why I’m thrilled to have you on board. Look, your sound, it’s… (pauses, as if searching for the word) fantastic. Real raw. Gritty. Just fantastic. (pauses, then deadpan) By the way, which one of you is the “wild one”?
(the band members exchange confused looks)
Peter Coyote: (nods approvingly) Perfect. Every band needs one, right? Keeps things interesting. And the kids—oh, they’ll love it. Love it. Now, let’s talk about the plan, shall we?
(leans in, voice turning sharp, conspiratorial)
Did we tell you the name of the game, boys? We call it riding the gravy train. That’s what this is. You want to be icons? Legends? You gotta play the game. And the game? It’s all about selling. The album, the merch, the tour… all of it. You got a message? Great. But you gotta sell it.
Peter Coyote: (raises an eyebrow, smirks) Creative control. Sure, sure. Listen, we love that. Love that. But here’s the thing, kid—(leans in closer)—you want freedom? You gotta earn it. And you earn it by giving the people what they want. So, first thing’s first, we need another album. Fast. Doesn’t matter if it’s new, or remixed, or hell, just play it louder. Just get it out there. You owe it to the fans.
(band members nod reluctantly)
Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re happy. Real happy. So happy we can hardly count. You’re the hottest act in town. Have you seen the charts? They’re green with envy, every last one of ‘em. And this? This is just the start.
(pauses for effect)
This thing—this project you got? It could be huge. A monster. If we all pull together as a team. We package it right, market it right, throw a few hits on the radio… you’re looking at arenas, boys. Big money. And don’t worry about the details. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and we’ll handle the rest.
Band Member 3: (almost whispering)
(Peter leans in, deadly serious)
Peter Coyote: So, did I tell you the name of the game, boys? We call it riding the gravy train. Now, the train’s leaving the station. All you gotta do is hop on.
(softly chuckling, shaking his head) Fellas, fellas… Look, I get it. You wanna be real, make waves, set fires. I see it in your eyes, that fire. But here’s the thing: you’re sweating over the wrong side of the deal.
Band Member 1: (puzzled)
Peter Coyote: I’m talking about the audience, champ. You keep playing like you’re trying to win ‘em over. Get rid of that. Quit trying so hard to prove you’re something special. No, you’re not here to sell them a damn thing. You’re here to get them to sell themselves to you.
(leans in, elbows on the table, voice low and smooth)
What I’m saying is: quit performing for them. You’ve got it backward. They’re your audience—make them feel like they’re the lucky ones. Make them think, “Hell, if I could just get a taste of what these guys have.” You want the public pumping you, hyping you up so they get a whiff of the magic. You understand?
Band Member 2: (hesitant) So… we don’t try to impress ‘em?
Peter Coyote: Impress ‘em? Impress ‘em? Son, they don’t want to be impressed; they want to be validated. Look, people are starving for something they think is authentic, and you? You got that look. Now, you wanna be rockstars, right? The real thing? Well, the real thing doesn’t try to be anything at all. They’re beyond all that.
(snaps fingers)
What you gotta do is be the thing they want to be. Make ‘em crave you. When they look at you, they should think, “That’s how it’s done.”
Band Member 3: (nodding slowly) So, we gotta… just stop caring?
Peter Coyote: Bingo. Stop selling them something. They wanna be sold to? They’ll go buy a pair of sneakers. You? You’re in the mystery business. They’re not buying a show; they’re buying the chance to believe. Make them chase that, make them sell themselves on you.
(smiles slyly)
That, boys, is how you pump the public—get them working for you. They’re your best hype. You just let them catch the idea of you, and that’s enough to keep them coming back, hungry for more. And you know what that looks like? You don’t make a better product. You don’t give them anything real, anything authentic. No, you reach for something easier. You try to hit a degraded,simplified version of that early fan—the one who was hungry, who thought this meant something.
(He pauses, letting it sink in, then points a finger at them)
That’s how it works. They aren’t looking for real. Real’s too much work. Real asks them to think. So we give ‘em the basics. A catchy hook, a leather jacket, a spotlight, a little swagger—and, suddenly, they think they’re witnessing something big. They’re buying the brand, not the band. And it’s all dressed up to look like the old days, but really? It’s just an echo, a shadow of what it used to be.
(leans back, chuckling)
But here’s the best part—they don’t know the difference. They don’t even want to know the difference. It’s easier that way. We simplify it, water it down, keep the edges soft. You don’t have to be great. You just have to look great. The audience does the rest.
Band Member 1: (protesting, uncomfortable) But isn’t that… isn’t that kinda hollow? I mean, people can tell when something’s real, can’t they?
Peter Coyote: (smirking) Oh, they think they can. They’ll tell you they want authenticity. But do you think they’re out there buying garage tapes? No, they’re lining up to buy what we tell them is authentic. It’s like this: the idea of something real is more valuable than the reality of it. You package that, they’ll buy it every time.
(pauses, letting the words hang in the air)
See, that’s how you reach the new consumer. You give them a memory of a memory, a cheap thrill that doesn’t need to mean a thing. They get the feeling without the work, without the grit, without the soul. And the best part? They’ll eat it up. They’re looking to us for what’s cool, what’s real. We just show ‘em the shortcut and call it the real thing.
Band Member 2: (disbelieving) So… so we just become… what? A brand?
Peter Coyote: (grinning coldly) A brand? No, boys. A brand would be too generous. You’re not a brand. You’re a product. And products? They get sold.
The mainstream molds us like clay, shaping us into a monoculture—an artificial orchard of uniformity. Each of us, like the rows of apple trees, stands neatly in line, subject to the same pesticides that poison our authenticity. Our minds, pruned and cut, are directed to grow in ways that serve a larger machinery. This training—this mutilation—teaches us to sing a song that is not our own. It is a hollow chant, a murmur in the wind, devoid of soul.
We become like these trees, standing tall but hollow inside. Our branches, where individuality once blossomed, wither. Our roots, that once dug deep into the rich soil of culture, decay. The earth’s pulse, which once throbbed beneath our feet, becomes distant, obscured by the endless hum of the system.
We crave connection, not only with each other but with the infinite energy of the soul. But we forget, blind as we are, that we too are creatures of the soil. The earthworm does not ask for its place in the soil; it simply is. We too are woven into this web of life, but our grounding, our natural place, is severed. Until we remember this connection, we will remain as sickly branches, reaching but never touching the sky, planted but never nourished.
Yet the soil, ever patient, waits. Beneath the layers of concrete and conformity, it still hums with the song we have forgotten. The earthworm moves in silence, reminding us that real transformation begins not from above, where the light dazzles and blinds, but from below, where the unseen roots stir in the dark, where the unseen work of decay and regeneration never ceases. The mainstream tells us that light alone brings life, but it is the interplay of light and dark, of sun and soil, that truly sustains growth.
As we lose ourselves in the mainstream’s illusion, we forget that the soul, like the roots of an ancient tree, knows how to find the water beneath the surface. But we must be willing to descend. We must unlearn the song we’ve been taught and listen for the deeper rhythm, the ancient pulse of the earth. Only then can we remember that we, too, are part of this cycle—not just observers, but participants, connected to the seasons and the soil.
The mainstream would have us believe that our growth must be uniform, orderly, and directed. But real growth—true flowering—comes from chaos, from surrendering to the wildness within. It is not in the manicured field that we find our true nature, but in the untamed forest, where each tree grows according to its own design, unpruned and free.
We are not mere products to be shaped and sold. We are living organisms, part of a vast, interconnected web. The soul does not thrive in isolation; it requires the nourishment of community, of diversity, of the wild and the sacred. To reclaim our roots, we must dig deep into the soil of our being, shed the layers of conditioning, and embrace the truth that we are not separate from the earth, but part of its living breath.
The music is still there. The sounds that shaped my early life, like sharp needles pricking my teenage skin, embedding themselves deep in my veins. I adored it. The riffs, the lyrics, the goddamn poetry of it all. The raw, uncut power of Boomer music was a truth I couldn’t deny. Clapton, Joni, Bowie—these people spoke to something primal. They set the atmosphere for everything, an invisible soundtrack that lingered through every misstep and victory. But over time, I started noticing something that left a sour taste in my mouth, like bad acid creeping into the mix.
It’s the people behind it. The musicians—the heroes of a generation—and their fans, these unwavering soldiers of nostalgia. They’ve stretched the limits of what I thought narcissism could be, to the point where it feels like some of them are on the verge of a complete psychotic break. Narcissistic schizophrenia, that’s what it is—where the self is all that matters, even if it’s fractured and disintegrating. Their stories, their triumphs, their petty struggles, all rehashed ad nauseam as if they’re somehow the axis on which the entire cultural world spins.
When I was a kid, when I was just a naïve teen, I’d sit there, nodding along, enraptured by these stories. The tour buses, the drugs, the groupies, the albums they cut in hotel rooms while the world watched. It was intoxicating. And why wouldn’t it be? The Boomers built a mythology out of themselves. They became gods of their own creation.
But now, I can’t stand it. I’m older, and the rose-colored glasses have long since shattered. What used to be compelling tales of a bygone era now feel like desperate playlists, forever on repeat, begging—pleading—for attention. It’s like they can’t fathom a world where someone else might get a turn. Like they’d rather sink the ship than let someone else captain it. Every acknowledgment they crave comes at a price, and we—the Xers, the Zoomers—are footing the bill.
In the meantime, while they were out there, wrinkled hands grasping at the last ray of sunshine to catch their sorry asses, they did what anyone in their position might do when desperation sets in. They started using everything around them for fuel. They took the furniture—every chair, table, and goddamn coffee mug—and threw it into the fire just to keep the flame alive a little longer. But that wasn’t enough, no. Soon, the walls came down. They dismantled the entire house, beam by beam, plank by plank. Every bit of it, tossed into the blaze like it didn’t matter, like they weren’t destroying the very structure that gave them shelter for so long.
But that’s the thing with people who can’t let go—they’d rather burn the whole thing to the ground than let someone else live in it. They don’t care who it belonged to before or who it might belong to after. In their minds, the house was always theirs. Always.
And the fire—they’re so damn proud of that fire. You can see it in their eyes. They’ll sit there, warming their hands, oblivious to the fact that the whole place is collapsing around them, acting like they’re doing us all a favor by keeping the embers going. They talk about how they “built this house” from the ground up, how without them, there’d be nothing. And maybe, once upon a time, that was true. But it’s not anymore.
