JUST BEAUTIFUL...
Minggu, 19 Agustus 2012
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Explaining Explaining Music
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I've always wanted to explain music - to explain the sequences of sounds which have moved me in such profound ways for as long as I can remember. Only 'explaining sex' can compete with my desire to explain music! (and my desire to explain music is older!). When I studied music at University, I realised I wasn't alone in having this fascination: many others over centuries have puzzled over exactly the same kind of phenomena. There was something comforting about that - and I had a sense of feeling at home when I met or encountered the writings of those who were also trying to explain music.
Having said that, their explanations usually left me cold - or at least luke-warm. I'd worked on my own explanations... a strange adolescent cybernetic (as I now see it!) theory of the way that emotion is manipulated through time and the experience of sound. I've still got large numbers of badly-written and messy pages of repetitive hammerings-away at the problems of music, logic and time. The academics I encountered, it seemed to me, were more interested in pinning their colours to a particular mast than really pursuing the problem: so Schenkerians went one way, the set-theorists went another, the Retians another, and so on. But none of them really dealt with the problems of experience - or they may have claimed to (like Meyer or perhaps Schenker) but there were some huge gaps. And of course there were huge gaps in my own theories. And the attempts continue: if anything they are worse now... like Tymoczko's which I commented on here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/what-can-we-reasonably-say-about-music.html.
Now I'm more interested in the desire to explain in the first place. What drives music theorists to peculiar esoteric formalisms of something which, if nothing else, is incredibly beautiful? If they behaved like this with an analysis of sex, we might simply say that they "weren't getting enough"! Are they not getting enough music? Was I not getting enough music? I think there's something in this...
The question is about the possibility of rational analysis, the value of rational analysis and its motivation. I think that the motivation for rational analysis cannot be separated from the institutional structure which supports its creation: the University. Simply put, the University is a place of discourse, and discourse depends on rational explanations for phenomena. The University is also a political place, and great prizes await those who present the most compelling rational arguments (heaven knows, they might even get more sex!). But that does not explain the fact that such rational analysis often has a formal character. There is a tendency to think "the greater the formalism, the greater the rationality" - of course that's false (although many economists and others seem to believe it!). But given that we do accord extra trust in the appearance of abstractions and formalisms, what does this say about our rationality?
Trust is key to discourse. The point about formalism is that it appears that it can serve to win trust. Why? This is what fascinates me about different kinds of explanation, and its particularly interesting when applied to music. It is a commonplace to say that maths and music are related. I think they are related because they both express the "limits of rationality" in profound ways. How does expressing the limits of rationality help to win trust? I wonder now if it's because the limits of rationality have a universal quality: that we are bound together by what we can't know. In other words, it is not what rationality and formalism and music can say which is important; it is what it cannot say. It is the fact that formalisms identify limits of rationality in ways that can be clearly articulated (like the performance of a musical score), that focal points are created for explanation. This is another way of identifying absence as causal, which I have discussed before (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/forms-of-thought-and-conviviality.html)
Does this explain the desire to explain music? No. It might explain the forms of explanation that arise. But to explain the desire to explain, we need to consider the form that explanation takes in terms of working with absence, and to think how this relates to human motivation. Whilst there may be a political motivation for producing the 'killer explanation' of music (or anything else) might be to win academic accolades, etc, I think if this was the sole intent of explaining something, nothing would really get explained at all - what we would have would be simple noisy 'posturing' of opinions (actually, we DO see a lot of this in the social sciences and (I'm afraid) education!). No science there.
I'd like to think that the motivation, the hunger, for explaining something like music is a search for meaning in life. What that means, in a more technical sense, is an ability to anticipate what life might throw at us. With anticipation comes greater robustness and viability, both at an individual and a societal level (and the individual is not separable from the society they inhabit). Of course, anticipation also plays a major role in the experience of music itself.
That trying to search for meaning in life through explaining music is futile only serves to highlight the poignancy of living. I find myself now torn between a drive to articulate formalisms around music, education, (actually everything!), and simply trying to be better at living and trying to take better care of the people around me. I guess I will always be torn in this way - the "explaining drive" fools me into thinking I am right (and others are wrong). And then I am pulled back to the beauty of music itself and a world of love.
Having said that, their explanations usually left me cold - or at least luke-warm. I'd worked on my own explanations... a strange adolescent cybernetic (as I now see it!) theory of the way that emotion is manipulated through time and the experience of sound. I've still got large numbers of badly-written and messy pages of repetitive hammerings-away at the problems of music, logic and time. The academics I encountered, it seemed to me, were more interested in pinning their colours to a particular mast than really pursuing the problem: so Schenkerians went one way, the set-theorists went another, the Retians another, and so on. But none of them really dealt with the problems of experience - or they may have claimed to (like Meyer or perhaps Schenker) but there were some huge gaps. And of course there were huge gaps in my own theories. And the attempts continue: if anything they are worse now... like Tymoczko's which I commented on here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/what-can-we-reasonably-say-about-music.html.
