Januari 2012

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Visualisation in Music and the Internet

Posted by dasfseegdse Selasa, 31 Januari 2012 0 komentar

There is a long tradition of trying to represent the meaning of music in a visual way - very similar to attempts to render meaningful visual representations of the unfolding of life on the internet. The most striking attempt to render the unfolding of a piece of music was made by Heinrich Schenker in the early 20th century. But Schenker's graphs are interesting and relevant to a broader discussion on visualisation because what they try to convey is the meaning, or rather the essence of the musical unfolding over time: it is an attempt to somehow compress time and convey the fundamental characteristics of the musical work in a representation around which confusions and ambiguities can be distilled and discussion concentrated on the salient points highlighted by the graph.

If the musical work were the unfolding of a business (or a university) or the unfolding of a learner's progress, one might imagine that a graph of those unfoldings would be of direct benefit to making decisions, to focusing discussion and to taking control. The fundamental objective of any visualisation is decision and control.

Schenker's approach in producing his graphs is phenomenological in the Husserlian sense. The distinctions between background, middleground and foreground (the different levels in the diagram above) are effectively different levels of 'bracketing-out' of phenomena: the higher you go up the graph, the more is removed.

But importantly, this bracketing-out process has most deeply been driven by a an underlying theory.. an underlying ontology, and at some level, this is quite a mystical thing with Schenker. But it is the ontological position that he adopts that renders his work meaningful because it gives it coherence. Schenker has invested his graphs with an idea - and his graphs are interesting because his idea is interesting, and still resonates for us today.

This is the distinction between Schenker's approach to musical unfolding and the current approaches to the visualisation of the unfolding of life on the internet. The images which have emerged of internet communications have been produced through an automated process, and through the construction of complex algorithms which plot data and draw lines according to simple rules of correspondence and relationship. In being automated in this way, these images also have their ontology... they also rest on an idea. But the idea of these auto-visualisations is never inspected: it is instead hidden behind the magic box of techno-wizardry. Its opaqueness results in the resulting images being pretty, but on the whole no less open to interpretation than the original time-based phenomena: they do not contribute to decision and control.

We need to ask "What is the idea invested in these images of internet communications? " And in response, I might suggest that there are some key issues:

communication is a matter of information exchange
meaning is conflated with the amassed exchanges of information
agency is reduced to communicative utterances
reflexivity is subordinated to utterances
utterances made away from the internet can be bracketed-out
a visual representation of information exchange is an aid to decision and control

There are obvious problems here.
But I suspect that visualisation will remain a 'flash in the pan' (even if it's a pretty flash) until deeper questions about the ontology of an approach to visualising the unfolding of online life are addressed.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

Vincent D'Indy and the breath of music

Posted by dasfseegdse Senin, 30 Januari 2012 0 komentar

I'm going to have a musical interlude - partly because I think it relates to other things I've been talking about recently.

Of all the music theorists I admire, I find the most interesting (and the most useful from a compositional point of view) is the French composer Vincent D'Indy. D'Indy is an unusual character - a devout Catholic who tended to be musically conservative, opposing the 'parallelism' of Debussy, favouring (like Schoenberg) an idea of harmony as functional. But most importantly, he founded his own school with his own pedagogical approach.

Music for D'Indy was a spiritual matter. In his "Cours de composition musicale" (which I quote here, and you can download here: http://imslp.org/wiki/Cours_de_Composition_Musicale_(Indy,_Vincent_d')) D'Indy states that it's fundamental elements are melody, rhythm and harmony. He has many fascinating things to say about the first two, but it's harmony I want to focus on here, because it was D'Indy's harmonic theory which was highly influential with a number of great composers who came after him - most particularly Olivier Messaien and Michael Tippett.

D'Indean theory of harmony is the most striking thing. He draws our attention to the cycle of 5ths, suggesting that in the major mode, a move up the cycle of 5ths is a process of increasing 'light' (montée vers la lumière), whereas descending increases darkness (la chute vers les ténèbres). This leads him to produce the following table:

Thus D'Indy sets out his harmonic system. The 'lightening' and 'darkening' processes are reversed when the mode is minor. In the minor mode, descent down the cycle of 5ths is lightening, and rising is darkening.

What really grabs me, though, is what he says next. That a rise up the 5ths in the major mode requires the expense of effort, whilst falling down the 5ths is a 'detènte', a 'letting go'.

It is like the muscular movement of the stomach.

What fascinates me about all this is that it presents itself as an approach to harmony which is part-biological and realistic in a bio-pschosocial respect as well as the more common physical realism. This is in contrast to both to Schoenberg's approach to functional harmony (who may be 'idealistic'), or to Schenker (who may be ultimately considered naively realistic in pinning too much to the harmonic series).

