Sunday, November 13, 2011

Cognitive dissonance ...

... Neuroscience Can’t Explain Wagner (or B.B. King) - Ideas Market - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for linking to this article. i think he speaks well to the limitations of neuroscience, a quantitative science, trying to explain away music and art, which are qualitative experiences.

    Here's the comment I made over there:

    Speaking as a musician and composer, thank you for putting into words so clearly exactly where and why neuroscience fails. Not just with music, actually, but with pretty much all forms of art. The problem is that they’re trying to make reductive generalizations about complex phenomena. Furthermore, as a musician who has studied and played music from other cultures, including Indonesia, it is demonstrable that the ideas of “consonance” and “dissonance” being explored here by these neuroscientists are so culturally-bound and culturally-local as to be laughable. Not only do other musics from other cultures contain lots of “dissonance” that is in fact very pleasing to the ear, but in fact Western music also did, prior to the standardization of equal temperament tuning, just a couple of centuries ago, no more.

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