Now, the flames aren’t warm. They’re choking. The smoke’s thick, suffocating, and it’s making it impossible for anyone else to breathe. The Xers and the Zoomers—hell, anyone who didn’t get in on the ground floor—we’re standing outside, watching this slow-motion disaster unfold. Watching them torch the place just to keep their fragile sense of importance alive.
They talk about legacies. But what kind of legacy is this? What good is a legacy if all it does is destroy what comes after it? If they’ve left nothing but ashes for us to sift through? They’re too far gone to see it. Narcissism has a way of blinding you to reality. When the only thing you care about is your reflection, you stop noticing the world around you. You stop noticing that the reflection’s starting to crack.
And we—those who came after, the inheritors of this mess—we’re left with a choice. Do we try to rebuild from the ashes, salvage what’s left? Or do we walk away, leave the ruins behind, and build something new, something they never even considered? Either way, they’ll keep stoking the fire, burning through everything they can find, convinced they’re the only ones keeping the flame alive.
The cheaper the mortgage, the more vibrant the cultural scene—it’s almost an economic law. When people aren’t crushed under the weight of exorbitant housing costs, they have room to breathe, to create, to take risks. In neighborhoods where the rent isn’t devouring their every dollar, artists, writers, and musicians can afford to be bold, to experiment, to push boundaries without worrying about where the next meal is coming from.
A vibrant cultural scene thrives on the energy of those who aren’t constantly calculating the cost of their passion in dollars and cents. It’s in these places, where the mortgage doesn’t dictate every life decision, that the real innovation happens. The art is raw, the music is loud, and the ideas flow freely because they aren’t being stifled by financial anxiety.
But as soon as the rents start rising, that vibrancy fades. The artists move out, replaced by those who can afford to buy in but bring nothing new to the table. The galleries close, the venues shut down, and the once-thriving neighborhood becomes just another sterile, gentrified outpost, trading cultural vitality for property value. So yes, the cheaper the mortgage, the more vibrant the cultural scene—because creativity, at its best, demands freedom, and freedom is a luxury few can afford when the price of living gets too high.
The cheaper the mortgage, the more vibrant the cultural scene—so it goes. When folks aren’t selling their souls to make rent, they can actually do what they’re meant to do: create, invent, make a little noise. In those places where the rent isn’t high enough to give you an ulcer, artists, writers, and musicians can mess around, take some chances, and maybe even make something halfway decent without having to think about how they’ll keep the lights on.
It’s pretty simple math: when you’re not being bled dry by your landlord, you’ve got some space in your head for ideas, and ideas are what keep a culture alive. You see it over and over—wherever the rent’s low, the art’s loud, the music’s wild, and people are full of crazy, wonderful notions. But once the rents go up, the party’s over. The artists pack up and split, chased out by people with money but no imagination. The galleries shut down, the bands move on, and what’s left is just another nice, boring neighborhood where nothing interesting ever happens.
So, yeah, the cheaper the mortgage, the more vibrant the cultural scene—because creativity thrives when people aren’t scared to death about how they’re going to pay for it. And when that fear creeps in, well, kiss it all goodbye. So it goes.
The concert hall shimmered, a metallic womb pulsing with fluorescent hum. Musicians, faces pale smudges in the harsh light, drifted in, shedding winter coats like molting insects. A cacophony of coughs, greetings sliced by the metallic screech of oboe tuning. It was the pre-symphony symphony, a chaotic ballet of individual voices yearning for cohesion.
The house lights buzzed, a metallic wasp trapped beneath its plastic dome. The air, thick with dust motes dancing in the fractured sunlight filtering through grimy windows, hung heavy with anticipation.
Then, a cough. A rustle of sheet music. A lone clarinet, its single black eye staring, unleashed a hesitant, reedy squeal – a test pattern scratching at the silence. A tremor ran through the orchestra, a collective indrawn breath. More coughs, more rustles, punctuated by the metallic rasp of a tuning fork. The air crackled with raw potential.
Then, a whisper. A single violin, a hesitant question mark in the stagnant air. Another joined, then another, a chorus of uncertainty, their notes scraping and raw. A lone flute, a reedy, mocking laugh. The cellos grumbled, a low, subterranean growl. It was chaos, a beautiful, monstrous disarray.
The last violin, a banshee in heat, wailed a sinuous melody. A cellist, a stooped gargoyle, growled a guttural counterpoint. Timpani, chrome cauldrons, rumbled with a promise of coming thunder. Each note, a shard of fractured dream, pulsed in the stagnant air, a million synapses firing in the collective unconscious.
Suddenly, a trumpet let out a warrior’s cry, a shard of sound slicing through the discord. The violins shrieked in response, a frenzy of scraping fury. The music writhed, a tangle of serpents, each instrument a separate venom, each note a pulsating threat.
But then, a shift. A single note, held pure and true by a clarinet, cut through the chaos. The other instruments, as if startled, fell silent, then one by one, began to find their place around it. The violins sang, their voices intertwining in a mournful melody. The cellos boomed. The flute yweaved a thread of mischief.
The cacophony coalesced. Violins shrieked in unison, a flock of metallic birds taking flight. Cellos boomed, a subterranean heartbeat. The oboe, mollified, sang a sweet aria. It hung there, a challenge, a dare. One by one, the others responded. Flutes trilled, oboes wailed, the low growl of the cellos vibrated through the floorboards, a primeval thrumming. Scales arpeggiated,
The music wasn’t melody, not yet. It was raw energy, a tangled jungle of sound. But beneath the chaos, a sense of order thrummed, a nascent beast struggling to be born. It was the thrill of creation laid bare, the sculptor chipping away at the formless block, the nascent masterpiece shimmering in the dust.
Little by little the disarray coalesced, became a living, breathing entity. The music pulsed with a life of its own, a raw, electric current that surged through the hall, vibrating in my bones. It was the sound of creation, messy and magnificent, and it sent a jolt of pure adrenaline straight to my head. I wasn’t just hearing music; I was feeling it, a primal force that threatened to tear me apart and rebuild me anew.
This wasn’t music; it was the city waking up, gears grinding, pistons pumping. It was the scream of existence, the raw, symphony of life itself. A symphony that, with each note, each tentative harmony, threatened to achieve a terrifying, beautiful coherence.
I sat transfixed, a fly caught in the web of sound. My body resonated, every nerve ending on fire. This wasn’t music; it was a primal force, a glimpse into the chaotic heart of creation. It was beautiful, terrifying, exhilarating – a junkie’s fix of pure sonic adrenaline. The rehearsal hadn’t even begun, yet I felt spent, drained, exhilarated. This was the true magic, the raw, unpolished power before the performance, the thrill of the awakening. This was the orchestra tuning in, and it was a symphony of its own.
Then, as abruptly as it began, it ended. The last note hung in the air, a shimmering echo, before dissolving into the silence. The musicians, faces flushed, exchanged tired smiles. But the air still crackled with the aftershock, a tangible energy that lingered long after the last note faded. The music was gone, but the thrill remained, a potent intoxicant coursing through my veins. I left the hall, blinking in the harsh sunlight, the world a little sharper, a little more vivid, forever altered.<>
Music, once a virus of the soul, a sonic worm burrowing into the meat of consciousness, has been lobotomized by the Soft Machine. Chopped into bite-sized dopamine nuggets, it’s pumped into the veins of the masses through the IV drip of the Attention Economy. Music, once a tangible fix, now a digitized roach motel for the attention junkies. The airwaves, a Burroughs dream of cut-up melodies, scrambled by the Cixin virus. Abundance breeds not harmony, but a cacophony of competing voices, each vying for a sliver of the shrinking attention span.
Once a tangible artifact, pulsating with analog life, it’s become a digital chimera, swallowed by the all-consuming maw of the attention economy.This is the Interzone, where the lines between commerce and creativity blur, and the very act of seeking recognition becomes a perilous dance with the predatory forces of the algorithm.
Musicians, word warriors armed with guitars and laptops, find themselves trapped in the Naked Lunch of the attention economy. They pump their sonic wares into the meat grinder of the algorithm, hoping to emerge on the other side, chewed up and spat out onto a curated playlist. Musicians, once solitary alchemists conjuring sonic spells, are now data points in a vast, chaotic network. But the algorithm is a fickle beast, a faceless god that devours content and excretes profit, leaving the artists with a hollow echo of recognition. They fight for visibility in a hyper-saturated marketplace, their screams swallowed by the white noise of a million competing voices.The airwaves crackle with the static of inauthenticity, manufactured pop stars churned out like assembly-line products. Attention, the new currency, is ruthlessly hoarded by unseen entities, leaving artists scrambling for scraps in the digital gutter.
The consumer, a drooling troglodyte hooked on the flickering screen, is bombarded with a cacophony of sonic slop. Choice becomes a weapon of mass distraction, a paralyzing vortex that drowns out any semblance of genuine engagement. Lost in the labyrinthine corridors of recommendation algorithms, they become automatons, their preferences molded by unseen hands.
Consumers, meanwhile, are bombarded by a sensory overload. Algorithms, like unseen puppeteers, manipulate their choices, herding them towards pre-packaged sonic experiences.Music becomes a mere background hum, a dopamine drip to numb the anxieties of the modern malaise. The true power of music, its ability to transport, to challenge, to connect, is lost in the cacophony of the marketplace.
But fear not, fellow travelers! There is a way out of this sonic labyrinth.
A Paradox
This Cixin good, this paradoxical commodity, thrives on its own obscurity. The more it screams for attention, the deeper it sinks into the psychic muck, devoured by the ever-hungry maw of the algorithm. Musicians, these unwitting agents of chaos, become cogs in the control machine, their creative essence siphoned off by the faceless entities that manipulate the flow of information.
For creators, the path lies in embracing the cut-up method. Fragment the narrative, inject dissonance, and challenge the expectations of the algorithm overlords. Forge connections with your audience, not through manufactured personas, but through raw, unfiltered expression.Let your art be a virus of its own, a subversive force that disrupts the sterile order of the Interzone.
But wait! A flicker of hope in the interzone. The artists, they can cut up the virus, weaponize their sound. They can build their own networks, bypass the gatekeepers, and speak directly to the awakened minds. Let the music be a virus of its own, spreading through the underground channels, infecting the minds with the truth.
Consumers, too, must awaken from their passive slumber. Seek out the uncharted territories, the sonic anomalies that lie beyond the algorithmic reach. Support the independent voices, the ones who refuse to be assimilated by the machine.Engage with music actively, dissect its layers, and allow it to resonate within your soul.
