One issue I've encountered from people confronted with my ideas is the question of whether or not I'm trying to 'reduce' the arts to a kind of formal framework and, in doing so, saying that the emotion, beauty, power and total experience of art can be explained in scientific terms, with possible artistic forms being laid out by certain formula describing the structures they must take. I will say flatly that I am not attempting to do anything of this kind. If anything, I hope that my ideas may actually provide reason to free art from being a slave to particular codes of formal patterns, by showing how these patterns might arise from mental causes, and hence possibly reveal that the specifics of these forms may not necessarily be the only way to achieve meaningful art in a given medium. As an example, the ability to comprehend blank verse and 'free' verse arose from the same cause as far as I can tell, and I would not place a meaningful distinction between them aside from one having a specific tradition and history along with its tendency to have more regular structure than the other. To make it clear, the structure that arises from the mental processes that enable these kinds of poetry, or similar structures in music, is not arbitrary, I don't believe you simply make up such structures on a whim and train the human mind to perceive them as meaningful through shear repetition, and the kinds of structures that people do perceive as being able to convey meaningful art are naturally shared in common due to the similar physical forms and feelings our minds may share (assuming there is, as there is good reason to believe, a fundamental connection between physical form and mental feeling [1]). But this does not mean that art is 'objective' or has any absolute value beyond our subjective experience of it. Our individual experiences of art may be valuable in themselves, but any art object, text or score simply is and can only be said to be good in that individuals may have the appropriate perception, feeling and mental structures that allow them to experience the art as being good.
I resent over analysis of art, including forced formulas and purposeless reductions of the actual art experience into smaller, limited parts that ignore the complexity of human experience for the sake of fitting things into a predefined box in order to pretend their nature is simpler than it is. If anything, I want to explore and make understood the issues I present specifically in order to guard against such practices. Many people who are temporarily incapable of understanding certain forms for reasons they may not be aware of may be tempted to indulge in over analysis because they have been informed that there is a kind of complexity in certain works they they realize they can't perceive, an which they aren't yet sure of how to arrive at an understanding of. Because of this, and because they place trust in those who they believe have superior insight to them, they might also reasonably trust the analytic practices of those who can perceive things they can't, without realizing that they lack the prerequisites needed to understand such art. But, because they have no authentic experience of what these practices are actually describing, they may end up placing too much weight in a mechanical, pre-memorized comprehension of these 'rules' they don't know the reason for, without understanding what purpose they serve or if they really are rules at all (rather than). This is exactly what I believe can be overcome through and understanding how various modes of thought processing differ (possibly through understanding the nature of modal faculties). People should be freed from dogma prescribed blindly, even if it may be otherwise well-intentioned.
Monday, June 19, 2017
Friday, June 16, 2017
Additional Effects
Transitioning to the non-linear thought processes of Poetic Super Grammar has had wider reaching effects on my mind as a whole than the experience of particular, abstract forms of thought and aesthetic experience that I've been talking about up until now. There are specific aspects of my thought process in general that seems to have been enhanced by the extra mental power, and I believe I have good explanations for why the case is so in each instance.
1. Chunking and Speed Reading
Firstly, I will deal with the ability to 'chunk' groups of words [1]. This enhancement seems to be related to the ability to treat sequences of sense objects, and particularly those relating to language, as a grouped block structure and take in sequences of such blocks in parallel. This ability seems to be of great aid in speed reading, and directly comparing the ease at which I could attempt to speed read before and after the activation of SGP (which I started experimenting with about a week after the transition) there was a significant and notable difference. Not only could I read faster (by about 30%, maxing out at about 800 words per minute judging by the tests I took), but the mental effort required to read quickly at a given speed greatly diminished, meaning I could practice reading rapidly without the same unpleasant mental fatigue and difficulty in concentration, which I honestly feel is a far greater boon than simply being able to increase brute reading speed.
The need to rely on the voice in my head (termed subvocalisation [2]) to extract meaning was lessened. Not eliminated, as I naturally sound out words in my mind involuntarily when I come across them regardless and have done this for most of my life, but I do feel that I more easily access the meaning of sections of text by looking at them and absorbing them, with less reliance on the mental voice for mediation of comprehension. This is not an experience I have been completely unfamiliar with though, as in my study of Japanese writing, seeing kanji (Chinese characters appropriated for Japanese, each which may be associated with several completely different, unrelated sounds) frequently results in me feeling the meaning of the sign independent of any vocalization of it, especially when such characters are presented isolated from any context or use in an actual word (as kanji typically need to be used in compounds with other characters to form words with a definite pronunciation). The experience is similar to what it is like to see a no entry sign and know intuitively what it means, and close to how I believe that people fluent in sign language might experience hand gestures as a language onto itself.
Overcoming reliance on subvocalisation and the more linear thought process it entails and 'graduating' to being able to read in blocks or chunks more freely may be a great aid to reading more rapidly and easily, but it may be the case that this will only be of real significance in those with SGP. I understand how it has come to be felt by many that subvocalisation itself ought to be seen as something that a person might treat like a crutch they should ween themselves off, and take the view that in deliberately suppressing it they become better readers subsequently having done so [3]. However I feel that such practice may be mixing up cause and effect, with subvocalisation being something that likely naturally tones down as one improved on the ability to make better use of the visual faculties and the block structure based chunking enabled by SGP. At this point, I believe that this kind of practice will otherwise be of very little practical use to anyone without SGP, and that their efforts would be better served by instead focusing on unlocking SGP first, after which the power to meaningfully reach beyond the limitations of one's sequential internal voice should become available naturally.
