Re: Coffeehouse Guitar vs street-busker

[mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 10:53 PM -0600 7/20/06, Krispen Hartung wrote:
>
>Plato's theory of the forms (it was not Socrates, btw)

Thank you!  I knew Socrates didn't sound right, but I was having a 
brain, erm, cloud as to where the theory originated.

>one can only suggest, in this theory at least, that music is only in the 
>mind.

Oh, in more than merely this theory.  I can remember in College 
Physics 101, our professor took about 15 minutes to tackle the issue 
regarding, "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no-one there to 
hear it...".  His main point was that very definition of Sound 
requires a receiver (listener) to interpret the vibrations in the air 
and convert them into Sound.  Otherwise, as you stated, there's no 
difference between generating Sound and merely moving air.  (So, that 
falling tree moves air, but since there's no observer it doesn't 
generate sound).  Sound only occurs in the brain, at least according 
to basic Newtonian Physics.

Thus, if Music is a subset of Sound, then the brain/mind is an 
indispensable component in the chain.  Some aspects of 
psychoacoustics also attempt to chart the characteristics of 
Sound/Music that occur only within the mind, completely divorced from 
the physical world.

>Man, I love this shit....I'll never be able to get to sleep now.

Kris, if you ever get a chance, I think you'd also get a kick out of 
reading writings from the philosophers of the Iranian Neo-Platonist 
movement -- around the first millennium AD (starting with Ibn Sina, 
but primarily Suhrawardi and Qutb al-Din Shirazi).  It's not so 
well-known here in the West, but the Islamic world actually spent 
quite a bit of time and thought extrapolating on the concepts first 
voiced by the great Greek philosophers.  Much of that philosophy was 
incorporated into the Illuminationist school of Islamic thought.

I've never been able to get very far in my reading of it for two 
reasons: A.) I don't already have the required background in the 
teachings of the Classical Greeks, and B.) I'm not really smart 
enough.  :P

It sounds like something that would be right up your alley, though, 
if you haven't already delved into the writings of that philosophical 
school.

        --m.
-- 
_______
"Take a packet of seeds.  Take yourself out to play
  I want to see river of orchids where we had a motorway..."