Saturday 24 February 2007

Pic of the day: Would you think of rap in a place like this? I think not. Perhaps yodeling, which can be bad enough, but only until you get to know it. (The picture is from Oblivion, in a radical example of art imitating life... I've seen plenty of places like this here in Norway.)

Beauty and the rap

Most of us probably realize that a life without beauty would lose much of its value. Even we who don't spend much time and thought on beauty in everyday life, still notice when there is exceptionally much or little of it. In many ways, lack of beauty is what we first associate with a prison cell, as much as lack of freedom. If you ask anyone who has not actually been there to draw a prison cell, it will likely be gray, rough, dark and devoid of decoration. If you ask them to draw a living room, it will likely have pleasing colors, decorations and plenty of light sources. Somehow people think that if you imprison someone in a place of beauty, it is less of an imprisonment. And they are probably right.

Being myself more of a listener than a viewer, I generally enjoy music more than paintings or sculptures. In fact, I find it hard to concentrate while listening to music, unless it is music I have heard so much that I am at least partly immune to it. Unfortunately I find it at least as hard to ignore ugly "music" such as rap and much of blues and reggae. Which leads me to todays topic:

Does beauty exist outside the eye of the beholder? Is beauty a basic property of the universe, discovered by humans in the same way that we discovered the atoms and the galaxies? And if so, why do some people enjoy rap?

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At first glance, it seems obvious that beauty must be in the eye of the behold, exactly because there is no complete agreement on what is beautiful and what is ugly. And yet it is not entirely random. There is a vague agreement that, in the most basic, harmony is beautiful. And already the ancient Greeks found out that harmony was a mathematical concept. It is also supported by the physical world, in sound in the form of resonance. In visual art, there is the Golden Cut or golden ratio, which is based on a simple mathematical formula that is also found in nature. In the beauty of the human body, symmetry between the left and right side is universally regarded as a good thing, and people intuitively show a preference for more symmetric people even when they can not point out exactly where the asymmetry is in others. This again turns out to have a reproductive advantage, as an important indicator of genetic health (though of course not the only one).

Observation of animals show that the appreciation of melodic music is not unique to humans, although we are unique in our ability to produce it over a wide range. Most mammals cannot produce music, but still respond to it. Some birds do indeed produce music, and since early times humans have appreciated the music of birds. Unsurprisingly the converse also turns out to be true: Birds react differently to music than to random sounds. Whales also sing, and their song if sped up greatly resembles birdsong. This indicates that the appreciation of music goes back at least to the common ancestor of birds and mammals, which was before the arrival of the dinosaurs.

Also, as I occasionally say, bees love flowers and boys love girls, but why do girls love flowers? I think we can agree that girls have not evolved to carry pollen from flower to flower in exchange for nectar. It also seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that any of us have bees in our ancestral tree. Bees can get into the most unlikely places, but still...

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In short, it seems that beauty at least in part reflects an appreciation of constants in nature, not intellectually but directly. This makes more sense than to look for "beauty waves" or "beauty particles" in beautiful music or art. But in humans, the sense of beauty has grown far beyond these simple beginnings, much like we have done in almost anything we touch, from food to reproduction. We add layer upon layer of refinement to what we do, and so also with music. It is in these layers that cultures diverge, and even individuals.

Musical genius Bill Evans has a theory that there is a universal musical mind, and that all music speaks to this mind; but you need to be "conditioned to" the particular style of music to understand it, much like spoken thought requires you to understand the language in which it is spoken. Different times of history or different parts of the world have different languages and even dialects, which may come between you and the true meaning (or, I add, beauty) of the music. There are a number of consecutive videos on YouTube where Evans talk about this, starting with this one. (The sequels should appear nearby on the page, while supplies last.)

This is certainly true to some extent. I was raised in a place where the Hardanger Fiddle was widely used and loved, and although we did not play it in our family, I could still appreciate it. But to my young urban friends, it sounds like the torture of cats. They are absolutely unable to appreciate the subtle harmonies of this fairly rare instrument. (The Hardanger Fiddle has four playable strings and four or usually five resonance strings, which vibrate along with the main strings. Also, you often play two of the strings at the same time.)

Given this experience, I try to give foreign music the benefit of doubt. But when it comes to rap, all bets are off. To me it does not sound so much like music as mockery, a systematic way to convey anger. And I suspect that this is its purpose, as the music of the antisocial underclass of America, whose only cohesive factor is the shared hatred of those who don't fail in life. For a music with only one emotion to convey, it is possible to optimize the genre to a higher degree. And indeed, I have seen reasonably successful integration of rap elements in Scandinavian dance music, though never alone, only as a contrast to melodic female vocals. In these situations it is actually bearable, though I would be hard pressed to say that it improves the song unless the song is explicitly about these contrasts. Then again I have not been "conditioned" to rap and thank the Light for that.

To belabor the aspect of "optimized" genres of music, in Great Britain there are public areas such as train stations where classical music is piped through hard-to-destroy loudspeakers, for the purpose of driving away antisocial elements. This works most excellently. Evidently the beautiful harmonies chosen really grate on the nerves of budding criminals in much the same way as rap grates on ours. It certainly works the other way around: The cheapest CD shop in my city frequently plays evil music when I come in, with the effect that I quickly leave without buying anything, and eventually have stopped trying altogether. (Besides, I subscribe to MSN music now, there is no point in buying CDs. But that is as much effect as cause, perhaps.)

The astronomer and sci-fi writer Sir Fred Hoyle mentions in passing in his novel The Black Cloud that music might correspond to larger- scale oscillations in the brain, whereas spoken communication corresponded to small-scale waves. Furthermore, the connection between the music and the brain waves might be more direct, so that a change in the music could effect a change in the state of mind without conscious intervention, while words cause changes through reflection, indirectly. I am not sure if he came up with this on his own, but I think this was the first place (if not the only place) I read it. Then again, I have read a lot more science fiction than music theory, though I am weaned now.

And yes, I obviously believe the same thing: That music speaks to us more directly than words. Still not completely bypassing the mind and manipulating our brain. But it speaks perhaps, as Bill Evans says, to a "universal mind", a different layer of mind than that shaped by words and facts. And I think this "universal mind" is the same that perceives beauty in other forms of art, as well as in nature. And it is probably in nature it first came to be. Often art imitates life, and when for some reason our ancestors got the gift of reflection, they started to reflect on the beauty of nature and decide to make beauty of their own. Animals may be able to feel pleased by what they see or hear, but they are not able to reflect on it. Now that we can, it would be a horrible waste to spend our lives like cats and dogs, don't you think?