There are many people who have tried to train themselves to speed read, but who, despite their efforts, seem to simply "lack the brain" to do so, with only a relatively small percentage of people being able to do so in a way they find to be practically useful. [4] I predict that SGP will be the main factor and mental barrier that prevents these people from being being able to speed read, or at least the second most important one after the motivation and will to want to learn it.
Having said all this, I must stress that while it does have very real uses, speed reading itself will not significantly aid you in experiencing or understanding rich, complex texts in a more in depth way, so if you do wish to try it, don't go about doing so expecting miracles.
2. Executive Function
Secondly, I want to talk about the concept of Executive Function. Executive Function (EF) has been proposed, in a variety of ways and by a variety of people, as a set of mental functions related to how people are able to focus their concentration on particular tasks, switch focus between tasks and consider and execute intended plans of action while avoiding distraction and temptation, along with suspending one's desire for immediate reward in favor of longer term objectives. [5a][5b] To provide one example of this, the mental difficulty of switching between work and leisure is a common experience that can occur unless EF is particularly strong. People will often find that, apart from the simple difficulty of performing various forms of unpleasant work and the tedium and frustration that naturally comes with, there is an additional quality of work that makes it even more undesirable to most people, the way that mentally gearing yourself up to get into 'work mode' coming from a preferred state of relaxation is inherently stressful (hence the occurrence of 'Mondayitis') along with the the opposite problem, winding down and mentally recovering from work can itself take time and effort that takes away from what should otherwise be enjoyable free time. So this ends up being a problem that compounds itself, the more effort and time put into work, the more time is also taken to gear up and recover form it, making downtime less effective and making the dread and stress of work potentially even worse, which might even further reduce a person's productivity, which might result in less work getting done etc. To sum up, extensive over work is bad in general, and there are many studies showing how much toxic work culture and the expectation of excess working hours has a woeful impact on productivity and quality of life in the worse cases. [6]
Unlocking SGP had a huge impact on how my mind dealt with this. Quickly after first going through the transition, it became apparent that a pronounced effect was that I could much more easily switch between different modes of thought of many kinds, a task which previously took far more focus and time. Due to this, I have numerous reasons to conjecture that SGP significantly reinforces the powers of at least certain aspects of Executive Functioning.
To make a certain important distinction clear at this point, these improvements to Executive Function itself are not themselves, or a result of, stronger will power. Rather, such improvement to Executive Functions means it actually takes less will power to concentrate, to avoid temptation, and also to change from whatever commitment you have a given mindset to another, and can do so more easily and rapidly. [7] Thus, most reduction in mental fatigue because of this should be the result of a corresponding reduction of effort, and it's best to be aware of this rather than mistake such for a stronger will. One of the reasons I want to make this point is to show something that I feel many people have a potentially mistaken conception of. Often, when people's musical or artistic tastes change it may be said that they have matured, with the accompanying implication that the person themselves has matured emotionally, having become more adult, and that their change in tastes are in part due to that change in attitude. However, with SGP, transitioning to it has allowed my musical tastes to change, while also causing a change in cognition that makes it less of a burden to act 'maturely'. So, in effect, what's actually happened in my case seems to be that, instead of maturity leading to a greater openness to taste, there is actually a separate cause behind both in SGP.
In this post: Learning Styles, Modality and Sense Dominance, I discuss how SGP had the effect of making it easier to switch focus between the dominance of modalities, effectively allowing me to quickly flush a deeply immersive focus on spacial structure and redirect my attention to the deep structure of music, or vice versa. A significant hypothesized component related to Executive Function is Baddeley and Hitch's central executive, part of their multi-component working memory model. [8] As discussed in [5b]The Relationship Between Working Memory Capacity and Executive Functioning, working memory components, the control the Central Executive has over such memory and Executive Function all seem to strongly related to a single factor or set of factors, which that paper terms executive attention. Assuming that Executive Attention is a meaningful construct, I will use that as a reason to import aspects of Alan Baddeley's updated working memory model [8] into this discussion on Executive Function and how it relates to my own experiences. In this model is included three buffer like components relating to distinct modalities, the visuospatial sketchpad (visual/spatial), the phonological loop (audio) and the newest component in the model, the episodic buffer (intermediate conceptual thought). The first two relate to visual and auditory imagination and the capacity working memory has to store images, or lists of, disconnected, unrelated data, a capacity which is highly limited and generally only allows the storage of a handful of objects. However, humans do seem to have the ability to recall larger amounts of information pertaining to the immediate past that are conceptually linked into structures with higher meaning (such as sentences and sequences of them), and the component responsible for the storage, manipulation and recall of this is what Baddeley call the Episodic Buffer. I do not necessarily that the episodic buffer is necessarily the sole working memory component that is needed or capable of achieving this (as this doesn't necessarily account for the recall of large connected structures specific to a given modality), but at the very least agree that some extra working capacity is needed beyond the register like behavior of immediate recall of atomic information and that it is this 'deep' capacity (or related aspects of it) the use of which is enhanced along with the improvements to EF, which also seemingly enables the particular forms of rapid chunking, parallelism and hierarchical organisation which utilize it. I should note though that I don't necessarily agree that spatial imagination is distinctly or uniquely connected to visual impression, as opposed to any other sense modality, aside from the convention that this is simply what typically occurs more strongly in those with visual dominance (as opposed to tactile, auditory or kinesthetic based build up of spatial feeling, which blind people can still make use of).
