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Author: Mitzi DeWhitt Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1450030726 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
INTRODUCTION. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? We had the experience but missed the meaning —T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets What does it mean? How many times we ask ourselves that question! Frankl wrote that to find meaning in one’s life was the primary motivational force in man. Gurdjieff’s fundamental question was ”What is the meaning and purpose of man’s life on earth?” Without meaning, life becomes only a dreary disillusionment, a mere stopgap between birth and death. Since our human nature abhors a vacuum, our common search turns toward filling the ever-present inner void. Our humanity urges us to fill in the empty space between the two points. What urges us is the will to meaning: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? The Mysteries not only address these wrenching human questions, but afford them objective, mathematically provable answers. The Mystery teachings are all about the science of mediation. Mediation means the mean between the extremes. Without the calculable knowledge of the mean, we are the halt leading the blind; and all fall into the ditch of ignorance and discord. From ancient times, the keynote of the special training into the Mysteries concerned the vibratory laws of harmonics. Harmonics is the language of initiates. Even today, our scientists, peering into the ineluctable mysteries of Nature, recognize how the knowledge harmonics unveils the hidden, mysterious, underlying substructure of the visible material world in which we live. They call it string theory. However, they see only the tip of the iceberg and fail to comprehend the vastness of the structure lying below the surface. Consequently, their results give no real meaning to their discoveries. As ancient cultures well knew, unless understood with a special cast of mind, the arid and secular (Ital. secco, dry) knowledge of mathematical harmonic ratios lead only to pedantic factual data that no one, except perhaps the pedants themselves, care to peruse. The sacred meaning is lost. Meaning, one might say, is the value computed by dividing the sum of two extremes of a range of values by 2? Both means and meaning are valuable as the connectors that join together the proverbial two ends of the octave stick. Means are what come in between. As the ancient musicians were at pains to point out, means provide the middle position. As the reconciling force, they represent the distinctive and valuable aspects of our human nature. In the Timaeus, Plato expresses the importance of the mean that mediates between the two incommensurable things: mind and body, allegorized as fire and earth. However, the universal frame was not simply a surface plane (for which a single mean would have sufficed). Rather, it was a solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two. Therefore, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible(as fire is to air, so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of harmonia, having been reconciled to itself,
Author: Mitzi DeWhitt Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1450030726 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
INTRODUCTION. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? We had the experience but missed the meaning —T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets What does it mean? How many times we ask ourselves that question! Frankl wrote that to find meaning in one’s life was the primary motivational force in man. Gurdjieff’s fundamental question was ”What is the meaning and purpose of man’s life on earth?” Without meaning, life becomes only a dreary disillusionment, a mere stopgap between birth and death. Since our human nature abhors a vacuum, our common search turns toward filling the ever-present inner void. Our humanity urges us to fill in the empty space between the two points. What urges us is the will to meaning: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? The Mysteries not only address these wrenching human questions, but afford them objective, mathematically provable answers. The Mystery teachings are all about the science of mediation. Mediation means the mean between the extremes. Without the calculable knowledge of the mean, we are the halt leading the blind; and all fall into the ditch of ignorance and discord. From ancient times, the keynote of the special training into the Mysteries concerned the vibratory laws of harmonics. Harmonics is the language of initiates. Even today, our scientists, peering into the ineluctable mysteries of Nature, recognize how the knowledge harmonics unveils the hidden, mysterious, underlying substructure of the visible material world in which we live. They call it string theory. However, they see only the tip of the iceberg and fail to comprehend the vastness of the structure lying below the surface. Consequently, their results give no real meaning to their discoveries. As ancient cultures well knew, unless understood with a special cast of mind, the arid and secular (Ital. secco, dry) knowledge of mathematical harmonic ratios lead only to pedantic factual data that no one, except perhaps the pedants themselves, care to peruse. The sacred meaning is lost. Meaning, one might say, is the value computed by dividing the sum of two extremes of a range of values by 2? Both means and meaning are valuable as the connectors that join together the proverbial two ends of the octave stick. Means are what come in between. As the ancient musicians were at pains to point out, means provide the middle position. As the reconciling force, they represent the distinctive and valuable aspects of our human nature. In the Timaeus, Plato expresses the importance of the mean that mediates between the two incommensurable things: mind and body, allegorized as fire and earth. However, the universal frame was not simply a surface plane (for which a single mean would have sufficed). Rather, it was a solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two. Therefore, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible(as fire is to air, so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of harmonia, having been reconciled to itself,
Author: Mitsuko Aramaki Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3642412483 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 514
Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012, held in London, UK, in June 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: music emotion analysis; 3D audio and sound synthesis; computer models of music perception and cognition; music emotion recognition; music information retrieval; film soundtrack and music recommendation; and computational musicology and music education. The volume also includes selected papers from the Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Expressive Performance Workshop held within the framework of CMMR 2012.
Author: Leo Samama Publisher: Amsterdam University Press ISBN: 9048528925 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
For virtually all of our lives, we are surrounded by music. From lullabies to radio to the praises sung in houses of worship, we encounter music at home and in the street, during work and in our leisure time, and not infrequently at birth and death. But what is music, and what does it mean to humans? How do we process it, and how do we create it? Musician Leo Samama discusses these and many other questions while shaping a vibrant picture of music's importance in human lives both past and present. What is remarkable is that music is recognised almost universally as a type of language that we can use to wordlessly communicate. We can hardly shut ourselves off from music, and considering its primal role in our lives, it comes as no surprise that few would ever want to. Able to transverse borders and appeal to the most disparate of individuals, music is both a tool and a gift, and as Samama shows, a unifying thread running throughout the cultural history of mankind.
