The Musical Rollercoaster
Ok so my last post was a bit of a ramble. I’ve been thinking a lot more over the last few weeks about it, doing a bit more reading, and I think I’m starting to develop the idea.
Before I flesh it out though, a metaphor:
For a listener, a new piece of music is a bit like being on a rollercoaster, except you were blindfolded right up until you got on, and you are facing backwards. Maybe it looks a bit like this…
For a composer however, writing music is like drawing a blueprint for a rollercoaster - it’s not that easy to get a sense of what it feels like to be on the roller-coaster, and even if you get on to try it out, you’re facing forwards, and you haven’t been blindfolded. To you, the roller coaster is always gonna look like this:
I have four main points I want to make about the difference between a composer’s perception of a piece and a listeners:
1) Music listening is guided by a perceptual set, a schema built up unconsciously over years of listening to music, which guides expectations and provides a framework for the listener’s instinctive response to the music. The perceptual set varies depending on context and genre, and is surprisingly holistic and sophisticated regardless of musical training or lack thereof.
2) As we learn to compose music, our perceptual sets shape the creation of a more rational mental set, which connects known symbolic information (chords, notes, frets on a guitar) with musical effects such as mood, consonance, and quality. I argue that this is necessarily less sophisticated than our perceptual set, as it is limited in its ability to account for complex interactions between multiple musical elements, and is restricted to styles of music we’ve actively analysed, played or written in.
3) When composing an understanding of how we employ both a mental set these to varying degrees. The mental set of a composer is designed to mimic the perceptual set of a listener, but I argue that there are often significant differences between them.
4) Because of these differences, listeners and composers may perceive very differently the same piece of music. I argue that an awareness of this, and techniques to manipulate one’s own perceptions, can allow us to write better music.
I have placed a cut here, behind which I’ll elaborate at length on this idea.
The listener’s perceptual set
A perceptual set is a group of expectations based on experience which shape and influence our experience of the world around us. When we listen to music we are employing a perceptual set to make sense of it.
Though the passive music listener’s perceptual set may be limited, and may prevent appreciation of new or foreign music, it has been shown to be very sophisticated. As listeners, our brains collect mountains of statistical data over the course of our lives, and bring all of this to bear on our experience of listening to new music. Huron (2006) makes a pretty strong case for this, suggesting that “statistical learning might form the basis for auditory expectation”.
It is my belief that we employ a number of different perceptual sets that deal with differing musical genres and contexts.
This perceptual set shapes our perception of music we hear, by attributing learned meanings to sounds, focusing our attention on certain aspects and not others, and guiding our expectations.
The composer’s mental set
A mental set is a set of learned approaches to solving problems based on experience. Mental sets can help us to solve problems, but they can also interfere with successful problem-solving.
For a composer, it is very difficult to make use of our perceptual set to write new music. For example, you may have heard a complex piece of jazz music, and your brain has extracted loads of statistical information about it, meaning that it will be easily recognizable next time you hear it. You know the piece, in a sense. However this doesn’t make it easy to sit down at a piano and pound out the chords, with all their extensions and substitutions. For that you need to be able to connect the perceptual information with symbolic information about your musical medium, whether it be the keys on the piano or notes on a staff or some other means of representation. This is where a mental set comes in handy - if I know some jazz theory, and I can visualize the keys on the piano that need to be used to create that mood, I can make a pretty good guess at how to play it. When we write new music, this mental set prevents us from having to rely on trial & error & re-invent the wheel every time.
It is my intuition that this mental set can never be as sophisticated and holistic as our perceptual set, and can never embody exhaustive information about the true experience of music. We can have a fairly impressive grasp of what sorts of notes and chords will create a type of mood, or what sort of instruments will combine to give a desired timbre, and we may even know what frequency the filter cut-off should be to achieve the perfect warm synth bass sound; however, the experience of music depends on a complex intermingling of all of these elements, the full complexity of which is impossible to grasp as symbolic information.
As well as being limited, a mental set can also make us narrow-minded. Someone trained solely in traditional notation may find themselves fixated on harmony & melody, ignoring other elements, whereas an electronic composer may unduly obsess over timbre. This biases change the way we perceive what we write, and may result in a situation where the intended effect of the music is totally lost on the listener.
Dissonance between the perceptual set and the mental set.
I argue that a composer’s perceptual set and mental set must differ to varying degrees. If this wasn’t the case, a great taste in music would be the only prerequisite to being a great composer.
Music’s effect, at its best, should be much more than simply the sum of its parts. However, due to the infinity of possibilities, it is very difficult to consciously predict the qualities that may arise from interaction between various musical elements. It is my theory that a composer’s mental set is mainly limited to predicting what is a good melody, what is a strong chord progression, or what is a compelling timbre, etc. The effect of combination of these elements is much harder to predict.