I predict that SGPAs will have specific advantages when it comes to Executive Attention. On tasks specifically designed to test short term visual and and auditory working memory (the sketchpad and loop respectively) and attentional control relating to those alone, I do not specifically predict that SGPAs will necessarily have a significant advantage or that they will perform much better. However, it is in deeper levels of working memory that function on a larger scale than a single image or short list (the episodic buffer being a possible candidate, thought there cold be more to this) and the ability to direct attention to larger scale deeper structures that unfold and can be recalled based on links, parallels and hierarchical relations between them (linking hunks/blocks/themes/sentences/spacial relations etc.) that the attention advantage SGPAs have may prove to be great. In my experience it typically took me several listens to a piece of music to properly digest the themes of a work and understand how they appeared though the Canonical Transformations* they took in the absence of SGP, having to commit such structures to long term memory first. With SGP, on the other hand, coupled with experiential familiarity with a given musical idiom, it's fairly common for me to now be able to mostly follow the thematic course of a work on first or second listen, holding the thematic material and its transformations and generally understanding the musical implications of this immediately. The ability to switch between tasks that require one to effectively clear one's mind of cruft and and change into a different attitude and mindset is also a related aspect of Executive Attention which I experience as requiring less discipline and deliberate concentration in order to effectively perform as a SGPA. As such, I would expect other SGPAs to benefit from such an advantage in similar ways.
3. Visual Cognition
Once again I will invoke Clive Bell's concept of "significant form", at least as it applies to aesthetic experience of 2 dimensional, visual art.
http://www.denisdutton.com/bell.htm
Now, one of the biggest reasons I'm bringing up this article again is that it does something very specific. Not only does Bell create a theory as to what might be counted in his eyes as high art and what might not, and why, but he references particular paintings to demonstrate exactly what artworks he considers to have 'significant form', which is uniquely capable of proving aesthetic emotion according to him, and what other artworks seem not to, yet might be liked by other people anyway for separate reasons. As such he holds artworks by Giotto and Cezanne as possessing this kind of form and being capable of producing such affect, yet uses particular images produced by Edwin Landseer, William Powell Frith and Luke Fildes, in the academic/salon tradition [9] of the century prior to the essay being written, as examples of works which have appeal for non-formal reasons and hence should be incapable of producing the specific feelings he terms 'aesthetic emotions'.
Edwin Landseer: Monarach of the Glen (1851)
Luke Fildes: The Doctor (1891)
Look at these works and feel free to take in whatever impression they leave on your mind. While viewing them, allow yourself to become immersed in them in whatever way feels natural to you. However, the reason I want you to do this it to contrast that with impressions of these next works, ones that are professed to possess aesthetically significant form.
What I found, when I had not attained SGP, was that viewing images of this sort left me deeply uncomfortable, with the impression that not only were the images not immersive or pleasant to look at, but that there was conversely something very off about how the were painted, that the colors were too washed out, and also clashed with each other in ways that were excessively harsh while having needless separation between hues. I found that this was true when observing virtually all art that was purported to be great and worthy of admiration in this way.
From the way I worded the above paragraph, you may be assuming something now. Namely, that I, now having the ability to perceive Poetic Form, can actually appreciate the forms of these works and their aesthetic content, and that it is exactly SGP which enables this. But this is not so. What I have found, instead, is that these works are markedly less unpleasant, that their colors and the way they contrast, while still not greatly pleasing to look at, now offend me far less and the idea that they might be said to have meaningful form makes far more intuitive sense; I can apprehend them as a whole without feeling that I am looking at something that was made to make me not want to look at it.
What I suspect may have happened is something that may also have an analogue. While I now have EVP and SGP, I developed EVP before SGP and never went through a stage where the reverse was the case, in which I would have had SGP but not EVP. However, I can't rule out the possibility that this particular state may occur in others. Conversely, the visual equivalent of this, where whatever mental mode I might need to have active in order to perceive 'significant form' properly (analogous to what EVP is to music) is absent, in spite of the fact that SPG may be allowing me to perceive these forms in a more 'integrated' way, may well be exactly the kind of state am in now, though it remains to see what kind of mental processing I would need to activate in order to perceive the visual equivalent of thematic tension in painting.
[1] https://www.speedreadinglounge.com/reading-groups-of-words
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
[3] https://www.irisreading.com/speed-reading-tips-5-ways-to-minimize-subvocalization/
[4] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Speed_Reading#How_to_Make_Speed_Reading_Actually_Work
[5a] http://www.rainbowrehab.com/executive-functioning/
[5b] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852635/
[6] https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies
[7] http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html#ya
[8] http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(00)01538-2
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art
1. Chunking and Speed Reading
Firstly, I will deal with the ability to 'chunk' groups of words [1]. This enhancement seems to be related to the ability to treat sequences of sense objects, and particularly those relating to language, as a grouped block structure and take in sequences of such blocks in parallel. This ability seems to be of great aid in speed reading, and directly comparing the ease at which I could attempt to speed read before and after the activation of SGP (which I started experimenting with about a week after the transition) there was a significant and notable difference. Not only could I read faster (by about 30%, maxing out at about 800 words per minute judging by the tests I took), but the mental effort required to read quickly at a given speed greatly diminished, meaning I could practice reading rapidly without the same unpleasant mental fatigue and difficulty in concentration, which I honestly feel is a far greater boon than simply being able to increase brute reading speed.