The idea of biological tension and release tie into so much else of what is interesting me at the moment. But most of all I am thinking about the simple application of cybernetic ideas to music analysis which I did last year some time. I had an interesting comment about my commentary of Lachenmann (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdVpOyN5Y-U) Might D'Indy help with a re-interpretation of prolongation?

Thinking about this, the central issue about prolongation is that in Schenker it is restricted to tonal music - the perfect cadence is central to his prolonging architecture. But what is the I - V - I progression if not a rising of effort and then a release? But the rising of effort doesn't have to specifically take that form. Indeed, in polytonal and atonal music, where there is simultaneous rising and falling, simultaneous keys, etc, moments where falling or rising fade in and out. As they do so, I think there might be a way of constructing a mechanism for describing prologations which are not as restrictive as Schenker's.

But I'm more interested in this because I wonder whether life itself is prolongation - or more formally, that the form of life is a way of prolonging life. That may be another way of saying 'viability', but it is at least a way that infers that we breath in and we breath out; we expend effort, and then we release it.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

The Luxury of Education

Posted by dasfseegdse Minggu, 29 Januari 2012 0 komentar

Is education necessary? Alison Wolf asked asked a similar question when she wrote "Does education matter?". Here I want to approach it from a different angle. I've been reading "The accursed share" by Georges Bataille and it is making me think about luxury. I've also been thinking about my dad, who spent much of his life reading and thinking and creating... and how important I believe it is to do that (what a good use of a life!). But at the same time, it is a glorious and wonderful indulgence.

Bataille is interested in indulgence and excess. At the core of his work is one of the most intelligent and profound commentaries on sexual life - 'Eroticism' is an extraordinary book. But beyond sex, Bataille turns his attention to economics, and influenced by Marcel Mauss's idea of "The Potlatch" which he expressed in the 'Essai sur la Don' ("The Gift"), Bataille argues that economics is upside-down. Classical economic theory turns about the principle of necessity. Bataille argues that in fact the world turns on moments of outrageous squandering of wealth, and that our inability to see this 'squandering principle' rests with a misplaced ethic which runs through classical economics which results in a misplaced focus on the commodity.

Of the squandering that stands out most clearly, there is of course the 'catastrophic expenditure' of war. Bataille analyses the Aztec civilization and the prime role of human sacrifice in that culture. Stomach-churning stuff. He considers the "Three luxuries of nature: Eating, Death and Sexual reproduction". Bataille is particularly concerned with the role of technology, and the fact that

"the revivals of development that are due to human activity, that are maintained or made possible by new techniques, always have a double effect: initially, they use a portion of the surplus energy, but then they produce a larger and larger surplus. This surplus eventually contributes to making growth difficult, for growth no longer suffices to use it up. At a certain point, the advantage of extension is neutralized by the contrary advantage, that of luxury; the former remains operative, but in a dissapointing - uncertain, often powerless - way."

This argument seems to me to be very reminiscent of the arguments about technology put forward by Ivan Illich. Illich too worried about 'surpluses', but (perhaps he was more tied to Catholicism than Bataille was), he argued against surpluses: he said the solution to the energy crisis could not be more energy, but less - we already had an energy glut! (and a speed glut, and a health glut and an education glut!). Bataille is on the same page, but comes to a different conclusion.

"I insist on the fact that there is generally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form! The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exhuberance; the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life."

But at the point of technological advancement in creating more and more surplus is that some sumptious way must be found to spend it all...

"at this point, immense squanderings are about to take place: after a century of populating and of industrial peace, the temporary limit of development being encountered, the two world wars organized the greatest orgies of wealth - and of human beings - that history has recorded. Yet these orgies coincide with an appreciable rise in the general standard of living: the majority of the population benefits from more and more unproductive services"

He goes on to argue that the mantra to 'raise living standards' is the only response of classical economics to dealing with the surplus of energy that must be spent. But

"a curse obviously weighs on human life insofar as it does not have the strength to control a vertiginous movement. It must be stated that the lifting of such a curse depends on man and only on man. But it cannot be lifted if the movement from which it emanates does not appear clearly in consciousness."

Reading this, I wonder about the burgeoning education industry. Bataille would see education as a sumptuous extravagance. Individuals are increasingly having to spend their own money on education, but do appear willing to do so. Might the waste and the luxury have a purpose in Bataille's system? Is it the kind of 'necessary squandering' of surplus energy? Would it help us avoid war?

