Re: "What Might Future Digital Notation Look Like?"

["Per Boysen" <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Raul Bonell <raul.bonell@gmail.com> wrote:

> i don't think there's so much people with mental capabilities
> of listening/assimilating some harmony tricks unless they have
> studied these progressions before, or layering is not too dense.

I'd like to agree with Raul on that. Everyone does indeed "hear" music
inside when thinking music, but in order to use your audio imagination
to "hear" a score from looking at it one a paper you need to possess
the intellectual tools to connect the icons on the paper to the sounds
within your audio imagination.

I have some personal experience with that. Looking into myself and
memories from my childhood at the time before I learned about keys,
melodies, scales, contrapunct and all that stuff, I'm finding that
everything really was there, in my mind, from the beginning - I just
didn't know the names for all these musical phenomena, or knew what
physycally produced them. I could recognize, remember and think about
close atonal clusters, unison melody parts, major- minor- and minor
seven chords as well as different application of vibrato in choir
singing (typically the gospel touch, the "Disney barbershop" touch and
the non-vibrato classical choir sound). I was constantly hearing these
things on radio and all around and was thinking about them for years,
wondering what it was. This happened at about five years age. About
ten years later when I started playing instruments and did a quick
check on music theory I picked up the correct names and explanations
for all the musical phenomena that had haunted my childhood.

Who has not suffered the damnation of hearing a stupid song over and
over in your mind? Why would it be much different to induce such an
audio memory from reading a score on a paper? I'm convince any one,
that cares for it, can learn that very quickly. Our brain seems
designed to work pretty well with "audio thinking" along the full
spectrum of musical phenomena. Anything we have once heard we may be
able to think.

-- 
Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)
www.myspace.com/perboysen
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