Music Banter - View Single Post - The Evolution of Music: Accident, or Adaptation?
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Old 12-16-2011, 10:54 AM   #181 (permalink)
MoonlitSunshine
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Join Date: Jul 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rubato View Post
I'd put lyrics under poetry rather than music. The two art forms may have merged together into song, but they're still very separate studies.
Damn Straight. I've had a number of discussions about whether certain artists should be considered poets or musicians *cough*LeonardCohen*cough*, I definitely believe that if someone is primarily a lyricist and not a "musician", then it's really accompanied poetry rather than music.

Quote:
Originally Posted by steveeden888 View Post

The whole business of tying music as a process of 'evolutionism' into some kind biological metamorphosis, that progressed over time is demonstrated in reverse, exactly the manner in which everything is showing signs of regressing. Any, especially a Nobel winning biologist would certainly know the Hierarchy of the biological order of life, both old and new.
Any chance you could elaborate on this particular paragraph in less... verbose language? I think one of the main reasons people don't like your posts is that because of the method in which you write your soliloquies, it comes across rather like you are intentionally speaking in tongues - disguising a lack of substance through the use of overly flowery language. I'm highlighting this paragraph as it seems to make no sense. Are you saying Music is regressing? Are you saying it isn't, which is proof that music did not evolve, as everything else is regressing? Are you discounting the entire subject on account of not believing in the concept of Evolution? Your posts leave many questions, and answer few. Perhaps if you made more of an effort to be clear people would be more happy to see you post.

Or hey, maybe you're just trolling, in which case, good for you. *pat*

Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePhanastasio View Post


I mean - what if Ke$ha was legitimately the most technically sound musician that had ever graced the Earth? I don't agree with this, but what if it was right?

I agree that there is no true sense of moral right or wrong (my own personal views extend that to a concept of morals being a form of unwritten societal law of mutual security), but I think you're extending the concept a little too much with this. The reason that morals etc. can be argued to have no Objective truth is because, there is no objective, universal standard to compare them to.

Taste in Music and Sense of Humour, for example, are even more subjective because they are part of a set of concepts that don't have order - that is to say, you cannot categorically rank senses of humour or taste in music, there is no mutually agreed order, like there are with, say, numbers. Noone can argue that 1 is greater than 2, because it is universally agreed that 1 is less than 2, agreed? Thus we have subjectivity, and my agreement with you that noone really has the right to say that someone's taste in music sucks, it's more that their taste in music doesn't agree with our own, but we will still maintain the right to tell people their taste in music sucks from the condescending heights of our own sense of superiority :P

However, Technical Ability is slightly different. It is possible to rank technical ability, because it is something which a) can increase over time and b) is measurable through the use of a number of different aspects of skill, depending on the instrument. It's an example of something called a Partially-Ordered Set in maths, if you're remotely interested.

Spoiler for Scary Maths'R'Us:
While not everyone can be compared (some people can be equally skilled but in different ways), you can take all musicians in the world and split them up into a finite number of groups, all of which are ordered, each with its own "Most Technical" artist. you can go on with that crazy mathematical hypothesis to apply Zorn's Lemma and state that because there is a maximal element in each chain (ordered subset), you can deduce that there is a maximal element (most technically skilled artist) in the set, but hey, that's not reaaallly necessary :P


The Gist of the spoiler for people who don't like maths is that because you can define technical ability by a combination of definitely ordered skills - how fast you can play, how cleanly you can play etc. etc. - there this a universal method by which you can at least semi-order technical ability. Using such a system, if would clearly be possible to prove categorically, without subjective personal bias, that there are far more technical artists than Ke$ha.
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