Our perceptual set on the other hand is not as limited by a need for rational understanding and manipulation. It can be far more holistic, and take into account the chaotic complexity of actual musical experience.
In addition to this, while our perceptual set encompasses every style of music we have ever heard, our mental set for composing may only deal with styles of music that we are experienced in analyzing or writing in.
Composing Music
Composing music necessarily combines these two sets to varying degrees. The mental helps us to create the desired effect, solve problems, fit things together, etc. The perceptual set guides our analysis and assessment of what we write. The trouble is that as soon as we start to consciously create new music, our perceptual set is altered by the more limited mental set and symbolic representations of music.
Self-taught rock musicians who largely improvise without a symbolic understanding of music theory are guided by a perceptual set which is perhaps closest to that resembling a regular listener, however they too employ mental sets when approaching tempo or structure. Though they may not be able to speak the music theory language, it is my experience that self-taught musicians still develop an abstract, personal sort of theory which could be considered a mental set.
Composers trained in counterpoint and traditional notation are clearly more guided by a mental set. The rules that guide counterpoint have arisen from intuition about what sounds good (guided by a perceptual set), but have been passed down as a rational kit which can be employed without the need to hear the music or use trial and error, effectively becoming a mental set. Even still, experienced composers working in this tradition have advanced audiation abilities that allow them to hear the composition in their minds and assess it using a more intuitive sense, employing a perceptual set.
Both the perceptual set and the mental set clearly have an important role in composition. However a mental set can often interfere with our perception of what we are writing, causing us to inadvertently perceive it in ways that a regular listener wouldn’t. For example, while we may have a bird’s eye view of the musical structure which guides our perceptual expectations, the listener hears from moment to moment without such a clear idea of the bigger picture. We may also look at a particular line in our score, and see that it is a little bit bland or boring, causing us to perceive it as such in the music, whereas the effect on a listener would be far more dependent on the whole texture of the music, the interaction of the various parts. They may not hear it as boring at all - in fact they may not even really hear it.
The disparity between a composer’s perception of their own music and the listener’s perception is of primary concern here. Perception will always involve top-down processes where knowledge and experiences interfere with our perception of the world. Music listeners are often not aware of this, and in fact there is no reason for them to be. There is a tradition within some genres to provide listeners with program notes or other information, to augment their perceptual set and ensure that the work is perceived in the way the composer intends, but this is rare and not always practical. For most composers, an awareness of the different ways a work may be perceived, influenced by differing sets and schemata, is vital
To achieve this, a composer must know how to manipulate their own modes of perception, to force the brain into multiple ways of hearing things. There is anecdotal evidence for this fact found in common advice between composers, songwriters, musicians and producers. Re-tuning your guitar to an unfamiliar tuning scheme is often suggested to get out of a rut; composers working on computers will often close their eyes or turn the monitor off when listening back to a composition; rock bands writing music collaboratively are often advised to record jam sessions, as listening when not playing an instrument differs wildly from listening whilst playing.
(This last example can be confirmed by anyone who has watched a long tedious performance by a particularly indulgent improvisation ensemble.)
I find in my own experience that I employ differing mental sets when using different visual tools for composition. Using notation promotes a certain mode of listening from say, playing the same piece on piano without notation. And audio editing on a computer promotes a different mode again. In addition to this I believe it’s important to try to do away with conscious analysis and rely only on a passive perceptual set to try to hear the music as it will be heard by an uninitiated audience. This is perhaps the most difficult mode of listening for a composer to achieve, but avoiding visual representations or instruments can help.
Conclusions
In summary, a perceptual set, built-up unconsciously through years of listening, shapes our perception of music. Whether music is good or bad is not inherent in the music itself - it is found in the complex relationship between all musical elements and the listener’s context-dependent perceptual set. When thought of this way, it is no wonder that it is so difficult to write great music. A mental set which helps us to ascribe mood and quality to symbolic music knowledge provides a fast-track to creating particular musical effects, but it can never encompass the full myriad of inter-relationships which amount to true musical experience, and may interfere with the perceptual process, causing us to hear the music in a way that is dramatically different to the casual listener.
Composers can employ techniques to manipulate their own perception in order to surmount these difficulties. Using various visual and tactile representations can trigger multiple mental and perceptual sets, which will result in a less biased perception of the music. Avoiding symbolic representations completely can also help in perceiving a work for what it really is, and how it might be heard by listeners. Just like an engineer can’t just stand back from his rollercoaster design and say “ah, it looks perfect” without a thought for what it will feel like to ride on it, composers have to find ways to hear their music without bias, from the perspective of the listener.