The Great Mahler Debate

[71 dB]

I believe you completely misunderstood my post. I was making the point that you were comparing a 2-3 minute pop song to a classical composition of undefined length and genre. As per example, if compared to an art song of say Schubert or Brahms, a modern song (depending on the genre/artist) probably contains a more complex spectrum of events than a repeated piano melody and vocal harmony. It's a bit rash to compare six centuries in vast different genres of orchestral music to a single musical form that is mostly exercised in the song-style. I'm pointing out the flaw in the initial comparison, not acknowledging simple differences in the quantitative so-called spectrum of events. If you are using a modern song as comparison to classical music, then compare a song to a song. It's quite simple reasoning.

A 2 mins long pop song (usually they are 3½-4 minutes) can have 2-minutes long events. Longer events can't fit in but so what? Everybody know that Wagner's operas and pop songs are very different in all ways. People compare different music genres. Many ignore Wagner's operas because they find Madonna much better music. It's not my fault classical music is so different!

[karlhenning]

Dang! Another intellectual contribution of which I am in silent awe!

[Israfel the Black]

I highly doubt that, given the harmonic poverty of current popular music, which rarely ever goes beyond the most banal 1-5 cadence.

I tend to disagree, but once again, I am speaking in terms of modern music, not exclusively the top 10 songs on continual radio station repeat. I would assert that Regina Spektor's piano and vocal music are on the same level complexity as a Schubert song, and I find them just as pleasing both melodically and artistically. To take a rock song, however, we are exceeding this banal 1-5 cadence and considering . Remember, Schubert himself is not simply a pop composer, but a musical genius of his century, as such, the songs of say Miles Davis, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and such forth are more appropriate comparisons, even if they do not equal, prove no less, the song style is still just as equally complex and to be sure, artistically purposeful. While pop music circulates, I think any person who enjoys music with any slight depth admire the greats of the 20th century without listening to classical music, and still receiving the same amount of complexity found in art songs.

[Steve]

This strikes me as some of the stupidest comments I've ever encountered. You are overwhelmed by my intellectual contribution to this thread and this is what you do, write pointless comments.

Note lenghts in music are defined in logarithmic way (1/1 note, 1/2 note, 1/4 note,....)
Logarithmic time scale IS most practical in music.

Well, if they were relavent intellectual contributions, perhaps.

[Israfel the Black]

A 2 mins long pop song (usually they are 3½-4 minutes) can have 2-minutes long events. Longer events can't fit in but so what? Everybody know that Wagner's operas and pop songs are very different in all ways. People compare different music genres. Many ignore Wagner's operas because they find Madonna much better music. It's not my fault classical music is so different!

They ignore Wagner operas because they are 4 hours long. Comparing Wagner to a pop song is asinine, and you still fail to see my point. A pop song can only be compared to a song, not an opera or a symphony. It's that simple. You can make value judgments on the transition of music into almost exclusively being in the song style or orchestral music in the film medium, but you cannot compare the "spectrum of events" or quantitative values of a song to a multi-layered hour long opera. It's ridiculous. Compare a song to a song, or an album to a song cycle. You are also singling out the geniuses of an entire century instead of counting many of the banal composers within those times who created shit. Therefore, if you want to compare Schubert, you would compare him to Miles Davis, Lennon, etc;

[Steve]

A 2 mins long pop song (usually they are 3½-4 minutes) can have 2-minutes long events. Longer events can't fit in but so what? Everybody know that Wagner's operas and pop songs are very different in all ways. People compare different music genres. Many ignore Wagner's operas because they find Madonna much better music. It's not my fault classical music is so different!

Yes, but those events are part of an organic composition, they are not seperate entities and should not be analyzed as such.

[Don]

Many ignore Wagner's operas because they find Madonna much better music.

I'd say some enjoy Madonna much more than Wagner; most folks haven't the slightest idea about Wagner or his music.  To say that many find Madonna much better music would be giving the typical person a level of musical awareness simply not possessed. 