This is not a call for utopia, but for a radical re-imagining. We must break free from the control of the attention merchants and reclaim the power of music as a transformative force.Let the sonic mutations begin, let the feedback loops scream, and together we may yet forge a new musical landscape, one that transcends the boundaries of the Interzone and pulsates with the raw energy of authentic creation.
So crank up the volume, let the feedback howl, and join the chorus of resistance. The Naked Lunch of attention may be served, but we can still choose the ingredients of our sonic feast.
What happens when an ideology under the infinite guise creates a finite number of institutional/non institutional posts? The more ideologically entrenched a society is, the more it perceives any diversity as a threat. All human societies require myths, and they cannot function effectively as societies so long as they remain baffled by their ambivalence. For any concerted action to be possible, myths must be “ideologized” In its essence, politics is the practice of making symbols useful, for good and for ill
A society is pre-totalitarian when its people will only accept as “truth” what confirms what they prefer to believe. The politics apprehends genuine artistic works as works of artifice. You also have to be skeptical of the altruism behind conscripting a large number of people for free work is in their best interests. That is to say, even the political needs art as its mythopoeic foundation and challenge.
It is also true that humans can only produce art through culture by means of sign systems that are politically established and maintained. The best sometimes artist can hope for is a tenuous and ultimately doomed alliance with the status quo.
In the Marxist base and superstructure model of society, Ruling class-interests determine the superstructure and the nature of the ideology justifying the actions of society. An authority who calls to us is interpellating us a position we recognize and accept. The position we take is relative to a superior and central ‘Other Subject’, exercising emotional authority. Our identity is thus defined by the other and we recognize ourselves as an image or a reflection of the Other. The consistency principle leads you into a cycle of investment whereby you bond your sense of identity both to the subject position and also the underlying ideology.
Althusser’s explained how Ideological apparatuses interpellated the subjects into ideological positions. This interpellation is a form of misrecognition, where an externalized image is perceived both as the self and an ‘other’ all of which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’”
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: ARISTOTLE’S FRETS
Aristotle imagined a world in which machines could do all the work for themselves. He believed that better machines could free and elevate people, even slaves. But when the economy becomes more about information it seems to distort and shrink the overall size. In the case of the music industry, making a pre-digital system “efficient” through a digital network shrank it economically to about a quarter of its size. Instead wealth is being vacuum upstairs, since most of the real value still occurs out in the real world is reconceived to be off the books.
We’re used to treating information as “free,” but the price we pay for the illusion of “free” is only workable so long as much of the overall economy isn’t about information. The information economy, has been busy trying to conceal the value of all information, of all things things
The identity stack is 3 layers: fabrication of interchangeable components, knowledge sets and expensive cryptography. Non-material roles may be priced at will pertaining to social conceptions of status, possession, rights and so forth. The capacity to “innovate” which is usually a word for disintermediation is now potentially exceeding the capacity to learn. The practice of splitting the economic and social aspects of technology at the lowest attainable level is like dividing church and state for our day.
The material structure can get as cheap as nature allows, and advances as quickly as technology. The ability to re-package and shrink economy seems to be growing exponentially. But if the world is to be reconceived and engineered as a place where people are not particularly distinguished from other components, then people will fade.
INFORMATION IS NOT FREE
Software could be the final industrial revolution, and it might subsume all the revolutions to come: Maybe technology will make all the needs of life so inexpensive that it will be virtually free to live well. But instead, we are probably heading into a period of hyper-unemployment, and the attendant political and social chaos. The outcome of chaos is unpredictable, and we shouldn’t rely on it to design our future.
We’re used to treating information as “free,” but the problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function. “Public goods” are defined as Non-exclusionary. They can be used by everyone, including those who don’t pay. They are Non-rivalrous. You disintermediate some and intermediate others. Transfer of intellectual property to those unrelated to the inventors is like injecting meth. Short term euphoria and long-term doom.
MOORE’s LAW
Moore’s Law means that more and more things can be done practically for free, if only it weren’t for those people who want to be paid. People are the flies in Moore’s Law’s ointment: when machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive. In previous times in history inventions of new things created high value occupations by automating or eliminating those of lower value. Today’s flexible software is threatening to “free” us from the drudgery of all repetitive tasks rather than those of lowest value, pushing us away from expertise.
Pdf Economy
The standard mindset in the Western post-industrial state can only conceptualize of things in an inherently consumerist fashion. Every purchase of an old-fashioned vinyl, keyboard or guitar opens an opportunity to earn money by enhancing provenance.
More and more of the economy is mediated through a productification of the environment, and then after productification, we turn it in pdfs or mp3 but keeping it predicable, largely consumerist experience. The rise of the “network economy” where all economic activity is mediated by information tools, and the commodification of all human activity as a service to the information age.
An Mp3 buyer is no longer a first-class citizen in a marketplace. When you buy a vinyl, you can resell it at will, or continue to enjoy it no matter where you decide to buy other vinyl’s. You have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else’s company store. Musical recording was a mechanical process until it wasn’t, and became a network service.
WHAT FREEMIUM & WALMART HAVE IN COMMON
In order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on the waste heat, the randomness. Google wants to be closed about how it compiles and exploits your information. Facebook wants you to have only one identity, so that it’s easier to collate information about you. Twitter suggests that meaning will emerge from fleeting flashes of thought contextualized by who sent the thought rather than the content of the thought. The plain is to gain dominance through rewarding network effects, but keeps dominance through punishing network effects.
The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels exploiting whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so. No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused. The power of the network grows as the square of its size. The original form was called the fax-machine effect.
One person with a fax machine is useless. Two people is one connection. Three people is three potential connections. Four is 6.
The Web has created a broad new class of knowledge workers: volunteer amateur editors. Their net effect is to displace existing knowledge workers, including journalists, writers, librarians, musicians. Nothing kills jobs faster and more permanently than free labor.
A few of the folks all this places aggregates will inevitably get an insane lift from being hitched to it, and they’ll create even more excitement. After all that’s the religion the world has run on for 40 years. This ideology wants the algorithm to run the show with as few humans in the loop as possible, ostensibly to improve “customer service” by “lowering prices.
The only thing that matters is that you don’t want to be left out of the loop in the information age. The game is on you, and it will only get worse. The only thing that matters is that you don’t want to be left out of the loop in the information age, and that you want your information to be valued in economic terms, not in terms of how much you can make from it. If the information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued by those who provide the information.
NAPSTERIZATION OF EVERYTHING: BIG DATA
Scientific data can be gathered and mined, just like gold, provided you put in the hard work. Pretending that data came from the heavens instead of from people can’t help but shrink the overall economy. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. No economy can be sustained on the backs of a few hundred major companies with a handful of employees and virtually no overhead. No amount of cost lowering can foster economic dignity when it also means that there are fewer good jobs.
We can’t tell how much of the success of an AI algorithm is due to people changing themselves to make it seem successful. People have repeatedly proven adaptable enough to lower standards in order to make software seem smart. Efficiency is a synonym for how well a server is influencing the human world to align with its own model of the world.
The future is uncertain. The death of traditional jobs in the manufacturing and retail industries and the decline in the middle class are just some of the factors contributing to the decline. No amount of cost lowering can foster economic dignity if it also means that there are fewer good jobs.
BELL CURVES: THE SUPERSTAR ECONOMY:
The music industry is a Superstar economy, that is to say a very small share of the total artists and works account for a disproportionately large share of all revenues. This is not a Pareto’s Law type 80/20 distribution but something much more dramatic: the top 1% account for 77% of all artist recorded music income. A star system is just a way of packaging a bell curve. Winner-take-all distributions come about when there is a global sorting of people within a single framework. But broader forms of reward like academic tenure and research grants are vastly more beneficial
All rituals in which anointed individual will suddenly become rich and famous are winner-take-all rituals. Winner- take-all Distributions, amplify errors and make outcomes less meaningful . To rely on them is a mistake — pragmatic, ethical, but also a mathematical one. Top players are rewarded tremendously while almost everyone else starves.
To get a bell curve of outcomes there must be a variety of paths, or sorting processes, that can lead to success. Henry Ford made a point of pricing his cars so that his own factory workers could afford to buy them. Digital networks have been mostly applied to reduce benefits of locality, and that will lead to economic implosion.
LEVEES
Bands, solo artist, styles and other talent have gone extinct during the collapse of the music industry, mainly as a result of human activity. A big part of the problem is that most consumers now attribute very little value to the recording itself. A decade-long decline in recording revenues has dismantled the label system, once the most reliable form of artist financing.
The music industry brass remained static and went on a campaign to blame everybody but themselves for their problems, The top 1% account for 75% of CD revenues but 79% of subscription revenue. Nashville has lost more than 80 percent of its songwriters since 2000. Most artists are overwhelmed with tasks that go far beyond making music, such as Tweeting fans. Lower royalties are killing an entire generation of writers, he writes. We are slowly losing the race against multi-resistant bacteria, he says.
The only thing that really works for the user (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify) has given rise to a hardware-based, proprietary, walled- garden, non-music-centric, de-facto monopoly. When you hollow out culture, it is inevitable that parasitic forces fill the void sometimes called corporations, sometimes called government.
The hyperefficient market optimized to yield star-system results will not create enough of a middle class to support a real market dynamic. It is that balance that creates economic growth, and thus opportunity for more wealth. To combat the degradations of star systems, levees” arose to compensate Thermodynamics and protect the middle class.
Levees modestly hold back thermodynamics to protect something precious. Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can’t be tweaked. We can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and film makers. But the destruction of transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care will come if the dominant idea of an information economy isn’t improved.
Live Music fans are frustrated with high ticket prices at concerts. The average consumer goes to just 1.5 shows a year. Many others are touring just to pay the bills, including medical bills. Dick Dale, who remains on the road despite his advanced age to pay for treatment for rectal cancer, renal failure, and massive vertebrae damage.
“When this music wants to be free things started happening. We just started having weekly fundraisers for people like famous musicians who’d gotten sick in old age and had like no support me more,” says singer/songwriter John Perry Barlow. “ Intellectual property kind of like a lot of things in our society it you can think of it as something that only benefits elites but actually it was fought for by unions trying to support people who are not elites at all,” he says. “To have it lost by people who thought they were doing the right thing is just one of the great tragedies of our era,” he adds.
