[b]David Byrne
There’s a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech, said Purves. That’s the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than the ratios of Pythagoras. The reason doesn’t have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.[/b]
Like that explains…what exactly?
I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.
Let’s file this one under “the games we play”.
If only more or less self-consciously.
It was rumored that the length of the CD was determined by the duration of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, because that was Norio Ohga’s favorite piece of music, and he was the president of Sony at the time. Philips had designed a CD with an 11.5 cm diameter, but Ohga insisted that a disc must be able to hold the entire Beethoven recording. The longest recording of the symphony in Polygram’s archive was 74 minutes, so the CD size was increased to 12 cm diameter to accommodate the extra data.
Actually, I didn’t know that.
I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I’m deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within a pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn’t play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?
Let’s file this one under, “you think too much.” Or, sure, maybe not.
Recordings aren’t time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it’s morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can “get into” clubs virtually, “sit” in concert halls you can’t afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don’t understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.
In other words, yet another manifestation of “I”.
The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
Let’s just say this: not me. I never matched the music to my mood, but let the music create the mood itself. Very hard to explain though.