Fist fight!!!

.... no.

This sentence is gayer than two men kissing.

This seems like some sort of strange anti-analysis.

From personal experience: I've been trying to play guitar, drums and sing for the last 10 years, I'm nothing special but understand enough about composition, technique, blah, blah... to analyze music on a formal level and have listened to enough diverse stuff to understand stylistic qualities. As far as getting into new genres, to only way that I could do it is by finding something that connected with me on a purely emotional level - that then gave me to drive to understand and explore the technical and stylistic side of it.

The key was getting to the mental point where dissection is instantaneous.

OK, now I'm talking like freakin' Billy the Blue Ranger.

I guess maybe im not 100% clear on what you mean by "dissection".

I have the opposite challenge. I (still, after years of experience where I should know better) have the tendency to go, "Gah! Don't do that! It's not weird enough."

Sounds like you're an objectivist (at least a bit)?

Re the overall discussion in the last couple pages, I'd agree that there's a different perspective once you've acclimated yourself to a genre a bit (via immersion, as well as reading about it a bit, etc.) than when you first experience it, at least in cases where it's quite unlike anything else you've experienced, but I wouldn't say that there are right or wrong criteria for judging anything, or that anything can be good aside from what people like about it (or bad aside from what they dislike about it).

"Understanding what makes something good," where the person doesn't like the thing in question, reads very funny to me to say the least. Good and bad refer to liking/disliking things, thinking that things are worthwhile for some reason or not worthwhile. They don't obtain outside of that. (Or in more common words, they're subjective, not objective.)

Do you mean objectivist like Ayn Rand? I don't need some lofty excuse to be a selfish *******, I just am :D.

I'd like a slice of your brain operated into mine! Then I wouldn't get stuck for months at a time, doing stuff than I think sounds too banal.

No--just someone who believes that aesthetic value (in this case) is or can be objective rather than subjective. Or in other words, someone who believes that music being good or bad can be independent of how individuals feel about the music in question.

Eh, to a very very very small degree, yes. I largely think that it's almost entirely impossible to overcome our biases towards forms of music though, which means that it's better to call it subjective because of how difficult it would be to establish objectivity on art. I've always been interested in researching music taste through neuroscience and seeing if there's some kind of "universal song" that evades culture and appeals to the human brain on an almost instinctual level. It'd be really interesting if we can circumvent composition for some music and create it on a rationalized level based on that information. We already know some things like repetition being appealing, but I think the field needs to dig deeper and see if maybe there is a level of objectivity to music.

Well, (near) universality would be different than objectivity though. For one, say it's near universal to feel that a particular piece of music is good, and of course that would be due to brain functioning and so on. But along comes someone whose brain works differently, and he feels that that same piece sucks. He's not wrong in that just because he feels differently. He's just unusual.

If aesthetic quality were objective, though, he should be wrong. He'd be perceiving the quality of the piece incorrectly, and he should be just as wrong that it sucks as he'd be if he insisted that the moon were made of cheese.

The universality thing was more of a tangent that got kicked off by my idea that establishing the objectivity as more than a firmly stated subjectivity could be done by that type of research.

I love it when conversation gets deeper than Evangelion

aylmao

I almost want to introduce my children to Merzbow before any other music, just to see what would happen. (Also, I don't have any children.)

Whatever you immerse them in as infants will have an impact. I come from a family of music lovers, and from the time I was a baby--I was born in the early 60s--my dad constantly played pre British Invasion rock 'n' roll, doo-wop, R&B, blues, country, etc., while my mom was very on top of current pop, so she was following the Beach Boys, Beatles, Stones, Who, Dylan, etc. right from the start and I heard that stuff all the time, too. My older sister and an uncle were into popular music as well as more obscure stuff, psychedelic music, early hard rock/metal, etc., and my grandfather was heavily into classical, jazz and pre-rock pop. So I grew up listening to all of that stuff rather than kids music or anything like that.

lol nice

OP was written so novel and hipster like and the Grammer was top notch I couldn't quite read it right can u dumb it down 4 me LOL

I had a mom who loved 70's-80'd rock and and pop and disco, a dad who loved southern rock and country and jazz, and a grandmother who loved classical. No wonder I like Meat Loaf.

I'm just taking away from this is that you're gay. And not as in lame.

No I'm not.

Only closet gays deny it.

Since the age of the ancients, music aesthetics has been a fantastic enigma of civilization, and the transcendence you describe is one of its most enduring emotive phenomena.

I can speak only for my myself and of my own personal experience, but I’ve a habitual propensity for hyper-analysis of music and the arts and enjoy the activity thoroughly. In fact, I revel in the meta more than in the music, itself - I thrive on critical reception, historical perspective, and contextual understanding. It isn’t so much the work of art as it is the artist, their direct environment, their culture, and their societal circumstance which interests me. This adds a rich dimension of understanding to the composition which I fear is ignored by the casual listener.

But to address transcendence, I’ve most certainly experienced moments where a piece circumvented my cerebral modus operandi and affected me in some other, less tangible or objective fashion. I recall experiencing a particular elation listening to Spiritualized’s Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space LP for the very first time - dilation of the pupils, a sudden release of dopamine and serotonin, pilomotor reflex… (or perhaps it was just Voight-Kampff.)

I’ll make no claim that one methodology is superior to the other, as there are evident benefits to each respectively. But I will say that those rare moments of transcendence are quite extraordinary, even for a mathematically-minded listener such as myself.

I’m really loving the thread - keep it up!

And thus begins the young boy's journey...