Perhaps in line with your thoughts, the pause isn't part of the music you were listening to and so, you listened to a version of the music you created when you paused the flow of notes.

Nevertheless, such pauses are generally not considered significant to the music itself which is odd since moments of silence, especially how long they last are musical devices in the full employ of composers.

There is a difference between listening to a song once, twice, thrice... Etc.

If you want to conduct science on the greatness of a song, you listen to it several times.

If you want to have it play the best quality in your mind, once. The resound will technically be better, like you want to hear it's effect.



I'm a good judge, I know the man in this art is too feminine for the scene.

Yet, if I was to try and relate to the artist, I wouldn't give it too much thought.

Did you hear the entire piece? — Moliere

Except for the single un-scored pause, yes.

To put it differently, you heard an entire piece differing (from the one you planned to hear) by one pause mark.

Hey... :gasp: yes! :100:

Let's try it like this.



*
*
***
*****




We have here two parts of the old guitarist. Together as a whole:




Now, by your reckoning, all we would need are the first two images and we could say we have seen the old guitarist. Break it up however you might imagine, too -- we can imagine it broken into hundreds of squares and triangles by some randomization algorithm, and by your reasoning if we have seen each of the hundreds of pieces then we have seen the entire painting. Hopefully you'll excuse me for not carrying out the demonstration, and you're able to see why someone would object to that.

We need to see the whole painting. Sometimes we need to see the entire painting hanging on a wall, and not just pictures of them on the internet, to get the whole effect. To stay with Picasso, Guernica is very much like that: its size has an effect on the viewer which is missed in looking up images of it.



I'd like to posit, at least, that the same holds for music. I can put music on in the background and hear it while focusing on something else, I can pause it and then go to work and come back hours later and restart where I was at. But there is also something to be said for listening to the entire work in a single session while concentrating on it. And I don't think the analogy is perfect -- I think there really is a difference between the visual and the audible, in terms of art. But it's close enough to hopefully highlight that there is something about continued listening which is important in evaluating music.

This was the piece of music I was listening to when I formulated the question. It's something that really only works when taken as a whole. Other examples would be movements in a symphony or even very pronounced melodies within symphonies -- like Beethoven's 5th and 9th, which have very distinct and remembered melodies that everyone recognizes, but which require at least many different parts to be heard in full.

I think I speak for both myself and @TheMadFool when I say we already agreed absolutely with all these implications of your OP for art and music, viz, the potential importance of experiencing the work as a whole.

I am guilty, possibly, of excessive understatement ("yes, except").

To hear an entire piece differing by one notational element is indeed to hear a different piece.

Some departures from notational correctness will be more consequential aesthetically than others, but I wasn't for a moment meaning to imply that fewer (e.g. a single) departures must be less consequential.

Oh, OK!

I may have misread @TheMadFool then, or just read him into your response too. My mistake.

I guess I'd say that you did not hear the entire peice then, and for some reason I read you as saying you had -- but you stated that the listener heard something different from the original score. OK.

This makes common sense to me when I look at examples.

But I wonder if there's some conceptual dimension here -- like, is there something that spells out what a complete work is? When do you stop listening? And what are these levels of commitment to listening? To what extent is the listener a part of the listened (for a work of art, at least)?

That sort of thing.

And I find it hard to give much of an answer, but it's something I'm thinking about -- hence the thread, to see if others have thoughts on the same matter.

But I wonder if there's some conceptual dimension here -- — Moliere

:ok:

-- like, is there something that spells out what a complete work is? — Moliere

For notational music, we potentially care about and often prize the differences between sound events that hang on "small" differences between notational descriptions. IOW the score is what spells it out. Although, we care about a lot else besides, of course.

With recorded music (whether notation-based or not) I think the situation is more like that of print-making and photography as analysed by Nelson Goodman: we prize the authenticity of sound events according to whether they trace back historically to a particular performance or, very often, an original master tape, or mix-down. Again, the identity of the work from instance to instance (from play to play, as from print to print) is important if "small" differences can be hugely consequential aesthetically.

I theorize 2 times is always the same, in a sense, subsequently 3, 4, sub sequent order and random. There is a nexus of number of degrade off visual matter.

It seems there's this (widely held) belief that the things we do maybe interrupted in its course and then resumed from the point of interruption with zero effect on what we're doing.

