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I am reading Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World.
Guenon has a reasoned prejudice against science that is however quite mistaken. He is rhetorical rather than cogent, has a number of outright crank views… and yet is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
What is right about Guenon, what is wrong, and what do I fail to grasp?
What is right is that there is a transcendental dimension to human life. It is universal. It is ultimate. It is authoritative. Indeed, it is authority in its native form. And I agree with Guenon (and Leo Strauss, and Eric Vogelin) that a civilization that flees from it or denies it is likely to destroy itself, or be destroyed.
What is wrong is that science, contra Guenon, does have an intrinsic transcendental value (it is true, not one often well stated or understood by scientists, but it is clear enough in that most real scientists are primarily motivated not by utility, but rather by the beauty of the world and of the order of the world). I detect an angry, dismissive, unconscious, defensive tone or attitude in Guenon with respect to science and technology.
What is is probably wrong is Guenon’s implication that tradition, in some sense, was politically formative or normative for civilizations before the 6th century BCE. As far as I can tell the wanderings and conquests of tribes and peoples was, is, and has always been depressingly and familiarly biological. But I may not grasp what he is trying to say, I may be reading too much into it.
I suspect, though I cannot well argue, that the move towards missionary religions (Buddhism, contemporary reactions in Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is well motivated, not wrongly motivated.
Perhaps a clue lies in Judaism. It is a missionary religion in that it views itself as holding revealed truth and in the end receiving all the world in the Moshiach’s Kingdom, and yet it is tolerant in that it fully acknowledges the righteousness of gentiles, and does not aspire to on its own hook immediately to convert the world.
What is wrong is that initiation by some preceding initiate is necessary in all cases. It was not necessary for the founders of the traditions. And it is certain that there were founders, because at one time there were not even any human beings.
I may fail to grasp that traditions were mutually tolerant. This may be the case (before the 6th century BCE). Or it may not, I do not know the history well enough. I am reasonably confident that it used to be a lot harder to travel this globe, and that may have a lot to do with tolerance — perhaps it was not possible to think about conversion.
What is wrong is absolutely crank theories such as Hyperborea, which historically have lead on naturally (e.g., Julius Evola or the Ahnenerbe SS) to anti-Semitism, racism, and all manner of truly vicious follies.
What I fail to grasp (perhaps I will grasp it later) is how Guenon deals with people like Second Isaiah or St. John of the Cross, who are, it is transparently obvious, initiated in the only important sense and who are yet committed to a missionary religion. One could say the same of the historical Buddha (or the perhaps several original founders of Buddhism).
The question for me is, why does a liberal such as myself, completely committed to the scientific world-view, find himself so eager to hear wild birds like Guenon, Strauss, Vogelin, Eliade?
A lamp: Thomas Merton?
I must keep working on my perception that fundamentalism is a contemporary form of idolatry, the characteristic sin of our age. The “revelation” is the idol, however, not the God of revelation. Interestingly, Guenon seems to scorn such reactions.
Mirror idolatries? – Everything in Nature is computable. Truth is revealed in some book.
Jews versus Arabs is a reductio to some sort of absurdam.
Parametric composition is the art of composing music by means of an algorithm whose output can be more or less continuously varied by adjusting a few numerical parameters. If changes in the pieces depend continuously upon changes in the parameters, then related pieces must lie next to each other in the parameter space. Such a parameter space is intelligible. It can be explored interactively, for example by zooming in and out, to discover certain classes of pieces, and more interesting pieces in each class. The parameter space becomes a sort of Mandelbrot set, and each parameter point in the space represents a piece, which is a sort of Julia set.
So, one would like there to be an algorithm that can generate any possible piece of music, and one would like to be able to compose by interactively exploring this space. I have informally proved that such an algorithm and such a parameter space exists. The proof goes like this. Any piece of music can be represented by a set of coefficients for the duplex Gabor transform over a subset of time and frequency. These coefficients form a finite 2-dimensional array of real numbers. Any such array can be approximated as closely as desired by computing the measure on a complex-valued iterated function system (IFS). From Michael Barnsley’s Collage Theorem, it follows that the measure changes continuously with changes in the coefficients of the IFS. Finally, although the IFS parameters can vary in number, any subset of IFS parameters can be mapped onto the unit square by identifying the upper corner of the square with the largest IFS in the subset, and the lower corner with the smallest IFS in the subset. Linear interpolation then suffices to identify each point in the unit square with a unique set of IFS coefficients, and each set of IFS coefficients in the subset can be interpolated from some point in the unit square. Thus, the unit square becomes a parameter map for generating any piece of music in the specified subset of time and frequency and the specified subset of IFS parameters. By making the subset of IFS parameters sufficiently large — perhaps a few hundred or a few thousand coefficients — the procedure becomes musically fruitful. Probably most pieces of music of moderate duration can be approximated by at most a few tens of thousands coefficients. After all, Barnsley showed that most digital images could be approximated by at most a few thousand IFS coefficients, and a digitized piece of music contains no more than about ten times as much data as a digitized image.
