Picking up the pieces
In my last post I wanted to see if anybody could guess a particular classical piece from hearing a single note, the single note in question being:
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Two listeners (Miss M. and ACD) impressively pinned this down to Beethoven almost immediately. Given just a slightly longer rendition of the sample resulted in a correct guess of the particular piece, the part in the presto of Beethoven’s 9th in which — as another commenter, Mitch, described — “it goes from brooding to joyous”.
I find it really interesting trying to determine at which point a series of notes changes from being, well, just a series of notes into being a universally recognizable melody. Everyone reading this probably has a certain section of their brain reserved for that particular theme, but when listening to music when does your brain kick in and scream “I know this!”?
It’s probably not quite here:
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Or here:
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But maybe now?
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It’s particularly fascinating that after listening to the whole theme:
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if you go back and listen to the short ones they seem a lot more obvious. Apparently, consciously knowing which music is about to be played makes your brain give that sharp recognition response with far fewer notes than would ordinarily be needed. Obviously it’s not terribly surprising that you can “recognize” a piece from a single note when you are told what that piece is going to be, but it isn’t just consciously recognizing a piece. It’s not just like someone telling you “you are about to hear the Ode to Joy theme” and you listen to that one note and confirm that indeed, it is the beginning of the theme. When you hear that single note again it is a primal feeling, a low level blast of recognition. Once you know what music the note is from it is almost impossible to avoid that recognition. It’s like trying not to read writing: once you see a written word you instantly identify it with a concept, it’s impossible to see it as just a bunch of lines.
Listening to a new piece of music is sort of like learning a new language. You initially get faced with all these sounds and melodies which you can sort of follow, but don’t have their own bit of brainspace. If you hear the notes which make up the melody one by one, there probably would not be a sudden moment of recognition, they are all just notes because you do not yet understand the piece. They are like a foreign word, which you understand is a word, but you do not have any mental object associated with it. If it were spelled differently you wouldn’t notice. It’s non-meaning would not be affected. In the same way you probably couldn’t tell if one of the notes in the music were altered.
Eventually you get to the stage in which those melodies provoke an instant response. The words make sense. The music has been imprinted into your head in such a way that it has become a piece of you. You can hum the melodies.
I can sort of feel this process happening sometimes. When a piece has first managed to burrow into my head and stake out a bit of territory for itself, I will sometimes have stress dreams in which it is endlessly looping in the background. It’s an almost unpleasant experience, but it’s also almost a given that this music will then become one of my favorite pieces, so all the not-quite-sleep trauma is totally worth it.
Thoughts From Last Nights Concert
Last night, total lunar eclipse night 2008, at a concert by the Alban Berg quartet:
Pre-concert: Are these chairs made from wood or cunningly crafted plastic? They’re too precisely curved to be wood I think but.. OW. The lamps under the soffit of the armrest are a) hot and b) grounded, and all the dry air has shoved far too much static on me for that not to hurt in two different ways at once. Oh, here we go…
During Haydn Op. 77 No. 1: Sonata form, you cheeky devil, you sonofagun – I can hear you the first time through now! You’re marchy today, too. I just saw you repeat the exposition, and now look at you all developing. 2nd movement: your start brings to mind in me Shostakovich SQ 13, and the rest of you is exceptionally lovely, I like your rising ripples. Huh, rising ripples sounds surprisingly filthy. The rest of you is sturdy and wonderful to watch as everything gets thrown back and forth but, sorry Haydn, you just didn’t quite do it for me this time.
Berg Op. 3: Uh-oh, 2nd Viennese school, my classical music mostly nemesis, but… oooo… this stuff sounds rather different when it’s being performed live, it’s suddenly far more appealing, why is that? I wonder if it’s because it’s more shocking to see that these are actual people, playing actual music, on instruments of all things! It’s not some kind of electronic device whirring and chirping away and generating all those odd sounds. It’s wood and guts. You lose that through a CD, don’t you? You almost forget that once upon a time, someone actually played the stuff you are listening to. The live effect is particularly overpowering during the really dramatic sections. Watching those players batter their instruments has an intensity that recordings just cannot match.
Beethoven Op. 132: I know you. You’re the string quartet that starts out like the Grosse Fugue. Then you have that bit in your first movement which sounds like Schubert’s Trout. The third movement is the really good one, this is spiritual stuff, and deliberately so. It’s amazing during a movement like this to watch the faces of those watching the performers. Us, the audience. So many heads turned upward and sideways and all heavy with contemplation and concentration. Eyes lightly lidded but clearly alive, active below. The fifth movement is almost a song, lyrical but certainly not saccharine. Stubborn. Resilient. And the ending kicks about ten kinds of arse.
Coda: Huh. the moon’s all red.
Taxation
Taxes, taxes, my room is covered in bloody taxes. At least they’re all done, if slightly incorrectly. The online tax software I was using wasn’t quite advanced enough to correctly work out when my estimated payments were and… this isn’t very interesting is it? The short of it is that I ended up paying an underpayment penalty unnecessarily, but it would have cost more than the amount of that penalty — plus another three hours of my life — to switch to another piece of software. Eugh.
Beethoven also had to deal with all this crap, as detailed in these pages over at the Beethoven Haus, which sounds like a nice place to visit. Having had my fill of finance for the weekend I am far more interested in their store. I could do with some Beethoven brandy, for a start. I also kind of like the creepiness of the death mask bust.
Aside form the consumerism, there are all kinds of museum-cool type things on this site: pages from his notebooks, portraits, caricatures, instruments. Start at the digital archives section and browse away.