The need to rely on the voice in my head (termed subvocalisation [2]) to extract meaning was lessened. Not eliminated, as I naturally sound out words in my mind involuntarily when I come across them regardless and have done this for most of my life, but I do feel that I more easily access the meaning of sections of text by looking at them and absorbing them, with less reliance on the mental voice for mediation of comprehension. This is not an experience I have been completely unfamiliar with though, as in my study of Japanese writing, seeing kanji (Chinese characters appropriated for Japanese, each which may be associated with several completely different, unrelated sounds) frequently results in me feeling the meaning of the sign independent of any vocalization of it, especially when such characters are presented isolated from any context or use in an actual word (as kanji typically need to be used in compounds with other characters to form words with a definite pronunciation). The experience is similar to what it is like to see a no entry sign and know intuitively what it means, and close to how I believe that people fluent in sign language might experience hand gestures as a language onto itself.
Overcoming reliance on subvocalisation and the more linear thought process it entails and 'graduating' to being able to read in blocks or chunks more freely may be a great aid to reading more rapidly and easily, but it may be the case that this will only be of real significance in those with SGP. I understand how it has come to be felt by many that subvocalisation itself ought to be seen as something that a person might treat like a crutch they should ween themselves off, and take the view that in deliberately suppressing it they become better readers subsequently having done so [3]. However I feel that such practice may be mixing up cause and effect, with subvocalisation being something that likely naturally tones down as one improved on the ability to make better use of the visual faculties and the block structure based chunking enabled by SGP. At this point, I believe that this kind of practice will otherwise be of very little practical use to anyone without SGP, and that their efforts would be better served by instead focusing on unlocking SGP first, after which the power to meaningfully reach beyond the limitations of one's sequential internal voice should become available naturally.
There are many people who have tried to train themselves to speed read, but who, despite their efforts, seem to simply "lack the brain" to do so, with only a relatively small percentage of people being able to do so in a way they find to be practically useful. [4] I predict that SGP will be the main factor and mental barrier that prevents these people from being being able to speed read, or at least the second most important one after the motivation and will to want to learn it.
Having said all this, I must stress that while it does have very real uses, speed reading itself will not significantly aid you in experiencing or understanding rich, complex texts in a more in depth way, so if you do wish to try it, don't go about doing so expecting miracles.
2. Executive Function
Secondly, I want to talk about the concept of Executive Function. Executive Function (EF) has been proposed, in a variety of ways and by a variety of people, as a set of mental functions related to how people are able to focus their concentration on particular tasks, switch focus between tasks and consider and execute intended plans of action while avoiding distraction and temptation, along with suspending one's desire for immediate reward in favor of longer term objectives. [5a][5b] To provide one example of this, the mental difficulty of switching between work and leisure is a common experience that can occur unless EF is particularly strong. People will often find that, apart from the simple difficulty of performing various forms of unpleasant work and the tedium and frustration that naturally comes with, there is an additional quality of work that makes it even more undesirable to most people, the way that mentally gearing yourself up to get into 'work mode' coming from a preferred state of relaxation is inherently stressful (hence the occurrence of 'Mondayitis') along with the the opposite problem, winding down and mentally recovering from work can itself take time and effort that takes away from what should otherwise be enjoyable free time. So this ends up being a problem that compounds itself, the more effort and time put into work, the more time is also taken to gear up and recover form it, making downtime less effective and making the dread and stress of work potentially even worse, which might even further reduce a person's productivity, which might result in less work getting done etc. To sum up, extensive over work is bad in general, and there are many studies showing how much toxic work culture and the expectation of excess working hours has a woeful impact on productivity and quality of life in the worse cases. [6]
Unlocking SGP had a huge impact on how my mind dealt with this. Quickly after first going through the transition, it became apparent that a pronounced effect was that I could much more easily switch between different modes of thought of many kinds, a task which previously took far more focus and time. Due to this, I have numerous reasons to conjecture that SGP significantly reinforces the powers of at least certain aspects of Executive Functioning.
To make a certain important distinction clear at this point, these improvements to Executive Function itself are not themselves, or a result of, stronger will power. Rather, such improvement to Executive Functions means it actually takes less will power to concentrate, to avoid temptation, and also to change from whatever commitment you have a given mindset to another, and can do so more easily and rapidly. [7] Thus, most reduction in mental fatigue because of this should be the result of a corresponding reduction of effort, and it's best to be aware of this rather than mistake such for a stronger will. One of the reasons I want to make this point is to show something that I feel many people have a potentially mistaken conception of. Often, when people's musical or artistic tastes change it may be said that they have matured, with the accompanying implication that the person themselves has matured emotionally, having become more adult, and that their change in tastes are in part due to that change in attitude. However, with SGP, transitioning to it has allowed my musical tastes to change, while also causing a change in cognition that makes it less of a burden to act 'maturely'. So, in effect, what's actually happened in my case seems to be that, instead of maturity leading to a greater openness to taste, there is actually a separate cause behind both in SGP.