What I have not done is to create a musically useful implementation of this algorithm. It is too compute-intensive. On current personal computers, computing a single IFS and rendering the generated duplex Gabor transform (I have performed the experiment) takes several minutes at least. To be musically useful, the algorithm would have to be able to generate thousands of these points in less than a minute, and even then it would take hours of exploration to discover interesting pieces. It might be possible to send each parameter point out to a di fferent computer on the World Wide Web, using a system like that of SETI@Home, so this brute-force approach should still be investigated. After all, the algorithm lends itself to computing each IFS, or indeed each coefficient in any one Gabor transform, in parallel.
However, on a single computer, computing so many sounds in this way is much too slow and takes much too much memory. Of course, instead of using Gabor transforms to represent the complete sound of each piece, it might also work to represent only the score for each piece. Scores contains millions of times less data than sounds. However, then the representation of the scores becomes an issue — there are many, many ways of representing scores. Ideally, one would like to be able to specify an orchestra of N voices over some subset of time, frequency, and loudness, and then be able to generate any subset of points in this set. Even better, one would like the representation to be close to how composers hear and imagine music. We know that the Gabor transform (sonograms, more or less) or, even better, various wavelet transforms are indeed close to at least some basic aspects of how composers hear and imagine sounds. What concise, compressed representation of scores is similarly close to at least some basic aspects of how composers hear and imagine scores?
I’m looking at TuneCore… for a pretty reasonable flat fee, you upload music and it appears on digital music stores, including iTunes and eMusic. As far as I can tell, TuneCore and Amazon.com are planning to implement CD publishing-on-demand following the same model.
For the first time in the history of music publishing and distribution, there is a completely flat playing field. For a mimimal fee that most can afford, music can be published to the World Wide Web and anyone with an Internet connection or a cell phone can access it. One wonders what will become of record companies.
I am probably going to try TuneCore out for my next album….
Some form of intermediation will probably creep back into the system, now that TuneCore has effectively removed most of it. But will the new middlemen be paid by the creators, or will they be paid by the audience, or both? In other words, new forms of intermediation (helping the audience find music they will like) could take several forms. The new middlemen could be reviewers, whose reputation would ensure a listen for music they recommend; or they could be agents or publicists paid by the creators; or they could be a new version of the record companies, setting up a brand and using their own A & R people to sign up creators. Which of these happen can be inferred from thought experiments on trying to make money. There is only limited money in acting as an agent unless the creator is phenomenally successful, in which case one morphs into a brand, a new form of music publisher. I think there is probably room for reviewers if they can figure out how to get paid, but to some extent they can be paid by ads on their pages.
But no matter what happens, this is wonderful!
I started composing because I saw a snowflake curve in Martin Gardner’s column in the Scientific American, and I thought it would make a cool piano roll.
I have never studied composition, nor have I put in the time to develop the skills required to take elaborate music heard in one’s head and notate it. The extent of my non-algorithmic composition is a church hymn, some tunes for fingerpicking guitar, some tunes for solo flute, one song for flute and guitar, a setting of a a short Emily Dickinson poem, and two or three rock or gospel songs composed by overdubbing. None of this material is in the least remarkable.
I do hear all kinds of music in my head, some of it quite elaborate, but most of it, I think, is pretty derivative. At one time, I could improvise pretty well on the flute, in a sort of post-bop, new music way. But I do not think I could ever stand out either in traditional composition, studio production, or improvised music.
What I can do, and what continues to draw me in, is to pursue the path taking off from that thought about the snowflake curve. There is music I really want to hear out there, and I don’t hear that many other people making it, certainly nobody taking it in the directions I most want to hear. It comes from a combination of discovery and invention.
