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Table of contents
Foreword
About the ebook
What is music aesthetics ?
Why do people want to impose their views on beauty ?
Several music aesthetics concepts
Music aesthetics and music education
Music aesthetics, taste and consumer behavior (storytelling)
Music aesthetics and knowledge management
Conclusion
Several bibliographic references
Foreword
A thought for our reader
Dear musician,
Dear listener,
Which thirst brings you here today ? What do you want to achieve ? That is the question. You certainly share some target with us, such as augmenting the quantity of music aesthetics in society and get new viewpoints on it to reinvigorate your own practises.
Finding new music for inspiration is easy today, in any form (sheet music, audio files, etc). But knowing how listening to it to get the most out of it (as a composer, a producer, a teacher or a researcher) may be less obvious. That is why acquiring notions in music aesthetics may be relevant for all music lovers and not only philosophers.
We wish you a pleasant reading,
The YMusic search engine team
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About the ebook
Object of the following lines
You will find here content that will help you to know more about making relevant judgments in the field of music, determining what musical beauty is for you in easier ways.
The ebook does not pretend to tell you what is beautiful in itself or what you must like, but its target is to introduce concepts in order to facilitate aesthetic judgments.
The following pages also talk about relationships between music aesthetics and related areas like education or marketing, explaining how making aesthetic judgments can be useful to various categories of people.
The YMusic search engine is here to help you to distinguish and manipulate musical criteria and the ebook, without presenting a specific aesthetic theory (such a theory can be found on our website), is a useful philosophical complement to music (re)search in general.
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What is music aesthetics?
Elements of the definition
The very beginnings of modern music aesthetics from the 18th century
Both terms, music and aesthetics, are uneasy to define and the finest researchers do not agree on single definitions. But at least we may say that aesthetic judgment depends on a consensus : several or numerous individuals agree on the fact that they find a reality beautiful (or ugly). Aesthetics itself depend on matter, notably light : without light, no painting or no movie. Without air : no music. It also relies on the subject who perceives things. That idea is quite new. Until the 18th century, philosophers thought that beauty existed « per se », in the cosmos, without any human intervention (artists were considered as artisans).
At the beginning of the 18th century, things change, thanks to two English philosophers. The first one, Anthony Ashley Cooper, defines aesthetics as the faculty to appreciate beauty. It is, for him, a natural human tendency. It is instinctive, yet it can be developed. It is also disinterested and internal, exactly like truth or a theorem.
The second disruptive philosopher, Francis Hutcheson, has a quite similar form of thinking, In a book published in 1729, he says that, for him, objects that can be said beautiful are internal or external, like music. Thus aesthetic pleasure can come both from internal judgment or from external sensations.
In 1750, in Germany, a philosopher, Baumgarten, says that the perception of beauty comes from a faculty named taste.
We will add that aesthetic waves are in fact perceived by the human subject. These waves can be more or less numerous.
What can we do so that more listeners can know which music they really like ?
In other words, so that they can determine what they truly find beautiful. Disseminating music aesthetics is an interesting target, as it helps to augment the quantity of musical beauty in society. To reach that target, it is necessary to help people to know more about their personal aesthetic tastes. Which form of aesthetic waves do they enjoy ? Various concepts, transformed into parameters in a tool like the YMusic search engine, can help them to develop their musical tastes.
What do listeners love in music ? At the most general level, it is the fact that a human, a musician, expressed his/her relationship to the world by transforming it, organizing it, in a specific way. Music composers make choices related to instrumentation, specific combinations of notes, etc. and thus produce aesthetic waves. These waves are performed and reach listeners.
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Why do people want to impose their views on beauty ?
The pleasant and the beautiful are co-created by musicians and listeners
FROM THE PLEASANT TO THE BEAUTIFUL
Kant, a German philosopher of the 18th century, said that there is a distinction between what is pleasant and what is beautiful. Pleasantness concerns the individual (if someone says « I like wine », it is because he/she can appreciate wine’s properties personally) and beauty supposes an agreement between several individuals or communities.
It means that one specific music listener may prefer pieces containing wind instruments over other works including strings. Such pieces are, for him/her, pleasant. Yet he/she cannot affirm that all pieces containing winds are more beautiful than those containing strings. That example shows the difference between what is pleasant and what is beautiful. It does not mean that the pure aesthetic pleasure is independent of the material existence of an object. In fact, an artistic object is an object, be it a song or a sculpture. It exists. However, the distinction established by Kant between the aesthetic judgment, which is for him contemplative and immaterial, and the aptitude to desire, conditioned for him by excitement, seems excessive.
