Interesting post, abstract. I hope you don't mind if I look at a couple of parts.
abstract said:
reading someone's lyrics is like getting to look inside their mind to see what is there.
Yeah, and I've found that to be both a positive and negative experience. I rarely listen to music with lyrics because I prefer to experience my favorite music as symbolic expressions of emotional and creative flows, undefined by others thoughts. That way, my imagination and thinking are stimulated. Exceptions are when a creative person is transcribing both their inner music and the associated thoughts and feelings as a single unit. As a musician, you probably know that there's a lot of good music out there that is creatively inspired and then ruined by grafting on words and phrases just to make a song, that's "catchy or more memorable or more marketable."
abstract said:
when you actually dig in to the lyrics and try to find out about them, you examine and absorb them, repeat them, and consider them, you realize that (and this is just my thought) that a lot of musicians tend to have a similar mindset to how they approach living life. it seems a musician is born with the near unconscious, but burning desire to experience creation in a direct way.
I agree, and I see it as certain individuals being born with this burning desire (or ability) and
becoming musicians, or painters, sculpters, etc in order to express this experience. I believe my son, who is a musician in a local band, qualifies in this regard.
abstract said:
if the universe is capable of being expressed with numbers, and music is also built on numbers, so it would seem to me that music is like a direct interaction with the cosmos via math. just a thought. maybe someone can expand/add dimension to this topic...
I see what you're saying. Looking at it from the perspective of symbolic logic as Lewis Carroll writes
here (and we are in a symbolic reality, right?), I see "patterns and partial-patterns" being the Genus from which the music, numbers and math can be seen as subclasses with regard to the issue under consideration. In this way, I can see a relationship between the different 'subjects' that allows each 'subject' to express the same unity, but in different ways.
I think maybe, I'm trying to say that instead of seeing "music is like a direct interaction with the cosmos via math," I see music
and math as different ways of expressing a person's direct experience of a creative process of the Universe that has, is, or will happen at some time and in some respect, somewhere in the Universe - and that it's all, in some way, music to the loving soul.
These are all just my personal thoughts on the matter. I didn't want to leave you with an impression that I was trying to "correct" anything. :)
You may, or may not, find the following interesting:
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The idea of patterns and partial-patterns (of which the words fractal and multi-fractal is used as a synonym) being the foundation of music is relatively new, I think.
Benoit Mandelbrot (the father of fractal geometry) suggested to Harlan Brothers that he undertake a mathematically rigorous treatment of fractal music. Brothers published a paper entitled "Structural Scaling in Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3," which appeared in the journal Fractals (Vol. 15, No. 1, 2007; pages 89-95). The article reveals musical structure related to the Cantor set and helps to establish a mathematical foundation for the classification of fractal music. A new article, entitled "Intervallic Scaling in the Bach Cello Suites," will appear in the journal this fall (that was in 2004 I think). The paper describes a novel and robust approach to establishing the existence of power-laws in music.
As with graphics, music can exhibit a wide variety of scaling behavior. In the course of exploring the role of power laws in music, Brothers has found many types of scaling including self-similarity with respect to duration, pitch, interval, motif, and structure. He has also written compositions to illustrate some of these scaling characteristics.
Source: _http://www.brotherstechnology.com/math/fractal-music.html