MKFaizi wrote:So, why put yourself into it? Can you listen to music without that feeling attachment?
Well, sure, but it's like masturbation. You can do it without thinking of a sexual situation, but it's more fun when I'm thinking about poking Britney Spears in the ass while yanking her hair out, lashing her with a whip and screaming "Who's your daddy!" the top of my lungs. It's just not the same.
My son is playing guitar now. Just a beginner yet though he has learned a lot quickly. He is trying to learn some Steve Vai stuff. He lacks some confidence. I told him that his fingers are just as long as Vai's and there is no reason he can't do it. Buster has enormous hands with extremely long fingers -- don't know the genetic connection there because my hands are smaller than the hands of most midgets -- no kidding -- I suffer mechanically for the small size of my hands -- kind of weird. So, he did manage to play this one Vai tune.
While he was playing, he said to me, "The guitar is addictive for me. Once I pick it up and start playing, I can't stop. I played from eight o'clock last night until two am."
For a fifteen year old, I think that is fine. Playing the guitar provides him access into an inner space -- kind of like meditation -- that I think is all right for a fifteen year old.
Yeah, I think music's a good part of a well-rounded education.
I've been trying to figure out the mathematical connection to it because musicians seem to statistically do better at math than non-musicians. I think it's because of the relations of time that you have to deal with in keeping a rhythm. You have to be able to hold a piece of time in your head and chop it up into halves or quarters or thirds or three quarters and a quarter or whatever--you can make it as complicated as you want. I think it helps your visualization skills to practice doing things like that.
Plus, in playing an instrument you learn a lot of funky tricks to play certain combinations of notes. Mathematics (all of science, really) is mostly about developing/learning a bag of tricks that you dig into to meet challenges. Most scientists and mathematicians can't even explain the principles behind what they do because they're so dependent on their tricks that they rarely think about the theories as to why these tricks work in the first place. I think that's why scientists are so narrow minded all the time. They just care about what works and that's about it.
But anyway, chopping up time and an assortment of tricks are what I think the connections between music and math are. The actual notes would go under the tricks category. There's nothing really mathematical about choosing what notes to play. That's more about "what works" and personal taste.
Then, you look at Steve Vai's web site. Dude has about one hundred or so custom built guitars. Mega-addiction.
Of course, he makes his living playing guitar. He is a master.
Yeah, he is awesome. He's a good player to learn from, definitely. Hendrix is good, too. He had a lot of finesse that I'm not even sure someone like Vai could mimic exactly. Vai is a lot more technical, though. Both of them are probably too hard for a beginner, though, really. As long as he plays things he actually likes, though, he'll stick with it.
Just kind of interesting -- the question or problem of getting past the addiction of music.
If you get past the addiction, what do you do then? Go to dental school? Addicted to teeth? I kind of don't think it's the same thing.
Music isn't really that addictive, I don't think. I used to think I could get a band together and make some killer music, but I could never get that going. I've always wanted to experiment with synergy but I could never find musicians who would buy into it. Musicians are either about copying someone or taking over the whole band with their ideas. There aren't many who will look at the whole thing and try to work with it as a whole. I think that's too heavy for most people.
I've always been kind of an experimentalist when it comes to music. I always wanted to know how composers wrote their music because I was always so baffled at how they put together something so complex, yet made it sound like it made sense.
But I think the possibility of getting somewhere is what drives most people. Buster almost certainly wants to get in a band, and I think that's a good aspiration that will keep him playing. When you're young it's easier to find people who you can relate with musically because your musical taste is simpler when you're young. I don't know what bands are popular nowadays but it's easy to find four people who want to play Nirvana tunes or whatever it is. As you get older your musical taste develops and gets more complex. If you become real picky like I did, or even a little picky, then it becomes pretty much impossible to find people who want to do what you want to do, and that's what you have to do to keep a band together. Unless, of course, you're the shit and you're running the show like Zappa. I think bands have to be formed real young so everyone can grow together, like Floyd or the Stones or whatever. It's difficult to keep a band together. Usually the band breaks up and the people try to find a new band and it's not quite what they want and they eventually give up because it's so much work with so little reward. Personally, I know of one band composed of people my age but that's slowly disintegrating. The only other musicians I know play for church sermons or sessions or whatever it's called. Oh yeah, service. They play for church services.
