The Importance of Good Questions
One thing that encouraged me to write the article for Jack's project was the list of questions he asked:
- Why do we make music?
- What function does it serve?
- Is there an absolute concept of music - an ideal form?
- If there is should we [be], or are we, forever striving towards that goal?
- And if so, is it ever attainable?
- Does music pre-exist, i.e. is there something called "Music" that we merely tap into when writing or performing?
- What is the value of music?
- How should we judge whether music is good or bad, or of greater or lesser importance?
- Can music be considered Art?
- What, if anything, differentiates Music from Sound?
- Does sound have to be culturally processed for it to become music, in the same way as flint must be processed for it to become a tool?
- What is it about music that makes us feel the way we do about it?
- Where did the musical behaviour come from?
- Is Music purely for entertainment?
If you've read some of my previous blog articles, such as this one, this one and this one, you will suspect that I sometimes get frustrated by the failure of music academics and music "scientists" to even ask the right questions, let alone provide any plausible answers. So seeing someone asking a series of questions, all of which made sense to me, and most of which my theory had something to say about, I took the opportunity to answer them.
Author's self-advertisement:
In my new book What is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery,
I explain the super-stimulus theory of music, which is possibly the first scientific theory
of music to do all of:
- Explain music as an evolutionary adaptation, which benefits us now, and not just in some hypothetical prehistoric environment.
- Give detailed explanations for specific aspects of music, including scales, chords, regular beat and repetition.
- Provide a universal explanation for all aspects of music (based on geometrical patterns of neural activity in cortical maps, where the same rule applied to different cortical maps explains corresponding different aspects of music).
- Explain the emotional effect that music has.
- Explain the similarities and differences between music and speech.
- Explain all six symmetries of music perception.