The scenario you described is a perfect example of this belief. The pause, for the listener, is of no consequence. I've done it myself when listening to my favorite songs and I never ever felt that I hadn't actually listened to them in entirety.

However, pauses maybe significant to a musical score in that their length and location are deliberate and intended by the composer. Introducing a pause, e.g. by pushing the pause button, that is not part of the original piece and either filling it with silence or other sounds (dogs barking, people in conversation, the sound of a leaking faucet, etc.) amounts to a significant alteration of the original. Ergo, pauses introduced by the listener are modifications to the real work but the listener never views it as such.

A simple explanation for this is that we're guilty of the hasty generalization fallacy: some things we do can have their flow broken and then resumed with no effect e.g. we can watch a movie on TV despite it being interspersed with commercials. However, music isn't like that: in music the interruptions do matter as silence or other sounds are completely legit devices that composers use for effect. I've never experienced a musical piece aired on TV being interrupted by ads. Maybe they're too short or maybe the producers intuit that any interruption to a piece of music amounts to altering it. :chin:

Less eloquently put, yes you did hear the entire piece. That is to say every audible bit of it did reach your eardrums and your brain did process it.

Often people differentiate between hearing and listening.

You ask someone to hear something it's often a random sound. You ask someone to listen to something there's usually some message they wish you to receive. If theres a message to the piece, say the beginning alludes to self indulgence and the end conveys there is something greater to that. Perhaps not?

No.

I've never experienced a musical piece being aired on TV being interrupted by ads. [irony]Maybe they're too short[/irony] or [understatement]maybe[/understatement] the producers intuit that any interruption to a piece of music amounts to altering it. — TheMadFool

:100:

No — Noble Dust

:100:

yes you did hear the entire piece. That is to say every audible bit of it did reach your eardrums and your brain did process it. — Outlander

Often people differentiate between hearing and listening. — Outlander

:ok: But often, as in the OP, and my comments so far, listening is just hearing, or facilitating hearing.

I guess I don't understand the significance of the question to you. So I'll offer a deflationary response.

If it is required to hear the entire thing in one go to count as listening, you didn't listen.
If it isn't required, you did.

I can see a few intuitions regarding continuity of the piece in the background, but I dunno how they relate.

Did you hear the entire piece? — Moliere

The obvious question is: why is this important? What if you didn't hear the entire piece, and yet you loved it, you were able to analyze it and understand it and be inspired by it and other good things? I'd say in that case that you did appreciate the piece aesthetically.

What if you drift off for half a second during the piece? What if you're at a classical concert and you're occasionally distracted by someone coughing such that you lose concentration for a few seconds. What if the performance you're listening to contains a non-obvious mistake by one of the musicians, like a wrong note? Would anyone then say it's not actually the piece it claims to be?

A listening experience broken by a pause might even heighten your appreciation, because it may give you time to bring to mind motifs and whatever from earlier in the piece, things that help you to make sense of what is to come. The composer may have an ideal listening experience in mind, but people are so different that I don't know if this ideal, from the listener's perspective, is always the main thing to strive for.

It's interesting though to compare it with the split painting. I think there's more to be said here about the essential temporality of music, and how that makes it different from the painting.

What if you drift off for half a second during the piece? What if you're at a classical concert and you're occasionally distracted by someone coughing such that you lose concentration for a few seconds. What if the performance you're listening to contains a non-obvious mistake by one of the musicians, like a wrong note? Would anyone then say it's not actually the piece it claims to be? — jamalrob

Taking this to its natural conclusion: we never listen to the entire piece. What then?

What then? — jamalrob

Decide whether the question is about whether or not we have encountered a complete and genuine instance of the artwork, or is instead one of any number of related questions about our processing of and response to whatever it is we have actually encountered.

When I listen to music I always try to imagine a perfect reconstruction.

The tunes that I imagine to play in my mind are often a notch greater than the source material.

You give a song a chance, as well as be judgemental. Opening this magical box, releasing the sound, not just to focus on but also to lose focus.

If you drift off half way through, that could be an art factor and counts as listening. What? Are we supposed to position ourselves correctly and suppress many forms of involentary movement?

I argue we do hear the entire work, why good art gets old.

