by Matt Sitman
Peter Reuell
explains a study offering insight into the visual side of music:
In a study by Chia-Jung Tsay, who last year earned a
Ph.D. in organizational behavior with a secondary Ph.D. field in music,
nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were
better able to identify the winners of competitions by watching silent
video clips than by listening to audio recordings. The work was
described in a paper published this month in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s a very counterintuitive finding — there have been some
interesting reactions from musicians,” Tsay said. “What this suggests is
that there may be a way that visual information is prioritized over
information from other modalities. In this case, it suggests that the
visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information
should matter much more.”
Alva Noē
meditates on the way music is more than just “sound art”:
When we listen to music we listen to a performance, in
the literal sense. We pay attention to what someone, or a group of
people, is doing before us. Music is action.
This
has has been obscured somewhat by recording, whose advent has
influenced how we think about music. The idea that music is about sound,
peeled off from its inherence in the tapping, plucking, smacking,
stroking, blowing, fingering and vocal actions of real people, or,
divorced from the thoughts, feelings and ideas of performers, seems
somehow plausible in an era where you buy pieces of plastic, or download
digital files, to get at music. In addition, electronic music has
seemed, to some, to be the final blow to what may now come to seem a
quaint idea: that music is an art of the body, an art of the analog
transduction of physical energies.
And so we easily lose sight of the fact that what we care about, when
we care about music, is not sound, but musicians and their use of
movement, the body, and material instruments, to articulate
significance.
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