Because I have done some traditional or studio-based composition, and because I was once married to the composer Esther Sugai, I have given considerable though to the relationship between traditional composition and algorithmic composition.
I have noticed that, as I have become more proficient at algorithmic music, it becomes more common for me to hear something in my head that I do have some idea of how to realize with an algorithm. Also, I have occasionally heard other composers’ pieces, and instantly understood how the piece was created, or could be adapted.
I now believe that this is not really that different from traditional composition, except that the algorithms in question are not normally thought of as algorithms.
There is not a whole lot of algorithmically composed music out there that really knocks me out, or makes me think “there is a path I really want to pursue,” but there is some. Iannis Xenakis, for sure. Tom Johnson. Some of the other minimalists.
At any rate, I’ve clarified my path. I’m going to pursue algorithmic composition more or less exclusively, and I’m going to produce that music more or less exclusively using software synthesis, especially Csound. I will probably avoid sampled sounds.
I’m 100% confident that there is great music to be made in this way. I don’t know if I can make great music, but I think I can, and I am sure going to try. There are, I think, some things that have to happen first.
I listen to a lot of music, and the gold standard for sound is good classical music in a good hall heard from good seats. Another high point is recent studio recordings of good rock musicians.
I think software synthesis can be just as good and have a larger range to boot, but it isn’t as good, yet. For it to be that good, I think we need to get beyond the linear time invariant/unit generator model of sound synthesis, and also beyond just doing imitative physical modeling. We still need notes - or at least, I still need notes - which means an impulse, or train of impulses, with musical pitch - but we need something complex or chaotic that is still a note.
Another thing we need is generators of listenable music, well-formed music, that has chord progressions, voice-leading, melodies, form, layers of structure, and whatnot. The excitement, for me, of initial forays into algorithmic composition was that it simulated aspects of this with very little cost. The challenge now is to enlarge the vocabulary without, of course, simply imitating or generating forms of the past. I am actually more hopeful about this than I am about synthesis. I think it will be possible to make large, complex pieces that are completely algorithmic, that many listeners will find listenable and will like, that will also be satisfying to composers, computer musicians, critics, music historians, and so on. In short, that will be listenable and yet open-ended, non-derivative. I have this hope not only because of what has already been done by algorithmic composers, but also because some recent trends in mathematical music theory are helpful in making more listenable score generators.
I think this can be done both on the level of notes, and on the level of unitary sound.
As actors, we form ideas of our purposes and the world in which we try to realize them that are complete. This we do either explicitly, or implicitly (by implication from our actions and motives). However, empirical conceptions of our purposes are necessarily incomplete (since they refer to a future which may or may not even be possible), and the scientific view of the world is, by design, provisional and therefore also incomplete.
This observation is related to the starting point of existentialism. Where I differ from existentialism is by attending to the completeness or incompleteness of ideas. Not their truth in any sense, although I will get to that, but to their completeness - to their universe of discourse.
God, or religion in general, is among other things the final purpose and the real point of our acts. If the mechanistic view of the world is correct, religion is noise, our lives do not really have any meaning, and there is no actual reason to do one thing rather than another. But in order for the mechanistic view not to be correct, there must be some objective content underlying the mythology with which, in the face of incompleteness, we conceive actual purpose.
I know I am circling round the point here, but it goes something like this. My acts are final, cannot be undone. I do intend them, and my thoughts do underly my intentions. Thus, the universe of discourse of my will and my thought is final and unlimited. However, the universe of discourse of empirical thought is provisional and limited.
To very briefly expand this, science is provisional by design, it is limited by our ability to conduct experiments and observations that test all aspects of theories, and there appears to be both a logical indeterminacy of self-description (MacKay) and a physical limitation to inference (Wolpert).
It follows that, necessarily, my intentions and thoughts transcend empirical thought. But since my acts, my thoughts, and myself are among the objects of empirical thought, there is a gap, inconsistency, or caesura in thought. It does not appear possible to remove this caesura.
Of coruse, religious mythology, or theology (which is an attempt to rationalize that mythology), cannot be brought into empirical correspondence with any particular facts and objects of the world. The question of the truth or untruth of theology is different from the question of the truth or untruth of physics. But, in guiding my final acts, the religious kind of thought is inarguably pointing in at least the right direction - a direction that empirical thought is existentially not able to point. In this sense, theology actually is objectively more true.
