The Survival of the Fittest vs. the
Wisest:
The Future of Electro-Acoustic Music
http://www.lmu.edu/acad/personal/faculty/mmilicevic/pers/98.htm
Author: Mladen Milicevic,
In order to
continue reading this paper any further beyond the first paragraph one has to
agree on two basic premises: a) to be interested in widening the audiences of
the electro-acoustic music beyond those people who are directly related to the
field; b) and also wish to use music as an art form which communicates
information among people with shared common experiences. Now, if you accept these two
statements you may proceed with interest--otherwise you will probably disagree
with most of the following text.
What can we learn form
Dawkins’ meme has a peculiar but
powerful role to play in our understanding of human culture. This is the way he
defines it:
Examples
of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes
fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate
themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves
in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via process which, in the
broadest sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about,
a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in
his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can
be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. [Dawkins
1976]
The important rule for memes, as for
genes, is that they must constantly replicate. This replication is a mindless
process not necessarily for the good of anything; replicators
that are good at replicating flourish--for whatever reason. Meme X spread among
the people because X is a good replicator. [Dennett
1995]
Let’s take a moment and look at the case
of one particular meme--the success of a four-note meme at the beginning of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It certainly has much less to do with the absolute
value of its pitch-set "internal" design, i.e. the way a musical
piece is compositionally structured, and much more to do with the design this
meme presents to the world, its phenotype, the way it affects the minds and
other memes in a particular socio-cultural environment.
It is very logical to assume that
humans intelligently create musical pieces (potential memes) rather than
producing them as random innovations. But, looking at
the state of affairs in electro-acoustic music, one sees more examples of
innovations than creations. Let me clarify the distinction. Quality of
electro-acoustic music, and for that matter the quality of anything, does not
depend exclusively on its structural organization, but rather it is rooted in
the transaction that occurs between the music and the audience. To evaluate
music is to find the quality of transaction between the musical configuration
and its cultural response. If that response is positive, meaning ecologically
prudent for the given cultural environment, then it may be
called creation. On the other hand, an innovation
which is just randomly new and not holistically related to the environment
will certainly produce a negative cultural response.
In order to expand the audiences for
electro-acoustic music it is necessary to look at the minds of the people who
constitute those audiences. Why in the minds? Because the minds are the habitats of the memes. Minds are
in limited supply, and each mind has only a limited capacity for the support of
memes; therefore, there is considerable "competition" among memes for entry into as many minds as possible. This
competition is the major selective force in the infosphere,
just as it is in the biosphere.
One way to look at music is through
the memetic competition among musical compositions
for admission into the minds of the audiences. Randomly presenting new musical
pieces (potential memes) to these minds can be compared
to playing by the rule of evolutionary biology known as the survival of the
fittest. It is well known that this game is
ruthless and will in its process discard the vast majority of its participants.
Being the only intelligent species on this planet, it is certainly wise not to
play by the rules of the very game that created us, because if we do so, we may
easily become a casualty of the same mindless evolutionary process. For that
reason, it would be preferable to turn this game around to our advantage,
redefining it slightly, and calling it the survival of the wisest. Since
humans have the brain that is capable of intelligent thinking, it would be a
tremendous waste not to use it in determining our own future, and the future of
our music. How can this be achieved?
Wrestling with this problem may
appear to be an insurmountable task, but the situation is not that hopeless
albeit. For the sake of clarity, let us imagine continuation of our inquiry as
an academic course in music composition. In this case, instead of teaching our students the elements of compositional structure such as
counterpoint, harmony, orchestration, etc., we teach them the basics of
understanding the sonic entities which human minds demonstrate interest when
listening. After the completion of such a course in music composition
our students would then be ready to learn the elements of musical structure
that may represent the best tools in achieving our intended goal. In other
words, how would students use musical structure in order to compose pieces which will seem interesting to the musically inclined
human minds of our audiences. As a consequence of this
process, the successful musical pieces will become the memes residing inside
the human minds. Once situated there, the memes will have a chance to
replicate, which is their sole function.
It is dangerous to make generalizations, but I am going to offer the following
anyway. Nobody cross-culturally educated would agree any more that music
represents a universal language. However, research tangibly shows that there
are some things which appear universally. In order to
make sense from the vast sonic events that enter its auditory cortex, the brain
had to become a master of simplification. This process is nothing like
filtering unwanted information, because such a mechanism would be tremendously
complicated and utterly inefficient. In actuality the
brain searches for familiar devices and patterns. [Jourdain,
1997] To create a musical pattern in the human brain,,
it is necessary to have repetition of the sonic event in question, thus it can
be remembered and used in the future. Composing a piece of music (a latent
meme) which appeals to the minds of the audiences outside the narrow and highly
specialized electro-acoustic music niche requires the existence of some sort of
a clearly recognizable musical reference. If there is a single negative
point about the avant-garde approaches in music, then it is the lack of
reference and use of discontinuity and disjunctness
without any historical or compositional reflexivity. Human beings, in large
part, will not find appealing anything which produces one unconnected
innovation after another, never going back and reevaluating
what has gone before in relation to what is going on now. Let me use an example
to illustrate this point.
