Please look through this essay!

Assignment brief:
Expand and refine 1 of the 3 reading tasks OR 1 of 2 analysis tasks for assessment. The essay/analysis paper should be the equivalent of 1500 words and follow Style Guide. Submit to the music office no later than 4pm on Thursday, 20 January.

Essay: Discussion of Roads’ ‘Time Scales of Music’
A brief discussion and comparison of evolution by nature and musical evolution by man.
The main factor in the evolution of the human hearing perception is; better senses of hearing and smell would aid in evading predators. So, we can imagine – that when humans still were living as hunters – having the best and finest tuned hearing was essential for surviving as the need for picking up every sound was crucial. Today, we are suffering from this – because our hearing haven’t changed that much – and in today’s society we are exposed for all sorts of unnecessary / unwanted sound. We have no way of closing or filtering these sounds out – many may argue that we can develop a high tolerance for such living, as human beings can adapt to living in most environments. As all other species, human beings use quite some time in changing the way we function in relation to our surroundings (evolution) and our hearing perception is not known to have changed much since we where hunters (the human species have actually not existed that long in terms of much interesting happening evolutionary speaking). The average human is said to have a hearing range from 20Hz to 20kHz. This is likely to change, because of all the noise that is around us. One could also speculate that we could get one “super group” of humans that are developing the other way, getting a more sensitive hearing range. But, since most of the noise we surround our self with is “unwanted” noise, it is more likely that the range and sensitivity will decrease.

I asked this question to the Newton BBS – an Internet science panel where you can ask questions to researchers and scientists – and I got two replies, undermining what I already thought (I have only chosen to quote one reply in this essay):

My question
“I was wondering if the human hearing perception has undergone any major changes in terms of evolution - and, is it likely to change in the future? And what may the outcome of this evolution be? “

Reply:

”I do not believe that the human evolutionary record is complete enough to determine this. Man has not been around long enough for this evolutionary change to be detected in the fossil record. And, there aren't enough rocks younger than 2,000,000 years to display this record. However, there is logical conjecture that early man had larger outer ears due to a survival need, compared to modern man. Man has chosen to make the world a noisy place. In my opinion, future man will have less sensitive hearing for two reasons: a decreased survival need for hearing, and decreased sensitivity due to noise exposure. It is also possible that evolution may enable the tragus (the flap at the entrance of the ear canal) to close at will to keep noise out, without the need to use fingers.” - Tom Esposito

Time in music
Objectively speaking, a composing process is usually that first drafts is what gives the frame of the work (Macro scale) which may go on to be worked on for months. The first draft may be the most spontaneous, but it usually needs refining, because the spontaneous is usually just a set of ideas. As Roads argues, a composer may spend 1 year on making 10 minutes of music, rejecting material as he progresses in his work. This relates to the Supra time scale – a scale beyond the individual composition (months, years, decades and centuries). But this scale is an important, because it is here the composer evolves (months & years) and ripens his or her ideas. Every piece of sound made by a composer during his or hers time is important, because this time scale will always relate to the next, “the Macro time scale, the time scale of overall musical architecture or form, measured in minutes or hours, or in extreme cases, days.” – Roads.
And this will in turn affect the Meso (divisions of form) as the composer develops his own style. It may also affect the Sound object, the next level on the time scale, and lastly the Micro, Sample, Subsample & Infitesimal time scale. The three most obvious time scales for modern music is the Subsample scale up to the Macro scale. This is because most people do not think in higher (or lower) abstractions than this, and do not often think longer than the general adaptation of western musical language.

I think that every composer of modern music are reliant on the repetition of the ‘Macro time scale’ to impart a sense of formal orientation because every composer will have some sort of cultural background, as will the listener. You can never start on a “clean sheet” as a composer, because the act of composing will always be a product of listening to other composers. This will always shine through at some point in their music. This will also be evident when talking about form. A general idea is that the composer should always try to learn through listening to other composers, and hence could you not say that a good composer is referring to other composers whilst still try to maintain a certain originality?

The difference in formal design in popular and classical music is a big one in many ways, but still, popular music as we know it today is often built on the principals of classical music. The common stigma about someone who enjoys classical music is that he or she has had some sort of education to understand the music in a better way. It may be true that one can get a higher experience of music if one know the concepts and theories lying behind the making of music – but it will not necessarily mean that the music will be experienced in a different tonal way. We must of course take in to account the amount of training the different listeners may have had prior to listening in order to appreciate regular intervals of cadences and repetition – but is this not similar to much of the popular music of today? Jazz, Rock, R & B and even Techno could never have existed if classical music had not made the set of rules that we can still find in music of today. Such forms as the A B A is still a common in today’s music – a clear product of the classical form.

The making of the popular music of today on a semi-professional such as an increasingly amount of people today is done in a home studio. Most sequencing software is made to stimulate the commercial market as well as the professional user. In order to create fast, recognisable results – a sequencer needs to come with a recognisable set of parameters when it starts up. For instance, Emagic Logic comes with the parameters 4/4 and 120bmp as a default. So does Fruity Loops, Qbase and Cool Edit. This is because most commercial pop music is made with these parameters. The reason for these parameters to be so commonplace is that it is said that it is the closest you come to your heartbeat while dancing. There is however an alternative to these sequencers, and they usually start off as a ‘clean sheet’ – maybe the most obvious and popular alternative of today being Max from Cycling 74, where you start off with nothing and make everything your self. This also creates several levels of abstractions in the creation process – and therefore forces the user to think in new and other ways.

I think that Roads discusses a very important subject in ‘Time Scales of Music’ – he wants to classify the whole spectrum of time in music – from the micro end to the infinite. The task Roads has taken upon him is not a light task – the subject is at times highly philosophical – and as Roads states him self: “It is necessary to see music over a broad range of time scales, from the infitesimal to the supra scale (Christensen 1996). Not all musicians are prepared to view musical time from such a comprehensive perspective, however, and it may well take decades for this perspective to filter into our general musical vocabulary”.
The technology of today, and the evolution of computers will possibly aid us on our way to a higher understanding of this complex subject. The hearing evolution is useful to look at when we are talking about Roads’ set of time scales – why are we at the place we are today? I think we all can agree that evolution has played a big part in how music is today. Many would argue that music has undergone a regression rather than evolution – and that the formalist ideas of the classical tradition has created rather predictable music than unpredictable and ‘exiting’. The need for stability in music on one hand, and ‘chaos’ on the other will always co-exist in my opinion. There may be room for Roads’ views on the time scales of music – but I think that it will probably (sadly enough) be forgotten soon enough going in to the Supra time scale, affecting the Macro time scale on the next level – and maybe in a 100 years, someone will have Roads’ ideas and thoughts again, in a refined and more simplified and understandable (commercial) way!

REFERENCES
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/Class/sound/u11l2d.html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/aascorps.htm