I think this point is very important, but it does not carry us very far. All right, we cannot help thinking theologically, this is the very structure of the thought of beings who act and know they act. But is this any help in resolving, for example, theological disputes?
I used to go to Tower Records and Kim’s Video for music, after looking at reviews in Wired or Computer Music Journal. Now, CD stores are no more, or shadows of their former selves, and I skulk around online, occasionally downloading a few MP3s. I don’t hear as much good new music as I used to, although clearly there is a gigantic, unprecedented flood of music online. I still read Computer Music Journal, but I learn more about what is happening in computer music by following blogs and mailing lists online, or by reading the proceedings of DAFx online. Or I look at conference schedules and then google for the papers or related papers online.
I used to read Scientific American and learned a lot of great stuff that way, including fractal composition back in 1979. I still read Scientific American, but it seems kind of dumbed down now. I also read the arXiv, and John Baez’ blog, from which I have learned all kinds of things, including neo-Riemannian theory.
I used to go to the public library to look at the catalogs and check out books. Now I go to the public library to get online with my netbook, and I look at the catalog online, and if I can, I read the book online…. I download PDFs like crazy… I have gigabytes of dissertations, papers, reports on my hard disk. My own library that I got online.
More and more of what I read and listen to is online… it’s obvious where this is going… gradually, the material basis of one civilization is being abandoned, while the material basis of another civilization is being built up at the same time. Rather amazing.
Meanwhile, everybody on the street is on the phone, and my wife gets upset because she never seems to be able to get anyone to answer their phone. Maybe if she broke down and got a cell phone, she could get somebody to answer.
Recently I found that MusicXML has become a de facto standard for exchanging scores between notation software, MIDI files, score viewers, and such.
I am considering adding MusicXML import and export to and from CsoundAC and possibly also Csound itself, using the MusicXML Library.
I am increasingly convinced that one of the major problems in computer music has been, and continues to be, lack of standards for music representation, music processing, and musical information storage and exchange. This has the effect of breaking up the computer music world into small communities that don’t really know how to talk to each other, and it impedes the formation both of a larger computer music community, and of a deeper tradition of computer music.
Non-systematic examples: Interviews with producers and composers in magazines such as Sound on Sound often show these people continuing to work with the first software that they learned, long after it has become obsolete. Conservatories and music technology schools usually standardize on some commercial computer music software, usually Max these days, but composers who have been working for a long time often relate to me their concern for the archivability and backward compatibility of their works and supporting materials, and this usually forces them to use open source software almost exclusively.
It is as if there was not one standard system of Western music notation — but rather each country, each style of music, or even each new generation of musicians had to learn their own mutually incompatible system of notation. You can imagine how much harder it would be, under such circumstances, to learn the piano literature, or to become a conductor or, especially, a composer.
So, I am hoping that putting MusicXML, which already seems to have achieved some fairly widespread use, into CsoundAC and/or Csound will do something to help break down these walls.
Currently, CsoundAC can export and export standard MIDI files, but the import facility is not very good. Csound itself can read and render standard MIDI files, but it can’t write them. I’m hoping that replacing CsoundAC’s MIDI code with MusicXML code that works better will be a better solution. Those who need MIDI from CsoundAC can translate exported MusicXML to MIDI using other software that actually works.
MusicXML is not perfect, but it is looks like it is probably improvable and extensible, and at any rate it already overcomes several limitations of MIDI, which has heretofore played, by default, this role of a universal score exchange format in spite of being very poorly suited for the task.
No human society has ever done without music, and therefore it seems that no society can do without it. We literally can’t come of age, graduate, party, court, get married, go into battle, or die without it. Most people won’t even go to work without it. It does more than identify us — it is one of the things that creates our identities. In other words, music is one of the tools with which we actually create ourselves. Unlike high school, we keep going back to music.
When I drive long distances late at night, I like to listen to music in the car. I can drive or talk while the music plays, but when I am actually listening to the music, I can’t think for more than a minute or so. It’s not so easy to stop thinking — you can’t do it just by trying. However, stopping thought is one of the main objects of serious meditation. Therefore, music is able to accomplish for many if not most people what years of meditation can do only for a few.