Now I'm more interested in the desire to explain in the first place. What drives music theorists to peculiar esoteric formalisms of something which, if nothing else, is incredibly beautiful? If they behaved like this with an analysis of sex, we might simply say that they "weren't getting enough"! Are they not getting enough music? Was I not getting enough music? I think there's something in this...
The question is about the possibility of rational analysis, the value of rational analysis and its motivation. I think that the motivation for rational analysis cannot be separated from the institutional structure which supports its creation: the University. Simply put, the University is a place of discourse, and discourse depends on rational explanations for phenomena. The University is also a political place, and great prizes await those who present the most compelling rational arguments (heaven knows, they might even get more sex!). But that does not explain the fact that such rational analysis often has a formal character. There is a tendency to think "the greater the formalism, the greater the rationality" - of course that's false (although many economists and others seem to believe it!). But given that we do accord extra trust in the appearance of abstractions and formalisms, what does this say about our rationality?
Trust is key to discourse. The point about formalism is that it appears that it can serve to win trust. Why? This is what fascinates me about different kinds of explanation, and its particularly interesting when applied to music. It is a commonplace to say that maths and music are related. I think they are related because they both express the "limits of rationality" in profound ways. How does expressing the limits of rationality help to win trust? I wonder now if it's because the limits of rationality have a universal quality: that we are bound together by what we can't know. In other words, it is not what rationality and formalism and music can say which is important; it is what it cannot say. It is the fact that formalisms identify limits of rationality in ways that can be clearly articulated (like the performance of a musical score), that focal points are created for explanation. This is another way of identifying absence as causal, which I have discussed before (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/forms-of-thought-and-conviviality.html)
Does this explain the desire to explain music? No. It might explain the forms of explanation that arise. But to explain the desire to explain, we need to consider the form that explanation takes in terms of working with absence, and to think how this relates to human motivation. Whilst there may be a political motivation for producing the 'killer explanation' of music (or anything else) might be to win academic accolades, etc, I think if this was the sole intent of explaining something, nothing would really get explained at all - what we would have would be simple noisy 'posturing' of opinions (actually, we DO see a lot of this in the social sciences and (I'm afraid) education!). No science there.
I'd like to think that the motivation, the hunger, for explaining something like music is a search for meaning in life. What that means, in a more technical sense, is an ability to anticipate what life might throw at us. With anticipation comes greater robustness and viability, both at an individual and a societal level (and the individual is not separable from the society they inhabit). Of course, anticipation also plays a major role in the experience of music itself.
That trying to search for meaning in life through explaining music is futile only serves to highlight the poignancy of living. I find myself now torn between a drive to articulate formalisms around music, education, (actually everything!), and simply trying to be better at living and trying to take better care of the people around me. I guess I will always be torn in this way - the "explaining drive" fools me into thinking I am right (and others are wrong). And then I am pulled back to the beauty of music itself and a world of love.
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HAVE A FABULOUS WEEKEND XX
Jumat, 17 Agustus 2012
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The Viable System Model and Drama Theory
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I'm currently wading through some difficult mathematical territory in search of a way of articulating why Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model) can be highly effective in stimulating reflexivity within complex organisations. My thinking is that the VSM contains a powerful combination of a simple set of categories for looking at the function of an organisation, with an equally simple explanation as to how these categories relate to one another in a recursive way. It is the implicit explanatory aspect of the VSM, which draws on the cybernetic theories of Ashby (the law of requisite variety: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)), which I think does the trick.
What does the explanatory aspect of the VSM do? In essence, I think its function is to manipulate the probability distribution for the mapping of categories onto aspects of organisational experience. Thus, whilst the categories (which are numbered by Beer as 'system 1', 'system 2', 'system 3', etc) may be almost arbitrarily applied to different aspects of the organisation in the first instance, the explanation that accompanies them means that other categories cannot be applied arbitrarily, or rather their mapping depends on some initial choice. In this way, logically, the choice of mappings is restricted. This has a number of effects.
Firstly it means that the assignation of categories is not completely arbitrary. The assignation of an initial category (x is System 1) changes the probability distribution of the assignation of other categories.
Secondly, and related to this, it means that the scope for agreement between a number of different stakeholders in an organisation is increased, because not only are there a restricted number of mappings, but also the explanation of one mapping or another quickly reveals to other colleagues a deeper meta-understanding of the organisational structure which can be critiqued. In other words, people do not argue about the assignations of categories, but argue about their understanding. This is at a meta level.
It is interesting to compare the VSM to deeper theoretical cybernetic work which also relates to organisation. For example, I am very interested in Luhmann's communication theory. But Luhmann is not practical like Beer, and his work can be challenging. However, deep inspection reveals much that is of value, particularly relating to the necessity for rich ecologies of communication in organisations and the pathologies that can set it if communication is constrained (through fear, power, managerial isolation, etc). At the same time, Luhmann's work can be usefully applied to the analysis of communications data from the internet, and since the internet forms a key component of the environment of all businesses (particularly Universities) applying this analysis ought to carry some practical benefit.