Whilst we've spent the last year or so arguing about the cost of education (and the lack of state support for it), at the same time we have seen that student numbers may not collapse as we thought they might. This needs explaining. Also we have seen another form of squandering in the squandering of talent through budget cuts, which was the inevitable result of the previous squandering of resources in propping up the bank industry.

Wherever we look, we see waste. Yet we see it negatively as the shadow image of classical economics. Bataille is making me think we need to look at waste again, and to examine its functioning in the deep processes of human existance.

Baca Selengkapnya ....

The rise of Techno-Education 2011 - 2020

Posted by dasfseegdse Senin, 23 Januari 2012 0 komentar

There was a point in the history of education where technology was quite a separate matter from education. Whilst schools and Universities had for many decades made use of classrooms, blackboards, slates, exercise books, pencils, textbooks, etc, not to mention the impact of printing a few centuries earlier, with the beginning of the explosion of information technology, the world of Universities and schools was far apart from the world of technology.

In the early years of the 21st century, the gap between them was narrowed, and within the first decade of the century, a point was arrived at where one could reasonably argue that they were 'coupled', or as other commentators preferred at the time, locked-in. Of course, this pattern of the resolution of the gap between the technological world and the educational world had been repeated many times before, the coupling of computers and education has particular implications which would spell the beginning of what would eventually be called the "age of techno-education".

The lock-in process also coincided with the great world economic collapse, which precipitated what was later referred to as the end of the capitalist hegemony. The internal contradictions of capitalism which pitted the primeval needs of humankind against the workings of a production machine became more explicitly discernable, with many writers of the period (of whom the most significant were Kernohan, Hall, Wilson, Grant and Sherlock) starting to identify new categories for understanding of economic and historical process. As with Marx, the process of 'changing' began with 'naming'.

Amongst the most significant categories of the new understanding were an increased awareness of the importance of 'care', 'attachment', 'compassion' and 'community', and the relations between these categories and the old priorities of 'profit', 'reward' and 'wealth'. As with Marx, the process of change brought about new human industries in the form of professionalised bureaucracies, but this time it was not the bureaucracies of the trades unions and the national welfare state that proliferated, but those of an energised and now global education industry.

The reasons for this rise of what was now a 'techno-education' are complex. Education wasn't cheap - but it seemed that however expensive it became (and by 2012, much state support for education had been withdrawn), individuals would pour the majority of their meagre resources (which included much of the resources that they might hope to accrue in the future) into it. Indeed, in the following years, there was a pattern of increasing resource being poured into education, and less into the ownership of property.

Education made itself more available and accessible through technology. Courses delivered through what were still very crude technological means gained in popularity. Moreover, as the scale of technologically-empowered delivery increased, and institutions converged on patterns of practice which could inter-operate, the autonomy of individual institutions lessened, and the large 'educorps' with which we are now familiar grew, "Oxbridge Enterprises" (now OXBRAND) becoming the largest in the world having been established in 2015.

But the rise of techno-education was a puzzle, because much of what education delivered up until about 2020 was, on the whole, not very good. Levels of student ability upon graduation, and levels of employment did not reflect the levels of investment that had been made in education. Until 2013, 'student satisfaction surveys' had been conducted regularly which seemed to indicate that everything was fine - until the emerging realisation that any individual who spends the vast bulk of their resources on an unwise venture is more than likely to defend their decision!

It was this realisation, however, that underpinned the way things were working in techno-education. For it appeared that the profligacy of individual educational expenditure was part-and-parcel of its continued viability, and no level of inadequacy of what was delivered would ultimately cause it to collapse (although one or two institutions did effectively collapse, but only into each other!). Techno-education was rooted in basic human needs which were channeled through a combination of the massification enabled by technology together with a socio-economic 'credo', promoted by governments around the world, which made sure that the individual profligacy was deemed absolutely essential. In this way, the world's economy turned away from manufacturing towards a combination of the techno-education industry and the techno-health industry to keep itself going.

However, by the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st century, the weaknesses of this model were starting to become apparent. Aside from the often excruciating levels of personal taxation which individuals had to bear as a result of their educational exploits, the social order was increasingly suffering from the problem that some aspects of the pre-techno education system were now lacking: most notably, the ability to think critically and to posses deep historical, philosophical and cultural perspective on the current situation. For whilst techno-education has attempted to address precisely these issues directly (with compulsory 'critical thinking', 'internationalisation' and 'employability' addenda to courses, for example), in fact these addenda didn't work. What emerged was in fact a new kind of caste system: it was the children of educated families who possessed the critical qualities lacking in those who may well have had the same education, but did not have the same parents. And so, in 2020, the family reform act attempted to directly address the inherent inequalities of the relationship between family and techno-education, which resulted in the gradual convergence of 'techno-parenting' and 'techno-education'...