Thus music listening can be both contemplative and conditioned by excitement. And it may be interesting for all musicians and listeners to know why a piece of music is both pleasant and beautiful, or both unpleasant and ugly. A contemporary French philosopher, Jean Dubuffet, insists, like Hegel (a German philosopher of the 19th century), on the fact that beauty can be found in any object and that the aesthetic reflection could progress more easily if people were not putting beauty in several specific objects, saying that the rest is unattractive. For him, any object in the world can be a source of fascination and illumination.
Yet how to demonstrate that it is ? In the field of music, it requires to take the listener into account. Listening, in fact, is also interpreting heard sounds according to musical data, i.e. music heard previously, the new materials being compared to ancient ones. The purpose of music aesthetics is to analyze the motivations and the reactions of the listener who perceives a specific piece of music. And also to measure his/her level of aesthetic pleasure. Whatever the piece of music is.
MUSIC AESTHETICS METHODS : A QUESTION OF PERSPECTIVE
Let us notice that aesthetic studies may insist on the process of aesthetic judgment and examine what, in a piece of music, creates an impact on the listener or on the role of that listener in the process. Both tactics may be combined, as the composer is also listening to his/her work and as the listener co-creates a piece of music when he/she takes the time to examine it. Both musicians and listeners who do not practice music have their views on musical beauty.
Amongst music aestheticians, we may notice that there are various music aesthetic schools and movements. One sort of music aesthetics is said to be axiomatic, its reasoning being similar to mathematics and logic methods. The theory that is supporting the conception of the YMusic search engine, which is useful in the framework of aesthetic development, was thought in that perspective.
Anyhow, whatever the aesthetic approach that one may adopt to talk about musical beauty, the musical work, which is not useful (as a plate or a car can be), is always a meaningful reality. And in the field of music as in other ones, attributing a unique cause to the success of a piece of music that is said beautiful is quite simplistic. During the same music concert, there are objective reasons to like or dislike the pieces that are performed, but dozens of people may have dozens of subjective thoughts on these pieces.
Highlighting personal motivations to love specific pieces of music is interesting for the listener himself/herself. And for the composer who prefers specific combinations of notes, it is the same. In any case, composers, performers and listeners co-create musical beauty and the target of music aesthetics is to examine how they define the musically beautiful.
We can also notice that, creating art, human beings affirm themselves as spiritual beings. In absolute ways, Hegel says. For him, as it was the case for Anthony Ashley Cooper, sonic materials express the movements of a human soul, rather than the external world.
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Several music aesthetics concepts
Core ones. From A to Z
The following descriptions are useful to describe what we consider as musically beautiful. We do not present all aesthetic concepts and the definitions do not pretend to be exhaustive but want to give a quick summary of complex ideas.
AESTHETICS
Part of the philosophy. During centuries, it considered beauty as a natural property of the cosmos, independent of any human production (artists were considered as artisans). In its modern form, i.e. from the 18th century, it studies the motivations and the reactions of human beings in front of artistic productions and natural elements. It includes various schools, like axiomatic aesthetics.
ART
Ensemble of rules, processes, techniques and crafts thoughts and applied to produce a work which is a source of aesthetic pleasure. The artistic production is the result of a thinking activity and it relies on the use of various materials (in music : sounds) organized by an artist which does not produce a good or service useful in the context of daily life but wants to express a specific view on the world through harmony.
BAROQUE
Aesthetic category in which a structure based on a certain entropy (disorder) is preferred and which relies on several axes (rather than one), asymmetry and freedom.
BEAUTIFUL (THE)
For aestheticians, the beautiful has no systematic definition. It could be presented as an element which imprints in an object specific qualities (like harmony for instance) which, perceived by a human being, are a source of aesthetic pleasure, that pleasure including both sensitive elements and rational ones, subjective components and objective ones.
CHORD
In the same period of time, assemblage of sonic elements which can produce an aesthetic effect on a music listener.
CLASSICAL
Aesthetic category defined by a type of structure which insists on symmetry, measure, stability, precision and rigor, rather than the contrary.
CONTRAST
A qualitative and/or a quantitative process which is based on the opposition of various materials (in music, sounds, for instance ; or pitch, tempo, etc).
CYBERNETIC ART
Amongst the numerous forms of arts, this specific one is made of sounds produced by a program written to be executed by a computer. In music, we talk about computer music.
FORMALISM
Aesthetic attitude in which the priority is given to the manipulation of the materials, in an artistic work, and not to the intentions of the artist.