Record companies and the Broadcast publishing official statistics are under increased pressure to keep up the illusion that the music Industry is recovering by manipulating whatever dials can be turned by law or fiat. It has given reign give to an interim “gimmick economy” but in the long term, this way of using network technology is not even good for the rich and most powerful players because their ultimate source of wealth can only be a growing economy. An economy where we sell each other PDF’s or MP3’s is no more viable that the debt based on we have now.
The ideal mechanism would reward creativity, and still be tough enough to withstand thermodynamics which will surely appear. So long as public goods make up a minority of a market economy, taxes on non-public goods can be used to pay for the exception where price and value gap are large.
TECHNOLOGY
I think where people go wrong in imagining post-capitalist economies is starting with values. The stacking order is technology → economics → values. You need to start with alternative technological principles. Example: design with degradation/aging as a feature not bug.
Venkatesh Rao
The average Sci-Fi writer of the 50s, 60s and 70s would be very, very disappointed with the world of 2018. Technology is not pure/impure but subjected to ape psychology People outside tech truly do not understand the insane & stupid arrogance that dudes develop when you give them magic computer powers, tell them to use those powers instead of thinking, pay them a lot of money, and then give them a space where they can suck each other’s dicks all day. Technology is someone’s opinion in material form, sometimes it’s tantamount to being trapped in someone else’s head. What if tech was designed to solve last century’s problems? Why are we so ineffective tackling the 21st? Maybe we are not prepared to make changes that go beyond our current level of mental complexity. Unfortunately the medium has ended up amplifying lack of flexibility, along with self-absorption.
Biggest “tech” breakthroughs in recent years have been nothing more than clever hacks to get around onerous regulation, he writes. Tech exaggerates economic system tendencies toward extraction, growth for growth’s sake, he says. “World building is a thing” in a digital world, he adds. It’s time for a new era of techlash, and a new generation of tech entrepreneurs, he argues. “Art requires the flexibility to loosen one’s identity in order to feel the pleasure of merging with the artist,” he says, in an emotional and physical connection.
Much of internet was a means to access inner space with different destinations being different possible versions of future you. The new stack is so successful that it optimizes its environment instead of changing in order to adapt to the environment. Cheap networking facilitates exaggerated and rapid network effects. Silicon Valley, which once seemed a portal to unlimited potential, now induces claustrophobia as so many distinct companies with different competencies and cultures must compete for the same global pool of so-called advertisers. It might eventually become an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.
This access to inner spaces was supposed to make up for our lack of experience in peer relationships which was preventing some the development of the common pathway through which people learn about decision-making skills and the capacity to maintain a relationship. However, when your inner space is opened to commercial activity, it exaggerates this economic system tendencies toward extraction, growth for growth’s sake, and the removal of human agency and connection. Now the system amplifies for ruthlessness, and capital “becomes a person” through corporations and tech.
So much information is “free,” that there is nothing left to advertise on Google that attracts actual money. It may well mean either the state takes the means of production to sustain itself (i.e seizes say a bitumen plant to keep roads) or simple hollows out in time. It seems like subtracting value, an enormous amount of value, and stymied progress to seize control and extract wealth.
High unemployment and very high underemployment may well result in a non functioning state. This means building new models for the distribution of necessary rival goods. It is entirely legitimate to understand that people are still needed and valuable. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to pretend to not need anyone else. The ghosts of the losers haunt every acre of easy abundance.
It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities first formed. Something was lost with the advent of the polis, and we still dream of getting it back. The greatest beneficiaries of civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from politics. In every case, abundance without politics was an illusion that could only be sustained in temporary bubbles, supported by armies. It was a bubble supported by the power of the rich, and it’s time to get rid of it, he argues. The quote could be interpreted as a daydream that better technology will free us to some degree from having to deal with one another.
For better or worse, when the time comes the future will be shaped by the separation of church and state for our times. Our new time lords display difficulty understanding the on-the-books value of culture.Ric Amurrio
MTV makes me wanna smoke crack Fall out of the window and I’m never comin’ back MTV makes me wanna get high Can’t get a ride no matter how I try And everything’s perfect and everything’s bright And everyone’s perky and everyone’s uptight I love those videos I watch ’em all day…….
Beck
Put a mirror on the side of a beta fighting fish’s aquarium and a male will beat itself against the glass attacking the perceived intruder. A hen lays eggs day after day as a farmer removes them for human breakfasts — 30,000 in a lifetime without one chick hatching but she never gives up trying.
Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen studied birds that lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey. He constructed plaster eggs to see which a bird preferred to sit on, finding that they would select those that were larger, had more defined markings, or more saturated color over the bird’s own pale, dappled eggs. The essence of the supernormal stimulus is that the imitation can exert a stronger pull than the real thing.
He found that territorial male stickleback fish would attack a wooden fish model more vigorously than a real male if its underside was redder. The healthiest, largest male chickadees have the highest crests on their heads and they are sought after as mates. When researchers outfit runt males with little pointed caps females line up to mate with them, forsaking the naturally fitter, hatless males.
Tinbergen was able to influence the behavior of these animals with a new “super” stimulus that was a detriment to their livelihood because they simply couldn’t say no to the fake stimulus. Much of Tinbergen’s work is beautifully captured by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett in the book Supernormal Stimuli.
There’s a jolt of recognition: just how different are our endless wars, our modern health woes, our melodramatic romantic and sexual lives candy, pornography, huge-eyed stuffed animals, diatribes about menacing enemies.
Human instincts were designed for hunting and gathering on the savannahs of Africa 10,000 years ago. Our present world is incompatible with these instincts because of radical increases in population densities, technological inventions, and pollution. Instincts arose to call our attention to rare necessities but now we use them to produce ubiquitous attention-grabbers.
Humans have a giant brain capable of overriding simpler instincts when they lead us astray. Evolution’s inability to keep pace with such rapid change plays a role in most of our modern problems. But we must recognize and understand what is going on before we will make this crucial switch in strategy
Junk food
It could be argued that for a large span of time humans had a relatively stable palette. A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment. The signal that once reliably correlated to healthy food has been hijacked. Tastiness, formerly representing the evolutionarily identified correlates of healthiness, has been reverse-engineered and perfectly matched with an artificial substance.
The problem with junk food is due to the fact that it is a “super stimulating” version of a natural reward we are supposed to pursue. the reason we are drawn to sickly desserts is because they are sweeter than any naturally-occurring fruit.
Some studies have suggested that foods like processed grain came about far too quickly and are doing quite a number on your mind and body. Junk food is addictive. Food is being engineered specifically to be more appealing than its natural counterparts.
HYPERREALITY: TV & video games
Awareness that watching television activates the primitive ‘orienting response’, keeping our eyes drawn to the moving pictures as if it were predator or prey. Awareness that liking ‘cute’ characters comes from a biological urge to protect and nurture our young
If people have the right to play video games — and it’s hard to imagine a more fundamental right — then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold.
and if you can make your game 5% more hypereal, you may be able to steal 50% of your competitor’s customers. You can see how this problem could get a lot worse. A video game can be so much more engaging than mere reality. Challenges poised at the critical point between ease and impossibility, intermittent reinforcement, feedback showing an ever-increasing score, social involvement in massively multiplayer games.
Is there a limit to the market incentive to make video games more engaging? You might hope there’d be no incentive past the point where the players lose their jobs; after all, they must be able to pay their subscription fee. This would imply a “sweet spot” for the addictiveness of games, where the mode of the bell curve is having fun.
Pornography
There’s a passage from a Kurt Vonnegut novel where a man shows another man a photograph of a woman in a bikini and asks, “Like that Harry? That girl there.” The man’s response is, “That’s not a girl. That’s a piece of paper.” Those who warn of porn’s addictive nature always emphasize that it is not a sexual addiction, it’s a technological one.
It’s been suggested that pornography messes up the “reward circuitry” in human sexuality — why bother trying to pursue and impress a potential mate if you can just go home and look at porn? Novelty is always a click a way, and novelty is closely tied to the highly addictive nature of dopamine.
the neurotransmitter dopamine does not cause people to experience pleasure, but rather causes a seeking behavior. want, desire, seek search,” she wrote. It is the opioid system that causes one to feel pleasure. Yet, “the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. We seekmore than we are saare satisfied
Actual women are killing themselves (e.g. supermodels using cocaine to keep their weight down) in the construction of another superstimulus transformed by makeup, careful photography, and finally extensive Photoshopping, into a billboard model — a beauty impossible, unmatchable by human women in the unretouched real world.
The Internet & Fomo
Social media has been shown to make some people depressed — they see the highlight reel of others, and may feel worse about their own life. These pruned and often misleading looks into others lives was never available before the web. In spite of this, people can’t stop checking them, thinking that they might be missing out on something.
The quick bursts of entertainment that the internet provides, and the fact that information is always a click away, may cause a decrease in conceptual and critical thinking as well as chronic distraction that slowly eats away at your patience and ability to think and work on things for extended periods of time.
What should you do? Deciding what’s normal
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
CS Lewis
Evolution seems to have struck a compromise, or perhaps just aggregated new systems on top of old. Homo sapiens are still tempted by food, but our oversized prefrontal cortices give us a limited ability to resist temptation. Not unlimited ability — our ancestors with too much willpower probably starved themselves to sacrifice to the gods, or failed to commit adultery one too many times.
Our limited willpower evolved to deal with ancestral temptations; it may not operate well against enticements beyond anything known to hunter-gatherers. Even where we successfully resist a superstimulus, it seems plausible that the effort required would deplete willpower much faster than resisting ancestral temptations.
MUSIC
When I am listening to certain pieces of music I feel a reverence creeping over me, an awe that has a spiritual quality. I do not see any contradiction between my agnosticism and my emotional reverence. I am a biological being subject to the same emotions and affinities as others
When I listen to music Something else happens. In the deep logic of the music, I sense a presence. My brain generates a mind state, a persona, and attributes it to the music. Not the mind of Mozart the man, but a kind of soul that invests that particular piece. The piece has a persona. It has a palpable spirit, and I feel as though I can have a personal relationship to that spirit.
The social, interpersonal, emotional machinery of my brain has been recruited. My brain is treating the music like a universe of complexity and investing that universe with its own deity, for whom I feel some measure of awe and reverence. My relationship to the music is, in the most fundamental sense, the same as a religious relationship to the real world.
In complexity, the human brain tends to see intentionality. We are after all social animals. We evolved to be social beings — to look at the complex pattern of behavior of others and infer a mind state, a personality, a persona. When we encounter complexity, the social machinery in the brain is engaged. It generates hypothetical mind states and intentions and attributes them to the complex entity. It is an automatic reaction. We can’t help the impulse.
