Making it easier to be musical

Alex Ruthmann, in a blog post discussing music-making with the educational multimedia programming environment Scratch, has this to say:

What’s NOT easy in Scratch for most kids is making meaningful music with a series of “play note”, “rest for”, and “play drum” blocks. These blocks provide access to music at the phoneme rather than morpheme levels of sound. Or, as Jeanne Bamberger puts it, at the smallest musical representations (individual notes, rests, and rhythms) rather than the simplest musical representations (motives, phrases, sequences) from the perspective of children’s musical cognition. To borrow a metaphor from chemistry, yet another comparison would be the atomic/elemental vs. molecular levels of music.

To work at the individual note, rest, and rhythms levels requires quite a lot of musical understanding and fluency. It can often be hard to “start at the very beginning.” One needs to understand and be able to dictate proportional rhythm, as well as to divine musical metadimensions by ear such as key, scale, and meter. Additionally, one needs to be fluent in chromatic divisions of the octave, and that in MIDI “middle C” = the note value 60. In computer science parlance, one could describe the musical blocks included with Scratch as “low level” requiring a lot of prior knowledge and understanding with which to work.

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How has the representation of the human body changed in modern and contemporary art over the last 100 years?

Big question! First, a little philosophical throat-clearing: I don’t believe that modern/contemporary art is as radical a break with the past as it likes to think. I had an art professor in college argue that, really, all abstract art is representational, and all representational art is abstract. Any abstract art has to refer to particular sensory impressions that the artist has had, because there’s nothing else we have to draw on for material. No matter how crazy the art is, we can’t help but look for signs of the physical world in it. Meanwhile, even the most photorealist painting is still abstract. You’d never be fooled by a painting into thinking you were looking out a window. Ultimately, it’s just static blobs of color on a flat surface; you have to do quite a bit of interpretive work to be “convinced” by the illusion.

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Is music the most abstract art form?

The Quora question that prompted this post asks:

Why has music been historically the most abstract art form?
We can see highly developed musical forms in renaissance polyphony and baroque counterpoint. The secular forms of this music is often non-programmatic or “absolute music.” In contrast to this, the paintings and sculpture of those times are often representational. Did music start as representational but merely move to a more abstract art form than other types of arts sooner? Does it lend it self to this sort of abstraction more easily?

I had an art professor in college who argued that all “representational” art is abstract, and all “abstract” art is representational. Any art has to refer back to sensory impressions of the world, internal or external, because that’s the only raw material we have to work with. Meanwhile, you’re unlikely to ever mistake a work of representational art for the object it represents. You don’t mistake photographs (or photorealistic paintings) for their subjects, and even the most “realistic” special effects in movies require willing suspension of disbelief.

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Inside the black box

Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as:

the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. Continue reading