HARMONY
An ensemble of proportions that satisfy the sensibility, in a piece of art. It mainly depends on specific combinations of mathematical ratios.
INSPIRATION
A process that is said to be illuminating, touching the consciousness of an artist and leading to the conception of a new piece of art.
PRINCIPLE OF ANALOGY
Principle which tends to prove the organic unity of an artistic work.
SCIENCE OF ART
A discipline created in 1913, detached from aesthetics and telling that aesthetics is only the science of the sensible, while the science of art examines only artistic works and problems related to their conception.
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Aesthetics and education
Questions and statements
SEVERAL AESTHETICS QUESTIONS APPLIED TO MUSIC EDUCATION
Teachers and students do not formulate aesthetic judgments in the same way. The first ones use a highly technical language, while the others (at least pupils) describe their experience with metaphors, like casual music listeners. Going somewhat further may be interesting to reconstitute their aesthetic judgment, which is relevant in the context of music education. It supposes to explore judgments and to determine constants in the conception of these judgments, whatever they are. It reinforces everyone’s aesthetic skills.
In that context, questioning can be useful. Here are several interesting questions:
·What are the criteria of value used by music listeners (from casual listeners to professional listeners like composers) to express a relevant aesthetic judgment and to assess music compositions?
·Which relationships do listeners establish with a musical object?
·How do music listeners sort formal relationships between musical elements in order to enjoy a musical experience and get entertained?
·How do listeners both analyze their emotions to make evaluative judgments?
·How do listeners enhance their aesthetic skills?
·How do musicians establish links between knowing and doing music?
Overall, how is musical knowledge acquired and what is the place of aesthetics in that context? Knowing music comes from practicing it or reading about it, yet also from taking impressions and intuitions into account, in relationship with evaluative judgments. It leads to the building of a critical discourse on music, a discourse followed by actions like searching for music similar to a piece heard before and appreciated. From piece to piece, real musical knowledge may be acquired. For instance, recognizing musical elements can become easier. Such knowledge can be used to compose music or to conduct research.
ELEMENTS SUBJECTS TO MUSIC AESTHETIC JUDGMENTS
Music listening is not always related to aesthetics. A listener is, « by default », an inattentive listener, even sometimes in music venues like outdoor festivals. His/her first target is then to do something pleasant with friends. But at times, music listening may be related to aesthetics. Then it can be said to be musicological. The two positions are very different in terms of knowledge acquisition. The aesthetic tastes of someone who is technically trained in music is not, in itself, superior to the viewpoint of someone who is not, yet it is better informed.
Let us notice here that with tools like the YMusic search engine, all music listeners can now question themselves about a piece of music and test sonic elements by themselves, without being forced to learn a specific music theory or frequent a music school. When music listening becomes more analytical, it becomes more mathematical, even amongst non-trained listeners, who are provided with numerous features. And those who are trained in music can analyze vast amounts of music more quickly and easily.
The types of aesthetic judgments may vary, in function of the listeners and the musical works. They can be related to:
·A whole piece of music
·How musical ideas are organized
·The originality of a piece (which involves comparison with other ones)
·The sophistication or the simplicity of a piece
·Musical patterns
·Etc.
In all these situations, the degree of objectivity varies in function of the listeners, not only because they have different levels of musical training, but also because each listener has a personal musical background (and a personal life background too).
Let us notice that these moments aspects of music judged by listeners, different in nature, help to understand that there are various ways to acquire musical knowledge and various types of music listening, all types depending on what culture expects from music in a given society. In a culture, what is music ? It is a specific type of cultural creation depending on sonic events. In fact, sound is a main component of the music aesthetics experience. Its sensual qualities hit the ear of the listener, which can evaluate specific sonic elements or a whole sound section in function of his/her own sonic culture.
Music aestheticians obviously contribute through their thinking and writings to the production and analysis of beautiful music, even if there is no unique viewpoint on the beautiful. Understanding how music produces an impact and why is their main mission. In that context, music history and music practice teachers play a main role too: as aestheticians themselves (and inevitably they are, in a way or another) or as peers and resource persons.
Understanding music means that the intellect, as well as the ears, is hearing music, trying to determine what is pleasant or unpleasant in it. The intellect attributes meanings and emotions to musical elements. Sometimes objectively, when it captures a specific sonic parameter like loudness, for instance (loudness is an objective criterion, a sound is loud or it is not). Sometimes in a subjective manner (and it is then more related to personal feelings). Listening to music, it is possible to reach a certain level of objectivity. In fact, all music genres contain rational elements, mathematical ratios. Real understanding happens when listeners perceive a musical structure, rather than isolated sounds.