Perhaps there are perfect compositions but humans are prone to error, in a composition.

Again, I max out the potential of a sound, in imagination.

If someone could play a sound - that's as great as I can imagine - does it count as 'a music piece', or are music pieces not pieces? Chaos?

This song was released yesterday, I think it's good art.

Two things I like about this, the third stanza that sounds more aggresive than the rest, and the pattern throughout the whole song where the phrase rose gold is used.

I wouldn't have noticed this pattern on listen 1?

You listen to a recording of a symphony (or any other "complete" piece of music). You push pause to grab some water, then come back and push play. You finish listening to the recording.


Did you hear the entire piece? — Moliere

Yeah, you heard the entire piece but not in one setting, so it's different if you heard it in one setting. It's probably an irrelevant distinction, but I suspect if you took 800 breaks so that it was so disjointed and so much time elapsed that you couldn't formulate it as a single piece in your head, it'd be relevant.

It's like if I watched the entire Game of Thrones over a few days versus if I watched 20 seconds a week for several years and then declared I had seen the whole thing.

I knew a guy who told me he hiked the entire Appalachian trail, which seemed less impressive when he explained he had done it over the course of many years, taking a different section each time. It was still a feat, but much less than someone who set out for many months and finished without a break.

I wouldn't have noticed this pattern on listen 1? — ztaziz

Good point. Being exposed to a stimulus isn't always noticing it.

And 'hear' can mean notice. (As well as be-exposed-to: my preference in the OP.)

Even so, what we can notice depends on what we are exposed to. And "small" differences in what we are and aren't exposed to (e.g. between the genuine article and two halves of it delivered separately) often make the most difference aesthetically.

Not saying you were saying differently.

mhmm

I'll tell you what I was more interested in for this topic...

I listen to a song once, it leaves a different imprint than twice, but the second time makes a pattern, subsequently third and fouth are different but still make a pattern, and then a different pattern emerges in tries 5 - 8, after that a pattern is possible but it's not as strict as 1-8.

1. The First Imprint.
2. (with partial memory)The Imperfect Judge.
3. (with a semi good memory)The Crossing.
4. (with good memory)The Perfect Judge.

Without going on to 8, I just want to highlight again that the 2nd listen is a different resound than the 1st and subsequently 3-8, and there's a rather strange pattern to it.

I have called this previously, mathematically, a nexus but I won't build on that just yet.

Any clue what I'm on about? Anyone?

Any clue what I'm on about? — ztaziz

Sounds like what you already said. We notice more and more, and then maybe eventually less, and look for something new.

Cool but heading off-topic.

noted. I will maybe start a new thread.

Still by far my favorite things to come from the internet is the wealth of references I never would have stumbled upon on my own, or would have done so at much slower speeds. I took a peak at the SEP Nelson Goodman article, and started to read the entry on identity, but this in turn went back further into the article. So I thought, before just reading the whole thing, I'd at least ask if I was on the right track in finding this bit on print-making and photography?


Not that it's necessary for me to read it all before responding. I'm more collecting there. In response:

It's interesting to me to think of music in these two different categories - the notational vs recorded (or perhaps even live as another category? Jazz improv without recording comes to mind)

In a way it's like we're trying to match something. Not that there can't be small differences -- such as the small differences between different conductors or musicians when playing from the same score. You mention this -- it's a matching that doesn't have to be exact, it just has to fall within some limits. Limits that are likely imposed by the listener, to an extent -- someone who has an ear for a particular orchestra or conductor likely has more narrow limits to someone who is just passingly familiar with some orchestral work.

With recorded music I don't know if matching is as easy. What makes a "small" difference? A few pops at the beginning of the recording that weren't there in the master don't seem to make much of a difference. We begin listening when the instruments begin, not in the dead space around the recording.

Hrm hrm. Still more errant thoughts on my part, I'm afraid.

I guess I don't understand the significance of the question to you. So I'll offer a deflationary response.

If it is required to hear the entire thing in one go to count as listening, you didn't listen.
If it isn't required, you did.

I can see a few intuitions regarding continuity of the piece in the background, but I dunno how they relate. — fdrake

The obvious question is: why is this important? — jamalrob

Still wanting to loop back around to @TheMadFool, and also more of what you post @jamalrob -- but it's taking me more time to formulate thoughts there so I wanted to quickly address the question of significance.

