L’analyse musicale aujourd’hui/Music Analysis Today, ed. X. Hascher, M. Ayari and J.-M. Bardez, pp. 55–75., 2014
The growing diversity – some might say ‘Babelization’ – of music theory and analysis over the las... more The growing diversity – some might say ‘Babelization’ – of music theory and analysis over the last 30 years is arguably a consequence of wider changes in musical scholarship, including its increasing interdisciplinarity. An overarching centripetal paradigm might usefully draw together the various centrifugal strands of theory and analysis in order to link ostensibly isolated discourses. This is not to impose a false consensus upon diverse and innovative research, but rather to identify underlying commonalities and to foster constructive dialogue using a mutually intelligible conceptual vocabulary and methodological framework. Evolutionary theory is offered as a candidate paradigm; in particular, it is the meme concept which offers a powerful unifying force in musical study. By means of four case studies focusing on significant current trends in theory and analysis, I explore how memetics might serve as a meta-narrative connecting a number of seemingly disparate areas:
• Schenkerism and the hierarchic replication and evolution of formal-structural schemata.
• Pitch-class set theory, neo-Riemannian transformational theory, and the evolution of (a)tonal organization.
• Implication-realization theory and the shaping of musical patterning by psychological constraints.
• Computational musicology, the identification of replicated patterns, and the agent-based simulation of counterfactual evolutionary scenarios.
I conclude by arguing that memetics can also illuminate the evolutionary development of theory and analysis itself, as a verbal-graphical-conceptual ‘memeplex’ subject to the selection pressure of perceived ‘fit’ with the music it seeks to model and with the wider intellectual climate.
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/musa.12133
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/musa.12133
• Schenkerism and the hierarchic replication and evolution of formal-structural schemata.
• Pitch-class set theory, neo-Riemannian transformational theory, and the evolution of (a)tonal organization.
• Implication-realization theory and the shaping of musical patterning by psychological constraints.
• Computational musicology, the identification of replicated patterns, and the agent-based simulation of counterfactual evolutionary scenarios.
I conclude by arguing that memetics can also illuminate the evolutionary development of theory and analysis itself, as a verbal-graphical-conceptual ‘memeplex’ subject to the selection pressure of perceived ‘fit’ with the music it seeks to model and with the wider intellectual climate.
Since its crystallisation in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), the memetic paradigm has increasingly been accepted as offering a way of understanding the nature and transmission of information which integrates the symbolic-conceptual sphere into the nexus of Darwinian processes regulating the physical and biological realms. If the claims of universal Darwinism are true, then music should also be understandable in terms of the differential replication of discrete particulate units—musical memes.
2. Aims
The paper aims to outline a memetics of music with particular reference to issues of musical perception and cognition. It considers:
• The identification of memes in the parameter of pitch using the criteria of segmentation and coequality;
• how musical memes form hierarchical complexes, both in the cultural and structural realms, and memeplexes;
• the relationship between the phemotypic manifestation of the meme and its memotypic psychological representation in terms of the notion of the cognitive schema;
• how the properties of musical memes drive the evolution of musical style;
• the implication of the memetic paradigm for our understanding of human consciousness as it applies to the compositional process; and
• the place memetics might occupy within musicology and music psychology.
3. Main Contribution
The paper asserts that memetics is a powerful new way of understanding music and aims to show how both musicology and music psychology may benefit from collaboration under its aegis.
4. Implications
The memetic paradigm downplays the human- and gene-centricity underpinning current models in musicology and music psychology and offers a new, meme-centred perspective.
with the historical evolution of human-generated music ('HGM'),
there has been little consideration to date of how they might relate to
computer-generated music ('CGM'). While CGM has been the subject
of much debate as to how it might be optimised and evaluated, these have focused largely on aesthetic matters. Although music theory and analysis (for all their pretences to scientific rigour) encompass an implicit aesthetic dimension, their primary focus is on understanding systems of musical organisation at the extra- and intra-opus levels, respectively. Given this, they are well placed to offer insights into CGM at the level of pattern-to-pattern continuity and structural-hierarchic coherence. This paper considers a number of issues relevant to the application of music theory and analysis to CGM and, by means of a case-study of the composition Colossus (2010), by the Iamus computer, assesses how theory and analysis might contribute to the generation and evaluation of CGM, and how CGM might, conversely, motivate theory and analysis to expand its conceptual vocabulary to encompass non-human musics.