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Music aesthetic taste and consumer behavior : storytelling
A bit of storytelling to discern real aesthetic issues
This is obvious: one may appreciate musical productions or « goods » only if he/she acquired a certain taste. We refuse to talk about «levels», when it comes to musical productions, or about « good » or « bad » productions « per se ». We would rather say that specific music aesthetics views contribute to produce specific music styles and that, dedicating time to that task, they can appreciate all these music styles.
Aesthetic qualities, in musical productions, relate to non-aesthetic ones : musical ratios, for instance. Aesthetic tastes are more than preferences, even if, economically speaking, consumers of cultural goods use the word « taste » as a synonym for « preference ». There is less consensus around aesthetic standards than around other types of judgments, for instance those related to truth and error. There are, of course, qualities in a musical object that can be seen and described, but subjective opinions are part of the description, taking pleasantness into account.
Let us imagine stories around fictional, yet realistic portraits of music consumers. What is the target here ? It is a way for us to share the real knowledge that we have of musicians’ (with more than 15,000 clients) and listeners’ needs in the field of music aesthetics without being intrusive (this is privacy’s respect) or going off-topic.
William
William is a connoisseur. He has an ear for music because he is fond of music and unceasingly listens to new music when he has free time. He has an extensive knowledge of popular music from the 1920s. He is interested in the idea of music appreciation and began to follow an online course which introduced him to classical music.
However, the analysis made by teachers during such classes do not interest him very much. He finds the explanations too theoretical and would appreciate entering in contact with interesting sounds and tunes more directly and massively but in a way that is different from the one provided by music streaming services. In fact, he found that strict classification by genres or moods does not often lead him to interesting (at his eyes) pieces without losing a lot of time : he spends much more time to eliminate uninteresting titles than to listen to other ones that he can like.
We can say that William is interested in music aesthetics: he makes judgments, practises active music listening and want to know more about new musical genres. Readings in music aesthetics or a tool like the YMusic search engine can help him...
James
James is regularly hired by professional press owners to review music in order to help their readers to extend their musical culture. As he is familiar both with with classical music theory and modern production techniques he is unique in his knack of presenting musical works from various eras. Being a smart reviewer searching for authenticity, he would now want to go further and get off the beaten track.
His established and faithful partners enchant him, yet they do not want to guide their audience to think out of the box and James would like to reach new types of audiences. He thus began to create a professional blog where he reviews pieces of music that are more niche. Musical information, for this type of pieces, is much more difficult to find, though, for instance the one that is related to sounds or forms.
In the case of James too, we have aesthetic questions related to the discovery of new styles of music. These questions are the most difficult ones to resolve, in a music industry wheres genres and their numerous subgenres are strongly linked to sales campaigns. Readings in music aesthetics or a tool like the YMusic search engine can help him...
Lucy
After a meeting with his thesis director, Lucy, a graduate student in music, decides to know more about European and world musical folklore, which is not the main subject of her thesis but will help her to understand how classical musicians apparently very different inserted elements of musical folklore in their classical works.
She must respect a specific delay to deliver her thesis and she would appreciate finding an online tool to explore and compare easily the work of these composers, especially at the level of the rhythm. As printed sheet music may be hard to find in specific cases, she begins to think that a music search engine could be useful. Another doctoral student tells her about apps that find music incipits and other apps that let introduce sequences of chords to compare them into different titles.
In Lucy’s context, these apps are more interesting than music streaming services to make music aesthetics statements, as they are providing her with some analysis, but they are embryonic. She would like to find a tool for more complex queries. Also, she is not interested in solving the type of issues presented and solved by these apps, or not in their ways. As she is already highly trained in music aesthetics, the only tool that she needs would be a granular analysis tool. For all these reasons, the YMusic search engine could be a real opportunity for her, it could help her to shape and frame the musical problems that truly matter for her...
Peter Paul
Peter Paul is a musicologist and also a guest professor within several university music departments. He also owns an independent record label and has an experience as a music producer and publisher. He spends a lot of time on music streaming services, both to find new talents for his label and to prepare courses for his students. He uses a metadata software which helps him to classify music by genre in a sophisticated way and to follow trends.
However, such software is useless when it comes to explaining why people really love and buy specific music, independently of an advertising campaign. As a small business owner, Peter Paul is on a budget and does not want to spend money for ads. And independently of sales, metadata software does not really help him to find new original talents. Also, it takes too much time.