In this post: Learning Styles, Modality and Sense Dominance, I discuss how SGP had the effect of making it easier to switch focus between the dominance of modalities, effectively allowing me to quickly flush a deeply immersive focus on spacial structure and redirect my attention to the deep structure of music, or vice versa. A significant hypothesized component related to Executive Function is Baddeley and Hitch's central executive, part of their multi-component working memory model. [8] As discussed in [5b]The Relationship Between Working Memory Capacity and Executive Functioning, working memory components, the control the Central Executive has over such memory and Executive Function all seem to strongly related to a single factor or set of factors, which that paper terms executive attention. Assuming that Executive Attention is a meaningful construct, I will use that as a reason to import aspects of Alan Baddeley's updated working memory model [8] into this discussion on Executive Function and how it relates to my own experiences. In this model is included three buffer like components relating to distinct modalities, the visuospatial sketchpad (visual/spatial), the phonological loop (audio) and the newest component in the model, the episodic buffer (intermediate conceptual thought). The first two relate to visual and auditory imagination and the capacity working memory has to store images, or lists of, disconnected, unrelated data, a capacity which is highly limited and generally only allows the storage of a handful of objects. However, humans do seem to have the ability to recall larger amounts of information pertaining to the immediate past that are conceptually linked into structures with higher meaning (such as sentences and sequences of them), and the component responsible for the storage, manipulation and recall of this is what Baddeley call the Episodic Buffer. I do not necessarily that the episodic buffer is necessarily the sole working memory component that is needed or capable of achieving this (as this doesn't necessarily account for the recall of large connected structures specific to a given modality), but at the very least agree that some extra working capacity is needed beyond the register like behavior of immediate recall of atomic information and that it is this 'deep' capacity (or related aspects of it) the use of which is enhanced along with the improvements to EF, which also seemingly enables the particular forms of rapid chunking, parallelism and hierarchical organisation which utilize it. I should note though that I don't necessarily agree that spatial imagination is distinctly or uniquely connected to visual impression, as opposed to any other sense modality, aside from the convention that this is simply what typically occurs more strongly in those with visual dominance (as opposed to tactile, auditory or kinesthetic based build up of spatial feeling, which blind people can still make use of).
I predict that SGPAs will have specific advantages when it comes to Executive Attention. On tasks specifically designed to test short term visual and and auditory working memory (the sketchpad and loop respectively) and attentional control relating to those alone, I do not specifically predict that SGPAs will necessarily have a significant advantage or that they will perform much better. However, it is in deeper levels of working memory that function on a larger scale than a single image or short list (the episodic buffer being a possible candidate, thought there cold be more to this) and the ability to direct attention to larger scale deeper structures that unfold and can be recalled based on links, parallels and hierarchical relations between them (linking hunks/blocks/themes/sentences/spacial relations etc.) that the attention advantage SGPAs have may prove to be great. In my experience it typically took me several listens to a piece of music to properly digest the themes of a work and understand how they appeared though the Canonical Transformations* they took in the absence of SGP, having to commit such structures to long term memory first. With SGP, on the other hand, coupled with experiential familiarity with a given musical idiom, it's fairly common for me to now be able to mostly follow the thematic course of a work on first or second listen, holding the thematic material and its transformations and generally understanding the musical implications of this immediately. The ability to switch between tasks that require one to effectively clear one's mind of cruft and and change into a different attitude and mindset is also a related aspect of Executive Attention which I experience as requiring less discipline and deliberate concentration in order to effectively perform as a SGPA. As such, I would expect other SGPAs to benefit from such an advantage in similar ways.
3. Visual Cognition
Once again I will invoke Clive Bell's concept of "significant form", at least as it applies to aesthetic experience of 2 dimensional, visual art.
http://www.denisdutton.com/bell.htm
Now, one of the biggest reasons I'm bringing up this article again is that it does something very specific. Not only does Bell create a theory as to what might be counted in his eyes as high art and what might not, and why, but he references particular paintings to demonstrate exactly what artworks he considers to have 'significant form', which is uniquely capable of proving aesthetic emotion according to him, and what other artworks seem not to, yet might be liked by other people anyway for separate reasons. As such he holds artworks by Giotto and Cezanne as possessing this kind of form and being capable of producing such affect, yet uses particular images produced by Edwin Landseer, William Powell Frith and Luke Fildes, in the academic/salon tradition [9] of the century prior to the essay being written, as examples of works which have appeal for non-formal reasons and hence should be incapable of producing the specific feelings he terms 'aesthetic emotions'.
Luke Fildes: The Doctor (1891)
Look at these works and feel free to take in whatever impression they leave on your mind. While viewing them, allow yourself to become immersed in them in whatever way feels natural to you. However, the reason I want you to do this it to contrast that with impressions of these next works, ones that are professed to possess aesthetically significant form.
 |
| Giotto: The Dream of Joachim (1305) |
 |
| Cezanne: Compotier, Glass and Apples (1880) |
 |
| Vermeer: The Milkmaid (1658) |
What I found, when I had not attained SGP, was that viewing images of this sort left me deeply uncomfortable, with the impression that not only were the images not immersive or pleasant to look at, but that there was conversely something very off about how the were painted, that the colors were too washed out, and also clashed with each other in ways that were excessively harsh while having needless separation between hues. I found that this was true when observing virtually all art that was purported to be great and worthy of admiration in this way.
From the way I worded the above paragraph, you may be assuming something now. Namely, that I, now having the ability to perceive Poetic Form, can actually appreciate the forms of these works and their aesthetic content, and that it is exactly SGP which enables this. But this is not so. What I have found, instead, is that these works are markedly less unpleasant, that their colors and the way they contrast, while still not greatly pleasing to look at, now offend me far less and the idea that they might be said to have meaningful form makes far more intuitive sense; I can apprehend them as a whole without feeling that I am looking at something that was made to make me not want to look at it.
