Abstract
In considering the potential of computer to assist humans in the production of music, we turn to the form that some music takes in the mind itself. This initiates a lengthy discussion of memetics, which will be important in latter chapters dealing with the affect of AI and the exponential expansion of technology on society. By way of example, we advance the notion that musical progressions employed in American ballads, jazz, and bebop are dependent on memes, built into a musician’s conscious selection of the tonal qualities accompanying a genre. These changes move and repeat the progression of chord changes that underpin the harmonic structure of a piece of music.
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.—Oscar Wilde
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Notes
- 1.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Music-and-Theater-Arts/21M-304Spring-2009/Syllabus/index.htm (Last visited 3/1/2010).
- 2.
There have been numerous studies to analyze the propagation of memes between users in a social networks, many of which employ evolutionary computation and epidemiological models similarly to the way diseases spread in human society.
- 3.
We cannot ignore that AI in the form of bots, which take on the significance of memes, have proven successful, as demonstrated by the influence these artifacts have had on the recent U.S. presidential elections. Query whether this level of sophistication can be used to advance something as complex as what we regard as the humanities, music, art and literature?
- 4.
Steven Jan goes on to cover the theoretical aspects of the mimetics of music, ranging from quite abstract philosophical speculation to detailed consideration of what actually constitutes a meme in music.
- 5.
Native American Music is usually choral, without harmony, and antiphonal singing. Rhythms are irregular with no pitch, where singing is generally accompanied by drums, rattles, and flutes.
- 6.
AABA refers to a progression consisting of the same chord or set of chords, A for example, being played for eight bars or measures, followed by another eight measures of the set, e.g., A, followed by the same chord of set of chords labeled B being played for eight measures, etc.
- 7.
Tonality refers to the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale into a hierarchy centered around the tonic.
- 8.
Modality represents the seven pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B into a number of different scale patterns, such as minor, major, diminished, etc.
- 9.
I am simply restating Immanuel Kant’s 1798 book Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: 4.6 Thesis 6: Consciousness of Self is not Knowledge of Self.
- 10.
Steve Pinker theorizes that music is not an evolutionary adaptation, but a spandrel, a byproduct of some other adaptation, which he conjectures is language, which made possible the production of music. See, podcast. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/steve-pinker-on-the-evolutionary-significance-of-music/.
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Carvalko Jr., J.R. (2020). Programmed in Our Head. In: Conserving Humanity at the Dawn of Posthuman Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26407-9_40
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