aside that which claims it is a "meaningless metaphor" (Gould, in
Blackmore, 1999, p. 17), another is that it is not truly scientific c. This
critique maintains that any insights memetics might offer are largely
qualitative and intuitive (humanistic), rather than quantitative and
empirical (scientific c). Put more formally, the critique hinges partly on
the Popperian notion of falsifiability (Popper, 1959), in the sense that
to be seen as scientific c memetics must be falsifiable, and for this to
occur it needs to be formalized so that falsifiability can be assessed experimentally in relation to its specific claims. While the "units, events
and dynamics" of memetic evolution have indeed been abstractly theorized (Lynch, 1998), they have not been applied systematically to
real corpora in music. Some researchers, convinced of the validity of
cultural evolution in more than the metaphorical sense adopted by
much musicology, but perhaps sceptical of some or all of the claims of
memetics, have attempted corpus-analysis techniques of music drawn
from molecular biology, and these have offered strong evidence in favour of system-level change over time (Savage, 2017). This article
argues for a synthesis between such quantitative approaches to the
study of music-cultural change and the theory of memetics as applied
to music (Jan, 2007), in particular the latter's perceptual-cognitive
elements. It argues that molecular-biology approaches, while illuminating, ignore the psychological realities of music-information grouping,
the transmission of such groups with varying degrees of fidelity, their
selection according to relative perceptual-cognitive salience, and the
power of this Darwinian process to drive the systemic changes that
statistical methodologies measure.
In an attempt to mediate between such analytical discourse, the computational approaches which moti-vated it, and the psychological and physiological processes ultimately underpinning them, the neurobio-logical encoding of memes is then explored, using William Calvin’s Hexagonal Cloning Theory (HCT). This theory (building on a long tradition of columnar models of cerebral functioning) contends that at-tributes of objects and phenomena are represented in the brain by resonating triangular arrays of neu-ronal “minicolumns” distributed across cerebral cortex, the association of such arrays into hexagonal groupings allowing the attributes of an object or entity – such as a physical object or a museme – to be represented. Such hexagonal groupings form plaques which compete for cortical territory in explicitly Darwinian fashion. The HCT appears to be a strong candidate theory for understanding both the repre-sentation of musical patterns by the brain and the perception and cognition of segmentation and simi-larity. It also offers a mechanism for the operation of Cope’s concept of the “lexicon”, a set of musical patterns related by abstraction of similarity relationships, the lexicon conceived here as a meme allele-class by analogy to the gene allele-classes of biology.
Narmour’s implication-realization (‘i-r’) model suggests that a musical meme will contain one or more implications, either realized or terminated by some form of clo-sure. Differentiation between relative strengths of implications may be possible within the terms of the i-r model: a particular meme may be regarded as carrying a stronger implicative ‘charge’ than another. The paper proposes the notion of implication-realization potential (‘i-rp’), an attempt at a comparative weighting of the intensity of implication based on the various melodic-intervallic steps contained within a meme.
If the i-rp of a mutant meme is greater than that of its antecedent then this will in-crease its perceptual-cognitive salience. This will thereby increase its propensity to imi-tation. In this way, its differential fitness will increase in direct proportion to the increase in its i-rp. Thus, the i-rp offers an index not just of perceptual-cognitive salience but also of Darwinian fitness and, concomitantly, of the likely distributional frequency of a meme.
Since its crystallisation in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), the me-metic paradigm has increasingly been accepted as offering a way of understanding the nature and transmission of information which integrates the symbolic-conceptual sphere into the nexus of Darwinian processes regulating the physical and biological realms. If the claims of universal Darwinism are true, then music should also be understandable in terms of the differential replication of discrete particulate units—musical memes.
2. AIMS
The paper aims to outline a memetics of music with particular reference to issues of musical perception and cognition. It will consider:
• The identification of memes in the parameter of pitch using the criteria of segmenta-tion and coequality;
• how musical memes form hierarchical complexes, both in the cultural and structural realms, and memeplexes;
• the relationship between the phemotypic manifestation of the meme and its memo-typic psychological representation in terms of the notion of the cognitive schema;
• how the properties of musical memes drive the evolution of musical style;
• the implication of the memetic paradigm for our understanding of human con-sciousness as it applies to the compositional process; and
• the place memetics might occupy within musicology and music psychology.
3. MAIN CONTRIBUTION
The paper asserts that memetics is a powerful new way of understanding music and aims to show how both musicology and music psychology may benefit from col-laboration under its aegis.
4. IMPLICATIONS
The memetic paradigm downplays the human- and gene-centricity underpinning current models in musicology and music psychology and offers a new, meme-centred perspective.