First, this is more of an errant thought on my part -- a musing. Maybe it'll go nowhere, maybe it'll just trip me off into something that's already well explored that I just hadn't thought of before, and maybe it'll come up with something interesting.

Second, the concept of listening is something that I think is pretty well unexplored and directly relates to quietism. Further, aesthetics is one of those areas that I think is pretty awesome for philosophy -- it's not as trapped by all the intuitions about truth and knowledge and seems to be able to work more freely because of this. So there are some other interests that pursing this question relates to, but it's also just kind of interesting unto itself.

But, again, I want to emphasize that this is very much in errant thought territory, and not well-thought out or historically grounded or anything like that. Just something interesting to think through and about, if it happens to grab you.

First, this is more of an errant thought on my part -- a musing. — Moliere

I did get drawn into your thread, but on reflection, it seems rather a contrivance to me now. Why should the word 'listening' actually have meaning at all if we interrupt a piece of music to do something seeming more important at the time?

It does grab me, because I've had the same thoughts, and my post was almost a reproach to my own tendency towards essentialism.

This might be an unwelcome spanner in the works, but I feel like asking, why is this about listening? The complete appreciation or absorption in a piece of music is just as often represented by dancing. Thinking of it like that puts a different light on the question, I think. Unless we want to restrict the discussion to art music.

Then it might seem like the whole idea of the "entire piece" is a historical artifact of the development of music alongside visual art since the Renaissance: the work of art as a neatly delimited thing of special value. Maybe a great piece of music can be a living, changing thing, hardly just a thing at all.

EDIT: And of course, improvisation and jazz are significant here too. John Coltrane may give the writing credit to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but his "My Favourite Things" is his, or at least as much his as theirs.

EDIT: RIP McCoy Tyner

Cool, not sure I was even aware of the SEP article, so you've returned the favour in kind :up: Did you find the article on his aesthetics, specifically? There's a link near the top of the main article, which omits the aesthetics.

But I would recommend the main source, as it's perfectly concise also: https://monoskop.org/images/1/1b/Goodman_Nelson_Languages_of_Art.pdf. Page 114 and elsewhere for print-making from a plate... might be only in later books that he pretty plainly generalises that to photographic printing from a plate or negative. And very briefly to recorded music too.

It's interesting to me to think of music in these two different categories - the notational vs recorded — Moliere

Sure, but for me the crucial insight is that musical artworks are sound-events: or, usually, sets or classes of sound-events, identified either through notation or recording or both. As such they reward attention to fine detail and differences as much as any visual artworks, and for the same reasons. Having a criterion of identity by which to differentiate very similar physical objects or sets of objects that we mightn't otherwise have told apart is how we sharpen our senses. Which is why @TheMadFool is quite right that we are never invited to come back to a piece of music "right after the break". And why I was keen to read the OP as being about the identity of the stimulus, not the response.

Notice there's nothing essentialist about this. It all falls out directly from G's nominalism. Like prints from a plate, plays of a recording can differ noticeably. As you say: "pops" or other distortions. We live happily with them, and carry on our (typically) obsessive comparisons and discriminations on the basis of the "identity" of reproductions from the original master.

someone who has an ear for a particular orchestra or conductor likely has more narrow limits to someone who is just passingly familiar with some orchestral work. — Moliere

Yes, we don’t want to spend our time on just any correct realisations from a score: is that what you mean? And with or without the aid of recordings we make discriminating choices. They just aren't the kind that we can base on a criterion of identity. They shade into other aesthetic questions like expression and aesthetic merit, which are also addressed in the book, if you're interested.

Cheers

Well, all. Please forgive the meandering. Thanks for the input so far, it's helping me to at least express something and not just get stuck in an intuitive yet unspoken rut.

Did you find the article on his aesthetics, specifically? — bongo fury

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goodman-aesthetics/

Sure, but for me the crucial insight is that musical artworks are sound-events: or, usually, sets or classes of sound-events, identified either through notation or recording or both. — bongo fury

Let's go along with this. The identity of a musical artwork is a set or class of sound-events identified through notation, recording, or both. This will allow us to differentiate between the work of art and our appreciation of the work of art, or as @Outlander put it :

Often people differentiate between hearing and listening. — Outlander

So we could say, in the above that we heard the entire peice, at least. And avoid something along the lines of @jamalrob asserting that we never hear the entire peice, which seems pretty absurd too.