Digital sound sampling and computer
technology of the nineties readily allow electro-acoustic music composers to
manipulate and transform organic sounds through myriad methods and
possibilities. This technological might inevitably render countless numbers of
musical compositions which deal with so-called sound
exploration. Unfortunately, most of these pieces remain just that--sound
explorations--and never present themselves as memes with faculty to catch on to
the audiences. Why is this so? Most of these pieces suffer from a syndrome which may be called "no point of
reference." What I mean is that if one is to make an
electro-acoustic music composition which deals, say, with sonic
transformation of the sound of a baby crying, one may consider it interesting
to do the following. First, it would be wise to ensure that the audience
listening to such a piece can clearly discern where this sonic manipulation is
coming from, and be able to hear and refer to from time to time to the original
sound source. Second, throughout the piece the audience should
be reasonably prepared for the direction these manipulations may take.
The human brain perceives by anticipation. It formulates perceptual hypotheses
and then confirms them. [Jourdain, 1997]
When the brain receives sequences of
musical sounds, it follows a similar process as in dealing with other patterns:
it attempts to "interpret" them by using the information stored in
its long-term memory about previous, similar experiences. This information may
allow some aspects of a future signal to be anticipated,
as happens when we hear the first line of a familiar song. This ability to
extrapolate forwards on the basis of past experience
is one form of that ability that we call "intelligence"; it can
dramatically enhance an organism’s chances of survival. Since humans constantly
judge by comparison, and our judgment of any item depends upon what we are
comparing it to at that moment, let’s be wise and use
this knowledge in composing music. If there is a point or pattern that
reflexively recurs throughout the musical composition, it will create its
memory in the brain and thus become a point of reference to which future
transformations of the same pattern may be compared.
If humans are able to compare then in return, they will be also able to
evaluate. If this evaluation process continues, in all probability it means
there is a growing interest in what is going on. This ongoing evaluative
process does not ensure that a musical composition containing recurring
patterns and their transformations will be a guaranteed recipe for the creation
of a successful meme. It simply means that unless there is a point of
reference, which may be just about anything recognizable to the ear-minds
of the audience, there is a significantly less chance for the produced meme to
catch on and become a good replicator. How
successfully one plays with musical patterns will, in the end, remain a matter
of musical talent.
It very important to understand that
it is no accident that the music memes which replicate
tend to be good for humans--not for reasons of our biological fitness,
but for whatever it is that we hold dear. This is an unsettling observation for
a person, who believes in absolutes. However, the situation should not be viewed
as totally desperate. Let me again put everything in
electro-acoustic music terms. It is amazingly fascinating to see what Csound, Cmix, Kyma,
Sound Designer, Sound Hack, and Lemur can do to sound samples, as well as what
MAX can do to musical structure when applied to fractals, neural nets, fibonacci numbers, solar systems, palindromes,
permutations, interpolations, pitch-sets, and population growth algorithms. It
is crucial to make sure that those fascinations that we hold dear,
do not remain the exclusive property of the composers who indulge themselves in
playing with their technological marvels. It is extremely important that the
audience also get to share some of our unique thrill. There must be some
significant overlap between what the composer holds dear and what the audience
holds dear.
This is a very demanding and
difficult task to put into reality, but if it is not done soon, the
electro-acoustic music memes are not going to find their habitats and replicate
themselves any further beyond the narrow, technically-oriented
facilitators. Unless established compositional approaches are changed, the
question will still remain: Do we compose only for our idiosyncratic selves or
for the audiences of our culture?.
On the other side of this argument Charles Rosen claims that survival of any music is
independent of the audience’s response.
The music that survives is the music
that musicians want to play. They perform it until it finds an audience.
Sometimes it is only a small audience, as it is in the case so far for Arnold
Schoenberg (and I am not sure if it will ever be a large one), but he will be
performed as long as there are musicians who insist on playing him. [Rosen
1998]
As much as I personally disagree
with Rosen’s basic assumptions about survival of the music, I can pretend for a
moment that Rosen is right having the following question rise: Who are the
performers of the computer music? The answer: Computer music
composers themselves. The only computer music composer that I came
across who publicly performs other composer’s computer music is Neil Rolnick. And here we arrive again
at the inescapable conclusion that we are playing our music for ourselves.
Isn’t it obvious that it is not
feasible to continue clinging to the notion that music is exclusively a form of
personal self-expression through which the composer produces a piece of music
without regard to the response from its socio-cultural environment. Paradoxical
notion of releasing musical memes in front of an audience and saying, "I
did not write my music for you at all, but I want you to listen to it
anyway" makes little sense. Evolution works on the same principle--the
survival of the fittest--in which case 99.99% of the answers to the question
raised above is certainly going to be "LEAVE IT!!!"
On the other hand, if a composer is interested in a socio-cultural response to
her/his music, it could make a wise decision and figure out what are the
perceptual and cognitive mechanisms which make audiences to like something.
Using the proposed approach, may certainly prove to be more successful in
sharing the electro-acoustic music with people who don’t
know what word
REFERENCES:
SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: