To look at this from the viewpoint of music theory (the study of music through form, composition, etc.), the main question being asked is what distinguishes between variances in performance and a new musical piece (I say piece as opposed to song because song refers specifically to vocal music), and mostly the differentiation is based on recognition and similarity, but this can be analysed a bit more precisely than "well it sounds like Skillet." All music has certain aspects, called elements which are its defining properties: melody (interaction of tone over time), harmony (interaction of tone simultaneously), rhythm (duration and accentuation of tones over time), timbre (the individual waveforms that differentiate one voice from another), dynamics (volume), form (structure), and tempo (speed). So if all of these elements are the same it is an identical piece. But changing certain elements of a piece are not thought to make a different piece. Changes to tempo and dynamics are rarely thought to alter whether a piece is still the same piece (certain schools of thought might argue with this). Small localized alterations to the other elements are referred to as "ornamentation," (such as holding a note for longer or a few extra notes added in) and also are thought at most to be slight variations of the a piece. More drastic, yet still identifiable, are "arrangements," where one or several elements are changed over the entirety of the piece, most often to form, harmony, and timbre. These are where we get into the gray area of differentiating between new pieces and variances. Arrangements are more often considered to be variation on a piece, but still signified as an arrangement, and some argue that they are new compositions. These also show that melody and rhythm (at least in western music) are the most identifiable elements, and changes to them are less likely to be recognized as the same piece. While localized changes to rhythm or melody can be found in arrangements, they are nowhere near as drastic as the changes to timbre or harmony, which could different for the entirety of the piece. Major changes to these, melody in particular, will make a piece unrecognizable, and at that point will likely be thought as a new piece. Conversely, if a every element besides melody and rhythm is changed, a piece could still be recognized as the original, changed drastically, yes, but still the same piece. And considering the main argument was about song, the element of lyrics is added in as well. This element can be modified locally just like any of the others, but it is a little different as it can be changed completely, still recognized as the original, and yet thought of as a different piece. This is called a "setting" and is one of the confusing parts of differentiation.
There could also be subsets within the set, such as the set of all performances of the old version, and the set of all performances of the new version.
i think some synthesis is in order here the artist creates/discovers the first "token" of the type, which becomes the "official" token, and the artist can subsequently change which token is the "official" token. but others can create other tokens of that type I also think that a token can be of more than one type at once (mashups and remixes for example). creation and discovery are synonymous in the situation of realizing in spacetime the first (known) token of some type
What I loved about this is that I was completely convinced that I was right about my opinion that a song is obviously just a collection from the person speaking about it's opinion of the song until the point you mention the artist having a say... Now I'm not convinced I'm right. I don't know what to think. As always, excellent video Olly!! Thanks for being so open to letting me use your stuff as reference material for my last video!!
I'd extend the set-theoretic model: Songs are not just "the set of all instances of the song being performed," but perhaps tuples that might include sets. So you have the set of performance-instances, the set of lyric-instances, the set of melodic-instances, the set of rhythmic-instances, and so on. Each of these sets is controlled in some sense by an "original" or (if it's more about musician's intent) merely "distinguished" version, so we have an idea that this version is "too different" to be included. This also matches our intuition that songs have certain components that are still bound to that particular song... something set "to the tune of" another song, for example. But then you can make songs to the tune of other songs, and they still count as NEW songs...!
I really wish you brought up John Cage as his entire body of work is about asking the question what is music. His Lecture on Nothing (and really the entire book of Silence: Lectures and Writings) and his thought had influenced much of the music world in the second half of the 20th-century, and it would have made a nerd like me geek out! That being said, I do think with the topic of the episode you brought up, John Cage might have been in a different realm of answering "What is music." He was more about deconstructing how music functions and how meaning is created through music than talking how music exists as a medium. He may have talked about that, I don't personally know. Overall, good episode! I just got a little excited when I saw the title and didn't get what I thought you were going to talk about :P
I literally saw the title to this episode and thought "That sounds like a This Exists episode" then I scrolled down on my feed and saw that you guys did a compilation. 😄
I think I mostly agree with the set theory: I think you can compare songs with other objects, like chairs. Someone, a long time ago, stuck a few pieces of wood together and said: "this is to sit on". He (or someone else) then called it a "chair". From that point onward, people called pieces of wood which had the function to sit on them, chairs. However, sometime later, someone made something comparable with this chair, only from a different material. This, apparantly, was still a chair. I think this is because people define things by their function, and not by their means of executing that function. How is a couch different from a chair then? Well, when you sit on a couch, you have more room. So if you think that a certain thing is to sit on, and you think it has more room to sit on, than you call it a couch. Notice the "if you think" part: certain people will define an object like a chair, and others could define the same object as a couch. This makes the question "what is that object?" a personal one. I think the same applies for music. When an artist writes a song, he creates a thing with a function: he creates soundwaves that make people feel a certain way. For any person, the things that makes him/her feel exactly the same way, would make it that song. So if the artist misses a note, but you still think the song makes you feel the same, it still is the same song (comparable to the example of the chair of a different material). I also think there exist subsets of the larger sets we define. Let's look at a wooden chair from IKEA. We might think that it qualifies as a chair, because you can sit on it. It doesn't, however, qualify as a metal chair. All metal chairs are chairs, but not vice versa. The same goes for the fact that it is from IKEA: it doesn't belong to the subset of the set "chair" that contains "chairs" that are made by some other manufacturer. You can also see that not all sets are as open to interpretation. Again, same goes for songs. A live performance of "holiday" by green day is an instance in the set "instances of the song holiday", and also in the subset "instances of the song holiday that are performed live". If you think a certain subset is still a subset of the bigger set, meaning you get the same feeling from that particular performance of the song than from the original, then it is for you. But it might not be for others. In conclusion, my answer to the question "what is a song" is: everything that makes you feel exactly the same way as the original did. So wether something is a certain song or not, is personal.
Hi, I like your channel a lot and it gives me a lot of inspiration.Thanks. I am a neoplatonist and I think that it answers all the questions. There is just one ultimate song-form which is part of the One. This absolute song being part of the One also has an absolute pleasure and it is from this that we get pleasure when listerning to it.All other songs are copies that are more or less exact. In Plato's terms the songs are copies of copies or the songs of today are copies of copies of copies ... As the real thing is impossible for us to obtain these copies are all that we have . David Bowie has the merit that his song which is about the closest we can get came down through him , just like your friend said.This would be like someone finding a great treasure that already exists . Assuming the right laws the treasure is his. An ordinary person cannot connect to the forms so David Bowie did a great service to humanity in bringing down his version of the perfect song with all the imperfections that it might have. His imperfect song copy is his. I interpret even Epicurus that real pleasure is only pleasure derived from Good. He said that it is better to look for someone to eat his meal with than to look for more to eat. He also said that the happiest day of his life was when he was dying from a kidney stone.This is probably one of the most painfull deaths.Plato said that someone who does bad is "sick" and that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do one.Meister Eckhart and Alfarabi both said that it is not enough to do good but one must be good and want to do good. My interpretation of Epicurus is that he was talking about someone on this level . Later generations made a mistake with his intentions.
Maybe I have genuine input here. A song or any musical piece composed is a journal of memories of how the artist reacted to the first note/sound he by intention or by chance started the writing with. How that is performed is the artist performing it's music with the intention to reproduce the said "story in the journal" in his/her current condition. The chanelling: It is an action-reaction game by the composer which is affected by the composers past life experiences, current physical and psychological conditions and intention with the said song. That's how all the songs ever made. Does musicians deserve credit for their work? Yes. Just as much as a painter or an author or any artist. Every art in the world is about showing different points of reality, let it be physical or abstract. Credit goes for the production of the said music which takes time and money. And coming up with the music is part of the production very much.
this makes me think of how alienated i get when i hear DJs play remixed versions of songs i like. i mean, i don't mind some double drops and switchbacks here and there, but i also feel like some DJs don't do well enough to maintain the original identity of the songs for live play. though this is a personal preference, i realize a lot, if not most of EDM/Dubstep/Trap fans don't really mind.
Like many things, I think the Buddhist idea of "Skandhas" is quite useful. It's the idea that things (in the Buddhist concept, the 'self' specifically) are like piles; removing on thing from the pile doesn't make it a completely different thing, nor does it remain the same. It basically gives us the idea that things don't have inherent 'seperateness' or 'thingness'. It's a hard thing to understand without having meditated!
There is, of course, the question of language. And, in this case, there are two concurrent languages in what makes a "song" as represented in all the examples in the video. The first component is lyrics, which is less abstract than the second component, which is music. Words are understood by just about everyone, ( at least on a basic level) and music is deeply abstract. So, when we talk about a what is essential in a song, it doesn't make sense to treat these two components as equally abstractable (perhaps a made-up word). Also, the pieces referenced in the video are pop songs, which are almost never meant to be note-for-note representations. They are meant to be malleable, and are most often not "fixed" in written musical language. For those who understand pop music, La Bamba is a C chord for 2 beats, and F chord for two beats, and a G chord for four beats, repeated over and over. There is also, a melody and a lyric, of course. But if you consider the harmony and the accompaniment, nowhere are you obligated to play those chords in a particular voicing, form, tempo or rhythm. In fact, you are free to substitute your own related chords, and to make variations in the melody (variations in the melody is what most people think of as "interpretation"--at least in pop music. But it is really re-composition). A song by Schubert, by contrast, has every note (including how quickly, loudly and fluidly it's played) strictly dictated. You can change the piano part of La Bamba, and it's still La Bamba. However, if you change a single note of Schubert's Erlkonig, you have denied Schubert's definition of his own work. It stands to reason, I believe, that the it's much more possible to attempt to define a song that is fully composed and fixed in written form (and is written with the wish and expectation by it's creator not to be changed--that's why it's written down with such precision), than it is for a pop or rock song. Perhaps, then, the subject of the video really is, "What are POP songs".
Well, as a musician, I believe that a song is a creation within the idea of music. In music, there is not an infinite value of notes and chords, and the idea that we have of music is basically based on rhythm, melody, structure and harmony. So when a artist writes a song, he is using this elements which defines a song, as he is writing a song. The same thing with the colors that a painter uses to make a painting. So my idea is that the songwriter uses the elements which music requires, but the authorship of the song goes to him, as he tried to express himself with that song. And that can be seen not only by the lyrics of the song, since music in not defined by having lyrics. The structure and the arrangement that the writer intended in the song can express his feelings as well. When a person does a cover of a song, or even the artist changes the structure of the song, but still calls that piece as the name of the original one, it depends on the intention of the performer to keep that piece as being the original or just to contain it as a reference, like a lot of musicians does these days. For me, people listens to music to feel pleasure, and to experience something that they can only experience while listening that song. So when a artist creates a song, it doesn't really belong to him. It belongs to everyone that wants to posses that piece of human expression. Unfortunately, comercial musicians think that the song really belongs to them, and creates the idea of product, that leads to copyrights in music, which, for me, makes absolute no sense. But to conclude, i'm not a plotonist. I believe that a song is created from the point of view of a person to express what this person wanted to express, but once other people heard it, they can take that expression and use in their art form and life.
Cavendish. She is much more interesting than any particular problem in applied ethics. Now, wrt music: The "set theoretical" (not really deserving this title btw) and platonist viewpoints can be made consistent. Here's a synopsis: there exists some suitable 1-to-1 mapping between every possible musical composition and some mathematical object. So if we are to say that entities such as numbers 'exist' then every possible mulical composition also 'exists' in exactly the same sense. Variations of the same work that correspond to different representations can then be gathered into a set which can be labelled as this or that musical composition. Whether two instances are deemed to be different will always depend on the initial choice of representation. But the counterexample I would bring about is the north german chorale prelude, based on the lutheran chorale. Some of the best instances of this style of composition are created by variations of a given melody using fairly strict rules - however two different settings of the same hymn would not, typically, be considered to be the same composition, even though they usually share the same title and draw from the same musical material, elaborating by very specific ways. A parallel that may be more familiar to the contemporary lay audience might be different settings of the same christmas carol. Finally the pedantic point (which is not even necessary to be made but still...) : a song is a composition written for voice with or without some accompaniment (the definition can be generalised to include compositions which do not use the voice but are referring to the song as a style of composing).
On the question of how similar a performance needs to be in order to count as a certain song I'd go back to the analogy of letters: Anything, that a person familiar with an A will recognize as an 'A', is a representation of 'A'. If it's quite distorted and not everybody can recognize it, different people may have different views as to if it is an A or not. If you change a song, but people can still recognize its origin, it's part of the original song [type]. A different notion would be, that every time you perform a song, it is a new song. Some songs may be very similar to previously performed songs, but they might always be just a tiny little bit different. If Bob Dylan decides to cover himself or the Beastie Boys change their lyrics, they're creating something new, that hasn't been there before. You'd then have to look at how different this new version is from a previous one in order to estimate its artistic novelty. It might also just be that your record player is just a little bit too slow. That again will change the song. You could then create a loose group of performed songs that can be recognized as having the same origin, that first version of the song. Another interesting point would be folk songs that don't have one definitive author, that were created and modified by a whole group of people over a long period of time. You couldn't attribute one author to such a song and thus there might not be that one true version...
What about genres like noisecore or grindcore in terms of artistic value? These types of songs are a sort of Dionysian frenzy of sound and energy, usually containing quite graphic lyrical imagery (say, Napalm Death's lyrics), or sometimes simple lyrics (say, Anal Cunt's lyrics). There is an ongoing argument about this genre, and whether or not these genres should be considered music. Bands like Napalm Death have some more credibility than the latter band mentioned, with the more simplistic lyrics. A.C.'s songs are abstract and lack a definite structure--it never sounds the same twice. The instrumentals are rapid, chaotic, and dissonant; while vocals consist of randomized guttural screams. Seth Putnam (deceased lead singer of A.C.) admitted to writing the lyrics after recording the song, and many songs are made on the spot; meaning that the vocal noises performed often have no to relation to the lyrics written. Before dismissing bands like this as nonsense and anti-social deviants with a cult following, I would like to point out (a) the growing popularity of grind/noise-core, (b) that the instrumental structure of Jazz had similar criticisms with the exception of the screamed guttural vocals, and (c) the parent genres of grind/noise-core (e.g. x,y, and z-types of (fill in the blank, 100s)-metal) that do have rhythmic structure and consistent song content and are recognized as art--the proof being in various artistic awards (e.g. Slipknot won a Grammy for the song "Duality" which consists of screamed lyrics) won by artists in various Metal genres. So, are works such as "Jack Kevorkian is Cool", "You're a Cop", "I Got an Office Job for the Sole Purpose of Sexually Harassing Women" and "02657" by the band Anal Cunt really songs, or is this a new category of art? Granted, this band is extremely offensive, intentionally, so if you look for their lyrics or music, be prepared for that... But despite the content, my question is simply: do these works meet the qualifications to be labeled as a "song". I would argue that these works, although offensive, are art; but is this art a song? Is all auditory art a "song"? Is this band perhaps meta-art? Thanks for your time if you didn't scroll away upon reading the band name in question.
I'm using my experience as a composer to offer feedback on this discussion. If we change the questions to: "What are words" and "What is language" this question may encourage us to take a different approach to discussing this topic. There are many mashups on youtube where musicians use a single chord-progression and impose the lyrics and melodies of many different songs on that progression. When we are listening, we decide that the song has changed when we recognize that the lyrics and melody have changed despite the instruments doing the same groove. The most common identifier, as well as the most significant identifier for "songs" are the combination of (lyrics + melody). If we listen to music that has lots of instrumentation, but no clear melody, and absolutely no lyrics... the ability to identify that arrangement of sounds as a "song" becomes increasingly difficult. With this kind of information, it may feel a little less profound to think of songs as "moments in time where we hear instruments, and someone singing a melody in-rhythm -- simultaneously with the music". Music tends to include when "moments where we hear distinct pitches being uttered in distinct rhythms". I don't mean to reduce the discussion to such a granular expression but I feel there is a mechanistic approach that makes this question in the context that you brought it up to be simpler than it is.
My education is linguistic, so I would, of course, define it in linguistic terms. "Suffragette City" is an idea with criteria that make any given performance more-or-less a part of the set of things that are "Suffragette City". The idea can only be conceived of in terms of our thoughts because we can only interact with the world in those terms. Since asking multiple people whether or not certain performances are considered "Suffragette City" will get you different answers and since you will be unable to get them to agree with one "correct" answer no matter how you argue, then there must be multiple answers to the question.
So I am (very slowly) going through all your back catalog of videos after thoroughly enjoying the last year or so. And while I know this is quite a long time than the original discussion, I immediately thought of an interesting example: Radiohead's Bloom. This song will never sound the same when hearing different performances, even by the original band. Sure, they all have the same lyrics, but the instrumental parts vary. It was written in such a way that each section of the song is in parts (this will become more clear shortly). And regardless of which instrument is played, it is left to each musician to decide which pieces of that section to play, what order (if any), and how many times to play them. For instance, the intro for lead guitar, I believe, was sectioned into 15 parts of varying bar lengths. In one performance, there are almost infinite possibilities of what they might decide to play. So what makes each version of Bloom, Bloom? Is it just the lyrics? Is it the feeling you get when hearing it? The weirdest part of it all is, you know its Bloom every time. It's almost inescapable because it sounds so unique and yet so beautiful.
I like the idea of the Set argument more. Something the Set view of it has me pondering on is considering whether a Set is simply every variation of a song with the name attached to the set, or if its possible that you can create a hierarchy of the Set going from the "Alpha" of the song which then branches out into every variation in a sort of tree but this raises the question of what you would consider the "Alpha" to be; the early drafts of the song in its creation or the first instance of the song in its entirety. And in expansion of that latter point, is the first instance a subjective relative to the individual or objective by the intention of the artist?
A song is a meme and what determines one song from another is it's reproduction. A song like Suffragette City will reproduce it self through various mediums, albums, concerts, covers*, bathroom singing and humming it to yourself, theses are all reproductions of Suffragette City and take up the same mental capacity. Whereas the old and new versions of It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) are two distinct song because the mental reproduction of the songs are so distinct that each song take up its own mental space. This applies to cover as well, if the cover is similar enough that it takes the same mental space as the original than it is the same song. However All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix as so distinct that the mental reproductions are not interchangeable, they are categorized differently in our minds and are therefore two separate songs. I'm just riffing off what I remember of Daniel Dennett' s work.
I'm leaning out a bit much here: I don't know that this is *actually* how it works. However, perhaps songs are dependent types? What I imagine that to mean (and I might be completely misusing a technical term here) is that the type of any given song may depend on extra variables. It might depend on space and time, so it only really is a thing in the context where it makes sense. It might also depend on the performer or specific performance. Not sure if there is a problem with circularity there, however. Roughly, the way I vaguely picture it, that would allow us to keep the notion of Songs As Types, but it would kind of cop out of many of the questions you posed with a simple "It depends." The song is what ever you care about as being part of the song right now. If you mean all the performances ever, that is permitted. If you mean all the performances by a specific person, that's permitted too. It all depends on which variables you specify or keep generic. That poses the question, however, what its most generic/bare-bones form would be. Like, could you just keep every variable unspecified, thereby recovering the purely Platonic version of the type? Or is there a minimum of variables that are necessary. I feel like a minimum should be necessary. For instance, if nobody knows the song anymore (or yet) and no records exist of it at all, does it really exist? Perhaps not. So I think the broadest you can get is the collection of all its performances and other representations such as memories or sheet music. All variants and performers included. If you object to that on the grounds of "this version is so different it has got basically nothing at all to do with the song *I* think of when I talk about this song", my response to that would then be "Ok, sure, that's fine. We just have to insert more restrictive values for the various variables and that's totally valid." In this view, each discussion of what a song is would require context on what we actually care about when asking that question in the first place. That might seem tedious but I think most of the time it's gonna be clear enough from context and experience what's meant. And when it's not, it's a good practice to be clear about that anyway.
Before I start, I should point out that I only woke up around 45mins ago and I'm not a morning person, so this might not make a lot of sense... I am a musician (although obviously not of Bob Dylan or David Bowie's calibre, or you'd have heard of me!) and I've never been very good at playing the same thing twice; when I was playing with my last band I took a sort of perverse pride in the fact that I never wrote down a specific set of notes because I felt that just repeating the same sequence over and over again became boring, and that lack of enthusiasm would come across in my performance to its detriment. My technique was always to have a broad, general idea in my head of the chord sequence and 'sections' of music (such as intro, verse and chorus), and approach each performance with whatever nuances of emotion I happened to have at the time. I was the sole guitarist in my last band, which meant I was playing chords but also had a lot of latitude when it came to improvised fills and flourishes. Quite often, one performance of my part of the song would sound very different to the last if you were to isolate it by removing all the other parts (even if it wasn't in such significant ways as to have a great impact on the sound of the song as a whole); this depended on how the other band members were playing their parts and the interaction with their nuances, what my mood happened to be, whether my temperamental guitar had stayed in-tune and the electrics were playing up, whether my fingers hurt from the previous song... and any of a thousand other tiny considerations. I never really thought of one single performance as an arbitrary and definitive article; I always saw the constant tiny changes from one performance to the next as a form of conceptual evolution. I suppose that, if I had been thinking on such an intellectual level rather than just "going with the flow", I would think of the musical process of constant evolution as tweaking each performance to take one step closer to some final, perfect and shining rendition of that particular guitar part. Of course, that perfection was never attainable, because my idea of what was "perfect" would change from one performance to the next. It could be said that - like Bob Dylan changing his song from folk to rockabilly - I saw the song's structure not as an absolute, but as a framework within which I did the best I could to attain whatever definition of perfection I held in my mind at that moment; it was always out of reach and ever-changing, but there was always some aim in sight (which, I suppose, would make it less evolutionary and more akin to intelligent design... like I say, I'm not awake yet!). New ideas would constantly change that concept of perfection - in fact, often it was mistakes in a performance that would introduce me to a new idea which would be incorporated into the ideal of perfection the next time around, as in: "I like that thing I accidentally did the last time, let's see if I can do it this time on purpose." In summary, I'd say that Bob Dylan changing his song from folk to rockabilly is completely within the realm of that ongoing evolutionary viewpoint - if rockabilly seems the way to go *in that moment*, then it's at least worth giving it a try. The audience might not like the fact that the song they came to hear isn't the same as the one on the recording they own, but then that's more an issue for the commercial side of the argument than the artistic. Human beings tend to like a predictable, familiar experience - it's comforting and safe because there's no unexpected surprises. That's more of a hard-wired biological trait from the days of cave-dwelling and primal survival ("I don't like the surprise of having a sabre-toothed tiger jumping out at me and eating me, so I'll just be wary of all surprises from now on"), so it's only natural that people would rather hear a carbon-copy of their recording at home when they attend a live performance - they get to sing along with all the words and enjoy the same ups and downs of notes they're used to. But that doesn't really serve the perfectionist/evolutionary agenda of the musical performance itself; it could be said that each performance is a fresh attempt to reach that ideal state, and if the live version is significantly different to the recording then that just means it's closer to the ideal than what has been committed to record before that. Okay, I'm babbling now and I have to get ready to go to work... but that's my point of view as a musician. :)
I think that the fundamentals of the original piece of work (ex. the chords, lyrics of the original piece piece of work) are what constitutes whether other renditions of the that piece of work (such as covers and live performances) are directly related to that work. I also think that if an artist decides to change song lyrics or change most of the chord progressions in their original piece of work, it becomes a related piece of work to the original, but it is not the originator. It is an interpretation from the artist. This can be said about covers of songs that change lyrics and other fundamental parts of the song as well. I guess the question would be then what are all the fundamentals of a song then. I also believe that it doesn't matter where or on what device the song is being played; as long as it holds on to the fundamentals of the original song and the observer can recognize it as that song, then it is still the original song. The original song most likely is the first conception of the work by the artist, and then shown to audience. I'm also kinda leaning against that artist have a say in what the song is. If you have watched the PBS Idea Channel episodes on fan theories and what input the author has on their work, I think it stifles creativity a lot when the artist says "Yep, this newest rendition of my song is still the same song. No other versions past, present, or future are that song". I think the audience has a lot more influence on the interpretation of what the original song is (and what related songs to the original are) once the song is released, then the artist. Thoughts?
Here's an idea, what if the song itself is an abstract object, but particular renditions of the song are not the song at all. Perhaps when we refer to a particular performance or recording of the song we are merely observing that it is "like" or "similar" to the idea that it is the abstract object itself. The way I imagine it is how there is no perfect circles in the universe so when you see something round you call it a circle because it resembles the abstract idea that is a circle. Similarly even though you have never heard "the real suffragette city" you have an idea of the qualities it has as an abstract object and when you hear it you identify those properties (or close approximations of them). As such, music can closely resemble a song or resemble it very little, but at no point does it definitively become not the song because it was never the song to begin with.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with the set-theoretical approach is that we seem to require the set to be fixed - to have some sort of intensional definition that we can appeal to - and I'm not sure that is possible. I have to wonder if we could take a Parfit-like approach to this. It seems to me that when someone asks if it's the same song, their question can actually be reduced to facts about the performance they're referencing at that specific moment (stuff like what are the notes in the song and how they relate to each other, what instruments are involved, who's performing it, what do the lyrics look like, etc. ) and how they compare to similar facts about some prototypical version of the song; and the degree to which they match would correspond to how comfortable they feel labelling that particular performance as the same song. This means indeterminate cases are perfectly okay because the identity of the song is not a fact in itself, it's just a label for other facts. Of course, because the prototypical version of the song might differ from person to person and the point at which a person feels they can call it the same song would also differ from person to person, you'd never get a right or wrong answer, so much as a popular or unpopular answer. IDK. This probably just raises more problems than it solves. And Margaret Cavendish, please. :D
We've already had this exact discussion at my university, though not about bowie... :) We came up with pretty much the same idea: We should pay the musician or composer enough credit for his work, so a set theory of some sort may be a good solution.
Every sound is music. Which sounds we decide to call music are decided based on previous sounds that we have heard before and that we were told that are music, which is basically a social construct. If we could build a time a machine and listen to the music of the far future we would probably think that is just noise, because we wouldn't have gone through the process of historic social constructionism to accept those sounds as music. Anyway, that's my opinion, and I apologize if the text is not very comprehensive since english is not my native language.
a song is obviously any sound which someone considers to be musical. as for what songs and their names, i think this is the same as any other named thing. songs deserve the name when they possess a sufficient amount of the properties associated with that name. these properties can be such as the lyrics, the notes, the tempo, etc. if you change one word, unless that sufficiently changes an important property (important and sufficient are defined by the speaker for that instance) then it is the same song. if it does sufficiently change an important property then it is a different song and as such deserves a different name, generally just by adding on a description of what is different such as "cover of suffragette city" as opposed to just "suffragette city" the artist is the first one to define what that name refers to, and as such has a lot of artistic power over what that song is and what counts. in this explanation of what a song is, the artist is essentially coining a term, defining a word or phrase to mean whatever he decides it will mean, and that definition takes the form of a song. and of course it is a creative act to define a word or phrase which has never been defined before, or coming up with a new definition for it. and of course they deserve credit for defining the word. this explanation has a few problems, mainly due to being so subjective. it is hard to make laws based on something which is defined by each person individually who refers to it. but despite that problem i think it is the best way to look at how names work, and it allows us to define what is and is not a song without drawing arbitrary lines, but it does allow those lines to be constantly changing and be subjective.
I loved the idea about music being discovered instead of created. It makes sense to me as all the notes and sounds already exists, we do not invent sound waves and ears, we can just now harness those sounds. This could be applied to wider aspects of art like literature and painting which is interesting. I think the essence of the question 'what is the ontology of music' is examined more close by looking at the nature of performance as a whole. After all, we face the same difficulties with William Shakespeare's plays which have been performed for far longer than Bowie's song. How far do director's creative licensees allow them to go? I recently saw a rendition of Othello where Iago was also played by a black man. The issue of race is lost in this version so does it retain the same intentions of the original play write? I think this can be related to Plato's forms. When we create/discover a piece of art - it is that original piece that could be the perfect form, the rest are shadows.
Interesting question. I had never really thought of it before. Regarding Plato though. Maybe music is a type of FORM. Like a Square or a Triangle. Music is a pattern that is repeated in various ways. Like the shadows on the walls of Plato's Cave, there might exist a "truer" form of a song that is more real. Wouldn't the SET be the spaceless timeless entity? It's like the Block theory of time.
I think his song becomes a new version of itself every time it gets modified. That is why artists often have radio edits, remixes, and Spanish versions. The song stays the same until the author feels that it is a new song. The way To Kill a Mockingbird is a modification of Go Set a Watchman.
To me it seems that there are two different meanings that can be taken from the word "song". The first meaning refers to the series of notes and lyrics that make up that song. These don't really physically exist, but they are created and categorized when the original artist defines it. The second version is any time that series, or similar series of notes and lyrics is created in the the form of sound, sheet music, digital file, or other physical form. It is easy to conflate the two, but it is important not to, or else unclear definitions are created.
Songs are a group of sounds that bring forth certain forms (ideas) that a person is to let imprint on themselves or reflect upon. The forms brought forth are decided by the musician, remixer, or whoever else uses it. For example a happy song is and I listen to it to be happy the artist decided it to be so and it is but a remixer remixes it an tries to make it a song the creates sadness but instead the song makes the feeling of hope. This example shows that songs are mere tools used to inspire the feeling of forms or ideas within us the artist has succeeded in his song for me but the remixer has failed to use the song to create sadness the song is the recognizable group of sounds that the remixer started with even if I can't recognize it, it is that song-it is that tool. If I use a hammer to hammer a nail and the hammer maker Intended that it has happened and if a person makes a pick axe out of it but I use it as a sledgehammer then I am still using a basic object it's just been improv
Ved upon by function and innovation. So if a song is constantly improved upon then when is it not the song it was originally: as soon as people perceive it to be otherwise all songs are pieces of every thing else humans have ever conceived of put in a different order used as some to draw a feeling or idea like a bucket used to draw water from a lake. So should artist be given credit for making a song if it is to simply draw forms that humanity has before: Should people even give a damn about life an love and philosophy?
i dont mean to sound like a non-philosopher, but i think we may be overcomplicating this. one very important tenant of antirealism (at least, from what i read in my philosophy textbook about it) is the emphasis on the fact that WE are in control. we made up all these concepts to begin with, so we get to decide what they mean! i really like what Sam said, and i think it aligns with my theory more than the "types" and "sets" theories you discussed. what music is (or for that matter, what any art is) is up to the creators. my theory is pretty simple: if you wanna call it music, it's music. this can explain how things like noise and drone and lowercase and 4'33" are all music, because the artists' intentions were for it to be considered music. and it can also be applied to art. for example, artworks like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. how or why in any context could a urinal with some writing on it be considered art? simple: because Duchamp said so. similarly, if John Cage wants to amplify himself writing out a sentence on paper and call it music, he can! this, i believe, is why the theory works, because it's flexible and it means that anything can be art and anything can be music if someone wants it to be. i've considered responses to this, like "then what counts as an artist/creator?" or "so i can just walk outside and point at a twig and call it art or music?" and my answers to those responses typically come back to the original theory; i think the theory is good enough so that it can encompass those queries. what counts as an artist/creator? anyone who wants to be an artist/creator! can i just walk outside and call a twig art? essentially yeah! like i said before, we made all this stuff up, so we get to decide! the only other response that might cause problems that i can think of is "can i, in the same way, call something NOT art or NOT music and therefore make it so?" and to that i would say that perhaps whether or not something is art to an Observer can be different or separate from whether or not it is art to the Creator. but truthfully i haven't thought that far ahead lol
+Matthew DeVoll another question my gf just posed to me is "can it be called music if its not a human who's making it" and my answer is yes bc it doesnt matter to the non-human thing that's creating the sound whether or not what they're creating is music bc they have no concept of what music is; it just matters to the person who is dubbing it music
+Matthew DeVoll i also just realized a HUGE flaw with this and that's that Duchamp and Dada stuff was specifically dubbed "ANTI-ART" so that was a terrible example, but whatever
+Matthew DeVoll That might be fair enough, but I think you are placing too great an emphasis on the composer's intensions. There exist too many cases where the intensions of the composer are impossible to fathom - that peculiarity renders such works impossible to classify. However no such problems arise when instead of the composer's perspective one considers the listener instead. Athother problem with both of these conceptions is that the classification of two different individuals may be inconsistent - so you end up with as many classifications as different opinions. Which is a state of affairs that is faithful to the historical events as such, but may not be particularly useful in itself as a classification.
Stating that songwriting is more of a process of discovery than it is creating makes a lot more sense to me. I mean, those chords and notes already existed before you started trying to write a song- you just discovered that if you put them in a particular order, they sound a certain way. Redundancy 101
I vote for Cavendish, because I have no idea who that is but if you describe her as a badass then she must be good and interesting. As for transformations of songs or other works of performance art, it has to be intent. No matter how much the performers change the piece, if they intend for it to be Song X or Play Y, it is Song X or Play Y. You can quibble infinitely on if it was good or proper, but that has no effect on what it actually is.
In my experience songs usually aren't defined by the style of music they're done in, more by the words or if it doesn't have words, the notes of the song. There's a musician called Richard Cheese who exclusively does renditions of pop songs in a lounge music style, some of the words are changed or left out but it's still within the basic realm of intelligibility between the message of his covers and the original songs. The point that the limit between that is vague still stands, but I think drawing a concrete line would necessarily end up being so arbitrary that it overcomplicates the entire definition. Contrast those very dissimilar covers with say the music of Weird Al Yankovic who makes songs with exactly or nearly exactly the same melodies, but with different words, and they end up being totally different songs. So it's more to do with the lyrics than the melody I'd say.
david rodriguez you don’t even need to get a degree just analyze philosophy and philosophers ideas and understand what they think you must understand and think and then you will be a philosopher
I really like the "set theory" model because, according to Sam, the artist can define the set however they like, but some people disagree. This means to me that there are 2 overlapping sets: one defined by the artist, who created the set, and one defined by the people who listen to it.
When you said something along the lines of "it exists in multiple copies in different times and different locations," that reminded me of the digital publication of art. For example, we'll use my Google+ icon. It's a photograph, taken by me. I uploaded it to deviantArt, meaning that it exists in multiple copies in different times and different locations. this can be true for many different pieces of art, and so I wonder: How do these pieces fit into the discussion?
that seems little like the design space of possibilities that Dennett wrote. Music can't be defined by something, it's a pattern continuum that can be changed always and don't have clear borders. Down with essentialism!!! :D
When in doubt, dissolve the question. If I whistle the melody to "Suffragette City," then I'm whistling the melody to "Suffragette City." What more do you need to know than that? Is it a true rendition of the song? But what does that even mean? I'm whistling the melody. I'm not David Bowie, I don't have the background instrumentation, and I'm not performing for an audience or being recorded. I can tell you everything there is to know about my performance, so any questions about whether it's a "true" form of the song doesn't... seem to matter. The question doesn't have any meaning.
i didnt whatever my opinion on songs would be, but i feel like music is a lot more fluid than people admit. the same templates overlap between different genres and consequently the same chord progressions riffs and melodies show up in multiple songs. which is why it is so easy to do mashups. i love writing music and finding new music, but the distinction between songs has become really smeared for me. its almost like every song is a token of just 12 notes.
Collateral damage would be very interesting! Also, I don't get why Set Theory requires songs to not be abstract, spaceless, timeless objects. To me it just seems that Set theory is just a lens to view the grouping of separate tokens under the specific type that you're trying to organize.
The problem with Sam's theory is "What happens when Dylan passes away, or even when someone else does a cover of one of his songs?" If we accept that if someone plays a song multiple times, that each one of those times it is still the same song, then authorial intent can no longer be considered the most important aspect.
Exactly, the concept of songs being an object and any other recognisable form of that song being titled as that particular song seems logical but does it all depend upon humans' ability to recognise it for it to be called an instance of that song? And if not, then can we call Giant Steps an instance of Mary had a little Lamb?
I think if "It's alright Ma" sounds one way to begin with, then he changes it we still call the new one "It's alright Ma" if not just with an added "rockabilly version" at the end. He may wish to change once more or even several times, but each time the song is contingent with the last rendition so all versions are "All right Ma" (Similar to Personal Identity) Those who wish to stay true to the song as it once was will disagree with the artist saying they've changed the "real" song to Glam Rock and then Elecro-pop and finally Classical Orchestrated version, as song as each time either the song keeps the timing and overall melody OR it's based off the prior version of the song then it can continue to be called by the original name the artist gave it.
Music and songs are simply patterns in sound waves that we are able to recognize, and so the question "is this or that version of the song the same song?" is entirely subjective as some people may recognize it as being that original song, while others may not.
Gosh, the musical platonist view is so alluring. I think I'll play it like Plato and say that in this world of change nothing can perfectly reflect the forms, all attempts to play a song are necessarily derivations with outside influence. The creator was in a way discovering the song, but if somebody is going to make money off of it shouldn't it be them? Anyway, I vote Cavendish.
I'd say that even if the smallest change is made to the song, it is a different song. I'd even go as far to say that the exact same tune played in the same way but at a different time or place would count as different song. One can think of a song as 4 dimensional object - with 3 dimensional space and 1 dimensional time component or just call it an event. There exists only one instance for each event just like there exists only one instance of an object, because exact physical parameters map only to one object. So there would be only one event for you humming at that exact time and space, creating sound waves of that exact form. This is as far I can see how song could be defined in strict terms, although this would not be a useful definition for song to use in language.Many events map to one song title in human recognition. We could call a set of events a song if they all map to one title in human recognition. Note that this allows for two persons to have the idea of one song title but different events that would map to it. You humming and the original might be the same song for some but not for others. It is because they access not the actual world but their subjective model of the reality and also the recognition process is not identical. This is a lot fuzzier definition but seems to describe more precisely what we actually mean by a song. This is quite similar to set theory.The same reasoning could be applied to classification of any existing or abstract object not just songs.
6:16 But that would mean that if the song is played by anyone other than the original artist that it isn't the song. Even older versions of the song would no longer be the song. So what are they then?
The type of music you based your arguments on is just a small part of what the art form actually contains. The musicians you mentioned work similarly to any brand based product you buy every day. I mean Coca Cola is neither the recipe alone (because we know the recipe changed over time) nor the actual liquid alone, etc., David Bowie's individual songs are similarly neither the written notes alone nor only the performances of these alone, they actually are simply products he deemed to give titles to. Humming and/or distorting these songs can be done only in reference to their original version which runs under the brand name, and the brand has (or had had at one point) full control over every aspect of this proto-product. This is however not the case in in other domains of music. There are and have been countless examples of works that survived without their composer's consent (these works still can be and are categorized as musical works (songs are only one of hundreds of types of music btw.) even if their composer never said they should be). There exist composing techniques (aleatoric, stochastic, etc.) which can create infinite possibilities of organizing sound in a single piece. A composer can write and claim such a piece without having full or even partial control over what elements and combinations of elements the work actually will contain. Furthermore there are countless pieces we don't know the author of. The only relevant definition is: "Music is an art form, social activity or cultural activity whose medium is sound and silence." (wikipedia). Every other previous definition of music (like "Music is organized sound", and as far as I know) has been proven wrong, and every single aspect of music except that of the passing of time has been proven to be optional.
I find myself drawn to the thought of 'Weird' Al Yankovic's parodies. I believe we can agree that "Ridin' Dirty" and it's parody "White and Nerdy" are separate and distinct songs. The parody is purposefully as musically similar to the original as possible. Where is the line? How much of a song must you change before the product is a distinct self-contained song? *this smacks of the ship of Theseus*
I believe there is a distinction, between the song as a blueprint for performed music, as it is written, and a specific performance/recording rendering of that design. I think attributing other dimensions or supernatural entities to the concept of these things is pointless. Concepts (labels) exist within our minds. That is the place where they have meaning, within the framework of our thoughts. Believing that everyone shares the same framework is a fallacy. While many of these frameworks are vastly similar, because otherwise we could not communicate about these concepts to each other, there are always minute to large differences. So concepts, are an invention of the mind and philosophy tends to treat them as a thing that physically exists, and even derive conclusions about them or come up with metaphysical constructs that explain them. Doing that would require us not to think about specific concepts like music, but instead to pursue this from the angle of it's underlying medium, consciousness. If concepts are to be understood, and thoughts are to be understood then we must first understand the underlying framework within which these things exist, our consciousness or the mind itself.
Music is a pattern made of tones and sounds and songs are a certain type of, or form of music pattern - that pattern can be recognisable even if you change it but if the change is too much it can no longer be recognised - but when is that line crossed ? that 's a difficult question and no easier to answer than when do a few grains of sand become a heap
I think asking whether something "is" or "isn't" Suffragette City is problematic. Similarity isn't binary, it's more like an axis - if I just hum a few notes, well, that's pretty far, but a David Bowie performance with one note out of place is real close to the "ultimate version". Whether appearances of Suffragette City, closer or farther as they may be are considered tokens/instances, is a personal preference and dependant on the circumstances. I guess this approach works better with Platonism, since it assumes a perfect version of the song and can deal with improvements on the original performance, whereas Nominalism seems to be a little stuck to the importance of the first instance (according to my understanding; it probably deals with it somehow). Now, what is every instance/token measured AGAINST, that's also personal. The "true meaning" or "ideal" of the song changes from person to person, which is what's going on with Bob Dylan - he makes versions which are true to the song in HIS mind, but that's not how many others see it. However, that means there ISN'T a single, perfect abstaction - there are many, one for every meaning of a work of art (sometimes more than one per person!). So the name "Suffragette City" merely refers to an APPROXIMATION of the meaning of the song, an anchor point or root from which every interpretation grows. The only way to measure the "Suffragette City"-ness of an instance is to compare it to the average opinion, or by the percentage distribution of the common verdicts. ...I'll stop now, before I get to copyright laws and other legal stuff. My head hurts as it is.
Sorry for the new-agey gibberish, but I think it's trippier than that... Just because the artist can change it doesn't mean it isn't eternal, but rather as we hurdle through time and space the artist's relationship with the transcendent form in question (the song he/she discovered) has to be expressed differently in order to re-capture the original truth (or sometimes, to come closer to the original truth)
Songs are ideas. Music, is a language by which intelligence can express itself. Music is a universal language. Songs can be complex ideas, but non the less, ideas. Much of human intelligence is expressed in music.
I see music as a blueprint; a kind of plan to be followed. Anytime something is constructed in the way that the audible tone follows that plan, then you have created an instance of that plan. In this way, playing a few bad notes still makes it an instance of this plan, just a poor one. If the plan exists as an idea, is it fair to say that it exists outside of time or before it was made? Out of an entropic soup of possible patterns, something was defined and given a name and becomes a song. Like any idea, it would be unrecognizable prior to this and so surely can't be considered as always having existed and just being "discovered".
I think "How much" is the wrong question because it isn't exactly a measurable kind of change. I think it's better to go into "What can he change", because from there we can look at the properties of each version and take their differences as answers.
Anything is a human conceptualization of the thing. The things themselves do not "care" for their name, structure of organization, they just are. In this sense, Things are, and every particular form of things is an "possible organization of things". Music is a form of things (vibration). The song itself is the name given to a very specific form of things. Bohemian Rhapsody will stop being Bohemian Rhapsody as soon as people stop naming it Bohemian Rhapsody. Not because whatever the thing now is, or is being performed as, and when, change its constitution, but because the thing itself doesn't "care" about it's classification, WE do. We are the ones to classify, and organize the things, in a useful set of things. So, if it useful to say that Bohemian Rhapsody is whatever Queen say it is, then awesome. If we define it as x +- 100 "song variation", then voila. The forms themselves are "similar" or "different" to us, but will be the relationship of matter that it is, regardless of the names we give it. It's what I call "Presentationist Metaphysics" and I'm writing about it.
Songs can be just patterns of sound waves at a certain frequency and a pitch, and this 'pattern' is just a figment of our imagination, trying to make sense of those sound waves, kind of like the copernican model of the planets, not a correct model, but just trying to make sense of the planetary motions. These patterns are a general rule and slight variations would still count as the song, and perhaps even the intention of singing the song when the person is a bad singer would still count as the song.
Why not consider it from a cognitive perspective? In an individual's brain, a given song is very much represented abstractly. Very soon after a sound is converted into neural signals by tiny hair cells in our inner ear, a large set of features are abstracted from it and it is these features (i.e. lyrics, melodic/rhythmic construction, etc.) that we use to identify a song. Exactly what those features are is a difficult question, but relatively unimportant to this discussion. I think it is enough to say that, clearly, they are complex and numerous enough for us to recognize the germ of "It's Alright, Ma" in Dylan's distorted, rockabilly version. 1. In this context, the problem of classifying an auditory input as "Song A" or "Not Song A" is at least somewhat individualistic. We, the classifiers, may disagree about precisely where to draw the line, but we will agree about most examples and the disagreement will be randomly distributed in some way. So, presumably the best solution is to take the average response of a lot of listeners? I like the idea about including the intention of the creator, but once a work is disseminated does it not take on a life of its own? --------- (this next part gets a bit long, but it is an interesting consequence of the first idea, so I wanted to think it through. apologies if it is a bit obnoxious to read.) -------- 2. I think the cognitive context can also avoid the idea that all songs should have always existed. That statement is certainly true in the sense that you can find any finite set of numbers in any infinite, non-repeating sequence of numbers, but I'm not sure that is a useful observation. Instead, perhaps a song can be defined by the least common canonical representation of it in the minds of its audience. By way of illustration, consider two recordings we would normally consider the same song -- a studio version and an acoustic version. Let's say person A has heard the studio version, and person B has heard the acoustic version. Person A's representation of what "the song" is will overlap with person B's in some places (let's say melody and lyrics) and diverge in others (instrumentation, tempo). The least common representation would be the places they overlap. This, then, becomes a question of "how many of the song's features can you change/remove before you start failing the 'Song A' / 'Not Song A' test?" It is not obvious what the answer is exactly, but you should be able to come to an empirical answer by testing with large, randomly selected groups of people. Since it is testable, I tend to think this a more useful definition to build on. Notice that, under this new definition, a song can only exist if its representation exists in someone's mind--not whether you could imagine its existence or not, but whether it has existed or not. I'm not making any claims on *when* the representations should exist... I think there is a lot to be discussed there but for another time maybe. I guess the conclusion is: it is not enough to say "all songs have always existed;" that is a relatively weak statement. It is much stronger to say: "a song exists if its minimal representation has existed in someone's mind." --- Hopefully that makes sense to someone other than me :-)
Doesn't this connect to the philosophy of language? You could say that "sufragette city" is merely a subjective label that we humans apply to a set of events/things that we feel are somehow connected. Because it's subjective, multiple people can connect it to different sets. So David Bowie and I can have different opinions on what constitutes sufragette city, while both being correct in some sense.
For explicit songs there are sometimes censored versions, this seems to support set theory where they would be part of the same set even though they have slightly altered lyrics
I think the music belongs to the public and it's the public realization of that music (aka when the pubic acknowledges the music) that a music is still the same that's why mumbling it still counts To back up that it's only the acknowledgement of the public that counts I'd like to say that musics are to be heard that way everyone that has already heard a music is the "keeper" of the music which exists only in the persons mind For example if I showed you Beethoven's 5 and told you it was the Star Wars theme and you had never heard either, you'd believe me
I believe music exists in memory and knowledge, because if no one can remember anything about the song they sang yesterday, it no longer exists. For instance a complicated piece like a Beethoven Symphony exists in its score, because without the score we wouldn't remember how the symphony goes, (at least not well). For pop and contemporary music we have recordings to solidify our memory. If a composer, (like Sibelius with his 8th symphony) throws their score into the fire before anyone else has seen it, then for all intents and purposes the piece no longer exists. If someone was to coincidentally write the exact same music as what was once in Sibelius 8, it couldn't be plagiarism because that symphony exists in no one's memory and there is no way we would ever know.
+Benjamin Saffir Now you have me wondering if Musical Notation was invented to prevent people from stealing songs! Certainly there would be no way to prove plagiarism back in the early days without it!
+Erik Amundson No, it was invented simply as a better way to remember the notes than having to cram it all into your head and pass it down orally. It has many advantages, such as allowing far increased complexity over oral transmission/folk music and also quite a fair bit more complexity than whats possible through recorded transmission/popular music. With the exception of a few epic poems like the Illiad or the Odyssey, you couldn't create a complex novel/narrative with a coherent structure without writing it down. Thats one of the advantages notation has, although I'm not sure if Guido was thinking of that when he first invented it - he just wanted to cut down the amount of time it took to learn the different Gregorian Chants.
What is interesting is how hundreds of years after musical notation was widely accepted did songs start to be regarded as private property. The whole idea of plagiarism, originality and individual ownership is really a byproduct, rather than a cause, of musical notation.
Absolutely, it's worth bearing in mind the Gregorian Chants that were being written down had been passed down orally for many years, so I doubt they knew the original author of many of them.
+Benjamin Saffir I am not so sure about that. These composers and performers were considered celebrities in their day too. If the David Bowie of the 1100s reaped similar rewards as the David Bowie of the 2000s (namely fat stacks and booty), that would be some powerful reasons to secure his brand. But back to the topic. It may be interesting to note that the American Courts don't recognize a song until it has been written down or recorded. Until then, according to the law, it doesn't exist. In that way, both you and the courts agree that the Platonic version is more accurate.
If someone says that the song is too loud we might claim that a song is just physical vibrations. If someone tells us to play the song again we might claim that a song is an eternal type. If someone tells us to rewrite the song we might claim that the song is a variable that can be set to platonic values. Before this video I would have said a song is a type of experience or at least the type of encoding for a type of experience because that would explain how you can think a song to yourself or sing it or type it. But that doesn't explain how a song should have been different or how you can make a song or change a song or how the chorus got in the song. The nominalist answer doesn't make sense to me, it seems recursive and unrelated to how we use the word song. A variable with resettable platonic values is my answer. The same answer fits for speeches, novels, poems and perhaps personal names. Even if my answer turns out to be nonsense I don't think that the nominalist or platonist definitions fit the usual unspoken definition of songs or speeches, plays, movies etc.
Assuming David Bowie did 'discover' Stairway to Heaven, he should still get credit for it, even in a creative way. Albert Einstein invented the theory of relativity, and still gets credit for that, even though it is not (and probably never will be) conclusively proved. And, where does classical music come in all of this? Is a piece of classical music already something abstract, in which case, ok, I guess, or is it the sum of all its performances? If so, what is the score? instructions for anyone to make a copy? Also, when you change a work, you are creating a new version of the work, which is technically not the same, but similar. Back to classical music, Tchaikovsky wrote three versions of the Romeo and Juliet overture. The first version had a completely different introduction, middle section (development, if you're a classical musician), and ending (coda), but other parts (the exposition and recapitulation) were exactly the same as the third version. are they the same piece? Similarly, are various drafts of artistic works the same work? Or are they different works. Perhaps the 'Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture' is not just a sum of all the performances, but the sum of all its versions (drafts/revisions/etc.), each of which is the sum of all its performances And, speaking of classical music, we know different people have different interpretations of them. Find as many recordings as you can of Beethoven's fifth. I'll wait. Yeah, notice how different the speeds are? And how there's a repeat in the first and last movements, but only in some recordings? Are they the same piece? We could define a piece by its FIRST performance, but Beethoven's fifth was ridiculously underrehearsed for the premiere, and so was played very badly. So anyone playing it well would be playing it wrong. Also, Beethoven's dead, so there's no way we could know his current opinion on what it should be. If there is an afterlife, he might have changes his mind and been unable to tell anyone. If not, is there no right way? Did Beethoven's fifth die with him, only to leave its shadow on Earth? Or we could take Beethoven's opinion from just before he died...
On whether it's still creativity if David Bowie was technically just discovering it: This (libraryofbabel.info/) is the Library of Babel. It has so many shelves, so many volumes, and so many pages that literally any possible combination of letters on a page exists somewhere in it. And you can find literally any sentence you can imagine somwhere in there. These words that I am typing right now are even on there, three times, in fact. However, I am still creating as I type.
In non formal set theory a set can contain anything so if you want a super-set that includes every instance of suffrage city that is similar to the original, first instance, to any given degree you can do that. Rather a better question if suffrage city is every instance of itself how can you know it, after all you only know a subset of those instances. In mathematics an axiom of choice is invoked and it is very controversial. Since what the axiom states is that there exist something that does the work of compiling your set for you whether you know the elements or not whether there are a finite number of elements or not. Still I have to say I'm playing devils advocate Since by far set theory is my favorite way of explaining language and objects.
We shouldn't forget that both theories - musical platonism and set theory - misses, even more, is silent about (in their fixation on metaphysics and de-substantiated 'Ideal song) a crucial and constituent element of any song (even art as such): that is, its listener/recipient. Every ontology of music (or art in general) must incorporate all three (traditional) aspects: artist, work, and recipient. We shouldn't isolate and focus our attention only on 'work' (because what does it mean for a 'work' to exists without any recipient?). We also shouldn't fetishize its author, who apparently (by which logic? on what grounds?) has an authority on the work of art that he/she supposedly created. I see a great value (and maybe a solution to some of dilemmas that given theories introduces) and a emancipatory potential in that the work of art is 'created' by its recipient and not by its author (the author only 'empirically' crated his work, but as the work finds itself in social context it simply looses it authorship, if I simplify a little); or as Roland Barthes puts it (in the context of author-text-reader), that the author is not the point of convergence where all the disparate levels of the text (or song in our case) are combined into a coherent story; this point of convergence in its reader (listener), who is simply by reading (listening) linking different points in the text (song), i. e. forming an interpretation. In the end, we, the listeners, are those who decides, simply by recognition, if given song is 'that song that I have heard' or not.
+Jaum yaung I agree with that. The author has definitely written the song and without him/her we wouldn't have anything to listen to. But he is only author in an empirical way, that is to say, he has definitely at some point in the past put those notes and words together and created the song. But is he also an author of a given cord, cord progression, musical instrument, or phrases and words also? On what grounds can an author says that he 'owns' a song and that he has an authorship/authority over it? (I think that this kind of 'authority' of authorship is not a neutral ground but a specific ideological framework; a framework - which we shouldn't forget! - was not there in every point of history: in middle ages, for example, there was not such a thing as 'the Author'. The Author, as we know it today, was a product of the Renaissance, in larger extend.) The point of Barthes' 'the death of the author' is to deconstruct this kind of false belief - in the eyes of an author AND its readers/recipients -, the belief that an author automatically means authorship and authority on interpretation, that the author has a final word what is 'correct' interpretation'. I think that this position is a little perverse and egoistic, at least. Another thing we shouldn't forget is that an author, says Barthes, is simply by writing stepping into his own death, into his own symbolic death, that is to say, by finishing his/her work (text, painting, song etc.) he loses all connection, all strings that binds him/her to it: the work enters a 'public domain'. (And an author who is crying like: 'No, you misunderstood me! This is not how I envisioned it. The correct interpretation is ...' - this kind of author missed the whole aspect of creating any peace of art, or anything for that mater: that is, the gaze of the viewer and how will the recipient, who was born into specific cultural space, interpret your work.) The author is not present in our heads when we listen to a song or when we view a painting; we are alone there - alone with our memories and past experiences. And this is the only thing what determines OUR interpretation (since there does not exists any other, 'objective' one).
+Jaum yaung But you have to remember, at least I think so, that copyright is an extension of the same ideological framework, combined with ideology of capitalism, that guaranties and creates 'the Author' in the first place. If we agree that 'the Author' is a product of this system, than we have to at least re-interpret what copyright after 'the death of the author' actually means (if we buy Barthes). And we cannot be pragmatic about this. (Since pragmatic, in this case, always means 'pragmatic, yes, but only under a specific ideology'.) In the case of 'the author produces original, and copyright should defend the author', you are entering on slippery ground of original vs. copy, which is by no means an easy territory. What is it in 'original' that makes it superior to a mere 'copy' of it? W. Benjamin call this 'the aura'; but what makes this 'aura'? An original itself? Or the discourse that circles around it? Has is do to with some specific quality of an original that is instantly recognizable? Or has it more to do that 'the Author' is present, and signed in/on the work? And what determines this author? (Our dilemma...) What gives some specific person, even if he has empirically written a song - what gives this person the right to call itself 'The Author'? Has is to do with empirical circumstances, or has it more to do with ideology in which this person is functioning and by which values he is viewing the world? This are some questions that are troublesome, for me at least. But the 'original vs. copy' is a basic platonic problem, and Plato himself finds itself in a contradictory position about it when he says that there exists 'good copies' (a copy of an Ideal), and 'bad copies' (a mere copy of an copy, i. e. art). What is symptomatic in this/his case is that he is actively trying to destroy 'bad copies' (art, sophists etc.), at the same time he is actively defending, in the end, the same mechanism, that is, 'good copies'. But the mechanism is the same: in both cases we are faced with 'copying'. As if Plato himself already understood, unconsciously, that the copy, a 'bad copy', is already undermining 'the original', a 'good copy' (as is 'unconsciously' understood by copyright laws...); and by this understanding he is actively trying to avoid 'bad copies' and diminished them from his State. What does this mean for 'authorship' or for 'the original'? Maybe that the position of 'original' itself is not naturally better than 'a mere' copy (look at art, for example, Appropriation art, which is undermining this very dilemma). And maybe 'the original' itself already stands on specific grounds, and is not a 'natural state of things', that is to say, that it need 'the Author' for it (the original) to exists, to have its 'aura'. Without this position or ideological framework this 'aura' simply evaporates.
+Jaum yaung I see that your argument is based on two, in my opinion big, presuppositions (correct me if I am wrong) which should be answered and deserves a reflection: 1. the author has the knowledge of his/her own work; and 2. the author's knowledge (any kind of his/her knowledge of his/her work, even 'false' one) should be ... has to be the governing factor for determining and locating the original, and, by the same action, dismissing all of its copies (under the pretence that we are marching towards 'the true epistemic revolution', in which all of the dots will be connected, or how should I put it.). (And maybe also a third presupposition: determining the original is our moral imperative. What if those 'simulacrum theorist' are right; what if there is no such hierarchy of original at the top and its copies at the bottom, but 'only' a planar field of equal positions diverging into multiplicities with rhizomatic structure? And our quest for finding the original is in this case totally meaningless ...) (1) Usually, if we exclude 'ideal cases' (which don't exists), we find that the author doesn't have full epistemic spectrum of his/her own work, that he/she doesn't fully know why this brush stroke was made, why this word or note was used, and so on. I don't mean to argue that the author is fully unknowledgeable about his/her own work, that the work is always created in unconscious flow of unexplainable emotions and reasons (this is mystification and, by the same token, fetishization of the author par excellence); I only say that what author thinks his/her work is about (his knowledge of it) is NOT the objective position on how this work should be received and interpreted. This is done by a truly unknown and multiple processes that includes, for example, social context (which cannot simply be explained and determined in advance NOR afterwords), etc. This is why I argue that the author's position (or knowledge, if you like), in the end of the day, really doesn't matter, even if his/her own sweat and blood are in his/her own work. The interpretation and recognition of author's work is always determined on how will it 'inscribe' itself into a 'social fabric', into a wider context, into art institutions/system, and us, the recipients, and never simply for its own qualities and author's opinions. (2) If we accept previous argument, than this presupposition is simply a false one. But we cannot overlook that an author has some sort of knowledge of his/her work, even if a 'false' one, and it is usually when we talk about it (the work of art, in any shape possible; in criticism, for example) given some exposure and value. But precisely on this point we can fall into a trap (for which I fear that you are falling into), that is, that we are giving to much emphasis onto the very author of the work, and not so much to the work itself and how do WE perceive it or how does it perturb the sociality. And we have to free ourself from this 'self-repression'. We have to recognize that position of the author does not automatically mean position of the authority. In good works of art, the work itself is 'speaking' what it means; no intervention of the author's opinions and thoughts are needed. But I see, only just now, that your basic dilemma is the fact that a copy can lie and deceive 'uneducated' (not in a bad sense) viewer/listener (which is also the dilemma for Plato); that he/she will live in a false belief that a cover, for example, is an original and not a mere copy. (Which, incidentally, happens to me a lot.) But I don't thing this is such a big problem; not from a personal standpoint nor from an 'analytic' one, since the latter will (through some kind of historical analysis) always find which one is 'the original' (the-first-one) and which one is 'just a mere copy'.
+Jaum yaung It may seem like I wanted to completely devalue and destroy the author and glorify positions of recipient. But I am not (neither is Barthes, to whom I am referring). I am just focusing my attention and shifting perspective the other way around just because the recipient is usually, in discourse about works of art or in 'layman's discourse' at least, completely neglected (as if work of art, any work, does exists in it self, without anyone to read/listen/view it). (And I got your point; you did not argue that the author is the only one who is important. I was, maybe wrongly to you, referring more to a 'state of things' - a state where most of population is at, that's my observation, where the author is fetishized to the extreme - and a state that is somehow apparent in this video, which also missed the whole aspect of the recipient and focusing its attention on 'Ideal things', either in platonic way or in the sense of abstraction of the sets.) Again, the author has its place that is equally important, it just doesn't have the 'traditional' authority over his/her work; the authority that was, for example, determining all past comparative literature studies, which has fallen into that trap (that I have mentioned above), that is: they have always focused their attention on the author, what he (usually only 'he' at that times) has to say about it, on his biography, life, and social context that text was written in, but the all diverged their attention from the text itself and how it relates 'here and now', in our times, in our social context. Thinking of author as the authority, or even some kind of authority (even a little one), is a great burden that can mislead us into a false interpretation of the text and into a glorification of the author-genius; we only look the text with 'historical' and 'author's' eyes, but not with our eyes, the 'eyes of our times', that we really should. In that case, I think, that presuppositions 'The author has ALL knowledge of his/her work.' and 'The author has SOME knowledge of his/her work.' are, in the end, the SAME presupposition: both fall into that trap that I have mention two times now. Of course we have to consider what author has to say about his/her work, but this does NOT mean that he/she has the final word on it, in the sense: 'OK, I have viewed the work, I have made my own interpretation ... now, let's go and ask the author what he/she has to say, so that I can finally and really understand his/her work and.' This is completely false position. It should be more in the lines of: 'OK, I have viewed the work, I don't know what it's about ... let go and ask the author, read some critics, and forget all of them, and go back to the work and view it and see how it relates to me and to my/ours situation in this point of history.' (Putting aside how will the interpretation of author/critics form my interpretation; in ideal scenario the viewer will be educated enough that he/she wont need this second step: he/she has done that many times before, so that now he/she doesn't need that much help because he/she has learned how to interpret any given work. But take this example with a grain of salt.) Another thing: you are, in most of your comments, referring to the 'social phenomena of people being fooled that a cover is the true original'. (That's way, incidentally, I was mentioning to you the platonic problem of copies and how they introduced the same dilemma for Plato himself.) But you are mostly arguing in generalities and never in concrete example. So do you know any? Because I am curious to know then (and I cannot recall any of them myself). And examples that have 'real' effects, that is to say, that they don't just fool people and they don't infringe copyright laws.
Platonism is not spooky. There's nothing mysterious about how abstract things can exist. They exist as abstractions. Surely we're not going to confuse abstractions with ghosts. A Platonist isn't saying that abstractions are material things that exist in some alternate universe that we hope to one day visit. David Bowie both created and discovered Suffragette City. David Bowie created our first copy of the song that now allows us to play the song at will. David Bowie also discovered that the notes and words of Suffragette City are pleasant to listen to when played in that order, which is something that has been true of Suffragette City for all time.
+Ansatz66 Imagine that a Christian fundamentalist tries to explain the moral downfall of today's youth by pointing to the lyrics of songs like Suffragette City. Is he wrong in attempting to make such an explanation? People tend to believe that great art can change society. Are they wrong? If Suffragette City is an abstract entity, there's no causal way in which it can influence society. Furthermore, how does David Bowie discover Suffragette city when the song can't causally interact with him?
***** "If Suffragette City is an abstract entity, there's no causal way in which it can influence society." Abstractions _can_ cause things, just not in the way that material things cause things. If you have a thought about a chocolate cake, that may cause you to eat a cake, but your thought doesn't exist as a material thing. There's certainly no cake inside your head, and the cells of your brain are merely the mechanism by which you think, not your actual thoughts. There is no material thing which we could ever point to and say that is a thought because thoughts are abstractions. A thought about cake represents many things. It represents your relationship to cake and it represents a complex series of events inside your brain. Obviously there is a series of physical events that leads you to think about cake and continues on to cause you to eat cake, so we can look at it on a purely physical level. At the same time, we can use abstractions to think about it on a higher level. As an abstraction, we can use your thought about cake to represent the physical events in your brain. As an abstraction, we can say your thought caused you to eat cake. Abstract things cause things in an abstract way. Concrete things cause things in a concrete way. If you are talking about how Suffragette City might be a concrete influence on society, then you're right and it cannot. Even so Suffragette City can influence society as an abstraction of the concrete chain of physical events that leads from the playing of the song to the change in people.
Ansatz66 Thanks for your response I enjoyed reading it. Suppose we have two competing explanations of reduced youth attendance in church: rock lyrics and drugs. Rock lyrics influence the youth as an abstraction of a chain of events that leads from their singing to a change in the youth. Drugs affect the youth by binding with receptors in the brain. Is it possible to compare how good these explanations are?
***** "Is it possible to compare how good these explanations are?" The only serious way to compare two explanations is testing the predictions of each explanation. If drugs are the cause, then that predicts that removing the drugs will remove the effect. Therefore, if we can remove the drugs then we can test the explanation by observing the result. A similar test might be done for the music explanation. If both explanations pass their tests, or if we're not able to perform any tests due to practical issues, then there is no way to compare the two explanations.
And what about the different "variances" you get on different playback? I mean, every setup give us different/colored sounds. From earbuddy to pro loudspeaker to flat mediums. All of them are included on the set?
In the set theory view, where only "performances" are members of the set, how about sheet music, a midi file or an mp3 file? All of them, I would say are not "instances of the song being played", but can through various means become "performances".
I'm not sure I agree with the opinion that a song is what the 'creator' says it is. If Bowie played Life on Mars and said 'this is suffragette city', I don't think that makes it 'suffragette city'. I think there must be a defining 'characteristic' or 'trait' of a song that remains, even if most things change. Even this/these 'traits' can change a little. But where the line between it being 'it's self' or being something else might be hard to draw with certainty. I think it is similar to the 'how many bits of a boat can you change before it's a different boat' question. But as well as changing parts of the boat, you are also changing the design. If you are changing parts of a row boat, and making it flatter, at some point it will be recognised as a raft. Like you can change the bass line, drum beat, tempo ect of a Dylan folk song to make it a blue grass song. But, back to the boat, if you are changing parts of your boat and also redesigning it so it ends up with out the essential characteristic of a boat, say the ability to be used to transport things over water (whether this is the essence of what a boat is, is unimportant right now), then it stops to be a boat. I would say with pop songs, the essential traits are the chorus lyrics and melody, usually. Not to say they can't be change a little, but without the chorus suffragette city is missing something that really defines the song. And with jazz or classical music, the essential trait Maybe I have lost my point a little, I feel maybe I am talking about the musical platonist idea of types and tokens. But I think what I really want to say is that the creator can not define what a song is, it is done by the listener. If it misses what all listeners use to identify what 'suffragette city' is, then one person saying 'this is suffragette city' doesn't make it so.
I think songs are memetic objects, ideas passed from brain to brain the similar to how the genetic code of a virus is passed from host to host. The reason I choose this interpretation is because I don't think that songs can properly exist as abstract, objective information. As you discussed in the video there's no standard form of that information. It can mutate or evolve, like memes and genes. Additionally, songs need a human being to interpret them. Two musicians can (and often do) independently come up with identical melodies. But those are different songs to the musicians because their brains are interpreting them indifferent ways. When viewing music through the lens of memetic objects, any person who intends to preform or make a recording of Suffragette City, and then expresses that intention, makes an instance of Suffragette City. The closest we can come to a "true" version of the song would be the very first time David Bowie came up with the song and tested it out. Another way to think about songs as memes, is that the song itself resides in the brains of listeners and performers, the sound waves are merely the vector along with the song propagates and inserts itself into the minds of others.
At a certain point music or poetry or any of it is a work. And once a work is in a public eye a certain aspect of that work belongs outside the creator(s).
Also very interesting is the question: what is music? Is music the imaginary library with every possible song ever written and yet to be written by humans in it? You could see it as that when a person writes an entire new song that sounds like no other song known to man, that song just were there in this library waiting to be discovered, rather than this person "creating" it out of thin air. All the notes already exist. Also what are the boundaries of what could be a song? Songs are notes played with a certain amount of length and time between each other. If you played a note of a melody now and play the next a year later, and the next a decade later, could that be called a song?
I am not sure about the artist's intention there... If you would have to rely on the artist's intention, wouldn't you have to ask the artist "what was your intention with that song?" for basically every song? And isn't that taking away an important part of the art's purpose, i.e. the interpretation (both kinds, the one that we do in our brains and the one different artists take on the same piece)? Take Tool, for example. If you ask Maynard Keenan what the meaning of their songs are, he will probably say you did not get what is the intention of their music. For them, interpretation, thinking about different meanings, reconstructing the art inside your brain, is really important. I am of the opinion that when we interpret the song in our mind, this is actually a new performance, it is you making art. The process is just as active as putting the actual notes together . I understand that this idea would just render the definition of song impossible or useless... The song would have to be something limited in time and space, created by people in the act of playing or listening to music. Any "reproduction" of that original would be a different song. By this notion, the very recording is a "fraud", because it is not the original composition. But yet you see it happening when artists say that they don't like the way some song was recorded, because it was 'too perfect', 'too square', 'too much of some instrument', etc. For me, this is the musicians saying "it was not the song that I invented, but an unsatisfactory copy". The cool thing about this idea, though, is that it doesn't really matter what you call the song you are playing in that moment. If you are feeling that, in the moment, the original song has a message that would be best translated if you play it as Death Metal instead of Blues, you can still call that "a rendition of the original song". Bob Dylan - or anyone else - could change "It's Alright Ma" anyway he wants, it is still valid, and it will never be the original song anyway.
songs are a pattern of sound, the same could be said of the mona lisa or any other work of art they are just patterns of color or stone or whatever. to reproduce simpy repeat the pattern, so in other words every version of David bowies songs you've heard are like photos of the mona lisa.
So when and why did we decide that an image can only exist once (eg. The Mona Lisa) and any copy is 'just a copy' but a song can be copied and reperformed and is still the same thing sorta? Surely we could do the same and point towards the first original recording of each song, especially back in the time of physically scratching/punching/magnetising? The issue with the "it's whatever the artist wants it to be"... what happens once the artist is dead? Does the song just always stay what the 'last will' of the artist was? Also, what about super old stuff, folk songs that nobody really knows who wrote them, there's no 'original' sheet music or even lyrics written down, just passed down the generations, until eventually there's a wikipedia article listing 10 different versions with further local modifications and at least 3 spoof lyrics?
"Plato is always wrong." - Nietzsche
To look at this from the viewpoint of music theory (the study of music through form, composition, etc.), the main question being asked is what distinguishes between variances in performance and a new musical piece (I say piece as opposed to song because song refers specifically to vocal music), and mostly the differentiation is based on recognition and similarity, but this can be analysed a bit more precisely than "well it sounds like Skillet."
All music has certain aspects, called elements which are its defining properties: melody (interaction of tone over time), harmony (interaction of tone simultaneously), rhythm (duration and accentuation of tones over time), timbre (the individual waveforms that differentiate one voice from another), dynamics (volume), form (structure), and tempo (speed). So if all of these elements are the same it is an identical piece. But changing certain elements of a piece are not thought to make a different piece. Changes to tempo and dynamics are rarely thought to alter whether a piece is still the same piece (certain schools of thought might argue with this). Small localized alterations to the other elements are referred to as "ornamentation," (such as holding a note for longer or a few extra notes added in) and also are thought at most to be slight variations of the a piece. More drastic, yet still identifiable, are "arrangements," where one or several elements are changed over the entirety of the piece, most often to form, harmony, and timbre. These are where we get into the gray area of differentiating between new pieces and variances. Arrangements are more often considered to be variation on a piece, but still signified as an arrangement, and some argue that they are new compositions.
These also show that melody and rhythm (at least in western music) are the most identifiable elements, and changes to them are less likely to be recognized as the same piece. While localized changes to rhythm or melody can be found in arrangements, they are nowhere near as drastic as the changes to timbre or harmony, which could different for the entirety of the piece. Major changes to these, melody in particular, will make a piece unrecognizable, and at that point will likely be thought as a new piece. Conversely, if a every element besides melody and rhythm is changed, a piece could still be recognized as the original, changed drastically, yes, but still the same piece.
And considering the main argument was about song, the element of lyrics is added in as well. This element can be modified locally just like any of the others, but it is a little different as it can be changed completely, still recognized as the original, and yet thought of as a different piece. This is called a "setting" and is one of the confusing parts of differentiation.
We did it! We solved music!
+This Exists From introducing the masses to Ebay Reflecto-porn to solving the concept of music itself, truly you are a renaissance man.
+K. Lloyd Thank you.
There could also be subsets within the set, such as the set of all performances of the old version, and the set of all performances of the new version.
Simple. David Bowie doesn't exist in time or space. it IS David Bowie after all
sagetmaster4 guessing there’s no space time in the Heavens...
Goodbye moon man
i think some synthesis is in order here
the artist creates/discovers the first "token" of the type, which becomes the "official" token, and the artist can subsequently change which token is the "official" token. but others can create other tokens of that type
I also think that a token can be of more than one type at once (mashups and remixes for example).
creation and discovery are synonymous in the situation of realizing in spacetime the first (known) token of some type
I've found this channel 3 years after completing my A level philosophy... So I'm a bit late to the party, but you sir, rock!
Thanks! Welcome to the little community!
This was a good episode, but I'm a bit disappointed we didn't cover the question "what is music?". What separates music from other sound?
+Delta X I talk about that exact thing in the video I cameod in on Sam's channel!
What I loved about this is that I was completely convinced that I was right about my opinion that a song is obviously just a collection from the person speaking about it's opinion of the song until the point you mention the artist having a say... Now I'm not convinced I'm right. I don't know what to think.
As always, excellent video Olly!! Thanks for being so open to letting me use your stuff as reference material for my last video!!
I'd extend the set-theoretic model: Songs are not just "the set of all instances of the song being performed," but perhaps tuples that might include sets. So you have the set of performance-instances, the set of lyric-instances, the set of melodic-instances, the set of rhythmic-instances, and so on. Each of these sets is controlled in some sense by an "original" or (if it's more about musician's intent) merely "distinguished" version, so we have an idea that this version is "too different" to be included.
This also matches our intuition that songs have certain components that are still bound to that particular song... something set "to the tune of" another song, for example. But then you can make songs to the tune of other songs, and they still count as NEW songs...!
wow, i love the idea of songs as sets. thanks for posting this video!
As a songwriter, I ask myself this question all the time. Glad I got some clarity. Thanks!
I really wish you brought up John Cage as his entire body of work is about asking the question what is music. His Lecture on Nothing (and really the entire book of Silence: Lectures and Writings) and his thought had influenced much of the music world in the second half of the 20th-century, and it would have made a nerd like me geek out!
That being said, I do think with the topic of the episode you brought up, John Cage might have been in a different realm of answering "What is music." He was more about deconstructing how music functions and how meaning is created through music than talking how music exists as a medium. He may have talked about that, I don't personally know.
Overall, good episode! I just got a little excited when I saw the title and didn't get what I thought you were going to talk about :P
I literally saw the title to this episode and thought "That sounds like a This Exists episode" then I scrolled down on my feed and saw that you guys did a compilation. 😄
I think I mostly agree with the set theory: I think you can compare songs with other objects, like chairs. Someone, a long time ago, stuck a few pieces of wood together and said: "this is to sit on". He (or someone else) then called it a "chair". From that point onward, people called pieces of wood which had the function to sit on them, chairs. However, sometime later, someone made something comparable with this chair, only from a different material. This, apparantly, was still a chair. I think this is because people define things by their function, and not by their means of executing that function. How is a couch different from a chair then? Well, when you sit on a couch, you have more room. So if you think that a certain thing is to sit on, and you think it has more room to sit on, than you call it a couch. Notice the "if you think" part: certain people will define an object like a chair, and others could define the same object as a couch. This makes the question "what is that object?" a personal one.
I think the same applies for music. When an artist writes a song, he creates a thing with a function: he creates soundwaves that make people feel a certain way. For any person, the things that makes him/her feel exactly the same way, would make it that song. So if the artist misses a note, but you still think the song makes you feel the same, it still is the same song (comparable to the example of the chair of a different material).
I also think there exist subsets of the larger sets we define. Let's look at a wooden chair from IKEA. We might think that it qualifies as a chair, because you can sit on it. It doesn't, however, qualify as a metal chair. All metal chairs are chairs, but not vice versa. The same goes for the fact that it is from IKEA: it doesn't belong to the subset of the set "chair" that contains "chairs" that are made by some other manufacturer. You can also see that not all sets are as open to interpretation.
Again, same goes for songs. A live performance of "holiday" by green day is an instance in the set "instances of the song holiday", and also in the subset "instances of the song holiday that are performed live". If you think a certain subset is still a subset of the bigger set, meaning you get the same feeling from that particular performance of the song than from the original, then it is for you. But it might not be for others.
In conclusion, my answer to the question "what is a song" is: everything that makes you feel exactly the same way as the original did. So wether something is a certain song or not, is personal.
Hi,
I like your channel a lot and it gives me a lot of inspiration.Thanks.
I am a neoplatonist and I think that it answers all the questions.
There is just one ultimate song-form which is part of the One. This absolute song being part of the One also has an absolute pleasure and it is from this that we get pleasure when listerning to it.All other songs are copies that are more or less exact. In Plato's terms the songs are copies of copies or the songs of today are copies of copies of copies ...
As the real thing is impossible for us to obtain these copies are all that we have . David Bowie has the merit that his song which is about the closest we can get came down through him , just like your friend said.This would be like someone finding a great treasure that already exists . Assuming the right laws the treasure is his. An ordinary person cannot connect to the forms so David Bowie did a great service to humanity in bringing down his version of the perfect song with all the imperfections that it might have. His imperfect song copy is his.
I interpret even Epicurus that real pleasure is only pleasure derived from Good. He said that it is better to look for someone to eat his meal with than to look for more to eat. He also said that the happiest day of his life was when he was dying from a kidney stone.This is probably one of the most painfull deaths.Plato said that someone who does bad is "sick" and that it is better to suffer an injustice than to do one.Meister Eckhart and Alfarabi both said that it is not enough to do good but one must be good and want to do good. My interpretation of Epicurus is that he was talking about someone on this level . Later generations made a mistake with his intentions.
Maybe I have genuine input here.
A song or any musical piece composed is a journal of memories of how the artist reacted to the first note/sound he by intention or by chance started the writing with.
How that is performed is the artist performing it's music with the intention to reproduce the said "story in the journal" in his/her current condition.
The chanelling:
It is an action-reaction game by the composer which is affected by the composers past life experiences, current physical and psychological conditions and intention with the said song. That's how all the songs ever made.
Does musicians deserve credit for their work?
Yes. Just as much as a painter or an author or any artist.
Every art in the world is about showing different points of reality, let it be physical or abstract.
Credit goes for the production of the said music which takes time and money.
And coming up with the music is part of the production very much.
this makes me think of how alienated i get when i hear DJs play remixed versions of songs i like. i mean, i don't mind some double drops and switchbacks here and there, but i also feel like some DJs don't do well enough to maintain the original identity of the songs for live play. though this is a personal preference, i realize a lot, if not most of EDM/Dubstep/Trap fans don't really mind.
Like many things, I think the Buddhist idea of "Skandhas" is quite useful. It's the idea that things (in the Buddhist concept, the 'self' specifically) are like piles; removing on thing from the pile doesn't make it a completely different thing, nor does it remain the same. It basically gives us the idea that things don't have inherent 'seperateness' or 'thingness'. It's a hard thing to understand without having meditated!
that's set theory in a nutshell
There is, of course, the question of language. And, in this case, there are two concurrent languages in what makes a "song" as represented in all the examples in the video. The first component is lyrics, which is less abstract than the second component, which is music. Words are understood by just about everyone, ( at least on a basic level) and music is deeply abstract. So, when we talk about a what is essential in a song, it doesn't make sense to treat these two components as equally abstractable (perhaps a made-up word). Also, the pieces referenced in the video are pop songs, which are almost never meant to be note-for-note representations. They are meant to be malleable, and are most often not "fixed" in written musical language. For those who understand pop music, La Bamba is a C chord for 2 beats, and F chord for two beats, and a G chord for four beats, repeated over and over. There is also, a melody and a lyric, of course. But if you consider the harmony and the accompaniment, nowhere are you obligated to play those chords in a particular voicing, form, tempo or rhythm. In fact, you are free to substitute your own related chords, and to make variations in the melody (variations in the melody is what most people think of as "interpretation"--at least in pop music. But it is really re-composition). A song by Schubert, by contrast, has every note (including how quickly, loudly and fluidly it's played) strictly dictated. You can change the piano part of La Bamba, and it's still La Bamba. However, if you change a single note of Schubert's Erlkonig, you have denied Schubert's definition of his own work. It stands to reason, I believe, that the it's much more possible to attempt to define a song that is fully composed and fixed in written form (and is written with the wish and expectation by it's creator not to be changed--that's why it's written down with such precision), than it is for a pop or rock song. Perhaps, then, the subject of the video really is, "What are POP songs".
Well, as a musician, I believe that a song is a creation within the idea of music. In music, there is not an infinite value of notes and chords, and the idea that we have of music is basically based on rhythm, melody, structure and harmony. So when a artist writes a song, he is using this elements which defines a song, as he is writing a song. The same thing with the colors that a painter uses to make a painting. So my idea is that the songwriter uses the elements which music requires, but the authorship of the song goes to him, as he tried to express himself with that song. And that can be seen not only by the lyrics of the song, since music in not defined by having lyrics. The structure and the arrangement that the writer intended in the song can express his feelings as well.
When a person does a cover of a song, or even the artist changes the structure of the song, but still calls that piece as the name of the original one, it depends on the intention of the performer to keep that piece as being the original or just to contain it as a reference, like a lot of musicians does these days.
For me, people listens to music to feel pleasure, and to experience something that they can only experience while listening that song. So when a artist creates a song, it doesn't really belong to him. It belongs to everyone that wants to posses that piece of human expression. Unfortunately, comercial musicians think that the song really belongs to them, and creates the idea of product, that leads to copyrights in music, which, for me, makes absolute no sense.
But to conclude, i'm not a plotonist. I believe that a song is created from the point of view of a person to express what this person wanted to express, but once other people heard it, they can take that expression and use in their art form and life.
Cavendish. She is much more interesting than any particular problem in applied ethics.
Now, wrt music: The "set theoretical" (not really deserving this title btw) and platonist viewpoints can be made consistent. Here's a synopsis: there exists some suitable 1-to-1 mapping between every possible musical composition and some mathematical object. So if we are to say that entities such as numbers 'exist' then every possible mulical composition also 'exists' in exactly the same sense. Variations of the same work that correspond to different representations can then be gathered into a set which can be labelled as this or that musical composition.
Whether two instances are deemed to be different will always depend on the initial choice of representation.
But the counterexample I would bring about is the north german chorale prelude, based on the lutheran chorale. Some of the best instances of this style of composition are created by variations of a given melody using fairly strict rules - however two different settings of the same hymn would not, typically, be considered to be the same composition, even though they usually share the same title and draw from the same musical material, elaborating by very specific ways. A parallel that may be more familiar to the contemporary lay audience might be different settings of the same christmas carol.
Finally the pedantic point (which is not even necessary to be made but still...) : a song is a composition written for voice with or without some accompaniment (the definition can be generalised to include compositions which do not use the voice but are referring to the song as a style of composing).
On the question of how similar a performance needs to be in order to count as a certain song I'd go back to the analogy of letters:
Anything, that a person familiar with an A will recognize as an 'A', is a representation of 'A'. If it's quite distorted and not everybody can recognize it, different people may have different views as to if it is an A or not.
If you change a song, but people can still recognize its origin, it's part of the original song [type].
A different notion would be, that every time you perform a song, it is a new song. Some songs may be very similar to previously performed songs, but they might always be just a tiny little bit different.
If Bob Dylan decides to cover himself or the Beastie Boys change their lyrics, they're creating something new, that hasn't been there before. You'd then have to look at how different this new version is from a previous one in order to estimate its artistic novelty. It might also just be that your record player is just a little bit too slow. That again will change the song.
You could then create a loose group of performed songs that can be recognized as having the same origin, that first version of the song.
Another interesting point would be folk songs that don't have one definitive author, that were created and modified by a whole group of people over a long period of time. You couldn't attribute one author to such a song and thus there might not be that one true version...
What about genres like noisecore or grindcore in terms of artistic value? These types of songs are a sort of Dionysian frenzy of sound and energy, usually containing quite graphic lyrical imagery (say, Napalm Death's lyrics), or sometimes simple lyrics (say, Anal Cunt's lyrics). There is an ongoing argument about this genre, and whether or not these genres should be considered music. Bands like Napalm Death have some more credibility than the latter band mentioned, with the more simplistic lyrics. A.C.'s songs are abstract and lack a definite structure--it never sounds the same twice. The instrumentals are rapid, chaotic, and dissonant; while vocals consist of randomized guttural screams. Seth Putnam (deceased lead singer of A.C.) admitted to writing the lyrics after recording the song, and many songs are made on the spot; meaning that the vocal noises performed often have no to relation to the lyrics written.
Before dismissing bands like this as nonsense and anti-social deviants with a cult following, I would like to point out (a) the growing popularity of grind/noise-core, (b) that the instrumental structure of Jazz had similar criticisms with the exception of the screamed guttural vocals, and (c) the parent genres of grind/noise-core (e.g. x,y, and z-types of (fill in the blank, 100s)-metal) that do have rhythmic structure and consistent song content and are recognized as art--the proof being in various artistic awards (e.g. Slipknot won a Grammy for the song "Duality" which consists of screamed lyrics) won by artists in various Metal genres.
So, are works such as "Jack Kevorkian is Cool", "You're a Cop", "I Got an Office Job for the Sole Purpose of Sexually Harassing Women" and "02657" by the band Anal Cunt really songs, or is this a new category of art? Granted, this band is extremely offensive, intentionally, so if you look for their lyrics or music, be prepared for that... But despite the content, my question is simply: do these works meet the qualifications to be labeled as a "song". I would argue that these works, although offensive, are art; but is this art a song? Is all auditory art a "song"? Is this band perhaps meta-art? Thanks for your time if you didn't scroll away upon reading the band name in question.
I'm using my experience as a composer to offer feedback on this discussion.
If we change the questions to: "What are words" and "What is language" this question may encourage us to take a different approach to discussing this topic.
There are many mashups on youtube where musicians use a single chord-progression and impose the lyrics and melodies of many different songs on that progression. When we are listening, we decide that the song has changed when we recognize that the lyrics and melody have changed despite the instruments doing the same groove. The most common identifier, as well as the most significant identifier for "songs" are the combination of (lyrics + melody). If we listen to music that has lots of instrumentation, but no clear melody, and absolutely no lyrics... the ability to identify that arrangement of sounds as a "song" becomes increasingly difficult. With this kind of information, it may feel a little less profound to think of songs as "moments in time where we hear instruments, and someone singing a melody in-rhythm -- simultaneously with the music". Music tends to include when "moments where we hear distinct pitches being uttered in distinct rhythms".
I don't mean to reduce the discussion to such a granular expression but I feel there is a mechanistic approach that makes this question in the context that you brought it up to be simpler than it is.
Back in the times of Machaut (and further back in antiquity), poetry and music were one.
My education is linguistic, so I would, of course, define it in linguistic terms.
"Suffragette City" is an idea with criteria that make any given performance more-or-less a part of the set of things that are "Suffragette City". The idea can only be conceived of in terms of our thoughts because we can only interact with the world in those terms. Since asking multiple people whether or not certain performances are considered "Suffragette City" will get you different answers and since you will be unable to get them to agree with one "correct" answer no matter how you argue, then there must be multiple answers to the question.
So I am (very slowly) going through all your back catalog of videos after thoroughly enjoying the last year or so. And while I know this is quite a long time than the original discussion, I immediately thought of an interesting example:
Radiohead's Bloom.
This song will never sound the same when hearing different performances, even by the original band. Sure, they all have the same lyrics, but the instrumental parts vary. It was written in such a way that each section of the song is in parts (this will become more clear shortly). And regardless of which instrument is played, it is left to each musician to decide which pieces of that section to play, what order (if any), and how many times to play them. For instance, the intro for lead guitar, I believe, was sectioned into 15 parts of varying bar lengths. In one performance, there are almost infinite possibilities of what they might decide to play.
So what makes each version of Bloom, Bloom? Is it just the lyrics? Is it the feeling you get when hearing it? The weirdest part of it all is, you know its Bloom every time. It's almost inescapable because it sounds so unique and yet so beautiful.
I like the idea of the Set argument more. Something the Set view of it has me pondering on is considering whether a Set is simply every variation of a song with the name attached to the set, or if its possible that you can create a hierarchy of the Set going from the "Alpha" of the song which then branches out into every variation in a sort of tree but this raises the question of what you would consider the "Alpha" to be; the early drafts of the song in its creation or the first instance of the song in its entirety. And in expansion of that latter point, is the first instance a subjective relative to the individual or objective by the intention of the artist?
A song is a meme and what determines one song from another is it's reproduction. A song like Suffragette City will reproduce it self through various mediums, albums, concerts, covers*, bathroom singing and humming it to yourself, theses are all reproductions of Suffragette City and take up the same mental capacity. Whereas the old and new versions of It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) are two distinct song because the mental reproduction of the songs are so distinct that each song take up its own mental space. This applies to cover as well, if the cover is similar enough that it takes the same mental space as the original than it is the same song. However All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix as so distinct that the mental reproductions are not interchangeable, they are categorized differently in our minds and are therefore two separate songs. I'm just riffing off what I remember of Daniel Dennett' s work.
I'm leaning out a bit much here: I don't know that this is *actually* how it works. However, perhaps songs are dependent types? What I imagine that to mean (and I might be completely misusing a technical term here) is that the type of any given song may depend on extra variables. It might depend on space and time, so it only really is a thing in the context where it makes sense. It might also depend on the performer or specific performance. Not sure if there is a problem with circularity there, however.
Roughly, the way I vaguely picture it, that would allow us to keep the notion of Songs As Types, but it would kind of cop out of many of the questions you posed with a simple "It depends." The song is what ever you care about as being part of the song right now. If you mean all the performances ever, that is permitted. If you mean all the performances by a specific person, that's permitted too. It all depends on which variables you specify or keep generic.
That poses the question, however, what its most generic/bare-bones form would be. Like, could you just keep every variable unspecified, thereby recovering the purely Platonic version of the type? Or is there a minimum of variables that are necessary.
I feel like a minimum should be necessary. For instance, if nobody knows the song anymore (or yet) and no records exist of it at all, does it really exist? Perhaps not. So I think the broadest you can get is the collection of all its performances and other representations such as memories or sheet music. All variants and performers included.
If you object to that on the grounds of "this version is so different it has got basically nothing at all to do with the song *I* think of when I talk about this song", my response to that would then be "Ok, sure, that's fine. We just have to insert more restrictive values for the various variables and that's totally valid."
In this view, each discussion of what a song is would require context on what we actually care about when asking that question in the first place. That might seem tedious but I think most of the time it's gonna be clear enough from context and experience what's meant. And when it's not, it's a good practice to be clear about that anyway.
Before I start, I should point out that I only woke up around 45mins ago and I'm not a morning person, so this might not make a lot of sense...
I am a musician (although obviously not of Bob Dylan or David Bowie's calibre, or you'd have heard of me!) and I've never been very good at playing the same thing twice; when I was playing with my last band I took a sort of perverse pride in the fact that I never wrote down a specific set of notes because I felt that just repeating the same sequence over and over again became boring, and that lack of enthusiasm would come across in my performance to its detriment.
My technique was always to have a broad, general idea in my head of the chord sequence and 'sections' of music (such as intro, verse and chorus), and approach each performance with whatever nuances of emotion I happened to have at the time. I was the sole guitarist in my last band, which meant I was playing chords but also had a lot of latitude when it came to improvised fills and flourishes. Quite often, one performance of my part of the song would sound very different to the last if you were to isolate it by removing all the other parts (even if it wasn't in such significant ways as to have a great impact on the sound of the song as a whole); this depended on how the other band members were playing their parts and the interaction with their nuances, what my mood happened to be, whether my temperamental guitar had stayed in-tune and the electrics were playing up, whether my fingers hurt from the previous song... and any of a thousand other tiny considerations.
I never really thought of one single performance as an arbitrary and definitive article; I always saw the constant tiny changes from one performance to the next as a form of conceptual evolution. I suppose that, if I had been thinking on such an intellectual level rather than just "going with the flow", I would think of the musical process of constant evolution as tweaking each performance to take one step closer to some final, perfect and shining rendition of that particular guitar part. Of course, that perfection was never attainable, because my idea of what was "perfect" would change from one performance to the next.
It could be said that - like Bob Dylan changing his song from folk to rockabilly - I saw the song's structure not as an absolute, but as a framework within which I did the best I could to attain whatever definition of perfection I held in my mind at that moment; it was always out of reach and ever-changing, but there was always some aim in sight (which, I suppose, would make it less evolutionary and more akin to intelligent design... like I say, I'm not awake yet!). New ideas would constantly change that concept of perfection - in fact, often it was mistakes in a performance that would introduce me to a new idea which would be incorporated into the ideal of perfection the next time around, as in: "I like that thing I accidentally did the last time, let's see if I can do it this time on purpose."
In summary, I'd say that Bob Dylan changing his song from folk to rockabilly is completely within the realm of that ongoing evolutionary viewpoint - if rockabilly seems the way to go *in that moment*, then it's at least worth giving it a try. The audience might not like the fact that the song they came to hear isn't the same as the one on the recording they own, but then that's more an issue for the commercial side of the argument than the artistic. Human beings tend to like a predictable, familiar experience - it's comforting and safe because there's no unexpected surprises. That's more of a hard-wired biological trait from the days of cave-dwelling and primal survival ("I don't like the surprise of having a sabre-toothed tiger jumping out at me and eating me, so I'll just be wary of all surprises from now on"), so it's only natural that people would rather hear a carbon-copy of their recording at home when they attend a live performance - they get to sing along with all the words and enjoy the same ups and downs of notes they're used to. But that doesn't really serve the perfectionist/evolutionary agenda of the musical performance itself; it could be said that each performance is a fresh attempt to reach that ideal state, and if the live version is significantly different to the recording then that just means it's closer to the ideal than what has been committed to record before that.
Okay, I'm babbling now and I have to get ready to go to work... but that's my point of view as a musician. :)
I think that the fundamentals of the original piece of work (ex. the chords, lyrics of the original piece piece of work) are what constitutes whether other renditions of the that piece of work (such as covers and live performances) are directly related to that work. I also think that if an artist decides to change song lyrics or change most of the chord progressions in their original piece of work, it becomes a related piece of work to the original, but it is not the originator. It is an interpretation from the artist. This can be said about covers of songs that change lyrics and other fundamental parts of the song as well. I guess the question would be then what are all the fundamentals of a song then. I also believe that it doesn't matter where or on what device the song is being played; as long as it holds on to the fundamentals of the original song and the observer can recognize it as that song, then it is still the original song.
The original song most likely is the first conception of the work by the artist, and then shown to audience. I'm also kinda leaning against that artist have a say in what the song is. If you have watched the PBS Idea Channel episodes on fan theories and what input the author has on their work, I think it stifles creativity a lot when the artist says "Yep, this newest rendition of my song is still the same song. No other versions past, present, or future are that song". I think the audience has a lot more influence on the interpretation of what the original song is (and what related songs to the original are) once the song is released, then the artist. Thoughts?
Collateral damage, please. As a military man, that subject interests me.
Here's an idea, what if the song itself is an abstract object, but particular renditions of the song are not the song at all. Perhaps when we refer to a particular performance or recording of the song we are merely observing that it is "like" or "similar" to the idea that it is the abstract object itself. The way I imagine it is how there is no perfect circles in the universe so when you see something round you call it a circle because it resembles the abstract idea that is a circle. Similarly even though you have never heard "the real suffragette city" you have an idea of the qualities it has as an abstract object and when you hear it you identify those properties (or close approximations of them). As such, music can closely resemble a song or resemble it very little, but at no point does it definitively become not the song because it was never the song to begin with.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with the set-theoretical approach is that we seem to require the set to be fixed - to have some sort of intensional definition that we can appeal to - and I'm not sure that is possible.
I have to wonder if we could take a Parfit-like approach to this. It seems to me that when someone asks if it's the same song, their question can actually be reduced to facts about the performance they're referencing at that specific moment (stuff like what are the notes in the song and how they relate to each other, what instruments are involved, who's performing it, what do the lyrics look like, etc. ) and how they compare to similar facts about some prototypical version of the song; and the degree to which they match would correspond to how comfortable they feel labelling that particular performance as the same song. This means indeterminate cases are perfectly okay because the identity of the song is not a fact in itself, it's just a label for other facts. Of course, because the prototypical version of the song might differ from person to person and the point at which a person feels they can call it the same song would also differ from person to person, you'd never get a right or wrong answer, so much as a popular or unpopular answer.
IDK. This probably just raises more problems than it solves. And Margaret Cavendish, please. :D
We've already had this exact discussion at my university, though not about bowie... :)
We came up with pretty much the same idea: We should pay the musician or composer enough credit for his work, so a set theory of some sort may be a good solution.
Every sound is music.
Which sounds we decide to call music are decided based on previous sounds that we have heard before and that we were told that are music, which is basically a social construct.
If we could build a time a machine and listen to the music of the far future we would probably think that is just noise, because we wouldn't have gone through the process of historic social constructionism to accept those sounds as music.
Anyway, that's my opinion, and I apologize if the text is not very comprehensive since english is not my native language.
a song is obviously any sound which someone considers to be musical.
as for what songs and their names, i think this is the same as any other named thing. songs deserve the name when they possess a sufficient amount of the properties associated with that name. these properties can be such as the lyrics, the notes, the tempo, etc. if you change one word, unless that sufficiently changes an important property (important and sufficient are defined by the speaker for that instance) then it is the same song. if it does sufficiently change an important property then it is a different song and as such deserves a different name, generally just by adding on a description of what is different such as "cover of suffragette city" as opposed to just "suffragette city"
the artist is the first one to define what that name refers to, and as such has a lot of artistic power over what that song is and what counts. in this explanation of what a song is, the artist is essentially coining a term, defining a word or phrase to mean whatever he decides it will mean, and that definition takes the form of a song. and of course it is a creative act to define a word or phrase which has never been defined before, or coming up with a new definition for it. and of course they deserve credit for defining the word.
this explanation has a few problems, mainly due to being so subjective. it is hard to make laws based on something which is defined by each person individually who refers to it. but despite that problem i think it is the best way to look at how names work, and it allows us to define what is and is not a song without drawing arbitrary lines, but it does allow those lines to be constantly changing and be subjective.
I loved the idea about music being discovered instead of created. It makes sense to me as all the notes and sounds already exists, we do not invent sound waves and ears, we can just now harness those sounds. This could be applied to wider aspects of art like literature and painting which is interesting. I think the essence of the question 'what is the ontology of music' is examined more close by looking at the nature of performance as a whole. After all, we face the same difficulties with William Shakespeare's plays which have been performed for far longer than Bowie's song. How far do director's creative licensees allow them to go? I recently saw a rendition of Othello where Iago was also played by a black man. The issue of race is lost in this version so does it retain the same intentions of the original play write? I think this can be related to Plato's forms. When we create/discover a piece of art - it is that original piece that could be the perfect form, the rest are shadows.
Interesting question. I had never really thought of it before.
Regarding Plato though. Maybe music is a type of FORM.
Like a Square or a Triangle. Music is a pattern that is repeated in various ways.
Like the shadows on the walls of Plato's Cave, there might exist a "truer" form of a song that is more real.
Wouldn't the SET be the spaceless timeless entity?
It's like the Block theory of time.
Well now I want to see a video on whether it's better to live a shortage but happy life or a long but less happy life
+Mike Hermida Since I'm a preference hedonist I should say that it's whichever has the greatest pleasure, which would be the shorter one.
I think his song becomes a new version of itself every time it gets modified. That is why artists often have radio edits, remixes, and Spanish versions. The song stays the same until the author feels that it is a new song. The way To Kill a Mockingbird is a modification of Go Set a Watchman.
To me it seems that there are two different meanings that can be taken from the word "song". The first meaning refers to the series of notes and lyrics that make up that song. These don't really physically exist, but they are created and categorized when the original artist defines it. The second version is any time that series, or similar series of notes and lyrics is created in the the form of sound, sheet music, digital file, or other physical form. It is easy to conflate the two, but it is important not to, or else unclear definitions are created.
Songs are a group of sounds that bring forth certain forms (ideas) that a person is to let imprint on themselves or reflect upon. The forms brought forth are decided by the musician, remixer, or whoever else uses it. For example a happy song is and I listen to it to be happy the artist decided it to be so and it is but a remixer remixes it an tries to make it a song the creates sadness but instead the song makes the feeling of hope. This example shows that songs are mere tools used to inspire the feeling of forms or ideas within us the artist has succeeded in his song for me but the remixer has failed to use the song to create sadness the song is the recognizable group of sounds that the remixer started with even if I can't recognize it, it is that song-it is that tool. If I use a hammer to hammer a nail and the hammer maker Intended that it has happened and if a person makes a pick axe out of it but I use it as a sledgehammer then I am still using a basic object it's just been improv
Ved upon by function and innovation. So if a song is constantly improved upon then when is it not the song it was originally: as soon as people perceive it to be otherwise all songs are pieces of every thing else humans have ever conceived of put in a different order used as some to draw a feeling or idea like a bucket used to draw water from a lake. So should artist be given credit for making a song if it is to simply draw forms that humanity has before: Should people even give a damn about life an love and philosophy?
i dont mean to sound like a non-philosopher, but i think we may be overcomplicating this. one very important tenant of antirealism (at least, from what i read in my philosophy textbook about it) is the emphasis on the fact that WE are in control. we made up all these concepts to begin with, so we get to decide what they mean!
i really like what Sam said, and i think it aligns with my theory more than the "types" and "sets" theories you discussed. what music is (or for that matter, what any art is) is up to the creators. my theory is pretty simple: if you wanna call it music, it's music. this can explain how things like noise and drone and lowercase and 4'33" are all music, because the artists' intentions were for it to be considered music. and it can also be applied to art. for example, artworks like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. how or why in any context could a urinal with some writing on it be considered art? simple: because Duchamp said so. similarly, if John Cage wants to amplify himself writing out a sentence on paper and call it music, he can! this, i believe, is why the theory works, because it's flexible and it means that anything can be art and anything can be music if someone wants it to be.
i've considered responses to this, like "then what counts as an artist/creator?" or "so i can just walk outside and point at a twig and call it art or music?" and my answers to those responses typically come back to the original theory; i think the theory is good enough so that it can encompass those queries.
what counts as an artist/creator? anyone who wants to be an artist/creator! can i just walk outside and call a twig art? essentially yeah! like i said before, we made all this stuff up, so we get to decide!
the only other response that might cause problems that i can think of is "can i, in the same way, call something NOT art or NOT music and therefore make it so?" and to that i would say that perhaps whether or not something is art to an Observer can be different or separate from whether or not it is art to the Creator. but truthfully i haven't thought that far ahead lol
+Matthew DeVoll another question my gf just posed to me is "can it be called music if its not a human who's making it" and my answer is yes bc it doesnt matter to the non-human thing that's creating the sound whether or not what they're creating is music bc they have no concept of what music is; it just matters to the person who is dubbing it music
+Matthew DeVoll i also just realized a HUGE flaw with this and that's that Duchamp and Dada stuff was specifically dubbed "ANTI-ART" so that was a terrible example, but whatever
+Matthew DeVoll That might be fair enough, but I think you are placing too great an emphasis on the composer's intensions. There exist too many cases where the intensions of the composer are impossible to fathom - that peculiarity renders such works impossible to classify. However no such problems arise when instead of the composer's perspective one considers the listener instead.
Athother problem with both of these conceptions is that the classification of two different individuals may be inconsistent - so you end up with as many classifications as different opinions. Which is a state of affairs that is faithful to the historical events as such, but may not be particularly useful in itself as a classification.
Stating that songwriting is more of a process of discovery than it is creating makes a lot more sense to me. I mean, those chords and notes already existed before you started trying to write a song- you just discovered that if you put them in a particular order, they sound a certain way.
Redundancy 101
I vote for Cavendish, because I have no idea who that is but if you describe her as a badass then she must be good and interesting.
As for transformations of songs or other works of performance art, it has to be intent. No matter how much the performers change the piece, if they intend for it to be Song X or Play Y, it is Song X or Play Y. You can quibble infinitely on if it was good or proper, but that has no effect on what it actually is.
In my experience songs usually aren't defined by the style of music they're done in, more by the words or if it doesn't have words, the notes of the song. There's a musician called Richard Cheese who exclusively does renditions of pop songs in a lounge music style, some of the words are changed or left out but it's still within the basic realm of intelligibility between the message of his covers and the original songs. The point that the limit between that is vague still stands, but I think drawing a concrete line would necessarily end up being so arbitrary that it overcomplicates the entire definition. Contrast those very dissimilar covers with say the music of Weird Al Yankovic who makes songs with exactly or nearly exactly the same melodies, but with different words, and they end up being totally different songs. So it's more to do with the lyrics than the melody I'd say.
This makes me want to pursue a degree in philosophy
+david rodriguez Go for it!
david rodriguez you don’t even need to get a degree just analyze philosophy and philosophers ideas and understand what they think you must understand and think and then you will be a philosopher
I really like the "set theory" model because, according to Sam, the artist can define the set however they like, but some people disagree. This means to me that there are 2 overlapping sets: one defined by the artist, who created the set, and one defined by the people who listen to it.
When you said something along the lines of "it exists in multiple copies in different times and different locations," that reminded me of the digital publication of art. For example, we'll use my Google+ icon. It's a photograph, taken by me. I uploaded it to deviantArt, meaning that it exists in multiple copies in different times and different locations. this can be true for many different pieces of art, and so I wonder: How do these pieces fit into the discussion?
that seems little like the design space of possibilities that Dennett wrote. Music can't be defined by something, it's a pattern continuum that can be changed always and don't have clear borders.
Down with essentialism!!! :D
When in doubt, dissolve the question. If I whistle the melody to "Suffragette City," then I'm whistling the melody to "Suffragette City." What more do you need to know than that? Is it a true rendition of the song? But what does that even mean? I'm whistling the melody. I'm not David Bowie, I don't have the background instrumentation, and I'm not performing for an audience or being recorded. I can tell you everything there is to know about my performance, so any questions about whether it's a "true" form of the song doesn't... seem to matter. The question doesn't have any meaning.
i didnt whatever my opinion on songs would be, but i feel like music is a lot more fluid than people admit. the same templates overlap between different genres and consequently the same chord progressions riffs and melodies show up in multiple songs. which is why it is so easy to do mashups. i love writing music and finding new music, but the distinction between songs has become really smeared for me. its almost like every song is a token of just 12 notes.
MARGARET CAVENDISH!!!! I want to hear about the lady philosophers!!!!!
Collateral damage would be very interesting! Also, I don't get why Set Theory requires songs to not be abstract, spaceless, timeless objects. To me it just seems that Set theory is just a lens to view the grouping of separate tokens under the specific type that you're trying to organize.
The problem with Sam's theory is "What happens when Dylan passes away, or even when someone else does a cover of one of his songs?" If we accept that if someone plays a song multiple times, that each one of those times it is still the same song, then authorial intent can no longer be considered the most important aspect.
Exactly, the concept of songs being an object and any other recognisable form of that song being titled as that particular song seems logical but does it all depend upon humans' ability to recognise it for it to be called an instance of that song? And if not, then can we call Giant Steps an instance of Mary had a little Lamb?
I think if "It's alright Ma" sounds one way to begin with, then he changes it we still call the new one "It's alright Ma" if not just with an added "rockabilly version" at the end. He may wish to change once more or even several times, but each time the song is contingent with the last rendition so all versions are "All right Ma" (Similar to Personal Identity) Those who wish to stay true to the song as it once was will disagree with the artist saying they've changed the "real" song to Glam Rock and then Elecro-pop and finally Classical Orchestrated version, as song as each time either the song keeps the timing and overall melody OR it's based off the prior version of the song then it can continue to be called by the original name the artist gave it.
Collateral damage would be a nice tie-in with the new Civil War trailer, so I choose that.
Music and songs are simply patterns in sound waves that we are able to recognize, and so the question "is this or that version of the song the same song?" is entirely subjective as some people may recognize it as being that original song, while others may not.
Gosh, the musical platonist view is so alluring. I think I'll play it like Plato and say that in this world of change nothing can perfectly reflect the forms, all attempts to play a song are necessarily derivations with outside influence. The creator was in a way discovering the song, but if somebody is going to make money off of it shouldn't it be them?
Anyway, I vote Cavendish.
I'd say that even if the smallest change is made to the song, it is a different song. I'd even go as far to say that the exact same tune played in the same way but at a different time or place would count as different song. One can think of a song as 4 dimensional object - with 3 dimensional space and 1 dimensional time component or just call it an event. There exists only one instance for each event just like there exists only one instance of an object, because exact physical parameters map only to one object. So there would be only one event for you humming at that exact time and space, creating sound waves of that exact form. This is as far I can see how song could be defined in strict terms, although this would not be a useful definition for song to use in language.Many events map to one song title in human recognition. We could call a set of events a song if they all map to one title in human recognition. Note that this allows for two persons to have the idea of one song title but different events that would map to it. You humming and the original might be the same song for some but not for others. It is because they access not the actual world but their subjective model of the reality and also the recognition process is not identical. This is a lot fuzzier definition but seems to describe more precisely what we actually mean by a song. This is quite similar to set theory.The same reasoning could be applied to classification of any existing or abstract object not just songs.
6:16 But that would mean that if the song is played by anyone other than the original artist that it isn't the song. Even older versions of the song would no longer be the song. So what are they then?
+OwenBruch22 Different songs, maybe?
The type of music you based your arguments on is just a small part of what the art form actually contains. The musicians you mentioned work similarly to any brand based product you buy every day. I mean Coca Cola is neither the recipe alone (because we know the recipe changed over time) nor the actual liquid alone, etc., David Bowie's individual songs are similarly neither the written notes alone nor only the performances of these alone, they actually are simply products he deemed to give titles to. Humming and/or distorting these songs can be done only in reference to their original version which runs under the brand name, and the brand has (or had had at one point) full control over every aspect of this proto-product.
This is however not the case in in other domains of music. There are and have been countless examples of works that survived without their composer's consent (these works still can be and are categorized as musical works (songs are only one of hundreds of types of music btw.) even if their composer never said they should be).
There exist composing techniques (aleatoric, stochastic, etc.) which can create infinite possibilities of organizing sound in a single piece. A composer can write and claim such a piece without having full or even partial control over what elements and combinations of elements the work actually will contain.
Furthermore there are countless pieces we don't know the author of.
The only relevant definition is: "Music is an art form, social activity or cultural activity whose medium is sound and silence." (wikipedia). Every other previous definition of music (like "Music is organized sound", and as far as I know) has been proven wrong, and every single aspect of music except that of the passing of time has been proven to be optional.
I find myself drawn to the thought of 'Weird' Al Yankovic's parodies. I believe we can agree that "Ridin' Dirty" and it's parody "White and Nerdy" are separate and distinct songs. The parody is purposefully as musically similar to the original as possible. Where is the line? How much of a song must you change before the product is a distinct self-contained song?
*this smacks of the ship of Theseus*
Hello Philosophy Tube, I see you made this video in a world where Bowie is still alive, that's nice.
I believe there is a distinction, between the song as a blueprint for performed music, as it is written, and a specific performance/recording rendering of that design. I think attributing other dimensions or supernatural entities to the concept of these things is pointless. Concepts (labels) exist within our minds. That is the place where they have meaning, within the framework of our thoughts. Believing that everyone shares the same framework is a fallacy. While many of these frameworks are vastly similar, because otherwise we could not communicate about these concepts to each other, there are always minute to large differences.
So concepts, are an invention of the mind and philosophy tends to treat them as a thing that physically exists, and even derive conclusions about them or come up with metaphysical constructs that explain them. Doing that would require us not to think about specific concepts like music, but instead to pursue this from the angle of it's underlying medium, consciousness. If concepts are to be understood, and thoughts are to be understood then we must first understand the underlying framework within which these things exist, our consciousness or the mind itself.
Also very interested in hearing about Margaret.
Music is a pattern made of tones and sounds and songs are a certain type of, or form of music pattern - that pattern can be recognisable even if you change it but if the change is too much it can no longer be recognised - but when is that line crossed ? that 's a difficult question and no easier to answer than when do a few grains of sand become a heap
I think asking whether something "is" or "isn't" Suffragette City is problematic. Similarity isn't binary, it's more like an axis - if I just hum a few notes, well, that's pretty far, but a David Bowie performance with one note out of place is real close to the "ultimate version". Whether appearances of Suffragette City, closer or farther as they may be are considered tokens/instances, is a personal preference and dependant on the circumstances.
I guess this approach works better with Platonism, since it assumes a perfect version of the song and can deal with improvements on the original performance, whereas Nominalism seems to be a little stuck to the importance of the first instance (according to my understanding; it probably deals with it somehow).
Now, what is every instance/token measured AGAINST, that's also personal. The "true meaning" or "ideal" of the song changes from person to person, which is what's going on with Bob Dylan - he makes versions which are true to the song in HIS mind, but that's not how many others see it. However, that means there ISN'T a single, perfect abstaction - there are many, one for every meaning of a work of art (sometimes more than one per person!). So the name "Suffragette City" merely refers to an APPROXIMATION of the meaning of the song, an anchor point or root from which every interpretation grows. The only way to measure the "Suffragette City"-ness of an instance is to compare it to the average opinion, or by the percentage distribution of the common verdicts.
...I'll stop now, before I get to copyright laws and other legal stuff. My head hurts as it is.
Sorry for the new-agey gibberish, but I think it's trippier than that... Just because the artist can change it doesn't mean it isn't eternal, but rather as we hurdle through time and space the artist's relationship with the transcendent form in question (the song he/she discovered) has to be expressed differently in order to re-capture the original truth (or sometimes, to come closer to the original truth)
Songs are ideas. Music, is a language by which intelligence can express itself. Music is a universal language. Songs can be complex ideas, but non the less, ideas. Much of human intelligence is expressed in music.
I see music as a blueprint; a kind of plan to be followed. Anytime something is constructed in the way that the audible tone follows that plan, then you have created an instance of that plan. In this way, playing a few bad notes still makes it an instance of this plan, just a poor one. If the plan exists as an idea, is it fair to say that it exists outside of time or before it was made? Out of an entropic soup of possible patterns, something was defined and given a name and becomes a song. Like any idea, it would be unrecognizable prior to this and so surely can't be considered as always having existed and just being "discovered".
I think "How much" is the wrong question because it isn't exactly a measurable kind of change. I think it's better to go into "What can he change", because from there we can look at the properties of each version and take their differences as answers.
Anything is a human conceptualization of the thing. The things themselves do not "care" for their name, structure of organization, they just are. In this sense, Things are, and every particular form of things is an "possible organization of things". Music is a form of things (vibration). The song itself is the name given to a very specific form of things. Bohemian Rhapsody will stop being Bohemian Rhapsody as soon as people stop naming it Bohemian Rhapsody. Not because whatever the thing now is, or is being performed as, and when, change its constitution, but because the thing itself doesn't "care" about it's classification, WE do. We are the ones to classify, and organize the things, in a useful set of things. So, if it useful to say that Bohemian Rhapsody is whatever Queen say it is, then awesome. If we define it as x +- 100 "song variation", then voila. The forms themselves are "similar" or "different" to us, but will be the relationship of matter that it is, regardless of the names we give it. It's what I call "Presentationist Metaphysics" and I'm writing about it.
I think remixes show the outer limits of distortion where the songs are still recognizable but still with the song being very different
Songs can be just patterns of sound waves at a certain frequency and a pitch, and this 'pattern' is just a figment of our imagination, trying to make sense of those sound waves, kind of like the copernican model of the planets, not a correct model, but just trying to make sense of the planetary motions. These patterns are a general rule and slight variations would still count as the song, and perhaps even the intention of singing the song when the person is a bad singer would still count as the song.
Why not consider it from a cognitive perspective? In an individual's brain, a given song is very much represented abstractly. Very soon after a sound is converted into neural signals by tiny hair cells in our inner ear, a large set of features are abstracted from it and it is these features (i.e. lyrics, melodic/rhythmic construction, etc.) that we use to identify a song. Exactly what those features are is a difficult question, but relatively unimportant to this discussion. I think it is enough to say that, clearly, they are complex and numerous enough for us to recognize the germ of "It's Alright, Ma" in Dylan's distorted, rockabilly version.
1. In this context, the problem of classifying an auditory input as "Song A" or "Not Song A" is at least somewhat individualistic. We, the classifiers, may disagree about precisely where to draw the line, but we will agree about most examples and the disagreement will be randomly distributed in some way. So, presumably the best solution is to take the average response of a lot of listeners? I like the idea about including the intention of the creator, but once a work is disseminated does it not take on a life of its own?
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(this next part gets a bit long, but it is an interesting consequence of the first idea, so I wanted to think it through. apologies if it is a bit obnoxious to read.)
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2. I think the cognitive context can also avoid the idea that all songs should have always existed. That statement is certainly true in the sense that you can find any finite set of numbers in any infinite, non-repeating sequence of numbers, but I'm not sure that is a useful observation. Instead, perhaps a song can be defined by the least common canonical representation of it in the minds of its audience.
By way of illustration, consider two recordings we would normally consider the same song -- a studio version and an acoustic version. Let's say person A has heard the studio version, and person B has heard the acoustic version. Person A's representation of what "the song" is will overlap with person B's in some places (let's say melody and lyrics) and diverge in others (instrumentation, tempo). The least common representation would be the places they overlap.
This, then, becomes a question of "how many of the song's features can you change/remove before you start failing the 'Song A' / 'Not Song A' test?" It is not obvious what the answer is exactly, but you should be able to come to an empirical answer by testing with large, randomly selected groups of people. Since it is testable, I tend to think this a more useful definition to build on.
Notice that, under this new definition, a song can only exist if its representation exists in someone's mind--not whether you could imagine its existence or not, but whether it has existed or not. I'm not making any claims on *when* the representations should exist... I think there is a lot to be discussed there but for another time maybe.
I guess the conclusion is: it is not enough to say "all songs have always existed;" that is a relatively weak statement. It is much stronger to say: "a song exists if its minimal representation has existed in someone's mind."
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Hopefully that makes sense to someone other than me :-)
Love to hear about the ethic of collateral damage
Doesn't this connect to the philosophy of language? You could say that "sufragette city" is merely a subjective label that we humans apply to a set of events/things that we feel are somehow connected. Because it's subjective, multiple people can connect it to different sets. So David Bowie and I can have different opinions on what constitutes sufragette city, while both being correct in some sense.
+somewony I like it!
Philosophy Tube
yay!
For explicit songs there are sometimes censored versions, this seems to support set theory where they would be part of the same set even though they have slightly altered lyrics
I think the music belongs to the public and it's the public realization of that music (aka when the pubic acknowledges the music) that a music is still the same that's why mumbling it still counts
To back up that it's only the acknowledgement of the public that counts I'd like to say that musics are to be heard that way everyone that has already heard a music is the "keeper" of the music which exists only in the persons mind
For example if I showed you Beethoven's 5 and told you it was the Star Wars theme and you had never heard either, you'd believe me
I believe music exists in memory and knowledge, because if no one can remember anything about the song they sang yesterday, it no longer exists. For instance a complicated piece like a Beethoven Symphony exists in its score, because without the score we wouldn't remember how the symphony goes, (at least not well). For pop and contemporary music we have recordings to solidify our memory. If a composer, (like Sibelius with his 8th symphony) throws their score into the fire before anyone else has seen it, then for all intents and purposes the piece no longer exists. If someone was to coincidentally write the exact same music as what was once in Sibelius 8, it couldn't be plagiarism because that symphony exists in no one's memory and there is no way we would ever know.
+Benjamin Saffir Now you have me wondering if Musical Notation was invented to prevent people from stealing songs! Certainly there would be no way to prove plagiarism back in the early days without it!
+Erik Amundson No, it was invented simply as a better way to remember the notes than having to cram it all into your head and pass it down orally. It has many advantages, such as allowing far increased complexity over oral transmission/folk music and also quite a fair bit more complexity than whats possible through recorded transmission/popular music.
With the exception of a few epic poems like the Illiad or the Odyssey, you couldn't create a complex novel/narrative with a coherent structure without writing it down. Thats one of the advantages notation has, although I'm not sure if Guido was thinking of that when he first invented it - he just wanted to cut down the amount of time it took to learn the different Gregorian Chants.
What is interesting is how hundreds of years after musical notation was widely accepted did songs start to be regarded as private property. The whole idea of plagiarism, originality and individual ownership is really a byproduct, rather than a cause, of musical notation.
Absolutely, it's worth bearing in mind the Gregorian Chants that were being written down had been passed down orally for many years, so I doubt they knew the original author of many of them.
+Benjamin Saffir I am not so sure about that. These composers and performers were considered celebrities in their day too. If the David Bowie of the 1100s reaped similar rewards as the David Bowie of the 2000s (namely fat stacks and booty), that would be some powerful reasons to secure his brand.
But back to the topic. It may be interesting to note that the American Courts don't recognize a song until it has been written down or recorded. Until then, according to the law, it doesn't exist. In that way, both you and the courts agree that the Platonic version is more accurate.
If someone says that the song is too loud we might claim that a song is just physical vibrations. If someone tells us to play the song again we might claim that a song is an eternal type. If someone tells us to rewrite the song we might claim that the song is a variable that can be set to platonic values.
Before this video I would have said a song is a type of experience or at least the type of encoding for a type of experience because that would explain how you can think a song to yourself or sing it or type it. But that doesn't explain how a song should have been different or how you can make a song or change a song or how the chorus got in the song.
The nominalist answer doesn't make sense to me, it seems recursive and unrelated to how we use the word song. A variable with resettable platonic values is my answer. The same answer fits for speeches, novels, poems and perhaps personal names. Even if my answer turns out to be nonsense I don't think that the nominalist or platonist definitions fit the usual unspoken definition of songs or speeches, plays, movies etc.
Assuming David Bowie did 'discover' Stairway to Heaven, he should still get credit for it, even in a creative way. Albert Einstein invented the theory of relativity, and still gets credit for that, even though it is not (and probably never will be) conclusively proved.
And, where does classical music come in all of this? Is a piece of classical music already something abstract, in which case, ok, I guess, or is it the sum of all its performances? If so, what is the score? instructions for anyone to make a copy?
Also, when you change a work, you are creating a new version of the work, which is technically not the same, but similar. Back to classical music, Tchaikovsky wrote three versions of the Romeo and Juliet overture. The first version had a completely different introduction, middle section (development, if you're a classical musician), and ending (coda), but other parts (the exposition and recapitulation) were exactly the same as the third version. are they the same piece?
Similarly, are various drafts of artistic works the same work? Or are they different works.
Perhaps the 'Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture' is not just a sum of all the performances, but the sum of all its versions (drafts/revisions/etc.), each of which is the sum of all its performances
And, speaking of classical music, we know different people have different interpretations of them. Find as many recordings as you can of Beethoven's fifth. I'll wait.
Yeah, notice how different the speeds are? And how there's a repeat in the first and last movements, but only in some recordings? Are they the same piece?
We could define a piece by its FIRST performance, but Beethoven's fifth was ridiculously underrehearsed for the premiere, and so was played very badly. So anyone playing it well would be playing it wrong.
Also, Beethoven's dead, so there's no way we could know his current opinion on what it should be. If there is an afterlife, he might have changes his mind and been unable to tell anyone. If not, is there no right way? Did Beethoven's fifth die with him, only to leave its shadow on Earth? Or we could take Beethoven's opinion from just before he died...
On whether it's still creativity if David Bowie was technically just discovering it: This (libraryofbabel.info/) is the Library of Babel. It has so many shelves, so many volumes, and so many pages that literally any possible combination of letters on a page exists somewhere in it. And you can find literally any sentence you can imagine somwhere in there. These words that I am typing right now are even on there, three times, in fact. However, I am still creating as I type.
In non formal set theory a set can contain anything so if you want a super-set that includes every instance of suffrage city that is similar to the original, first instance, to any given degree you can do that. Rather a better question if suffrage city is every instance of itself how can you know it, after all you only know a subset of those instances. In mathematics an axiom of choice is invoked and it is very controversial. Since what the axiom states is that there exist something that does the work of compiling your set for you whether you know the elements or not whether there are a finite number of elements or not. Still I have to say I'm playing devils advocate Since by far set theory is my favorite way of explaining language and objects.
We shouldn't forget that both theories - musical platonism and set theory - misses, even more, is silent about (in their fixation on metaphysics and de-substantiated 'Ideal song) a crucial and constituent element of any song (even art as such): that is, its listener/recipient.
Every ontology of music (or art in general) must incorporate all three (traditional) aspects: artist, work, and recipient. We shouldn't isolate and focus our attention only on 'work' (because what does it mean for a 'work' to exists without any recipient?). We also shouldn't fetishize its author, who apparently (by which logic? on what grounds?) has an authority on the work of art that he/she supposedly created.
I see a great value (and maybe a solution to some of dilemmas that given theories introduces) and a emancipatory potential in that the work of art is 'created' by its recipient and not by its author (the author only 'empirically' crated his work, but as the work finds itself in social context it simply looses it authorship, if I simplify a little); or as Roland Barthes puts it (in the context of author-text-reader), that the author is not the point of convergence where all the disparate levels of the text (or song in our case) are combined into a coherent story; this point of convergence in its reader (listener), who is simply by reading (listening) linking different points in the text (song), i. e. forming an interpretation.