What I suspect may have happened is something that may also have an analogue. While I now have EVP and SGP, I developed EVP before SGP and never went through a stage where the reverse was the case, in which I would have had SGP but not EVP. However, I can't rule out the possibility that this particular state may occur in others. Conversely, the visual equivalent of this, where whatever mental mode I might need to have active in order to perceive 'significant form' properly (analogous to what EVP is to music) is absent, in spite of the fact that SPG may be allowing me to perceive these forms in a more 'integrated' way, may well be exactly the kind of state am in now, though it remains to see what kind of mental processing I would need to activate in order to perceive the visual equivalent of thematic tension in painting.
[1] https://www.speedreadinglounge.com/reading-groups-of-words
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
[3] https://www.irisreading.com/speed-reading-tips-5-ways-to-minimize-subvocalization/
[4] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Speed_Reading#How_to_Make_Speed_Reading_Actually_Work
[5a] http://www.rainbowrehab.com/executive-functioning/
[5b] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852635/
[6] https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies
[7] http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html#ya
[8] http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(00)01538-2
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Variant Construction: Part 3 - Integrating Structures
7th symphony allegretto A1 motif
Having gone through everything in the previous post, we'll first return to our Beethoven (7th symphony) example to clear some things up. I want to make it clear, to avoid unnecessary confusion, that even a sequence that consists of substructures that are perceived to repeat can be a full Canonical Sequence in itself, as long as it doesn't require SGP in order to comprehend the way the theme flows or how thematic material is used in it (which is an important distinction). As such, the primary theme of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th is very much a Canonical Sequence, even thought it could be decomposed into something that could at least in part be built up with Variant Addition. It has repeating substructures within it (motifs consisting of the individual 2-bar subsections in each 8-bar theme, which I have labeled A1 above), and you could construct the theme by taking a single such subsection and extending it out with Variant Addition (similarly to what was done with the Montiverdi madrigal in the previous part), but there is still nothing preventing it from being interpreted as a single, whole Canonical Sequence in the absence of SGP. Each A1 section within it ends appropriately enough and continues to lead into the next substructure (either continuing into another A1 within the theme or ending the theme by omitting its final note), but without creating an expectation that its own structural resolution is suspended and delayed so as to be resolved through the entirety of the next substructure, (which would otherwise be a phrase extension, which I would indicate with the black, backward pointing arrows that I used in the modified versions of the Montiverdi madrigal, but which are absent in my illustration of the opening section of Beethoven's 7th in part 2). Instead, each 2 bar motif is basically sufficient in itself, as while it sets up the next part or instance of the theme, as an individual phrase, to continue by not constituting a complete structural cadence itself (except when ending each theme instance), it also doesn't create an expectation that the note immediately after should be a realization of such a cadence either. Specifically there is no need to reinterpret it with SGP or variant structures, since, unlike "Zefiro Torna", the theme does not set up an expectation of a resolution that is subverted. So each part can be perceived to flow into the next using the basic understanding of musical repetition offered by the more fundamental sense of basic metrical rhythm combined with the phrase structures that arise out of EVP (as opposed to SGP based structures).
However, what I have discussed above is not necessarily something that can be used as a general rule which tells you what is a motivic part of a Canonical Sequence or what is strictly a variant structure, or even that there has to be a hard distinction between the two if it's possible to interpret a structure as both (an issue I'll deal with shortly). I intend this as an illustration of the differences between these two specific examples (motifs from Beethoven's 7th and Montiverdi's Zefiro Torna) and consider it largely an attempt to explain why I have placed each in the category that I have using my own intuition. I expect each reader to follow along with the music in each example itself in order to discover what they feel themselves, and find out how their own experience of mental phenomena matches up with what I have described along with what each of the specific aspects subjectively feel like to them. I want to build up the phenomenological intuition of the reader by bringing attention to these things, so that they will either realize what they lack, or otherwise learn to distinguish between various ways they do perceive structure in music and how it feels to grapple with each.
So, continuing on, I will have to point out that, despite me stressing that the motif discussed doesn't require SGP to be perceived as a satisfying musical theme, there's nothing actually saying a SGPA couldn't interpret these substructures in light of something like a generalization of variant addition, and in fact, I'd say that doing so is actually the natural way that a EVN-SGA would end up hearing the theme, as being composed of many internal structures as well as also being a complete theme that is still itself a canonical sequence, as this enables a greater impression of structural richness and is likely to happen subconsciously anyway, given that it is my experience. This total sense of structure rising out of all the possibilities enabled by SGP is what I label Variant Construction, which is what this series of articles has been building up to defining. Now, I must note that I don't actually intend to define all the structural possibilities that may result from this, as I suspect those may be effectively infinite, but I do want to give people a general idea of what this does enable.
To let you picture this more clearly and finally give it some sort of definition, Variant Construction enables compositional techniques enabled by Variant Addition such as "phrase extension", "phrase elision" [4], and additionally allows certain kinds of links between phrases and uses of interpolation to enlarge structure. Variant Construction is primarily an interpretive model of total structure, a way of defining and exploring how exactly it is that structures that would otherwise be limited to the expressive power of canonical sequences can be reinterpreted using super grammatical faculties so that these additions and expansions of structural possibility can take place and make sense to the listener while enriching the experience of the music. As such, variant construction concerns itself with a totality of structural possibilities that go beyond the techniques mentioned above, and allows the exploration of things like the addition of internal structure to canonical sequences that might affect how their phrasing is interpreted. It also affects things like extra motivic grouping, like how patterns between groups can affect how they relate and form larger groups under grouping structure (which we will look at later on using the C Major Prelude analysis detailed in the GTTM[1]). Beyond this, it is also concerned with the resolution, or sublation, of ambiguities in the variant structure that may arise from all this. The rest of this article will use different pieces to illustrate these ideas.
