From: eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman)
Subject: Re: Musical Virtual Worlds
Date: 15 Nov 90 07:08:17 GMT

In article <1990Nov13.213038.27046@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> 
  garry@cs-sun-fsc.cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Garry Beirne) writes:

;In short, I think that the music world has a mature notion of 'virtual 
;worlds' and is at the forefront of 'interactivity'.  

My current line of work involves what I'm calling an "auditory cyberspace." 
It's based around some notions of consciousness, especially of temporal
integration & the possibilities of transmitting cognitive structure, as 
outlined in my PhD thesis "music as secondary consciousness: an 
implementation," which ought to be on the shelf within a few months. The 
medium is a high intensity broth and involves something comparable to
echolocation, insuinuating objects of arbitrary complexity with no "real-
world" correlate. The listener/participant has no "observational" status.

While I'm here, some quick positions:

The concept that we're "visually oriented" is shallow and, I think, probably
incorrect: consult any textbook of auditory disorders (Sacks has come out
with one called "Hearing voices.") Visual orientations are, to me, essentially
distance-preserving modalites of selfhood which express an unwillingness
to jeopardize one's detachment from the world -- a detachment which usenet,
a visual medium, promotes, hence its peculiar psychology. Not to undermine
seeing, of course: but the blind do have it easier than the deaf. The deaf,
unless regimented into an appropriate educational proghram early on, may
have a highly underdeveloped sense of time and of selfhood.

The "musical" perspective espoused by most recent musical cognitivism is
based on some unfortunate misunderstandings of musical history: especially
problematic is the notion of musical generative grammars. There is no
such thing, in my view; worse, I think it is detrimental any sort of thinking
that goes on around music to insist on the ideas od a "semantics," be they
emotive, significative, or pseudo linguistic. Habituation entails
perceptual automatization, as already James pointed out. The reliance of
cognitivism on previous experience is at most a pedagogical blunder, not
an insight into how music "works." I am looking at things that force involvement
and map out experience, not things that are, from an intercationist
stance, already dead.

eliot handelman
princeton u., music