In the end, we, the listeners, are those who decides, simply by recognition, if given song is 'that song that I have heard' or not.
+Jaum yaung I agree with that. The author has definitely written the song and without him/her we wouldn't have anything to listen to. But he is only author in an empirical way, that is to say, he has definitely at some point in the past put those notes and words together and created the song. But is he also an author of a given cord, cord progression, musical instrument, or phrases and words also? On what grounds can an author says that he 'owns' a song and that he has an authorship/authority over it?
(I think that this kind of 'authority' of authorship is not a neutral ground but a specific ideological framework; a framework - which we shouldn't forget! - was not there in every point of history: in middle ages, for example, there was not such a thing as 'the Author'. The Author, as we know it today, was a product of the Renaissance, in larger extend.)
The point of Barthes' 'the death of the author' is to deconstruct this kind of false belief - in the eyes of an author AND its readers/recipients -, the belief that an author automatically means authorship and authority on interpretation, that the author has a final word what is 'correct' interpretation'. I think that this position is a little perverse and egoistic, at least.
Another thing we shouldn't forget is that an author, says Barthes, is simply by writing stepping into his own death, into his own symbolic death, that is to say, by finishing his/her work (text, painting, song etc.) he loses all connection, all strings that binds him/her to it: the work enters a 'public domain'. (And an author who is crying like: 'No, you misunderstood me! This is not how I envisioned it. The correct interpretation is ...' - this kind of author missed the whole aspect of creating any peace of art, or anything for that mater: that is, the gaze of the viewer and how will the recipient, who was born into specific cultural space, interpret your work.)
The author is not present in our heads when we listen to a song or when we view a painting; we are alone there - alone with our memories and past experiences. And this is the only thing what determines OUR interpretation (since there does not exists any other, 'objective' one).
+Jaum yaung But you have to remember, at least I think so, that copyright is an extension of the same ideological framework, combined with ideology of capitalism, that guaranties and creates 'the Author' in the first place. If we agree that 'the Author' is a product of this system, than we have to at least re-interpret what copyright after 'the death of the author' actually means (if we buy Barthes). And we cannot be pragmatic about this. (Since pragmatic, in this case, always means 'pragmatic, yes, but only under a specific ideology'.)
In the case of 'the author produces original, and copyright should defend the author', you are entering on slippery ground of original vs. copy, which is by no means an easy territory. What is it in 'original' that makes it superior to a mere 'copy' of it? W. Benjamin call this 'the aura'; but what makes this 'aura'? An original itself? Or the discourse that circles around it? Has is do to with some specific quality of an original that is instantly recognizable? Or has it more to do that 'the Author' is present, and signed in/on the work? And what determines this author? (Our dilemma...) What gives some specific person, even if he has empirically written a song - what gives this person the right to call itself 'The Author'? Has is to do with empirical circumstances, or has it more to do with ideology in which this person is functioning and by which values he is viewing the world?
This are some questions that are troublesome, for me at least. But the 'original vs. copy' is a basic platonic problem, and Plato himself finds itself in a contradictory position about it when he says that there exists 'good copies' (a copy of an Ideal), and 'bad copies' (a mere copy of an copy, i. e. art). What is symptomatic in this/his case is that he is actively trying to destroy 'bad copies' (art, sophists etc.), at the same time he is actively defending, in the end, the same mechanism, that is, 'good copies'. But the mechanism is the same: in both cases we are faced with 'copying'. As if Plato himself already understood, unconsciously, that the copy, a 'bad copy', is already undermining 'the original', a 'good copy' (as is 'unconsciously' understood by copyright laws...); and by this understanding he is actively trying to avoid 'bad copies' and diminished them from his State.
What does this mean for 'authorship' or for 'the original'? Maybe that the position of 'original' itself is not naturally better than 'a mere' copy (look at art, for example, Appropriation art, which is undermining this very dilemma). And maybe 'the original' itself already stands on specific grounds, and is not a 'natural state of things', that is to say, that it need 'the Author' for it (the original) to exists, to have its 'aura'. Without this position or ideological framework this 'aura' simply evaporates.
+Jaum yaung I see that your argument is based on two, in my opinion big, presuppositions (correct me if I am wrong) which should be answered and deserves a reflection: 1. the author has the knowledge of his/her own work; and 2. the author's knowledge (any kind of his/her knowledge of his/her work, even 'false' one) should be ... has to be the governing factor for determining and locating the original, and, by the same action, dismissing all of its copies (under the pretence that we are marching towards 'the true epistemic revolution', in which all of the dots will be connected, or how should I put it.). (And maybe also a third presupposition: determining the original is our moral imperative. What if those 'simulacrum theorist' are right; what if there is no such hierarchy of original at the top and its copies at the bottom, but 'only' a planar field of equal positions diverging into multiplicities with rhizomatic structure? And our quest for finding the original is in this case totally meaningless ...)
(1) Usually, if we exclude 'ideal cases' (which don't exists), we find that the author doesn't have full epistemic spectrum of his/her own work, that he/she doesn't fully know why this brush stroke was made, why this word or note was used, and so on. I don't mean to argue that the author is fully unknowledgeable about his/her own work, that the work is always created in unconscious flow of unexplainable emotions and reasons (this is mystification and, by the same token, fetishization of the author par excellence); I only say that what author thinks his/her work is about (his knowledge of it) is NOT the objective position on how this work should be received and interpreted. This is done by a truly unknown and multiple processes that includes, for example, social context (which cannot simply be explained and determined in advance NOR afterwords), etc. This is why I argue that the author's position (or knowledge, if you like), in the end of the day, really doesn't matter, even if his/her own sweat and blood are in his/her own work. The interpretation and recognition of author's work is always determined on how will it 'inscribe' itself into a 'social fabric', into a wider context, into art institutions/system, and us, the recipients, and never simply for its own qualities and author's opinions.
(2) If we accept previous argument, than this presupposition is simply a false one. But we cannot overlook that an author has some sort of knowledge of his/her work, even if a 'false' one, and it is usually when we talk about it (the work of art, in any shape possible; in criticism, for example) given some exposure and value. But precisely on this point we can fall into a trap (for which I fear that you are falling into), that is, that we are giving to much emphasis onto the very author of the work, and not so much to the work itself and how do WE perceive it or how does it perturb the sociality. And we have to free ourself from this 'self-repression'. We have to recognize that position of the author does not automatically mean position of the authority. In good works of art, the work itself is 'speaking' what it means; no intervention of the author's opinions and thoughts are needed.
But I see, only just now, that your basic dilemma is the fact that a copy can lie and deceive 'uneducated' (not in a bad sense) viewer/listener (which is also the dilemma for Plato); that he/she will live in a false belief that a cover, for example, is an original and not a mere copy. (Which, incidentally, happens to me a lot.) But I don't thing this is such a big problem; not from a personal standpoint nor from an 'analytic' one, since the latter will (through some kind of historical analysis) always find which one is 'the original' (the-first-one) and which one is 'just a mere copy'.
+Jaum yaung It may seem like I wanted to completely devalue and destroy the author and glorify positions of recipient. But I am not (neither is Barthes, to whom I am referring). I am just focusing my attention and shifting perspective the other way around just because the recipient is usually, in discourse about works of art or in 'layman's discourse' at least, completely neglected (as if work of art, any work, does exists in it self, without anyone to read/listen/view it).
(And I got your point; you did not argue that the author is the only one who is important. I was, maybe wrongly to you, referring more to a 'state of things' - a state where most of population is at, that's my observation, where the author is fetishized to the extreme - and a state that is somehow apparent in this video, which also missed the whole aspect of the recipient and focusing its attention on 'Ideal things', either in platonic way or in the sense of abstraction of the sets.)
Again, the author has its place that is equally important, it just doesn't have the 'traditional' authority over his/her work; the authority that was, for example, determining all past comparative literature studies, which has fallen into that trap (that I have mentioned above), that is: they have always focused their attention on the author, what he (usually only 'he' at that times) has to say about it, on his biography, life, and social context that text was written in, but the all diverged their attention from the text itself and how it relates 'here and now', in our times, in our social context.
Thinking of author as the authority, or even some kind of authority (even a little one), is a great burden that can mislead us into a false interpretation of the text and into a glorification of the author-genius; we only look the text with 'historical' and 'author's' eyes, but not with our eyes, the 'eyes of our times', that we really should.
In that case, I think, that presuppositions 'The author has ALL knowledge of his/her work.' and 'The author has SOME knowledge of his/her work.' are, in the end, the SAME presupposition: both fall into that trap that I have mention two times now. Of course we have to consider what author has to say about his/her work, but this does NOT mean that he/she has the final word on it, in the sense: 'OK, I have viewed the work, I have made my own interpretation ... now, let's go and ask the author what he/she has to say, so that I can finally and really understand his/her work and.' This is completely false position. It should be more in the lines of: 'OK, I have viewed the work, I don't know what it's about ... let go and ask the author, read some critics, and forget all of them, and go back to the work and view it and see how it relates to me and to my/ours situation in this point of history.' (Putting aside how will the interpretation of author/critics form my interpretation; in ideal scenario the viewer will be educated enough that he/she wont need this second step: he/she has done that many times before, so that now he/she doesn't need that much help because he/she has learned how to interpret any given work. But take this example with a grain of salt.)
Another thing: you are, in most of your comments, referring to the 'social phenomena of people being fooled that a cover is the true original'. (That's way, incidentally, I was mentioning to you the platonic problem of copies and how they introduced the same dilemma for Plato himself.) But you are mostly arguing in generalities and never in concrete example. So do you know any? Because I am curious to know then (and I cannot recall any of them myself). And examples that have 'real' effects, that is to say, that they don't just fool people and they don't infringe copyright laws.
Platonism is not spooky. There's nothing mysterious about how abstract things can exist. They exist as abstractions. Surely we're not going to confuse abstractions with ghosts. A Platonist isn't saying that abstractions are material things that exist in some alternate universe that we hope to one day visit.
David Bowie both created and discovered Suffragette City. David Bowie created our first copy of the song that now allows us to play the song at will. David Bowie also discovered that the notes and words of Suffragette City are pleasant to listen to when played in that order, which is something that has been true of Suffragette City for all time.
+Ansatz66 Imagine that a Christian fundamentalist tries to explain the moral downfall of today's youth by pointing to the lyrics of songs like Suffragette City. Is he wrong in attempting to make such an explanation? People tend to believe that great art can change society. Are they wrong? If Suffragette City is an abstract entity, there's no causal way in which it can influence society. Furthermore, how does David Bowie discover Suffragette city when the song can't causally interact with him?
***** "If Suffragette City is an abstract entity, there's no causal way in which it can influence society."
Abstractions _can_ cause things, just not in the way that material things cause things. If you have a thought about a chocolate cake, that may cause you to eat a cake, but your thought doesn't exist as a material thing. There's certainly no cake inside your head, and the cells of your brain are merely the mechanism by which you think, not your actual thoughts.
There is no material thing which we could ever point to and say that is a thought because thoughts are abstractions. A thought about cake represents many things. It represents your relationship to cake and it represents a complex series of events inside your brain.
Obviously there is a series of physical events that leads you to think about cake and continues on to cause you to eat cake, so we can look at it on a purely physical level. At the same time, we can use abstractions to think about it on a higher level. As an abstraction, we can use your thought about cake to represent the physical events in your brain. As an abstraction, we can say your thought caused you to eat cake.
Abstract things cause things in an abstract way. Concrete things cause things in a concrete way. If you are talking about how Suffragette City might be a concrete influence on society, then you're right and it cannot. Even so Suffragette City can influence society as an abstraction of the concrete chain of physical events that leads from the playing of the song to the change in people.
Ansatz66
Thanks for your response I enjoyed reading it. Suppose we have two competing explanations of reduced youth attendance in church: rock lyrics and drugs. Rock lyrics influence the youth as an abstraction of a chain of events that leads from their singing to a change in the youth. Drugs affect the youth by binding with receptors in the brain. Is it possible to compare how good these explanations are?
***** "Is it possible to compare how good these explanations are?"
The only serious way to compare two explanations is testing the predictions of each explanation. If drugs are the cause, then that predicts that removing the drugs will remove the effect. Therefore, if we can remove the drugs then we can test the explanation by observing the result. A similar test might be done for the music explanation.
If both explanations pass their tests, or if we're not able to perform any tests due to practical issues, then there is no way to compare the two explanations.
+Ansatz66 Spooky isn't like Scooby Doo spooky, it's a term that some philosophers sometimes use to refer to stuff that is weird or unclear.
And what about the different "variances" you get on different playback? I mean, every setup give us different/colored sounds. From earbuddy to pro loudspeaker to flat mediums. All of them are included on the set?
In the set theory view, where only "performances" are members of the set, how about sheet music, a midi file or an mp3 file? All of them, I would say are not "instances of the song being played", but can through various means become "performances".
I'm not sure I agree with the opinion that a song is what the 'creator' says it is. If Bowie played Life on Mars and said 'this is suffragette city', I don't think that makes it 'suffragette city'.
I think there must be a defining 'characteristic' or 'trait' of a song that remains, even if most things change. Even this/these 'traits' can change a little. But where the line between it being 'it's self' or being something else might be hard to draw with certainty.
I think it is similar to the 'how many bits of a boat can you change before it's a different boat' question. But as well as changing parts of the boat, you are also changing the design. If you are changing parts of a row boat, and making it flatter, at some point it will be recognised as a raft. Like you can change the bass line, drum beat, tempo ect of a Dylan folk song to make it a blue grass song. But, back to the boat, if you are changing parts of your boat and also redesigning it so it ends up with out the essential characteristic of a boat, say the ability to be used to transport things over water (whether this is the essence of what a boat is, is unimportant right now), then it stops to be a boat.
I would say with pop songs, the essential traits are the chorus lyrics and melody, usually. Not to say they can't be change a little, but without the chorus suffragette city is missing something that really defines the song. And with jazz or classical music, the essential trait
Maybe I have lost my point a little, I feel maybe I am talking about the musical platonist idea of types and tokens. But I think what I really want to say is that the creator can not define what a song is, it is done by the listener. If it misses what all listeners use to identify what 'suffragette city' is, then one person saying 'this is suffragette city' doesn't make it so.
I think songs are memetic objects, ideas passed from brain to brain the similar to how the genetic code of a virus is passed from host to host. The reason I choose this interpretation is because I don't think that songs can properly exist as abstract, objective information. As you discussed in the video there's no standard form of that information. It can mutate or evolve, like memes and genes. Additionally, songs need a human being to interpret them. Two musicians can (and often do) independently come up with identical melodies. But those are different songs to the musicians because their brains are interpreting them indifferent ways. When viewing music through the lens of memetic objects, any person who intends to preform or make a recording of Suffragette City, and then expresses that intention, makes an instance of Suffragette City. The closest we can come to a "true" version of the song would be the very first time David Bowie came up with the song and tested it out. Another way to think about songs as memes, is that the song itself resides in the brains of listeners and performers, the sound waves are merely the vector along with the song propagates and inserts itself into the minds of others.
At a certain point music or poetry or any of it is a work. And once a work is in a public eye a certain aspect of that work belongs outside the creator(s).
Also very interesting is the question: what is music? Is music the imaginary library with every possible song ever written and yet to be written by humans in it? You could see it as that when a person writes an entire new song that sounds like no other song known to man, that song just were there in this library waiting to be discovered, rather than this person "creating" it out of thin air. All the notes already exist.
Also what are the boundaries of what could be a song? Songs are notes played with a certain amount of length and time between each other. If you played a note of a melody now and play the next a year later, and the next a decade later, could that be called a song?
The guy singing the title cards sounds like You Suck At Cooking.
+guitaristcj It was me!
Wow! I didn't know you had an ear for harmony! Love your videos, keep it up!
I used to be in a choir when I was a kid: guess some of it stuck with me?
I could tell!
I am not sure about the artist's intention there... If you would have to rely on the artist's intention, wouldn't you have to ask the artist "what was your intention with that song?" for basically every song? And isn't that taking away an important part of the art's purpose, i.e. the interpretation (both kinds, the one that we do in our brains and the one different artists take on the same piece)?
Take Tool, for example. If you ask Maynard Keenan what the meaning of their songs are, he will probably say you did not get what is the intention of their music. For them, interpretation, thinking about different meanings, reconstructing the art inside your brain, is really important. I am of the opinion that when we interpret the song in our mind, this is actually a new performance, it is you making art. The process is just as active as putting the actual notes together
.
I understand that this idea would just render the definition of song impossible or useless... The song would have to be something limited in time and space, created by people in the act of playing or listening to music. Any "reproduction" of that original would be a different song. By this notion, the very recording is a "fraud", because it is not the original composition. But yet you see it happening when artists say that they don't like the way some song was recorded, because it was 'too perfect', 'too square', 'too much of some instrument', etc. For me, this is the musicians saying "it was not the song that I invented, but an unsatisfactory copy".
The cool thing about this idea, though, is that it doesn't really matter what you call the song you are playing in that moment. If you are feeling that, in the moment, the original song has a message that would be best translated if you play it as Death Metal instead of Blues, you can still call that "a rendition of the original song". Bob Dylan - or anyone else - could change "It's Alright Ma" anyway he wants, it is still valid, and it will never be the original song anyway.
songs are a pattern of sound, the same could be said of the mona lisa or any other work of art they are just patterns of color or stone or whatever. to reproduce simpy repeat the pattern, so in other words every version of David bowies songs you've heard are like photos of the mona lisa.
So when and why did we decide that an image can only exist once (eg. The Mona Lisa) and any copy is 'just a copy' but a song can be copied and reperformed and is still the same thing sorta? Surely we could do the same and point towards the first original recording of each song, especially back in the time of physically scratching/punching/magnetising?
The issue with the "it's whatever the artist wants it to be"... what happens once the artist is dead? Does the song just always stay what the 'last will' of the artist was? Also, what about super old stuff, folk songs that nobody really knows who wrote them, there's no 'original' sheet music or even lyrics written down, just passed down the generations, until eventually there's a wikipedia article listing 10 different versions with further local modifications and at least 3 spoof lyrics?