MUSIC AND SHAMANISM
One of the most common shamanistic themes is the shaman’s supposed death and resurrection. This occurs in particular during his initiation. Often, the procedure is supposed to be performed by spirits who dismember the shaman and strip the flesh from his bones, then put him back together and revive him. In more than one way, this death and resurrection represents the shaman’s elevation above human nature.
First, the shaman dies so that he can rise above human nature on a quite literal level. After he has been dismembered by the initiatory spirits, they often replace his old organs with new, magical ones (the shaman dies to his profane self so that he can rise again as a new, sanctified, being). Second, by being reduced to his bones, the shaman experiences rebirth on a more symbolic level: in many hunting and herding societies, the bone represents the source of life, so reduction to a skeleton “is equivalent to re-entering the womb of this primordial life, that is, to a complete renewal, a mystical rebirth”.
Third, the shamanistic phenomenon of repeated death and resurrection also represents a transfiguration in other ways. The shaman dies not once but many times: having died during initiation and risen again with new powers, the shaman can send his spirit out of his body on errands; thus, his whole career consists of repeated deaths and resurrections. The shaman’s new ability to die and return to life shows that he is no longer bound by the laws of the super stimulus , particularly the law of death: “the ability to ‘die’ and come to life again […] denotes that [the shaman] has surpassed the human condition”.
Having risen above the human condition, the shaman is not bound by the flow of history. Therefore, he enjoys the conditions of the mythical age. In many myths, humans can speak with animals; and, after their initiations, many shamans claim to be able to communicate with animals. According to Eliade, this is one manifestation of the shaman’s return to “the illud tempus described to us by the paradisiac myths”. The shaman can descend to the underworld or ascend to heaven, often by climbing the World Tree, the cosmic pillar, the sacred ladder, or some other form of the axis mundi.
Often, the shaman will ascend to heaven to speak with the High God. Because the gods (particularly the High God, according to Eliade’s deus otiosus concept) were closer to humans during the mythical age, the shaman’s easy communication with the High God represents an abolition of history and a return to the mythical age . Because of his ability to communicate with the gods and descend to the land of the dead, the shaman frequently functions as a psychopomp and a medicine man.
The general nature of religion
Eliade is known for his attempt to find broad, cross-cultural parallels and unities in religion, particularly in myths.
In his discussion of sacred space, the author notes that sacred space is always considered the “really” real part of the universe, while non-sacred space is ambiguous and without structure. That is to say, the sacred is the solid, fixed point from which all else is oriented, while the non-sacred is a formless expanse without essence.
Given these descriptions, super stimulus is unlivable. It does not provide a context within which anything can be accomplished, because, as Eliade rightly notes, “
Nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation — and any orientation implies a fixed point”. As such, one never finds man living a completely existence only with superstimuli
The ephemeral super stimulus does not encompass and account for the totality of phase space. On the other hand the eternal can encompass and account for the superstimuli. If ultimate reality (the “really real” part of our existence) is sacred, it makes sense that profane aspects could also exist.
Eliade shows that sacred space is understood as a place where the eternal meets the temporal, where the divine dwells with the merely human.
Rather, sacred spaces are built on the model of the gods. In building a sacred place, man is emulated the creation of the world by the divine. This act is motivated by a desire to “take up his bode in objective reality” and escape the illusion and relativity of profane life.
Mankind is not making up creation stories with the construction of sacred spaces, we are emulating creation stories. In other words, our creation myths do not present a god who is the result of time and space; rather time and space are the result of creation. “The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world.” The profane simply cannot do this.
The sacred does not provide an escape from reality; it provides a return to reality. It is a door to the beginning of time, when man and gods lived together in peace and perfection. In entering the sacred, man longs to recover “the strong, fresh, pure world that existed in illo tempore” .
This existence is the really real and everything since the fall from the state has lacked its substance. We now live in the shadowlands, to quote Lewis again. As such, religious devotion is not an escape or an avoidance of reality, as Kant would have us believe, but rather the bold acceptance of reality. To enter into the sacred is to face the facts as they are. On the other hand, to try to live as if the world is only profane can much more rightly be called an avoidance of reality. It is the man who refuses to face the sacred who is the one trying to escape from what is really real.
Origin myths and sacred time: THE DREAMTiME
Eternal return and “Terror of history”
Eliade argues that traditional man attributes no value to the linear march of historical events: only the events of the mythical age have value. To give his own life value, traditional man performs myths and rituals. Because the Sacred’s essence lies only in the mythical age, only in the Sacred’s first appearance, any later appearance is actually the first appearance; by recounting or re-enacting mythical events, myths and rituals “re-actualize” those events. Eliade often uses the term “archetypes” to refer to the mythical models established by the Sacred, although Eliade’s use of the term should be distinguished from the use of the term in Jungian psychology.
Thus, argues Eliade, religious behavior does not only commemorate, but also participates in, sacred events:
In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.
TURN ME ON I’M A RADIO: RESONANCe
Music often transport us to where we first heard them or to a phase of life when they held an important place. Old feelings, old relationships, old situations are resurrected and made present through sound. As long as we continue to hear those songs — and each time we do — that bygone period is restored to vibrant immediacy.
music also serves as an intergenerational pathway, promoting a real or imagined sense of continuity between past and present. Songs known (or thought) to be deeply woven into the societal fabric bring us face to face with long-dead ancestors and with a world we did not inhabit but feel viscerally connected to.
And it bears reiterating that these musical sensations are not experienced simply as emotional memories, but as the past made present once more. On a practical level, this explains the regularity with which recurring repertoires are affixed to communal rituals, both religious and secular. Such music helps tie participants to the activity itself and to the flow of history in which similar activities have already occurred and will occur again.
Although this discussion of return implies endlessness, it is not a static process. As we have learned from countless time travel tales of popular fiction, inserting ourselves into events that have already taken place invariably introduces new elements and causes new variations, subtle and not-so-subtle. So it is with time relived on the pages of comic books, retold in rituals and contained in repeated songs. Each of us is a constantly changing accumulation of thoughts, feelings and experiences, and every time we return to the familiar — the eternal — we approach it from a different vantage point.
Far from discrediting the notion of timelessness, the changes precipitated when our current selves encounter the perpetual past can be understood as the dynamic anatomy of eternity. Without this potential for freshness, the eternal return would hardly be longed for.
Coltrane’s notebook showing his reharmonization Fifth House
“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
Albert Einstein
Creative inspiration reveals itself through the diligent study of previous generations and the mastery of established skills. Schools of thinking must be studied, styles are to be imitated, and techniques will need to be ingrained creating the new from the old. This idea of continual reinvention and self expression is prevalent throughout the history of this music and you’d be hard pressed to find a lasting piece of music or style that didn’t have a direct line back to the creative work that came before it.
“Deja Entendu”. You know that “deja vu” (French for “already seen”) is that strange feeling that you’ve experienced something in the exactly the same way before. Over the years I’d noticed a number of distinct similarities between one jazz composition and another. Some of that is intentional, and there’s even a word for it; the term “contrafact” refers to a piece of music in which a new melody is played over a familiar chord progression.
There was a territorial struggle in the 1940s between the performing rights societies, ASCAP and BMI; they collect royalties and distribute them to artists when their music is performed live or aired on stations, it’s a way to ensure that artists are compensated when their music is used. ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Publishers) was founded in 1914, and pretty much had a monopoly on licensing until 1939, when it demanded a 100-percent increase in fees.
The National Association of Broadcasters responded by creating BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated), both to offer an affordable alternative to ASCAP and to license emerging genres of music that ASCAP wasn’t interested in — namely, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel, country, folk, Latin, and, eventually, rock and roll. Radio stations essentially banned ASCAP recordings from the airwaves, giving BMI a huge win and making it a major player overnight.
But this posed a serious problem for recording artists. When they realized that the vast library of ASCAP-licensed songs were off-limits, the more creative artists circumvented that obstacle by taking advantage of a loophole in the laws then governing intellectual property. This proved to be a windfall for beboppers, who simply applied new melodies to the chord changes of familiar songs, changed the titles, and registered them as their own compositions.
The opportunity to create new work using existing harmonic material was attractive to musicians and record companies, as chord progressions are not subject to copyright infringement law. It enabled bands to record songs that could exploit the popularity of older ones and increase sales; but among more creative and innovative musicians, developing new work on older songs re-cast the song in a contemporary context, but expressed in the idiosyncratic style of the artist.
It even can be said that this development did as much to put bebop itself on the map as it did to launch BMI, because it played right into the bebop mindset. In swing and other kinds of music up to that time, improvisation was modular, relegated to pre-ordained sections, similar to the (usually short) cadenza passages in classical music. Bebop, however, reversed that model — musicians would play the head, or main theme, of a piece, then break out into extended, exploratory, melodically complex soloing over the tune’s harmonic foundation, before finally returning to re-state the head.
In informal jam sessions and club dates these pop tunes were used as proving grounds for new musical ideas.
“I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing.”
Charlie Parker
The most famous contrafact is Rhythm Changes, which is based on the chord progression of I Got Rhythm. So why not get 10 for the price of one? By learning just a couple chord progressions, you’ll actually have memorised progressions to lots of different tunes.
In this way, the musician has a chance to “own” the work, both in terms of royalties and individuality. In earlier recording history this was done through the solo, as Coleman Hawkins did on Body and Soul in 1939. As record labels developed rosters, they focussed more on “The New Thing” ― invariably this meant a soloist or band leader with an strong improvisational voice, and for the composing musician this meant creating new forms and harmonies, or disguising the old ones.
Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm harmonic structure, along with its numerous variations, has spawned thousands of contrafacts. Composers from Duke Ellington to Ornette Coleman have written new melodies over this venerable set of chord changes.
Two famous I Got Rhythm-based compositions are Charlie Parker’s Dexterity and Crazeology by Parker and Benny Harris. .
And that is the origin of many of the contrafacts of the 1940s, including “Ornithology”, written by Benny Harris and Charlie Parker and recorded by Parker in 1946, six years after Morgan Lewis and lyricist Nancy Hamilton wrote the song, “How High the Moon”, for the 1940 Broadway revue, Two for the Show. The songs share the same chordal movement, with Bird’s overlaid melodic materials differing from the previously established tune enough to preclude legal problems.
What is a contrafact?
