I have read the book, I think somewhere around the 6th grade. But I remember it, and even remember liking it. It is almost impossible to create a world without music. This is kind of a redundant blog because I have the beginnings of writing about this in my project proposal, but it's incredibly disconserting and eerie to experience a moment of sound-less-ness.
I visited the Pompideau this past summer, and an artist had created an installation in the museum that manifests this idea. He or she (I can't remember the artist's name) placed a player piano in a fairly large room, acoustically sound room. We entered this room first, and heard the Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. We passed through this room to enter a sound proof room. He placed a piano in this room as well, but the piano was not playing music. Oddly enough, I felt claustrophobic. The air felt thick and static, and my ears were almost ringing. In the absence of sound, my ears, it seems, tried to create noise. It was as if my aural sensory organs were going through withdrawal.
I can't imagine living in a music-less community. I imagine the citizens would be very much like automata, as they are in The Giver. Or would the conception of what is music change? In other words, would citizens in such a society find the screech of tires or the noise of a fork on china aurally pleasing or at least satisfying? What do you think?
Posted by hourenk at March 8, 2005 02:16 PMIt is an interesting question to ask if “music” would survive in a “world without music” through "the noise of a fork on china" etc. In some ways this is the flip side of my question about Bene Gesserit Gypsies. So the joint query is: are humans wired in such as way that they inevitably create internal/Giver or external/Gypsy access to aural stimulation that satisfy a fundamental need for said waveforms? A specific aspect of Kate’s question I see as particularly interesting is that music is posited as proceeding from a devoted neural process. I didn’t want to bring my argument for the (potential) necessity of music all the way back to the brain because that opens up a whole can of worms, but it’s also interesting to consider.
This short article describes a case in which the emotional link to music – basically what I think what Kate missed in the soundproof room - is severed. So in a sense this is technically possible. Yet the people who wrote the study seem to think that statements like “Accumulating evidence from functional brain imaging studies in normal individuals suggests that functionally and anatomically separable neural networks mediate music perception and emotion” actually mean something. Did they previously assume there was a single music-emotion “network?” That would be disturbing. Professor: “Ahh, yes, you hear music with your music neurons. Next question.” Basically music can be broken down into any number of facets manifest in various parts of the brain and while you can read interested articles about that for days, in the end I think we know very little about music as a unitary phenomenon.
Another, less reductionistic approach to the question of the necessity of music (“life without music”) would be to look at studies of suicide rates and their relationship to music preference. There was an oft-cited study done in 1993 that found hard rock was generally preferred by males over pop and when it did not serve a therapeutic purpose in females (they liked it, but didn’t feel better after listening to it) those females had the highest suicide rate. However, further studies have not completely replicated these convenient results. I’m not exactly thrilled with this methods of investigating the question either which necessarily operates with a solipsistic definition of music.
After this lengthy gripe, what’s my oh-so sagacious resolution of this issue? It seems fari to say there’s not an analytic solution, but I think there is the possibility for studying these approaches jointly and looking for emergent behavior and processing. True, this involves some belief in micro-macro correspondence on my part. But I’ve been funneled into this opinion by reading enough papers on optimal information processing/evolution through a mix of stability and diversity in the neural networks to think finding linked analogous patterns in society and music is not futile.