[NewMusic] slusser's article

[decker]

Some stiff wrote:
"Experience is also what [This Is Your Brain On Music] reveals to be 
fundamental to what each of us defines as music, perhaps the "chilling" 
element Weasel refers to.  Non-idiomatic improvisation will never be 
music to the masses.  According to the research, you're only going to 
get that shot of dopamine when a musician tickles something you're 
already familiar with.  That pretty much narrows it down to musical 
explorers and "tone scientists" (to borrow from Sun Ra).  As I concluded 
in my review, we may be the only audience for our music."

First time lurker, just wanna suggest we all keep a close eye on these 
materialist/hard-science arguments, they never get at generative forces 
or framing concepts, like how does a new experience become familiar in 
the first place? Every "instrument" including singing and gesture were 
an innovation at some point. Hard sciences often fails (instructively) 
at describing entelechy, emergence, Hegelian dialectics, whether in 
biology with punctuated equilibrium (Gould's notion, hated by many 
hardcore materialists) or aesthetic/cultural paradigm shifts. Even 
within a dopamine-release theory of aesthetics, is familiarity the only 
trigger? What chemical pathways are etched through waterboarding or 
coitus interurruptus? Are they mistaking entertainment for art? Don't 
think science won't be reductive like that, they love them a solvable 
problem and not surprisingly marketers love them some evolutionary 
psychologists.

We know flux better when our brains and bodies are in wild 
pubescent/nervous throes, but we grow older, jaded, attending primarily 
to familiarities in an effort to stave off what's really happening: 
mutation, error, uncertainty, chaos, powerlessness, decay. Art since 
Hegel has had to contend with mutability, I'm not sure sciences isn't 
still head in the sand trying to fix on natural laws, hoping no one will 
notice einstein and newton still contradict one another.

Just saying, beware the application of fMRI studies to aesthetics and 
ethics, evolutionary psychology tells you about a minute fraction of 
subjective experience, the fraction that would equally apply to 
cro-magnon as to pee-wee herman which is to say, not the most 
interesting part. That's not to suggest cro-magnon didn't have culture 
and personality, but determinism doesnt describe aesthetics when it 
describes mechanisms of perception.

Decker