[Cato]

Straighforward technical way to detect events is to use some kind of modified Cepstral analysis. Perhaps even as simple method as Spectral analysis to squared (=power signal) and low-pass filtered audio signal would do the trick.

Mentally we detect the events pretty much automatically. Every event should create a vibrational field in our brain.

Yes, pop music is very different from art music and that shows in the "spectrum of events". Comparing them is relevant as it illustrates the huge differencies. It tells us that one reason people into pop music have difficulties with classical music is because they are used to narrow spectrum of events. We can always think about what are the optimum spectrums of events for different music genres?

I get them from my head. I made them up just to illustrate the concept of my ideas.

(My emphasis qbove)

Sorry, no, maybe every event does create a "vibrational event" (why the subjunctive?) in our brains, but that does not mean it contains meaning for us, either conscious or subconscious.

Example: ornithologists for years thought that bird calls were a rather robotic reflex caused by genetic imprinting.  But research, beginning with Len Howard (q.v. Birds as Individuals) and continuing with Theodore Barber (q.v. The Human Nature of Birds) showed something startling: what to our conscious perception seems to be the same 3 or 4-note birdsong repeated again and again is in fact something quite different.

A researcher took a tape of seemingly repetitious birdsongs and calls and slowed it down: astonishingly, the tape contained all sorts of extra notes - vibrational events for the tape recorder - but not for our ears and brains.  One conclusion: the avian ear is much more subtle and apparently faster than ours.

71db wrote:

A 2 mins long pop song (usually they are 3½-4 minutes) can have 2-minutes long events. Longer events can't fit in but so what?

"So what?"  Is that not precisely the point?  Looking at the above, you can conclude that the human ear can be blissfully unaware of the mathematics and the "grammar" as well as the content and context of music: I will refer to the story about Bruckner watching Götterdämmerung and wondering suddenly why Brunhilde was jumping onto the funeral pyre.

Beware of trying to place numbers- logarithmic or otherwise - onto human behavior: there are many bleached bones in that desert!

And compare apples only to apples!  Except when it comes to computers!      Then there is no comparison!

[Dancing Divertimentian]

You are overwhelmed by my intellectual contribution to this thread and this is what you do, write pointless comments.

No, 71.

No one is overwhelmed by anything. You're only fooling yourself if you really believe that.

There have been plenty of honest attempts on this thread to query you as to your "theories". This should give ample indication of the honesty with which many approach you.

Yet your explanations offer nothing substantial. All we get is an endless "it's in my head" sort of childishness. Which counts for nothing.

Geniuses of this world don't hide themselves behind vague terms and smoke screen labels like "free thinker". They put their cards on the table and offer genuine, rational explanations for their theories. That is, if they want to be taken seriously.

If you can't recognize this then you are nowhere near as intelligent as you claim.

[MishaK]

They ignore Wagner operas because they are 4 hours long. Comparing Wagner to a pop song is asinine, and you still fail to see my point. A pop song can only be compared to a song, not an opera or a symphony. It's that simple. You can make value judgments on the transition of music into almost exclusively being in the song style or orchestral music in the film medium, but you cannot compare the "spectrum of events" or quantitative values of a song to a multi-layered hour long opera. It's ridiculous. Compare a song to a song, or an album to a song cycle. You are also singling out the geniuses of an entire century instead of counting many of the banal composers within those times who created shit. Therefore, if you want to compare Schubert, you would compare him to Miles Davis, Lennon, etc;

I agree with all that, but you are describing the exceptions, not the rule.

[Florestan]

71 dB, first you say this:

Long events: 4 - 16 s

Then, you say this:

A 2 mins long pop song (usually they are 3½-4 minutes) can have 2-minutes long events.

Which one is true, because they are mutually and arithmetically exclusive?