Contrafactum is the term for a Medieval era process of applying new texts to older melodies. This was connected to the practice of troping, where new words were added to pre-existing song texts. There are two results from troping: the trope, where the additional words had some context or shared meaning with the older lyrics; and the sequence where the new words did not refer to the original work.
However, the contrafact is not an exclusively jazz phenomenon, the tradition of taking an existing song and altering it started in the 16th century. During this time the lyrics for secular songs were often replaced with religious text. In doing so the harmonic backdrop was preserved while a more “meaningful” text was applied.
Within jazz itself, sometimes the more popular contrafacts can become better known to musicians than the original composition: calling Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies or Bob Carleton’s Ja-Da sees people rooting for fake books (and perhaps not finding them), but calling Thelonious Monk’s In Walked Bud or Sonny Rollins’ Doxy is less problematic in a modern jazz jam session.
The best known contrafacts in jazz are the many versions of the blues. The blues has no true “original” melody: it is an eternally unfinished song form. The blues have a few distinct harmonic and metrical forms of their own, of which (simplistically) the most common in jazz is a twelve-bar structure in duple or compound time that moves from tonic to subdominant, then usually to the dominant before returning to the tonic. Each musician creates a new melody within this framework, sometimes with minor alterations to the harmony, but almost always with a different melody.
ANTI-LANGUAGES
By rejecting, modifying and replacing elements of the lingua franca, members of small groups and communities were able to communicate subversively. This can certainly be seen in the advances in American jazz, where rhythmic and harmonic innovations divided some musicians and critics into various factions or schools, somehow apart from the main body of jazz (for example, perceptions of the “Tristano school” of players being unemotional and detached; Parker and Gillespie playing music that was too complex and designed to not entertain the audience
Coltrane being described as “anti-jazz” by someone, somewhere at almost every major stage of his career.
The second take of Ko Ko and Byas’ version of How High The Moon were released on the same single by Savoy in April 1946; Ornithology was released by Dial, but Parker didn’t record a studio version of this song until 28th March 1946. It is unclear how parts of a “newly-written” song came to appear in an improvised solo that preceded it.
Parker expresses this musical sentiment referring to his experimentation over Ray Noble’s standard Cherokee. Take a listen to Parker’s contrafact KoKo on Cherokee:
Tunes like Ornithology, Koko and Donna Lee were the natural result of the experimentation and study of these standards.
It’s important to keep in mind though, that an effective contrafact is not just another blues head or rhythm changes tune or haphazard melody over a familiar progression. For the greatest improvisers, the contrafact was a way to explore a new harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic concept — to instantaneously stick with tradition and move it forward.
Here are a few common jazz contrafacts that you’re probably encountered.
In contrast to the original melody of I Got Rhythm, the melodies of Dexterityand Crazeology have a classic bebop identity. The complexity of each of these melodies evoke the sound of an improvised solo. Dexterity contains greater chromatic content melodically, while Crazeology combines chromatic harmonic content with simpler diatonic melodic content.
Another important contrafact is Lennie Tristano’s Ablution, which is based on the chord changes of the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein tune, All the Things You Are. While Tristano stays true to the original chord changes, the first eight measures of the piece. First, there is a great deal of chromaticism in the melody, much more than contained in Dexterity. Parker’s use of chromatic tones is limited to conventional chord extensions while Tristano employs notes beyond those typically found in chord/scale relationships.
Ornithology.
In a radio interview Parker said
Ever since I’ve ever heard music, I thought it should be very clean, very precise — as clean as possible, anyway, and more or less tuned to people. Something they could understand, something that was beautiful, you know? Because definitely there are stories and stories and stories that can be told.
Parker’s solos on the song always depart from the main theme radically, communicate directly to the listener, but using the musical language he created for himself. Parker’s improvisational performances were in fact a form of pre-composition, which might be an overstep if we take “pre-composition” to mean that he wrote entire solos out (although there is no reason why he may not have done this). Charlie Parker’s ideas around the placing of his phrases and ornamentations in musical time are more revolutionary than the harmonic and melodic devices he used. Because of this, Ornithology hides its ancestor very effectively: the influence of Parker is so pervasive that the only reason we know they are related is through the chord progression. From a compositional standpoint, Parker and Harris troped on How High The Moon to create a sequence, obscuring the rhythm, stress, melodic contour and meaning of the original to express the new language.
Lennie Bird: homage to the present time
In a short amount of time, there were already many musicians emulating Parker’s style. One person who did not was Lennie Tristano. Tristano was a pianist who had very definite ideas about how the music should go, and how be-bop was formed: he thought that bebop should be “cool, light, and soft”, and saw the new form as an evolutionary step in jazz. He formed a school of players like Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, who through his teaching methods learned a way of improvising and composing which has an intelligent focus on the line, contrapuntal collective improvisation and advanced harmonic substitutions. Tristano encouraged his students to write solos on existing songs ― essentially contrafacts ― as part of musical development.
Tristano met Parker in 1947, and saw him as both the most talented progenitor of bebop. Each man respected the other’s skill and musical ideas, with Tristano teaching his students to transcribe solos by Parker so as to study his innovations closely: whilst decrying many other musicians as superficial copyists of Parker’s original style.
Examining Tristano’s song Lennie Bird there are some signs of this admiration.
Unlike Ornithology, Lennie Bird remains faithful to the transposition of the first musical phrase that occurs in How High The Moon: but other than that, it is more closely bound to Ornithology, and it could be declared a contrafact of its contemporary.
REHARMONIZATION
The second technique of reinventing the standard songbook used by improvisers is reharmonization — altering a chord or sequence of chords in a song’s progression while retaining the original melody and structural outline of the tune.
After experimenting with altering the melody through the contrafact, the next logical step is to actually change the chord progression of a tune — reharmonization. For example, take a look at the normal 12 bar blues progression and Bird’s reharmonization of the blues:
12 Bar Blues
Bird Blues
Certain chords have been altered or substituted to create a more dense harmonic motion, yet the overall form of the tune remains the same. You can also check out this article, Basic Bebop Reharmonization, for more on this concept.
Here are a few common reharmonizations that you’ll probably encounter at some point in your musical journey:
Blues = Blues for Alice
Rhythm Changes = Eternal Triangle
How High the Moon = Satellite
Rosetta = Yardbird Suite
Satellite: going different places
“I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.”
John Coltrane
By the time Charlie Parker had died in 1955, John Coltrane’s career seemed to be on an ascending path: the trumpeter Miles Davis formed a critically-acclaimed and popular quintet with him, and he was seen as one of the up-and-coming young tenor saxophonists along with Sonny Rollins. At the same time, his life was in free fall — his dependence on heroin and alcohol affected his ability to work, eventually forcing Davis to disband the group in 1956.
During this time, Coltrane had a dream in which he says Charlie Parker had told him to keep on those progressions ’cause that’s the right thing to do― something he certainly took to heart at this time: his writing around this period involved different harmonic configurations relying on alterations of sequences based on seconds and fourths, and creating the instrumental and musical agility to create many alternatives on the same sequence. It’s rarely pointed out, but evidence of this work can be seen as early as on the septet album “Coltrane” with the song Straight Street, where the rhythmic pattern of functional v-I progressions creates a descent in the tonal harmony of a major second each measure:
We were sleeping at their place at 103rd and Broadway, and we knew John was awake when we heard him playing tenor sax for an hour… John explained that he was playing the intervals to his recent composition, Giant Steps; he even showed us the voicing on the piano.
Along with that landmark song, he conducted his harmonic experiments using contrafacts, as shown in Countdown (based on Eddie Vinson’s Tune Up — which was popularised and then attributed to Miles Davis), Fifth House (on Tadd Dameron’s Hot House, itself a contrafact of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing called Love), 26–2 (Charlie Parker’s Confirmation), and his contrafact on How High The Moon called Satellite.
In the late fifties John Coltrane began to experiment with reharmonization and the concept of non-diatonic or chromatic third relationships. Below is an example of this reharmonization technique he created on a ii-V7-I in the key of C.
In Coltrane’s reharmonization of the standard ii-V7 -I progression shown above, the new key centers are Ab, E and C. The basic outline is still D-7 to G7 to C, but he doubles the harmonic motion and introduces new key centers moving by chromatic thirds.
Additionally, related dominant chord (V7) is then placed before each of the key centers to accentuate its arrival.
Apart from being a trope on the original title, Coltrane’s contrafact puts the original melody in plain sight from bars 10 to 14, showing its roots. The rest of the song is typical of Coltrane’s writing in this period of his development; like Giant Steps and all the contrafacts mentioned, the melody of Satellite is tied to the minim of each bar, and the chord changes are also mapped to this duple rhythm. This has the effect of removing the structure of the melody at the fourth level.
With Satellite, Coltrane is not just expressing his language through melody, but more through obscuring the old harmonic progression and adjusting it to fit his own needs, all the while keeping hold of the root of the original.
Below is a list of tunes that Coltrane tunes and reharmonizations that utilize the above chord relationship:
Body and Soul
But not for Me
Fifth House = Hot House
Countdown = Tune Up
Spring is Here
Satellite = How High the Moon
26–2 = Confirmation
Going Beyond Contrafacts In the realm of 1960s post-bebop composition, Wayne Shorters contributions are of major importance in conceptual and historical terms. Of the 35 compositions recorded on Miles Davis E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Water Babies, and Miles in the Sky albums, 17, or nearly half, were penned by Shorter.
Musical quotation is the practice of directly quoting another work in a new composition. The quotation may be from the same composer’s work (self-referential), or from a different composer’s work (appropriation).
Sometimes the quotation is done for the purposes of characterization, as in Puccini’s use of The Star-Spangled Banner in reference to the American character Lieutenant Pinkerton in his opera Madama Butterfly, or in Tchaikovsky’s use of the Russian and French national anthems in the 1812 Overture, which depicted a battle between the Russian and French armies.
Musical quotation is to be distinguished from variation, where a composer takes a theme (their own or another’s) and writes variations on it. In that case, the origin of the theme is usually acknowledged in the title (e.g., Johannes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn).
In the case of quotations, however, an explicit acknowledgment does not generally appear in the score. Some exceptions are found in Robert Schumann’s Carnaval:
in the section “Florestan” he quotes a theme from his earlier work Papillons, Op. 2, and the inscription “(Papillon?)” is written underneath the notes (he quotes the same theme in the final section “Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins”, but without acknowledgement)
in the final section, he also quotes another theme first used in Papillons, the traditional Grossvater Tanz (Grandfather Dance), but this time the inscription is “Thème du XVIIème siècle”.
