drawing music

We saw Art School Confidential Sunday night, and on the walk home we agreed that the drawing teacher let the students get away with too much individual expression. It seems more likely that freshmen in a drawing class would be required to draw realistically, to learn the fundamentals, before working on developing their own style. Except these students seemed pretty advanced, so maybe they were past that stage, but I'd think the teacher would at least want to see how well they could do with realism.

In my music composition classes in college, we had to write for a while in a classical style before we were allowed to get all modern and atonal and stuff. I think this is considered analogous to learning realistic drawing. Now, I do think music composition students should learn the classical style, but I think the analogy is only about half right. In art, you start out trying to draw realistically because you (and your teacher) already have some idea of how to evaluate the results, both from having observed reality and from having observed other realistic art. In fact, the human visual system evolved to make very fine distinctions among natural phenomena, especially human faces, which are usually considered the most important thing to learn to draw. You, and especially your teacher, could also evaluate your assignments somewhat if they were less realistic, but there is just not as much experience to go by, and comparisons would be more subjective.

In music, you will also have an easier time judging your music if it follows classical conventions, because you've heard a lot of classical music and probably understand it better than the modern stuff. But the classical stuff is still "abstract"; the "rules" are very well understood but are still somewhat arbitrary. (That is, they evolved over thousands of years, with the human mind as the selecting agent, but the human mind's evolution was also affected by music's evolution, and there was a lot of randomness, so the eventual forms produced were not an inevitable result of biology.)

A better analogy for realistic drawing would be studying and learning to imitate the sounds that the human ear evolved to hear in the first place: animals we can eat, animals that can eat us, running water, weather, and of course human speech. Messiaen and Rothenberg had a good idea studying birdsong. I'm pretty sure that other composers have studied the rhythms and harmonic structures of human speech, although I don't know who. But here's an interesting question: does the brain's speech center get involved when listening to instrumental music? Has anyone tried to find out?

Of course, for longer musical structures, nature doesn't help a lot, and classical music is probably the best reference, although other dramatic art forms should be studied as well (theater, film, literature, dance). Or maybe I'm wrong. What is the natural origin of "drama"?

(no subject)

Writing that last post reminded me of an idea I had recently in response to a stupid meme that seems to have swept the nation.

The stupid meme is the idea that kids in public schools don't need to be taught math beyond basic arithmetic. This position has been taken by some otherwise intelligent people who really ought to know better. Here is an example. I don't have time to go into exactly why everyone needs to study math, but here is the overly blunt and simplistic version: math is like lifting weights. If you can't do math, your mind is weak, and the only way to make it strong is to work on math until you can do it better. (I told you it was overly blunt and simplistic.)

Reading this kind of thing makes me feel like a slob, because I haven't done much math in the past ten years and I know I've gotten significantly worse at it. There's no reason why brain exercise should end when school ends. I need to start doing math again. And other kinds of mental exercise. Fortunately my job puts some demands on my brain, and flexagon and I do cryptic crosswords together, but overall my brain is not as fit as it once was.

And that's roughly what my recent idea was: what would be the mental equivalent of circuit training?

This goes back to something I thought of a few years ago. I think there may be analogies between different kinds of mental exercise and different kinds of physical exercise. Math, puzzles, etc. are like weightlifting; they provide resistance that you have to push against. Brainstorming and free association are like cardio; you let your brain go full out without much resistance. And meditation is like stretching; you try to force your mind into an extreme state of relaxation.

So in mental circuit training, you would rapidly go through a series of exercises designed to build strength, speed, endurance and flexibility all at once. Maybe warm up with ten minutes of free association, then alternate ten minutes each of math problems and crossword puzzles, maybe with two more minutes of free association in between each repetition. Then after an hour of that, you meditate for twenty minutes. Customize to your goals and time constraints.

Is this a good idea? Should I try to design more detailed routines? Any ideas for what to include? Has it been done already?

(no subject)

Oh yeah... Dork for Mac is out. I released it late Monday. Yesterday I submitted it to Apple's third party downloads page, and they put it up pretty quickly, so I've been getting lots of hits from there.

Business is... well, it's not turning a profit, but I've made enough sales to pay for last week's advertising, which suggests that it could become profitable. I'm definitely going to advertise on Something Positive again.

Three real blog posts in one evening! I am unstoppable!