Fare Thee Well

Still in the process of leaving my current job; which I decided needed some musical accompaniment:




 (listen to at least the 2:00 mark to get my true feelings)


Also too:




You just kind of wasted my precious time, but don't think twice it's alright.

Happy Ruination Day!

This blog is reputed to have a crush on Gillian Welch:







Nicely sandwiched between Friday the 13th and income tax day, April 14 is the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, the sinking of the Titanic, and the worst of the Dust Bowl storms...so far it's been a pleasant enough day here and now, but I'm a bit edgy.

Mental Music Machinery

(for Marvin Minsky)
[better audio]


I've been thinking a lot about music lately, trying to come up with a theory of catchiness. That is to say, despite my notable lack of actual musical talent or knowledge, I have a tendency to latch on to particular songs and replay them in my mind throughout the day, grooving to the best of my limited abilities. This doesn't make me any different from everyone else, but something about the way I grasp or don't grasp music makes it seem theoretically interesting. At least to me. What is going on in my head that these artifacts of pop culture should entrain and engross me?

The very difficulty of grasping music is part of its attractiveness. Music is or ought to be the paradigmatic case of embodied cognition. Musical knowledge (certainly the kind I have) is not so much representational as enactive. I don't "know" the tune, I couldn't write it down, but I can replay it. That is, I've built inside my head a little music machine, capable of recreating some of the structural elements of a song, all without knowing much about it in any symbolic sense. Over the years I've learned a few tricks, like ways to count beats, that I can use to produce a traditional symbolic representation of some aspects of music. but it's laborious and it has nothing to do with the way a catchy song catches. I don't "know" these songs in the sense that I know a fact, but in some other way.  What that way is is a bit of a mystery, but I envision as a little clanking machine I've cobbled together that is capable of crudely reproducing the core of a tune.

These machines generally are not purely mental; they tend to involve bodily movement (sometimes called "dancing" or "spazzing back and forth") and/or vocalization. In other words, I can't just replay them in my head; muscles need to be involved.

So once I get the core of a little music machine in my head, I enjoy letting it go, and sometimes it goes off on its own without me willing it (that is practically the definition of "catchy"). I envision it as a complex collection of roughly-built mechanisms, something like the mechanical sculptures you see in every public space these days, but more energetic and involved with itself, so maybe a cross between one of those and a Friden calculator, with a touch of Arthur Ganson. A rattling contraption at best, but fun to watch, to participate in.

There is a bootstrapping quality to learning one of these things, because repetition makes the machine work better. The cognitive slipperiness of the music contributes the the pleasurability of these repetitions, because (a) the act of repeating always seems like a bit of a feat, and (b) the results are always a bit of a surprise. This may be essential to catchiness, which (and here I'm getting into more music theory than I really know) tends to involve swing or other elements that play off a standard mechanical metric.

The things that seem catchy to me seem to be characterized by a strong rhythm and a certain way the lyrics snake through the beats in unexpected ways. There, now, as soon as I start to try to describe anything musically specific I get hopelessly tangled in the inadequacy of language. Actual musicians do have ways to talk about this stuff of course.

This train of thought was partly inspired by Marvin Minsky's essay Music, Mind and Meaning, which has a section entitled "Sonata as Teaching Machine". But where Minsky's theory is mostly structural, I'm trying to get at some other qualities of music besides its formal relationships.

Music's metric frames are transient templates used for momentary matching. Its rhythms are "synchronization pulses" used to match new phrases against old, the better to contrast them with differences and change. As differences and change are sensed, the rhythmic frames fade from our awareness. Their work is done and the messages of higher-level agents never speak of them; that is why metric music is not boring!

So I'm fully in sync with the first part of this idea, that one of the functions of rhythm is to provide a frame for comparing different things (phrases) in a common context. But he loses me on the second half, partly because we are talking about different types of music and different types of listening. In my type of music, the rhythm does not fade from consciousness but is ever-present, and the higher-level structures are maddeningly elusive.

Again, this might be a function of my idiosyncratic tastes (I am a rhythm guy; while I can appreciate other aspects of music like beautiful harmonies, they don't have this entrancing quality for me) and/or the primitive state of my musical abilities. I like to think that my ignorance may be a strength in thinking about this stuff. As to why I or anyone else should be interested, well, there is a sense in which musical entrainment may be at the core of human society. Maybe music is not some weird side effect of the human mind but something fundamental to what we are. And if so, my crude models of it may be getting at something more fundamental than those that employ sophisticated theory.

Friday night funk comes on Thursday this week

I had some unutterably profound thoughts this morning about the reconciliation of religion and science, the nature of existence, and the origins of political order but decided to spare everyone and put up this instead:

 

From the Treme soundtrack album which is quite worthwhile.

Not Everything is Free

I released a Lisp package into the open-source universe recently; this was developed as part of an an abandoned development project at my previous company, which graciously it to be released to the wild where it may be of use to someone.

But the only reason I'm mentioning it here is that it gives me an excuse to post this haunting song by Gillian Welch about the plight of "content creators" in this modern digital world we are creating. At least, that's the most obvious interpretation of it.



Here's an earlier post on a similar theme, or see here. I personally love giving my work away for free, and only wish that we lived in the kind of anarchist propertyless utopia mentioned in the blog tagline, so I didn't feel partly like a sucker doing it. The current world of open-source and peer content creation is great in many respects, except that one set of people does all the work, and a different small set of people gets to collect all the economic benefits.

It's like the hacker community set out to make itself into a property-free utopia regardless of whether the rest of the world went along, and deliberately undermined most of the ways in which software developers got paid. Contrast this to musicians, who like most artists are hard-nosed about money and had the same thing imposed on them (by digital copying and file sharing), but not by their own choice.

Don't get me wrong, I still think open source is a tremendous win, but it would be more of a win if the rest of society was organized along more socialist-communitarian lines. Technology has decreed that content creators get to be the vanguard of socialism, despite groceries and real estate still operating according to the old laws of scarcity.

Today's stuck song

So I'm walking down the street in San Francisco singsnarling songs from the Tom Waits / William Burroughs collaboration The Black Rider, like this one:

You must be careful in the forest
Broken glass and rusty nails
If you're to bring back something for us
I have bullets for sale

Perhaps it's got to do something with my recently-revealed Satanic connections (this song is sung by the devil himself). I had the pleasure of seeing Marianne Faithfull perform this role in the San Francisco ACT production a few years back. Can't find any videos of that, but the original German version is around:

When the ship comes in

Every so often a Dylan song gets stuck in me and won't leave. A few weeks ago it was "Dear Landlord", today it's this:


Maybe it's that Pesach is coming up, or maybe it's the sense that the American public may be reaching a breaking point, or just residual anarchism from last weekend, or maybe even seeing the Watchmen movie (which made ample use of Dylan, but left out one of the key elements of the original graphic novel, an intercalated pirate comic called "Tales of the Black Freighter" in reference to the same Brecht/Weill song that inspired the above).

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.