When we are awake but not thinking, our spirits are open to the influences of things we don’t know how to think about, like God and the most basic imperatives of our bodies, souls, and societies. Being wide awake, yet not thinking, is one of the most basic forms of liberation. It is being completely in the moment. It makes it possible for us to return to old thoughts with original intention, and it prepares us to think new thoughts. Thus, by helping us to stop thinking, music liberates us.
But music not only opens up our souls in this way, but also in its forms music suggests concrete ways of being. It motivates us to sing, to move, to dance, to make love, to fight, and other things, and it motivates us to do these things in certain specific moods and certain specific ways. By creating these specific impulses, music helps to create specific cultures, even specific civilizations.
Leaders are more or less aware of the power of music — a power which of course the other arts share, in greater or lesser degree, although music seems to me the most powerful of all the arts in this way. Therefore, tyrants are always at pains to control music. Of course, controlling music is as difficult as controlling listeners and performers and, above all, composers… neither more nor less.
Finally, My Web site is up. It links to all my finished music at CDBaby or Sonus. As I make new pieces, I will post them. The site also hosts the CsoundVST build, some photos, and such of my old writings as I could easily typeset with LaTeX.
I have been thinking of doing this for years, and now I have done it. I feel weird. I also have removed Silence from my to do list. Now making music is more or less at the top of my queue (along with renovating our apartment). This, let us hope, is different, and about time.
I am going to try to just put stuff on my Web site for a year or so (and submit to easy music opportunities) and see how that goes, before seeking other kinds of publication.
At some point, perhaps rather sooner than later, people will live as though culture exists only on the World Wide Web. At that point, only scholars and specialists will use books, magazines, CDs, LPs, photographic prints, and so on. I foresaw this when I started trying to write science fiction in 1970, and I have too hesitantly begun trying to live as though it is the case.
The implication is that an alternative civilization is surfacing right through the floor of this one. This civilization is more socialistic than capitalistic, more anarchistic than democratic, and influenced more by the university department than by other other institution of the past.
The problem is, all this anarchy will be centralized on the servers of a corporate feudalism, and subject to the Panopticon of the NSA.
We can’t get our minds around this, because we can’t foresee the resolution of this antinomy.
So, I lose to anarchy if I don’t put my stuff up here, and I lose to feudalism if I don’t make damn sure I have hard copies and backups of all my stuff.
The resolution of the antinomy probably lies in the fact that the World Wide Web is an ecology, and it will not be possible to eradicate its wildlife because it can always be virtualized and tunneled. Even a tacit code could work, like steganography.
The gods demand sacrifice, sacrifices imply results, this implication is karma, karma implies dependent arising, dependent arising is sunyata, emptiness. Thus, Schopen.
Where does the one God fit into this picture? The impredicability of sunyata implies that if emptiness is inconsistent, this does not necessarily apply to God.
Briefly, the impredicability of sunyata arises when the notion is formalized in set theory. Paradoxes are generated when the definition of a set refers to that set. The abstract form of the paradox: Is the set of all sets that are members of themselves, a member of itself? If it is, it isn’t; and if it isn’t, it is. In metamathematics, such paradoxes are serious only if they refer to completed infinities. The concept of the emptiness of emptiness, explicitly expounded in Madhyamika dialectic, appears to generate this paradox when formalized. Of course, in Buddhism, the question of infinity is usually bracketed. However, I believe that merely not excluding the possible infinity of dharmas does generate the impredicability of sunyata.
The concept of God does not generate a similar paradox because God is an individual, not a class.
To start at the beginning of the chain of theological reasoning in sunyata, and to relate it to monotheism, sacrifice tends to be identified with idolatry. Also, God is not the object of idolatry, because God is not an object.
Then again, God sacrifices Himself to Himself (explicitly in Christianity, but there are hints in classical and tribal religion). Yet God is not an idolator. So what does this mean? This kind of sacrifice (within God, and not to an object) begins to remind me of Mahayana thought, specifically to the formulation of the trikaya and of the bodhisattva path.
Does this have anything to do with the evident desire in Kabbalah and in some forms of gnosticism to identify the God of the bible as a demiurge?
When I inferred the impredicability of emptiness, I was relying on a form of the paradox of impredication that is cast in terms of set theory. I wonder if the same paradox would obtain if sunyata was formulated in terms of categories, since a category can be a proper class.
Still, I cannot avoid the feeling that must be something about the relationship between God and emptiness that is terribly important.
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