To some extent, I think that this is what the learning analytics agenda is about. But there is a disconnect between the pretty pictures of data analysis and the real everyday political concerns of employees of an organisation. There is even a danger that clever data analysis could lead to a kind of managerial hubris which claims a 'higher intellegence' than the people on the ground doing the actual work! It is Beer's work which is with the people on the ground, yet Beer's work does not lend itself to the kind of deep analysis of communications that Luhmann's work affords.
So what can be learnt from Beer that might help in the practical realisation of the benefits of data analysis? Developing the notion of the role of explanation in Beer, and the consequences it carries for agreement, I am starting to look again at Nigel Howard's work on 'Drama Theory' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_theory). This is a game-theoretical approach which seeks to articulate the complex ways in which individuals behave in organisational situations as they act in coalitions with colleagues with ideas about the strategies of those colleagues, or sometimes for their own personal gain. Howard's work can be seen as a mathematical articulation of institutional political behaviour.
As I try to understand the maths, I'm seeing some resonances between the dynamics of understanding each other's strategies (which is an anticipatory dynamic) and the dynamics of looking at immediate gain. Leydesdorff makes a distinction between those dynamics which rely on the previous state, and those dynamics which anticipate future states. The latter, it seems to me, are related to the understanding of strategies, and the extent to which strategies are agreed upon, and strategies depend on the articulation of explanations.
If the goal of an effective organisation is maintaining rich reflexive communications as a means of maintaining profitable interactions with its environment, then the role of explanation and anticipation are fundamental. If the way that explanation works within things like the VSM can be better understood, then we can create a relationship between the data analysis of internet communications and frameworks for articulating explanations of that data. In other words, the technology can serve as an environment for nurturing explanations amongst staff and in the process creating environment for rich cooperation.
What does the explanatory aspect of the VSM do? In essence, I think its function is to manipulate the probability distribution for the mapping of categories onto aspects of organisational experience. Thus, whilst the categories (which are numbered by Beer as 'system 1', 'system 2', 'system 3', etc) may be almost arbitrarily applied to different aspects of the organisation in the first instance, the explanation that accompanies them means that other categories cannot be applied arbitrarily, or rather their mapping depends on some initial choice. In this way, logically, the choice of mappings is restricted. This has a number of effects.
Firstly it means that the assignation of categories is not completely arbitrary. The assignation of an initial category (x is System 1) changes the probability distribution of the assignation of other categories.
Secondly, and related to this, it means that the scope for agreement between a number of different stakeholders in an organisation is increased, because not only are there a restricted number of mappings, but also the explanation of one mapping or another quickly reveals to other colleagues a deeper meta-understanding of the organisational structure which can be critiqued. In other words, people do not argue about the assignations of categories, but argue about their understanding. This is at a meta level.
It is interesting to compare the VSM to deeper theoretical cybernetic work which also relates to organisation. For example, I am very interested in Luhmann's communication theory. But Luhmann is not practical like Beer, and his work can be challenging. However, deep inspection reveals much that is of value, particularly relating to the necessity for rich ecologies of communication in organisations and the pathologies that can set it if communication is constrained (through fear, power, managerial isolation, etc). At the same time, Luhmann's work can be usefully applied to the analysis of communications data from the internet, and since the internet forms a key component of the environment of all businesses (particularly Universities) applying this analysis ought to carry some practical benefit.
To some extent, I think that this is what the learning analytics agenda is about. But there is a disconnect between the pretty pictures of data analysis and the real everyday political concerns of employees of an organisation. There is even a danger that clever data analysis could lead to a kind of managerial hubris which claims a 'higher intellegence' than the people on the ground doing the actual work! It is Beer's work which is with the people on the ground, yet Beer's work does not lend itself to the kind of deep analysis of communications that Luhmann's work affords.
So what can be learnt from Beer that might help in the practical realisation of the benefits of data analysis? Developing the notion of the role of explanation in Beer, and the consequences it carries for agreement, I am starting to look again at Nigel Howard's work on 'Drama Theory' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_theory). This is a game-theoretical approach which seeks to articulate the complex ways in which individuals behave in organisational situations as they act in coalitions with colleagues with ideas about the strategies of those colleagues, or sometimes for their own personal gain. Howard's work can be seen as a mathematical articulation of institutional political behaviour.
As I try to understand the maths, I'm seeing some resonances between the dynamics of understanding each other's strategies (which is an anticipatory dynamic) and the dynamics of looking at immediate gain. Leydesdorff makes a distinction between those dynamics which rely on the previous state, and those dynamics which anticipate future states. The latter, it seems to me, are related to the understanding of strategies, and the extent to which strategies are agreed upon, and strategies depend on the articulation of explanations.
If the goal of an effective organisation is maintaining rich reflexive communications as a means of maintaining profitable interactions with its environment, then the role of explanation and anticipation are fundamental. If the way that explanation works within things like the VSM can be better understood, then we can create a relationship between the data analysis of internet communications and frameworks for articulating explanations of that data. In other words, the technology can serve as an environment for nurturing explanations amongst staff and in the process creating environment for rich cooperation.
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INSPIRING INDEED!
Kamis, 16 Agustus 2012
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MY IDEAL...
Rabu, 15 Agustus 2012
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