I've never experienced a musical piece aired on TV being interrupted by ads. Maybe they're too short or maybe the producers intuit that any interruption to a piece of music amounts to altering it. :chin: — TheMadFool

You know YouTube has the audacity to intersperse ads into long orchestral recordings? Heathens, I tell you.


I like how you point out that when we push pause we're introducing something to our experience which the composer also uses in the artwork. That would be why the visual division served as analogue -- because the artist uses space in the case of paintings.

Still, I think I'm being won over by the identity theory posited by @bongo fury, for now at least. Whereas pausing it does introduce a significant difference to the work of art, the identity of the work of art is unchanged by my pausing it and starting it back up again.

Yeah, you heard the entire piece but not in one setting, so it's different if you heard it in one setting. It's probably an irrelevant distinction, but I suspect if you took 800 breaks so that it was so disjointed and so much time elapsed that you couldn't formulate it as a single piece in your head, it'd be relevant.

It's like if I watched the entire Game of Thrones over a few days versus if I watched 20 seconds a week for several years and then declared I had seen the whole thing.

I knew a guy who told me he hiked the entire Appalachian trail, which seemed less impressive when he explained he had done it over the course of many years, taking a different section each time. It was still a feat, but much less than someone who set out for many months and finished without a break. — Hanover

I think this gets along with what @bongo fury is saying. We hear the entire peice in any instance, but our aesthetic appreciation -- or the impressiveness of the hike, in the other case you mention -- *can* differ depending on how broken up it is.

What if you didn't hear the entire piece, and yet you loved it, you were able to analyze it and understand it and be inspired by it and other good things? I'd say in that case that you did appreciate the piece aesthetically. — jamalrob

I think I am inclined to agree, now, against my former intuitions. I think the distinction between our aesthetic appreciation and the identity of the artwork is useful here. While there is something to be said about listening to the whole thing with that intention, or even in being absorbed in a work of art -- like what you mention about dance being just as good an example for absorption -- it probably shouldn't define the identity of the work of art, or be some sort of necessary condition for aesthetic appreciation.

Taking this to its natural conclusion: we never listen to the entire piece. What then? — jamalrob

Decide whether the question is about whether or not we have encountered a complete and genuine instance of the artwork, or is instead one of any number of related questions about our processing of and response to whatever it is we have actually encountered. — bongo fury

I think, given the eventual focus on listening, I like the idea of deciding that we have heard a genuine instance of teh artwork, but that the identity of the artwork differs from our appreciation of the artwork. So, define the stimulus as such-and-such to explore our response and processing of the stimulus.

I'll tell you what I was more interested in for this topic...

I listen to a song once, it leaves a different imprint than twice, but the second time makes a pattern, subsequently third and fouth are different but still make a pattern, and then a different pattern emerges in tries 5 - 8, after that a pattern is possible but it's not as strict as 1-8.

1. The First Imprint.
2. (with partial memory)The Imperfect Judge.
3. (with a semi good memory)The Crossing.
4. (with good memory)The Perfect Judge.

Without going on to 8, I just want to highlight again that the 2nd listen is a different resound than the 1st and subsequently 3-8, and there's a rather strange pattern to it.

I have called this previously, mathematically, a nexus but I won't build on that just yet.

Any clue what I'm on about? Anyone? — ztaziz

I agree that the 2nd time I listen to something it's a different experience from the first time. Even more than that -- the more I listen to a particular genre the more I'll hear on a first listen of songs in the same genre, or sometimes even just having more conceptual tools will enhance my ability to pick out different meolodies, instruments, or harmonies as I listen.

Something that really surprised me when I first got into classical music was this phenomena -- the more I read about classical music, the more I heard when listening to both well-worn musical pieces and new ones that I hadn't heard before. There was a definite conceptual element to my direct hearing of the music, at least in producing my experience of the work of art.

And I think this iteration continues on. Some works of art can be listened to so many times that it goes on even greater than 8, and is probably relative to both the listener and the work of art.

And each listen seems a little different from the previous, I'll agree.