Where are the contrafacts now?
Tristano, Parker, and Coltrane were applying contrafactum on a popular song: A quick look at recent jazz releases shows that it’s more common to cover a song than apply contrafactum.
The context for working with popular material shifted from one black Amercian art-form (jazz) to another — the rap and turntablist elements of hip-hop culture. Through the process of sampling and mixing, turntablists and DJs pay homage to the pre-existing song, even as they manipulate its form for their own musical structures.
In early hip-hop the sources of material were just taken from anywhere they could be found: but as hip-hop-influenced pop music and hip-hop itself has become globalized and commercialized, it has had to deal with the consequences. Where jazz rarely asked permission to borrow even in its popular phase, hip-hop and pop are now constrained by law and economics.
Some of the key contrafacts are:
I Got Rhythm
Anthropology ~ Parker
Moose the Mooche ~ Parker
Cotton Tail ~ Ellington
Daphne ~ Reinhardt
Don’t be That Way ~ Goodman
Lester Leaps In ~ Young
Oleo ~ Rollins
Rhythm-A-Ning ~ Monk
The Eternal Triangle ~ Stitt
All the Things You Are
Ablution ~ Tristano
All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother ~ Mingus
Bird of Paradise ~ Parker
Boston Bernie ~ Gordon
I Want More ~ Gordon
Jahbero ~ Dameron
Prince Albert ~ Dorham
Back Home Again in Indiana
Ice Freezes Red ~ Navarro
Ju-Ju ~ Tristano
Lex ~ Byrd
Donna Lee ~ Parker
Cherokee Apache Dance ~ George Coleman
The Injuns ~ Byrd
Ko-Ko ~ Parker
Warmin Up a Riff ~ Parker
Confirmation
26–2 ~ Coltrane
Denial ~ Davis
Doujie ~ Montgomery
Juicy Lucy ~ Silver
Meteor ~ Farlow
Striver’s Row ~ Rollins
Weeja ~ Elmo Hope
What Is This Thing Called Love?
Barry’s Bop ~ Navarro
Hot House ~ Dameron
Subconscious Lee ~ Konitz
Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am ~ Mingus
What Love? ~ Mingus
Stompin’ at the Savoy
The Kangaroo ~ Les Paul
Relaxin’ With Lee ~ Parker
Sweet Georgia Brown
Bright Mississippi ~ Monk
Dig ~ Davis
Sweet Clifford ~ Brown
Teapot ~ J. J. Johnson
Just You, Just Me
Mad Be Bop ~ J. J. Johnson
Spotlite ~ Coleman Hawkins
Evidence ~ Monk
Lover, Come Back to Me
Bean and the Boys ~ Hawkins
Bird Gets the Worm ~ Parker
Quicksilver ~ Silver
Oh, Lady Be Good!
Dewey Square ~ Parker
Rifftide ~ Hawkins
Fats Blows ~ Navarro
Hackensack ~ Monk
Out of Nowhere
Casbah ~ Dameron
Jayne ~ Ornette Coleman
Nostalgia ~ Navarro
317 East 32nd Street ~ Tristano
How High the Moon
Lennie-Bird ~ Tristano
Ornithology ~ Parker
And countless others…
But do keep in mind that the chord progressions of contrafacts, while based on other songs, may have been reharmonized — so they won’t look 100% the same. But they are, nonetheless, based off the original song so it’s still worth learning the original chord progressions.
“We begin by misunderstanding the music we play: listen carefully and follow what [these voices] say to you, and you will see, you will then hear more and more distinctly, and you will know more and more about yourself”
[Dich immer besser in Dir auskennen]”.
Communication typically goes wrong because other people have, as we put it, the wrong picture of what we’re meaning. It can take an age for two people to realize divergences over quite basic things. We’re very bad at managing to make good pictures in the minds of others.
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Messages get misunderstood because the way we categorize
What is taking place in our mind when we listen to music? Is it a construction of formal structures, or is it a correlation between emotional labels and musical motifs, electrical impulses in the brain and so on? This assumption, which is regarded almost as self-evident, is the starting point for all the attempts to explain the nature of the musical experience.
A lot of unhappiness comes about in this world because we can’t let other people know what we mean clearly enough. On the one hand, pure formalism, which claims that musical forms are constructed in the listeners mind while listening to the music, lacks the power to explain the importance of music to human life — the excitement evoked by a particularly marvelous performance, for example.
One of the philosophers who can help us with our communication problems is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was a recluse. He had a stutter, paused for ages in the middle of his sentences and had a habit of storming out if he didn’t like what people were saying. It was weirdly the ideal background for someone intent on studying how easily communication between people goes wrong.
Born Vienna in 1889. The youngest child of a wealthy, highly cultured but domineering steel magnate. Three of Ludwig’s four brothers took their own lives, and Ludwig himself was frequently troubled by suicidal thoughts. After studying at Cambridge, his father died and he inherited a lot of money. He gave it all away, mainly to his already very rich relatives and went to live in spartan solitude in Norway.
His two great works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) has fascinated artists, playwrights, poets, novelists, musicians and even movie-makers, and yet in a sense Wittgenstein’s himself realized, his style of thinking was at odds with the “Zeigeist” or “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all.
How do human beings manage to communicate ideas to one another?
Wittgenstein thought of this while reading a newspaper article about a Paris court case in which, in order to explain with greater efficacy, the details of an accident that had taken place a road junction, the court had arranged for the accident to be reproduced visually using model cars and pedestrians.
It was a Eureka moment. In Wittgenstein’s view words enables us to make pictures of facts. And his answer is that language works by triggering within us pictures of how things are in the world. To say: The palm tree is by the shore, paints a rapid sketch that like the model lets another person see the situation in their mind and understand.
On the whole, problems of communication typically start because we don’t have a clear and accurate enough picture of what we mean in our own heads. We say meaningless things which therefore can go nowhere in the minds of others or we read more meaning into the words of other than they ever intended or than is warranted.
You tell your partner you had a conversation with an interesting person at the hotel reception. The picture in your mind is an innocent one. But your partner swiftly forms a very different impression.
In the humanities, scientism takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies” — .
Ray Monk
Wittgenstein says that there are many questions, to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions.
Roger Penrose, has a theory, on Penroses own admission, speculative, in which he thinks that a stream of consciousness is an orchestrated sequence of quantum physical events taking place in the brain. But suppose he’s correct, would we, as a result, understand ourselves any better? Is a scientific theory the only kind of understanding? Well, you might ask, what other kind is there?
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. It strives, not after scientific truth, but after conceptual clarity.
In the Tractatus, this clarity is achieved through a correct understanding of the logical form of language, which, once achieved, was destined to remain inexpressible, leading Wittgenstein to compare his own philosophical propositions with a ladder, which is thrown away once it has been used to climb up on.
Ray Monk
The difference between science and philosophy, is between two distinct forms of understanding: the theoretical and the non-theoretical. Scientific understanding is given through the construction and testing of hypotheses and theories; philosophical understanding, on the other hand, is resolutely non-theoretical. What we are after in philosophy is the understanding that consists in seeing connections.
Instead of thinking that language is only just about pictures, he developed the idea that language is like a kind of tool that we use to play different games, which doesn’t literally mean games, more patterns of intentions.
So if a parent says to a frightened child: “Don’t worry — everything’s gonna to be fine”, they can’t know it really will be fine.
They aren’t playing the Rational Prediction From Available Facts Game.
They’re playing another game: The Words as an Instrument of Comfort and Security Game Wittgenstein’s point is that all kinds of misunderstandings arise when we don’t see which kind of game someone is involved in.
If one’s partner says: “You never help me. You’re so unreliable.” The natural inclination might be to hear this as a part of a Stating the Facts Game; like saying: The battle of Waterloo was in 1815.
So one might respond by citing facts about how actually you got the car insurance yesterday, and you bought some vegetables at lunch time, too. But actually, this person is involved in a different language game.
They’re using words not to capture facts. They’re playing The Help and Reassurance Game. So in the language game, they’re involved in, “You never help” means “I want you to be more nurturing.”
For example, if we ask a group of subjects to point at the appropriate colored rectangle when they hear the word “red,” we could come to some conclusions about the empirical link between the word and the subjects’ behavior.
In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein also wanted to draw attention to how much of our self-understanding depends on the words of others, on languages that have developed publicly and communally over many centuries long before we’re born.
To give as example, in Western cultures we roll out a red carpet for an honored guest; we do not wear loud red clothes at a funeral; a bride is dressed in white. Grasped as norms, these links constitute a meaning of these objects, and thus they are analogical to grammatical links in a particular language.
NON-THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING IS STILL ACTUAL UNDERSTANDING
Non-theoretical understanding is the kind of understanding we have when we say that we understand a poem, a piece of music, a person or even a sentence.
How does one demonstrate an understanding of a piece of music?
What is needed, is “a culture”: “If someone is brought up in a particular culture-and then reacts to music in such-and-such a way, you can teach him the use of the phrase ‘expressive playing.’ What is required for this kind of understanding is a form of life, a set of communally shared practices, together with the ability to hear and see the connections made by the practitioners of this form of life.
The reason computers have no understanding of the sentences they process is not that they lack sufficient neuronal complexity, but that they are not, and cannot be, participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.
We are bewitched into thinking that if we lack a scientific theory of something, we lack any understanding of it. Imagining, for example, that we will understand ourselves better if we study the quantum behaviour of the sub-atomic particles inside our brains, a belief analogous to the conviction that a study of acoustics will help us understand Beethoven’s music.
The British philosopher Alan Watts, said it best: A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow.
One of the crucial differences between the method of science and the non-theoretical understanding that is exemplified in music, art, philosophy and ordinary life, is that science aims at a level of generality which necessarily eludes these other forms of understanding.
To understand a person is to be able to tell, for example, whether he means what he says or not, whether his expressions of feeling are genuine or feigned.
“Is there, such a thing as ‘expert judgment’ about the genuineness of expressions of feeling?” Yes, , there is.
But the evidence upon which such expert judgments about people are based is “imponderable,” resistant to the general formulation characteristic of science. “Imponderable evidence,”“includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone. I may recognise a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one… But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference… If I were a very talented painter I might conceivably represent the genuine and simulated glance in pictures.”