I think the reason music can be addictive is because it can provide that deep meditative state but artificially contrived; a purely pleasurable meditative state rather than one that is productive of something that is other than mere pleasure -- pure introspective thought.
I think it's more of a hypnotic experience than a meditative or a thinking experience. Listening to a constant rhythm is really pretty mind-numbing. It's like a drug, it's just too comfortable to really have any new thoughts while it's playing. You tend to think comfortable thoughts in comfort, which don't go anywhere you haven't already been.
I used to have a workstation keyboard where you could sequence 8 tracks of synthesizer parts with a drum track, so you could write music just by playing it, like Zappa and his Synclavier. When you're trying to write a piece of music and you want to add a new part to it, you'll never be able to think of the new part while you're listening to the old parts. It's really easy to come up with the first part and maybe the part after that, but if you start listening to what you already have over and over and enjoying it, it will become impossible to think of a new part that fits because you get so attached to what you already have that you get stuck in it. I've known a couple of other people who had the same problem. If music were really conducive to thinking, I don't think that would happen. You really have to figure out what you're going to express in the piece, and when, before you start putting it down. That's the big advantage in being able to write it down on paper compared to using a tape recorder or sequencer or whatever. You don't have to learn the song as you write it, you can just write it first.
I have been an artist. I think putting on layers of paint is a meditative process, too, but it is a meditation of pure pleasure. Even if you make some philosophical progress in the exercise of putting on paint, the paint provides the tactile pleasure.
Words can also bring pleasure.
There is nothing wrong with pleasure but I kind of think that in order to become a philosopher, you have to get past those pleasurable creative addictions.
I am not expressing it well but I reckon what I am trying to say is that you have to get past the pleasure of the medium.
Any thoughtful input into what I have tried to express is welcome -- because I do not think that I have nailed it.
I think you pretty much nailed it, but I think even an artist, a good artist, has to get past it as well. There is a certain amount of pleasure to be had in the medium, but I think the truly creative person is interested in what the possibilities of it are and how much he can figure out about it. What tricks he can pull off in combination in order to embellish some fundamental idea.
I think great artists experiment with their style and stuff, like Van Gogh's pointillism or Louis Wain's wallflower cats. Those are gross examples but most stylistic experiments are things no one would ever know about without deeply studying the person's art. Dali was inspired by atoms so he went off making different depictions of atoms for awhile. Who woulda thunk it, you know?
Great artists develop their style and bad artists can't for some reason. I'm not sure if it's because they have no faith in themselves or what. They can't see possibilities or don't look for them or something. They don't feel the need to explore themselves, I guess, so the things they create are just a reflection of the part of themselves that they are already familiar with. They can repeat but they can't invent. They don't challenge themselves in a creative way. Maybe they're afraid or something.
My cousin-in-law is an excellent fine artist, but from what I understand, he doesn't produce any original stuff because he "doesn't know what to paint". Tsk! If you don't know what to paint, then paint the thing that you shouldn't paint, I say. Paint something! You'll figure out what to paint after a few tries. It's like military reconnaissance. You need to know where the enemy is in order to make plans for an attack. If you don't know your enemy, you'll be paralyzed. If you paint a few pieces and study them then you'll know what you're capable of and you're not capable of, so you can start making some stylistic explorations. You have to know what your style is before you can explore it.
Philosophy is the same way, though. It's art. It's a creative process, it's just that the product is directed entirely inward. Well, maybe philosophical writing should be considered philosophy too. I tend to think of it as a different type of art. But I think the great philosopher plays around with his style of thinking, trying to break new ground. That's what I try to do anyway. I'm not a great artist, though. I'm too lazy for that. I think you have to have real passion, too, to be a great artist. I've never been real passionate about anything for very long, only in short spurts. I'm passionate about new things but I get sick of them too easily. It's not failure, either. I'm not afraid of failure, I just find it hard to continue when the value of the goal can't justify the amount of work it would take to achieve it. That's why I gave up music, really. There's nothing in it for me. I'd be bored shitless being a musician and playing the same damn songs every night. That's not creative enough for me. I could probably tolerate being in a jazz band, because you have more freedom playing it, but the whole attitude behind it seems kind of bland and academic to me. Maybe if everyone wore diapers and the singer had a pair of nunchuks I would like it better, I don't know.