[mahlertitan]

Note lenghts in music are defined in logarithmic way (1/1 note, 1/2 note, 1/4 note,....)
Logarithmic time scale IS most practical in music.

no, it's not logarithmic, it's inverse, x^-1=(1/x), so mathematically speaking it should be (1/1 note 1^-1, 1/2 note 2^-1, 1/4 note 4^-1....)

but even so, you are ignoring the 3/4, and fact that time signature can be anything, it doesn't have to follow any mathematical model.

[71 dB]

So much forced and irrelevant critic I don't know if I bother answer. 

New ideas take time to be accepted. These theories of mine are raw.

1/1, 1/2, 1/4,... is a logarithmic system. 3/4 is just a addition to this system:
1.5*[1/2, 1/4, 1/8,..]

Note: 1.5 is almost square root of 2 so it almost fits to a logaritmic system!

You are splitting hairs

[MishaK]

1/1, 1/2, 1/4,... is a logarithmic system. 3/4 is just a addition to this system:
1.5*[1/2, 1/4, 1/8,..]

So is 7/8 or 9/16 and many others. But then the possible exceptions are as numerous as the examples for the logarithmic systmen, so it's not much of a system then, no?

[71 dB]

So is 7/8 or 9/16 and many others. But then the possible exceptions are as numerous as the examples for the logarithmic systmen, so it's not much of a system then, no?

Not all is logarithmic. Most is and that why logarithmic system rules!

[bwv 1080]

Trying to follow the discussion amidst all the confusion over #'s going on.

If I take 71dB to mean that the time scale of meaningful events in music follows a log or power law scale, then he is right.  If you take a Beethoven string quartet and think about ratios in the durations of phrase length to section length to movement length to the length of the whole piece, a log scale seems appropriate.

The meter ratios  (3/4, 7/16, 5/8) etc have nothing to do with log time as I understand 71 dB to mean it.

[71 dB]

The idea of logarithmic scale is in it's economy of covering a scale of huge dynamic variation.
Our senses work in logaritmic way too.

[71 dB]

Example: ornithologists for years thought that bird calls were a rather robotic reflex caused by genetic imprinting.  But research, beginning with Len Howard (q.v. Birds as Individuals) and continuing with Theodore Barber (q.v. The Human Nature of Birds) showed something startling: what to our conscious perception seems to be the same 3 or 4-note birdsong repeated again and again is in fact something quite different.

A researcher took a tape of seemingly repetitious birdsongs and calls and slowed it down: astonishingly, the tape contained all sorts of extra notes - vibrational events for the tape recorder - but not for our ears and brains.  One conclusion: the avian ear is much more subtle and apparently faster than ours.

Yes, all things do not create vibrational fields in the heads of all listeners. Advanced listerers hear more. The communication of birds is developped so that birds hear relevant things even if humans do not. Luckily music is composed for human ear.

[bwv 1080]

The idea of logarithmic scale is in it's economy of covering a scale of huge dynamic variation.
Our senses work in logaritmic way too.

And it goes without saying that loudness is logrithmic itself (the decibel scale for example)

[karlhenning]

If I take 71dB to mean that the time scale of meaningful events in music follows a log or power law scale, then he is right.  If you take a Beethoven string quartet and think about ratios in the durations of phrase length to section length to movement length to the length of the whole piece, a log scale seems appropriate.

Insofar as I understand you, no, I don't think I agree.

The meter ratios  (3/4, 7/16, 5/8) etc have nothing to do with log time as I understand 71 dB to mean it.

Of course, though I'm unsure where you got these, Steve.

Yes, all things do not create vibrational fields in the heads of all listeners. Advanced listerers hear more.

You can say whatever you please about "vibrational fields," because no one (probably including youself) has any idea what they are supposed to mean.

And it goes without saying that loudness is logrithmic itself (the decibel scale for example)

Yes, although there is no uniform way in which loudness relates to "meaningful events" in music (to cite another of 71 dB's fuzzphrases), of course.