“An inner process stands in need of outward criteria,” And where does one find such acute sensitivity? Not, typically, in the works of psychologists, but in those of the great artists, musicians and novelists. “People nowadays,” , “think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them-that does not occur to them.”
Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value
RETROSPECTION – TUNE RECOGNITION
How is retrospection different from other memories? Why can music trigger memories in us? And how does expectation lead to the experience of emotion? Tune recognition or as I like to call it retrospection involves a number of complex neural computations interacting with memory. It requires that our brains ignore certain features while we focus only on features that are invariant.
The brain must be able to separate the aspects of a song that remain the same each time we hear it from those that are one-time-only variations. If the brain didn’t do this, each time we heard a song at a different volume, we’d experience it as an entirely different song! And volume isn’t the only parameter that potentially changes.
THE CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW
The relational school argues that our CPU and main memory system stores information about the relations between objects and ideas, but not necessarily details about the objects themselves.
If shown two cars that barely scraped each other, one group of subjects might be asked, How fast were the cars going when they scraped each other? Their memory output of what they actually saw had been reconstructed on the basis of a simple question the experimenter had asked a week earlier.
Have you ever tried to tell someone about a dream you had over breakfast the next morning? We naturally and automatically fill in this missing information when retelling the dream. The left brain makes up stories based on the limited information it gets.
We can change all of the pitches used in the song , the tempo, and the instrumentation, and the song is still recognized as the same song. We can change the arrangement say from blue- grass to rock, or heavy metal to classical and, as the Led Zeppelin lyric goes, the song remains the same.
OHRWURM
how it is that songs get stuck in our heads. Scientists call these ear worms, from the German Ohrwurm. Our best explanation is that the neural circuits representing a song get stuck in playback mode, and the song or worse, a little fragment of it plays back over and over again.
THE RECORD-KEEPING THEORY
Supporters of this view argue that memory is like a tape recorder or digital video camera, preserving all or most of our experiences accurately, and with near perfect fidelity. Experiences are stored as traces, they said, that are reactivated when we retrieve the episodes from the CPU and memory.
We also know anecdotally that people can recognize hundreds, if not thousands, of voices. You can probably recognize the sound of your mother’s voice within one word, even if she doesn’t identify herself. You cccan tell your spouse’s voice right away, and whether he or she has a cold or is angry with you, all from the timbre of the voice.
We can hold in memory the sound of famous peoples voices, often as theyre uttering specific content or catchphrases: Im not a crook, Say the magic woid and win a hundred dollars, Go ahead — make my day, We remember the specific words and specific voices, not just the gist.
CATEGORIZATION
In order to survive, to find edible food, water, shelter, to escape predators, and to mate, the organism must deal with three scenarios.
1st SCENARIO
Objects that may create identical, or nearly identical, patterns of stimulation on our eardrums, retinas, taste buds, or touch sensors may actually be different entities.
SECOND SCENARIO
Second, objects, though in presentation they may be different, are inherently identical. Although I may be used to hearing your voice in person, through both ears, when I hear you over the phone, in one ear, I need to recognize that you’re the same person.
The first two are perceptual processes: understanding that a single object may manifest itself in multiple viewpoints, or that several objects may have identical viewpoints.
3rd SCENARIO
The third problem states that objects, although different in presentation, are of the same natural kind. A red apple may look different from a green apple, but they are both still apples.
Leonard Meyer notes that classification is essential to enable composers, performers, and listeners to internalize the norms governing musical relationships, and consequently, to comprehend the implications of patterns, and experience deviations from stylistic norms.
Our need to classify, as Shakespeare says in A Midsummer Nights Dream, is to give to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.
Aristotle laid the methods by which modern philosophers and scientists think about how concepts form in humans. He argued that categories result from lists of defining features. For example, we have in our minds an internal representation for the category “triangle.” It contains a mental image or picture of every triangle we’ve ever seen, and we can imagine new triangles as well.
WITTGENSTEIN
How do we get out of this reliance on definitions? Is there an alternative? Wittgenstein proposed that category membership is determined not by a definition, but by family resemblance. We call something a heavy metal if it resembles other things we have previously called heavy metal.
Although most heavy metal songs have distorted electric guitars, so does Beat It by Michael Jackson — in fact, Eddie Van Halen plays the guitar solo in that song. Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin is a heavy metal anthem, and there are no heavy, loud drums in 90 percent of that song.
SHADES OF MEMBERSHIP
Is a robin a bird? Most people would answer yes. Is a chicken a bird? Is a penguin? Categories do not always have clear boundaries. Questions of membership are a matter of debate and there can be differences of opinion:
Certain stimuli hold a privileged position in our perceptual system or our conceptual system, and that these become prototypes for a category: In the case of our perceptual system, categories like “red” and “blue” are a consequence of our retinal physiology; certain shades of red are universally going to be regarded as more vivid, more central, than others because a specific wavelength of visible light will cause the “red” receptors in our retina to fire maximally. We form categories around these central, or focal, colors.
Rosch tested this idea on a tribe of New Guinea people, the Dani, who have only two words in their language for colors, mili and mola, which essentially correspond to light. When shown a bunch of different shades of red, we don’t pick a particular one because we’ve been taught that it is the best red, we pick it out because our physiology bestows a privileged perceptual position on it.
Think of “Revolution 9” (an experimental tape piece written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with no original music, no melody or rhythm, which begins with an announcer repeating, “Number 9, Number 9,” over and over again) how far is it from a prototype song?
There are three eras of Fleetwood Mac: the blues years with Peter Green on guitar, the middle pop years with Danny Kirwan, Christine Mc Vie, and Bob Welch as songwriters, and the later years after Buckingham-Nicks joined. Although Mick Fleetwood and John Mc Vie, the drummer and bassist, are the only two members who have been with the group from its beginning, neither of whom sings or wrote the major songs.
HIERARCHICAL ENCODING
Most musicians cannot start playing a piece of music they know at any arbitrary location; musicians learn music according to a hierarchical phrase structure. Other experiments have shown that musicians are faster and more accurate at recalling whether a certain note appears in a musical piece if that note is at the beginning of a phrase or is on a downbeat, rather than being in the middle of a phrase or on a weak beat.
Heres a demonstration, done by Daniel J Levitin based on an experiment that Andrea Halpern conducted: Does the word at appear in the American national anthem ?
If you’re like most people, you scanned through the song in your head, singing it to yourself at a rapid rate, until you got to the phrase What so proudly we hailed, at the twilights last gleaming.
Now, a number of interesting things happened here.
First, If you were only able to play back a particular version you had stored in memory, you wouldnt be able to do this.
Second,
Your memory is not like a tape recorder; if you want to speed up a tape recorder or video or film to make the song go faster, you have to also raise the pitch.
Third,
When you did finally reach the word at in your mind your target in answering the question I posed you probably couldn’t help yourself from continuing, pulling up the rest of the phrase, the twilights last gleaming. This suggests that our memory for music involves hierarchical encoding not all words are equally salient, and not all parts of a musical phrase hold equal status. We have certain entry points and exit points that correspond to specific phrases in the music — again, unlike a tape recorder.
Daniel J Levitin
THE MULTIPLE TRACE THEORY
We need a theory of category formation that will account for
If Im only storing abstract, generalized gist information, how could I construct a category like songs that have the word love in them without having the word love in the title ?
The distinguishing feature of exemplar theory is that every experience, every word heard, every kiss shared, every object seen, every song youve ever listened to, is encoded as a trace in memory.
MULTIPLE- TRACE MEMORY MODELS.
As we attend to a melody, we must be performing calculations on it; in addition to registering the absolute values, the details of its presentation details such as pitch, rhythms, tempo, and timbre we must also be calculating melodic intervals and tempo-free rhythmic information.
We are storing both the abstract and the specific information contained in melodies. They preserve context, multiple-trace memory models can also explain how we sometimes retrieve old and nearly forgotten memories. Have you ever been walking down the street and suddenly smelled an odor that you hadn’t smelled in a long time, and that triggered a memory of some long-ago event?
Wittgenstein uses understanding music as a model for understanding language. Understanding what it means to understand music can give us a clue to understanding language. The issue is particularly challenging when instrumental music absolute music, as Wagner was the first to name it is at issue: How could a collection of pure musical sounds express anything?
It seems obvious that people understand music when they listen to it,
However, understanding music is not a mental event that occurs in the listener’s mind as a reaction to musical sounds. We therefore cannot understand what it means to understand music through psychological or statistical studies of mental reactions.
We cannot answer questions about aesthetic impressions through empirical experiments or statistics as to people’s reactions and the agreements among them,
Rather, to describe a musical taste we have to ask about the whole musical tradition:
Did children give concerts in that musical culture? Did women give them or only men? Did widening the audience circle from the nobility to the bourgeois have any influence on these matters?
In the Brown Book Wittgenstein mobilizes music to clarify this idea:
Understanding and explaining a musical phrase. -Sometimes the simplest explanation is a gesture; on another occasion it might be a dance step, or words describing a dance. — But isn’t understanding the phrase experiencing something whilst we hear it? . . . Are we supposed to imagine the dance, or whatever it may be, while we listen? . . . If seeing the dance is what is important, it would be better to perform that rather than the music. But that is all misunderstanding.
Explanations of music, according to Wittgenstein, do not rely on decisive evidence, on justifying conditions.
We can whistle, draw something, do some movement with our hand or make a comparison with a clown walking a tightrope and almost falling. If we don’t succeed in explaining it in one way, we can always try another.
Thus, this is not the right way to approach the question of musical meaning. What is the right way, then?
We have to know music. We have to learn to play an instrument, learn harmony, forms and structures; we have to know the history of music, the history of its theory and aesthetics. We cannot explain or understand how we understand music without knowing music, as we cannot explain or understand how we understand language without knowing a language. We cannot really talk about understanding music without some degree of musical ability.
The more comprehensive one’s musical skills, the deeper one’s understanding. It is always possible to deepen it even more by practice.
Another language game that we can imagine is a music lesson: the teacher explains a musical phrase to the student through an image or gesture. From the student’s reaction — a light in his eyes, something he says and especially the way he now plays — the teacher can know whether he understood or not. If not, the teacher can try another explanation. Understanding music, according to Wittgenstein, is a matter of learning; that is what explanations in music are aimed at.
The clue to understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy of music is, more than anything else, music itself. It is doubtful whether one can understand what he says about music without having significant musical skills. At a time when the humanities are institutionally obliged to pretend to be sciences, we need more than ever the lessons about understanding that Wittgenstein — and the arts — have to teach us.
