The Need for New Terminology
In my previous article Music alters Perceptual Identity Judgement, I introduced the hypothesis that music is a stimulus which induces the listener’s brain to perceive a group of similar but different things as though the different perceptions of those different things are actually different perceptions of one single thing.
It would be as if you looked at different pictures of a different object, but then somehow you realized they were really just different pictures of the same object, which just looked different because it was rotated differently, or the lighting conditions were different, or it was closer or further away.
The primary example, as it applies to music, is that a melody is composed of a sequence of melodic phrases, and the musical nature of the melody induces the listener’s brain to assume that the perception of each phrase is actually a different perception of the same thing.
Given this hypothesis, the question naturally arises, what actually is the “same thing”, in this situation?
This theory introduces a few new concepts, and to advance analysis and understanding of the theory, it will be helpful to start by introducing some new terminology.
Perceptual Unification: Sources & Derivations
In a situation where different perceptions might be considered to be perceptions of different things, or perceptions of the same thing, perceptual unification is the process of deciding that they are actually perceptions of just one thing.
There are two basic concepts here for which we need words:
- The different perceptions.
- The one single thing that you perceive if your brain decides that the perceptions are all perceptions of that one thing.
I propose the following definitions:
- The source is the one thing that results in different perceptions.
- The different perceptions of the source are to be called derivations or derived perceptions.
The process of perceptual unification happens when the different derivations are unified into perception of the one and only source.
In the case of music, the derivations are things for which we already have names, such as melodic phrases in a melody. It would be useful to have a standard way to give a name for the source for any particular type of derivation, and to do that we need a suitable prefix.
A good candidate for this prefix is “ur-”, which is a German prefix that refers to the earliest or most fundamental version of something.
So, for example -
- Melodic phrases in a melody are derivations of a single source ur-phrase.
- Chords in a chord sequence are derivations of a single source ur-chord.
In some cases one of the derivations is more primary than the others. Typically this is the derivation such that if you had to choose just one derivation to represent the source, you would choose that derivation.
The main examples of sources with primary derivations are:
- The notes in a chord are derivations of a single source ur-note, and the primary derivation is the root note of the chord.
- The melody and harmonies of a melody sung simultaneously are derivations of a single source ur-melody, and the primary derivation is the actual main melody.
Projections
We also need a name for the process of deriving the derivations from the source. Following the analogy of a source 3D object and its derivations consisting of 2D images, we can define projections as the functions that map the source onto the derivations. The projections have parameters which vary in order to generate different derivations. In the case of 2D images of a 3D object, the parameters would include orientation of the 3D object (ie rotation), distance from observer and even lighting conditions.
In the case of sequential derivations, the parameters of a projection will be functions of time, and we would normally expect those functions to be smoothly varying and therefore approximately linear for any chosen small time interval (especially for those parameters that have a positional or other geometric interpretation).
Pursuing the analogy of 3D objects projected to 2D images, we can consider additional parameters which are internal degrees of freedom, ie where the 3D object is itself not completely rigid.
One very important example of that is a person – there there are many parameters that determine a person’s current pose where those parameters change over time as the person moves themselves around with their muscles.
This is an important example, because even though there are many degrees of freedom involved, we still need to have a strong concept of which different perceptions of a person are perceptions of the same person. (We could note that most of our ability to identify different people is based on our ability to identify faces, but of course even faces have a large number of degrees of internal freedom, ie in terms of different facial expressions, and we need to be able to identify a person independently of their current facial expression.)
Progression
The concept of projection functions with parameters that are approximately linear functions of time gives us a fairly straightforward analogy to, for example, the motion of a 3D object through space. The progression of a sequence of melodic phrases will be interpreted (by the listener’s brain) as the result of the motion of the projection as applied to the static unchanging ur-phrase.
Unreality and Transcendence
In the case of music, the perceptual unification of derivations to reveal a source is somewhat forced, in particular it is forced by the occurrence of exact repetition of low-level components of a musical item, ie notes in a scale and regular beats. These exact repetitions signal to the brain that for anything it observes that seems like it might be a repetition of something, that it should be willing to conclude that it actually is a repetition of one thing.
That is, the listener’s brain is very strongly encouraged to unify different perceptions which otherwise, without this extra forcing, the brain would not bother to unify.
If the things that might be repeated are similar, but not similar in a manner that the brain can currently explain in terms of its perceptions of that kind of thing, then a consequence of the forced perceptual unification process is that the listener’s brain has to invent the hypothetical sources from which the different perceptions are derived.
These hypothetical sources do not correspond to any known thing or object in reality – so they exist beyond normal reality.
This, I propose, is exactly what creates the feelings of transcendence and other-worldliness that strong music can induce in a listener.
In fact, given that this hypothesis about music can directly explain how music can create transcendent feelings, we can tentatively propose that transcendence is the fundamental property of music, and that all other aspects of how music affects us as listeners are a consequence of that transcendence.
Partiality
It is necessary to give a caveat for this hypothesis.
I have talked about the brain perceiving multiple different things as if they were one different thing.
However, in practice, for most of those things, we still retain a conscious awareness of those things as being different.
The implication is that even when perceptual unification occurs as a result of forcing, the unified perception does not fully replace the non-unified perception – rather it co-exists, and subjectively it is more like a “colouration” – enough to create a sense of transcendence, and a feeling that you are experiencing things outside normal reality, but not so intense as to make you believe that you are somehow actually removed from normal reality.
Song Lyrics
Any theory about music has to deal with the issue of song lyrics.
The theory has to be able to give us answers to questions like:
- Why does music even have lyrics?
- In what way are lyrics the same as or different from “normal” spoken language?
In the context of perceptual unification hypothesis, we can observe that one very consistent feature of song lyrics is rhyming, and rhyming is a type of exact repetition of low-level components of something, so that would seem to match up with how the hypothesis applies to exact repetition of melodic and rhythmic components of music.
However it’s not so clear how the concepts of source, derivation and projection would apply to song lyrics. I will defer detailed discussion and analysis of song lyrics to a later article.