Music is not science (in more ways than one!) and can go no further than
the range of human hearing. (There are those lollypop radios you suck on
and listen with your mouth, but everything you hear with your mouth you've
heard before with your ears, but that's more about radio than science...)
There is no unhearable in music as there is an unknowable in science.
Technology continues to open up and expand scientific perception, maybe
forever, but technology cannot do this for music. The Electronic generation
of sound was the very LAST music assist science will provide. It's a MUCH
more finite range of possibilities that must end up working as audio in our
ears.
There is no quantum level of sound to hear benieth what we can hear, or
that's what I'm betting. (The microscopic recording of very small,
"unhearable" sounds has also appeared in music.) The definition of music
cannot expand beyond silence at one end and total noise at the other, both
of which have already been explored in terms of precedent. And, I contend,
every possible precedent in between as well. Science can and does continue
to explore and reveal when its subject goes beyond the range of our natural
senses, but music cannot.
Up through the last Century, you actually could and did hear new, untried
sounds incorporated into music from time to time, but no more. If you hear
ANY sound in music that has not been used/heard before, let me know
immediately, and I will be willing to revise my theory if I can't tell you
where and when it has been heard in music before. Musical precedent is just
a memory.
DJ
Negativland
>>>>>Everything that CAN be music (categorically speaking) has
>reached our ears by now...
>
>You may be right but I can't help thinking about the fact that in the late
>19th and early 20th Centurys the scientific world thought that, between
>Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism and Newton's laws of gravitation,
>everything that could be known about physics was pretty much known. As it
>turned out the seemingly tiny bit left to discover was relativity and
>quantum physics, which revolutionized science.
>
>There may yet be an infinite range of invention in the seemingly narrow band
>of undiscovered territory and, as a practical matter, what is "music" is
>defined subjectively by the listener so we may find its very definition may
>expand greatly as the human mind evolves (and helping that process along is
>certainly one of art's great functions).
>
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