Peter Paul would like to satisfy his humble yet faithful audience. He knows that a huge part of music streaming services catalogues are never reached. How could he formulate new aesthetic statements and find the corresponding artists to enrich his catalogue, while he is so busy ? A certain number of music departments in universities all around the world developed analysis tools in their lab, but none of them helped him to know more about his tastes as a producer. Peter Paul could only appreciate the YMusic search engine…
Oliver
Oliver is, for several years, a composer whose scores are played in local venues. Trained in classical music, he finds electronic music attractive and he recently took a music production course which helped him to do his first steps in the field. He still experiences difficulties in building the foundations of his own composition style : electronic music is not so monolithic that several of his classical teachers said once. And Oliver aims to mix elements of classical and electronic music in future compositions.
What he needs now is a tool to establish a list of music patterns found both in classical and electronic music. A broader analysis tool able to transcend the concept of music genre and trends, a search engine with a small number of enlightening features to know more about the musical reasoning of each composer that he wants to understand. For all these reasons, the YMusic search engine can be a real asset for Oliver: being able to review a vast database at the level of musical content itself, it may contribute to open uncanny music aesthetics opportunities…
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Music aesthetics and knowledge management
From sensation or tags to beauty
Relying on judgment, music aesthetics has of course strong relationships with research and knowledge management. When music researchers select a topic for their thesis, when a music librarian is cataloging a corpus, they make differentiations, produce new ideas related to classification and, therefore, they model musical knowledge and contribute to the development of musicology.
These activities and many other ones produce economic value within the music industry. Many music professionals contribute to create and distribute music and they all have extended music aesthetic skills from different cultural backgrounds. Meeting other professionals, they can create new musical knowledge, taking both existing knowledge and aesthetics and their intuitions and sensitivity into account.
The YMusic search engine, containing features to analyze the content of a piece of music, can help to execute tasks related to knowledge management. And as it also offers the opportunity to create playlists which can be exported in Youtube and Spotify and constitute a new possibility to share music search results with other listeners. The principle of playlists is not new, yet with YMusic, playlists’ content is more relevant, as each query answers to questions related to the musical content itself.
Making playlists with YMusic, listeners can share aesthetics judgments on musical content and show directly the pieces of music that they find beautiful at the musical level. Explicitely: playlists do not contain any form of analytical statement, they do not contain anything else than musical materials, but it is the most important when it comes to music. These playlists can be checked by ear and, therefore, even listeners who are not trained in musical theory can recognize the level of musical similarity between titles, in much easier ways than those offered by keywords and tags.
Doing playlists with YMusic and sharing them, attentive music listeners contribute to the constitution of other music listeners’ as music aesthetic subjects. In fact, these ones also answer to music by making aesthetic judgments, saying a piece of music beautiful, another ugly. And the algorithms behind YMusic do not tell listeners what they must find beautiful. They just give efficient tools to classify musical elements, checking their proportions for instance.
It helps listeners to know more about the combinations of musical elements they love and, therefore, why they appreciate the music they appreciate. And listeners can then describe their music listening experience, sharing their knowledge with others. They can relate their rhythmic perception, establish relationships between melodic and harmonic elements, etc. From sensations’ searchers, they become beauty’s explorers.
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Conclusion
In this presentation, after a brief reminder of the birth of modern aesthetics, we explained the main concepts of music aesthetics and how they concern all music lovers, from casual listeners to professional composers. Through music listeners personas, we described common music aesthetics problems met by listeners and musicians during their music searches.
From the second half of the 20th century, music aestheticians are confronted with new music aesthetic issues and questions. Compositional techniques and music production began to combine with the creation of synthesizers. Both musical structures and sonic forms now mix in subtle ways. Researchers find an interest in describing in which ways.
In that context, the YMusic search engine can be a useful tool for music listeners who want to determine with precision why they find a piece of music beautiful or ugly and for music creators who want to analyze music at a granular level.
Now we invite you to test the YMusic search engine. You always searched for music with words, now find it with musical criteria.
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Bibliographic references
For several ones, please consult the section "music aesthetics" of the general bibliography of the website. (link below)
In this online book, dedicated to all music lovers who want to develop their search and knowledge skills, after a brief reminder of the birth of modern aesthetics, we explain the main concepts of music aesthetics and how they concern all music lovers, from casual listeners to professional composers. Through music listeners personas, we describe common music aesthetics problems met by listeners and musicians during their music searches.
INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC (A)ESTHETICS: READ THE ONLINE BOOK