Author: Keiji Hirata Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 9811951667 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
This book presents a new approach to computational musicology in which music becomes a computational entity based on human cognition, allowing us to calculate music like numbers. Does music have semantics? Can the meaning of music be revealed using symbols and described using language? The authors seek to answer these questions in order to reveal the essence of music. Chapter 1 addresses a very fundamental point, the meaning of music, while referring to semiotics, gestalt, Schenkerian analysis and cognitive reality. Chapter 2 considers why the 12-tone equal temperament came to be prevalent. This chapter serves as an introduction to the mathematical definition of harmony, which concerns the ratios of frequency in tonic waves. Chapter 3, “Music and Language,” explains the fundamentals of grammar theory and the compositionality principle, which states that the semantics of a sentence can be composed in parallel to its syntactic structure. In turn, Chapter 4 explains the most prevalent score notation – the Berklee method, which originated at the Berklee School of Music in Boston – from a different point of view, namely, symbolic computation based on music theory. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce readers to two important theories, the implication-realization model and generative theory of tonal music (GTTM), and explain the essence of these theories, also from a computational standpoint. The authors seek to reinterpret these theories, aiming at their formalization and implementation on a computer. Chapter 7 presents the outcomes of this attempt, describing the framework that the authors have developed, in which music is formalized and becomes computable. Chapters 8 and 9 are devoted to GTTM analyzers and the applications of GTTM. Lastly, Chapter 10 discusses the future of music in connection with computation and artificial intelligence. This book is intended both for general readers who are interested in music, and scientists whose research focuses on music information processing. In order to make the content as accessible as possible, each chapter is self-contained.
Author: Charles O. Nussbaum Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262140969 Category : Emotions in music Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.
Author: Sølvi Ystad Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3642025188 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2008 - Genesis of Meaning in Sound and Music, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in May 2008. The 21 revised full papers presented were specially reviewed and corrected for this proceedings volume. CMMR 2008 seeks to enlarge upon the Sense of Sounds-concept by taking into account the musical structure as a whole. More precisely, the workshop will have as its theme Genesis of Meaning in Sound and Music. The purpose is hereby to establish rigorous research alliances between computer and engineering sciences (information retrieval, programming, acoustics, signal processing) and areas within the humanities (in particular perception, cognition, musicology, philosophy), as well as to globally address the notion of sound meaning and its implications in music, modeling and retrieval.
Author: Judith Stallings-Ward Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000028453 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Since its publication nearly eight decades ago, the consensus among scholars about Fábula de Equis y Zeda, by the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) remains unchanged: Fábula is an enigmatic avant-garde curiosity. It seems to rob the reader of the reason necessary to interpret it, even as it lures him or her ineluctably to the task; nevertheless, the present study makes the case that this work is, in fact, not inaccessible, and that what the anhelante arquitecto, intended with his masterpiece was a creation myth that explains the evolution of music in his day. This monograph unlocks the fullness of the poem ́s meaning sourced in music’s mythical consciousness and expressed in a poetic idiom that replicates aesthetic concepts and cubist strategies of form embraced by the neoclassical composers Bartok, Falla, Ravel, and Stravinsky.
Author: Stephen Sondheim Publisher: ISBN: 9781559360258 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"Priceless and peerless...a thrilling work of theatricality." --Wayman Wong, San Francisco Examiner For over three decades, Stephen Sondheim has been the foremost composer and lyricist writing regularly for Broadway. His substantial body of work now stands as one of the most sustained achievements of the American stage. Pacific Overtures, originally produced in 1976, combines an unsurpassed mastery of the American musical with such arts as Kabuki theatre, haiku, dance, and masks to recount Commander Matthew Perry's 1835 opening of Japan and its consequences right up to the present. This new edition of Pacific Overtures incorporates substantial revisions made by the authors for the successful 1984 revival.
Author: Mitzi DeWhitt Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1465332073 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
As the third in a musicological trilogy that seeks objective answers to physical and metaphysical questions by way of musical ratios and proportions, this book may start with the acoustical properties of vibrating strings, but it certainly does not stop there. Rather, it goes on to attack some of the thorniest issues facing quantum physics today, including why string theory, as it is presently conceived, doesnt work; what is missing in the physicists understanding of missing information; and how the real cause underlying the perceived inflation of the universe is, in fact, due to the power laws inherent in vibrating strings. The surprising answers are neither wholly mathematical nor totally philosophical, but result from the reconciling perspective of music theory, the real M-theory. Moving beyond the sterile and secular world-view of the physicists, the author introduces into the equation the sacred metaphysical soul principle, now viewed as the holographic membrane whose sole function is to gather and store information and thus serve as the anti-entropic force within the universe. The properties of the soul, being movement and expansion, have long been associated with the figure called the lambdoma, and with the ancient diatonic scale that naturally forms within it, known as The Scale of the Soul of the World and Nature. With uncanny insight, the author shows how there is not one, but three musical scalesdiatonic, chromatic, and enharmonicwhich form of their own accord within the expanding lambdoma. These informing musical scales become the obvious links to the three branes of the quantum physicists, at the same time providing substantive evidence for why a three brain system is absolutely essential for the completion of the soul of manan idea that students of the Gurdjieff Work will find very familiar, and perhaps very intriguing.
Author: Mitzi DeWhitt
Author: Mitzi DeWhitt
Author: Mitsuko Aramaki
Author: Leo Samama
Author: Keiji Hirata
Author: Charles O. Nussbaum
Author: Sølvi Ystad
Author: Judith Stallings-Ward
Author: Stephen Sondheim
Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Author: Mitzi DeWhitt