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Re: Coffeehouse Guitar vs street-busker
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..."