Week 11

CRITIQUE: Assignment 4 (Found Footage)

Music and Nature continued

Readings:(all downloaded to class files)

·       Hauser, Marc D. and Josh McDermott. 2004.  Are consonant intervals music to their ears? Spontaneous acoustic preferences in a nonhuman primate.

·       Gray, Patricia, et al. 2001. The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music.

·       Barucha, Jamshed J., Meagan Curtis, Kaivon Paroo. 2006. Varieties of Musical Experience.

Additional

·       Selections from The Origins of Music (2001). Edited by Nils Wallin, Bjorrn Merker, and Steven Brown.

Listening

·       Pauline Oliveros ­­–– Alien Bog (1967)

·       Chris Watson –– Vatnajökull (2003)

·       Ron Nagorcka –– Devils of the Night (2002)

FOUND FOOTAGE ASSIGNMENT:
Can be viewed here: Je te Plumerai

I took the commandment "to have fun" with this assignment literally.  Much of the footage is from the 1930s, and I had gathered two sound clips, one the French tune Allouette, from the same time period and region sung by "The Forester's Chorus." When I looked up the meaning of Allouette, I found that the cheerful French work song is about plucking out the eyes, beak, and feathers of a bird for singing its morning melody. It seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to a film about a mysterious figure who turns off a large spigot, drying up a river and all its tributaries.

READINGS:

This week's readings and listenings were an interesting intersection of  scientific and anthropological perspectives. The main question here, as described by Gray, is about evolution and the nature of music. Evidence of musicality in whales and birds awaken a kind of yearning in humans for discovering a universal language of music. Examining how music and thought (human and otherwise) evolved and continues to evolve is a common thread throughout the readings.

Hasuer and McDermott tested various musical experiences on monkeys looking for just this kind of evidence. While monkeys prefer white noise and the sounds of eating to screams and louder sounds, they would just as soon sit next to a speaker and listen to nails clawing at a chalkboard as music. (Interestingly this is one sound that Schafer found to be universally detested around the world in his cultural studies of music. Cats purring was universally liked.)

While hating the sound of nails on a chalkboard is a uniquely human phenomena, most other sound combination preferences are diverse and varied throughout cultures. As Barucha and his colleagues explain, certain combinations of musical chords, which would seem to be more harmonically resonant, for example a progression from the chord of C to E, don't appear as expected. Cultural conditioning in Western music leads us to expect D to follow C and that is what we prefer.

Barucha's thesis involves looking at music as cognitive space.

Music structure, especially melody, harmony, and tonality, has

the properties of a mathematical space, but it also maps onto a psychological space

(Krumhansl, 1991; Lerdahl, 2003). Moving through this abstract space means

exploring its implications. While it has no counterpart in a physical space, neither

is it just a metaphor for physical space: it is a conscious representation that functionally

captures spatial relationships and movement. (Bharuch, 162)

This description  has interesting implications for artist who are exploring the intersections between phonography and music such as Chris Watson. Watson's field recording of the Vatnojokull glacier, the largest in Europe, were composed in much the same was as Steve Peters' ruminations on the New Mexico desert. The glacier is explored phonographically and collaged in the final composition to explore and redefine our expectations of field recording. If music is a kind of mapping of mathematical and psychological space, as Barucha describes, Watson's glacier fulfills the definition fully and completely.