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C Minor Fugue Example:
First I'll make use of Bach's C minor fugue from Book 1 of the WTC to illustrate what can be done with this kind of ambiguity.
Here, in this fugue, you may be tempted initially to follow along the subject as shown in this diagram, going with this grouping or some variation of it.
The key to understanding why I have called Variant Construction, lies in this potential of creating new interpretations though 'searching' through possible grouping structures in this way. I must note that I'm not specifically trying here to define the process of composing music by adding repeating or linked parts of Canonical Forms in particular ways (though this in naturally relevant to composition), but rather, to name the mental process of mentally building up the music into groups in such a way that interpretations more complex than what the canonical sequences of EVP would allow otherwise become possible. This may be important in the actual process of composition, but I wish to stress that I intend this primarily as a method of understanding how the mind can process music.
I've brought up the two different basic groupings I have for a reason. Different interpretations of grouping structure can result in different examples of such groupings feeling important if you specifically concentrate on perceiving them, but there's nothing actually saying you can't subconsciously experience each of these groupings being a meaningful part of the feel of the phrase structure simultaneously to a certain degree. It is possible that each of them is capable of being a force shaping how you understand and interpret the music if, instead on concentrating on one of them exclusively, you try to acknowledge how different groupings might each affect the music at the same time. In fact I'd say that in many cases it is ideal to be able to understand multiple grouping structures like this unconsciously (especially in complex fugal works) with the ultimate aim actually being to put aside the need to explicitly think about the structure of the music and surrendering to the sense of everything flowing smoothly, working together at the same time while you are barely aware of any conscious attempt to analyse anything. In my experience, I feel the greatest richness in the music when I'm able to move past the mindset of explicit searching for structure and manage to let everything I'm aware of influence me at once. But in this flow state, I find that explicit awareness of division into grouping structure feels superfluous. Instead, it ends up feeling like a single, almost indefinable structure shaped by forces that are beyond my explicit conscious understanding, though which are only possible by first familiarizing myself with the music and thinking about the apparent structures which are presented to me as I listen to them now that I possess both Encompassing Voice and Super Grammatical Perception.
Here, Glenn Gould describes the way that, in interpreting a piece, he may wrestle with several different forces that simultaneously influence how he feels he ought to influence his phrasing of the piece, only being satisfied when he believed that he's played well enough to capture each of them appropriately. As such, it may only be possible to really get into this state (whether listening or playing) after already spending enough time grappling with the piece.
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G Minor Fugue Example:
To continue on, lets look at examples of what Variant Construction can actually achieve on a larger, more substantial scale and how bigger phrase structures can arise by having super grammatical processes link their elements together.
But hang on, isn't the second last note still a D, falling in the same place in the only an octave higher? And couldn't this mean that there's a sense in which the final four notes are an embellishment of the A to D step in the previous bar? Try listening to the piece again and with this interpretation in mind. It's unnatural and results in a lack of resolution doesn't it? But on the whole doesn't this feel similar to what happened in the Montiverdi piece before, where the end of one section is forced to become the beginning of another, in a way that demands that your mind find some way to resolve it, but is otherwise awkward and unsatisfying if you can't? I know I was completely unable to resolve this when I lacked SGP. But now, for me, there's a sense that it acts as a structural hinge that links together different parts by making you interpret them as extensions of other material.
We only have to look further into the piece to see what the melodic structure could have done in contrast. In fact, this form of it occurs in the bass only a short time after (at around 0:55 into the linked video). Here, the part that is equivalent to the 'hinge' in the section where the material is first introduced is played out in they way you would expect it to be played in order to give it a firm resolution. The marked sections are able to parallel each other as canonical material (modified through embellishment) and resolve in parallel fashion, before continuing on into a cadential sequence resolving to D (though I guess this would be a half-cadence in this instance [2]).
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Cadential Extensions and Assorted Structures
Expansions of cadences, elongations of parts of the music that serve to hammer home the tonal center and firmly finish off a piece or section of it are common in tonal music, especially in common practice western art music. A perfectly 'generous' example of this is the finale of Beethoven's 5th.
https://youtu.be/xAQFJ1YpFaI?t=12m40s
When this occurs, variant construction is essential in enabling the feeling of continuation of post-candential expansion throughout these sections. Without it, the listener will simply desire the music to rest on the tonic as soon as possible and find the expansions past this to be excessive and pointless.
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Varied Rhythmic Examples:
Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps is one of the most SGP intensive works in the repertoire. The way that each musical block fragment of melody links up with other blocks across the distinct rhythms is something that SGPNs will completely fail to perceive, making the whole work feel perpetually disconnected, and the slower parts especially will feel like a slog to get through. There is very much a night and day difference on what it is like to listen to it between lacking SGP and having it. It is a strong showcase of how poetic sensibility can be used to create a separate sense of meter that carries through variations of rhythm that would otherwise break this feeling. This process is similar to what I hold allows the less rhythmical, freely structured meters of High Verse poetry to work on a poetically sensitive mind.
This John Adams composition and the way its sequences musical fragments are blared at the listener should have a similar effect, it will only feel like it has meaningful structure to SGPAs. The actual poem itself, John Donne's Batter my heart, three-person'd God, also contains meaningful structure whose effects will not be fully apparent to those without SGP, such as feeling resulting from the parallel between "knock, breathe, shine" and "break, blow, burn", and the total meaning of "Reason, your viceroy in me," which I hold contains conflicting ambiguities of meaning that SGPNs will be unable to intuitively resolve.
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Justification and relation to the Generative Theory of Tonal Music:
Part of why I am so confidant that SGPNs will be unable to comprehend variant structure is that I effectively spend years searching for structures like it in music, perplexed by my own inability to perceive anything resembling it despite expecting to be able to do so. I was told by lovers of 'well composed' [3] symphonic music that part of why they loved such music was that each each aspect of it felt like part of a well ordered machine, each section feeling like it naturally flows on from the previous, with each part having to follow on, often in ways they couldn't imagine playing out differently. Yet, despite having attained Encompassing Voice during this time and assuming that I had all the mental capabilities needed to fully appreciate all kinds of music, I didn't feel that way at all, with most art music still feeling broken, disjointed and piecemeal, with odd, abrupt changes to melodies that made no sense and unnaturally drawn out cadences. I didn't know at the time if I was lacking in any particular way, or that there was any additional state of mind of importance beyond EVP that I might need, and so I assumed that if I was perceptive enough I would 'get it' somehow and that it must somehow be my lack of sensitivity or knowledge that was holding me back. I read comments by an amateur composer explaining how the structural difficulties he would encounter in composing music were close to those of writing software, and how he could "write himself into a corner" in both cases creating structures similar in kind that extended themselves in ways that would prevent him achieving his goals. But with my experience developing software and the extent allow me to relate to this, this didn't make a lot of sense to me. Music (though still incredibly emotional) just didn't seem to have the same kind of rich structure that would allow the kinds of 'mistakes' that could have such significance on such a scale.
But encountering Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) only caused me to became even more perplexed. I wanted to make sense of it, and honestly believed I could at that point if I thought about it hard enough, but I found that even on the most basic level it described features of music that I had no experience of. The grouping of things into hierarchical structures on several levels from the smallest motif to the largest movement subsuming one another in turn, beyond that of the internal tension implied by thematic structures, was not something that I had ever felt was meaningful in any of my experience of music. Or at the least, such structure was irrelevant to the shaping of my interpretation of thematic structure. I could guess how certain patterns might arise that could give rise to this hierarchical structure, or which might be intellectually analysed as such (especially while looking at a score or graphical representation of the music and looking for similarities and parallel symmetry), but I didn't feel that any of these constructs had importance to musical structure independently of simply being part of a given theme (which I now categorize as a canonical structure) or subsequent response. It is only now that I intuitively feel how parallelism gives rise to extensions and variants of structures, beyond them simply being part of a basic thematic skeleton.
I will note though, that in the GTTM, a significant assumption is made about the nature of the listener to whom the structures described are supposed to be apparent. That is that the listener is someone who is "experienced in a musical idiom", i.e. they have somehow learned or innately possess the cognitive capability and prerequisites required in order to understand the formal structures described, whatever that implies. This suggests an awareness that not everyone will perceive music the same way, which at least is something that can account for differences of culture, and is something that agrees with my own theoretical framework and experiences. Leading on from that, I will make the suggestion that Lerdahl and Jackendoff's GTTM describes an experience of musical structure that is absolutely dependent on the possession of EVP and SGP together, and that people not in possession of both cognitive abilities will not process music in that way. This I feel will end up being a core aspect of my theory, once I have spend more time evaluating Lerdahl and Jackendoff's theories.
Conclusions and Research:
For much of this article, we've specifically looked at some of what EVA-SGAs are uniquely capable of perceiving and how I've chosen to model this with the ideas of Variant Addition (parallel structure that can extend and/or transform the flow of themes) and Variant Construction (the mental sublation/combination of the various possibilities of these grouping structures, and others, into a total, continuous whole). All this is in contrast with the musical structures that are possible to comprehend without SGP. Because of this, we can start to find ways of classifying possible grammars of music in terms of linguistic ideas
For instance, the EVA-SGN understanding of how successions of canonical themes follow each other within a given single voice is generally similar to the structure of recursive right embedding of sentences in language, with each theme running its course and then, depending on how solidly it ends in a cadence (determined by the 'strength' of the note influenced by contextual factors and how it resolved relative to the global key that has been established in the listener's mind), continuing on through the next theme instance (whether it be a variation of the same theme or other material that follows melodically). Large scale (arbitrarily large scale?) center embedded structures made up of variant transformations of (thematic) canonical sequences impossible without SGP, however, are seemingly made possible by Variant Construction. Through this, SGP also allows subsections effectively resolving into a different key to be embedded in larger structures, and all kinds of basically arbitrary musical forms to be built up using these techniques. Understanding the mental buildup of these structures is something I wish to further pursue and hopefully research can be done on this in the future that makes this possible.
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So to end it all, and provide a bit of consolation to readers who may have realized by now that they are not in possession of at least one of these perceptual abilities, I'll grant listeners a couple of pieces which I'm sure are capable of completely satisfying even those who otherwise have neither EVP or SPG.
This last one being a particular favorite of mine. Enjoy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_theory_of_tonal_music
[2] http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~caplin/caplin-classical-cadence.pdf
[3] https://youtu.be/OuYY1gV8jhU?t=6m3s
[4] http://core.ecu.edu/music/jacobse/classes/analysis/PHRASES.HTM
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