Does Music Need Its Own Category?

I find interesting that we animate music-making, music-listening, music-appreciating beings relationally consider and speak of music. We speak of its impact on us, how it makes us feel, and our relationship with it. We discuss music as often in terms of its agency as we do in terms of its instrumentality. In class, and it classmates' blogs we acknowledge the significance and necessary role of music in a human life. Some have asked could we live without music? Is life without music imaginable?

Davies’ position about why and how we respond emotionally to music, the value of such responses, and why we choose to listen to music that elicits ‘negative’ responses from us has to do with emotional ‘appearance’.” He states that we are the ones descriptively attributing emotions to music by creating a counterfeit physiognomic profile for music. Davies believes music’s patterns of dynamic movement present the appearance of emotions “without being external indicators of inner perturbations” that music does not and cannot emote (180-185).
Music has the capacity to engage us with varying intensity and on multiple levels, emotionally, physically, and energetically. Davies said, “Music is the focus of attention and perceptual object of the (emotional) response”. He credits Matravers with the claim that “our response to music is a feeling, not an emotion, because it lacks the cognitive contents characteristic of emotions - the response is not an object-directed, cognitively founded emotion. Music can arouse only rather general feelings…and is capable of expressing only a limited range of emotions” (188).

Davies believes that we have anthropomorphized music because it moves in ways that fit the emotionally descriptive terminology we use for human action-description. I think he does not give us or the vibrational relationship that music creates with us sufficient credit.

MY QUESTIONS:
1. Bird songs can elicit emotional responses from other conspecific and interspecific birds (within their own specie and between other bird species).
Can Davies theory of ‘appearance’ is applied to birds’ emotional responses to other birds’ songs? If not, how does this affect Davies’ theory?

2. Davies states, “any theory of musical expressiveness must acknowledge and respect the phenomenological vivacity and particularity” of manner with which emotion is expressed by music (175). In this statement Davies gives agency to music as the expressor of music. Is he conferring animate-like status to music?
Should music be classified in a unique category since it has characteristics of both animate and inanimate essences?

Musical Instruments and Moral Patient Status

I find it interesting that audiences comprised of non-professional musicians generally view musical instruments as deserving the same respect and potential beingness as professional musicians. I agree with Davies that this perception is more than the awareness of the monetary, historical, or artistic value of the instruments. Davies supplies us with the historical and ethical aspects involving human relationships with musical instruments. I wonder if there is also a neurobiological component contributing to the ability of people to meld with musical instruments. Levitin found that hearing a piece of music activates the same parts of a listener's brain as it does in the brain of a musician playing the piece. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, a functional MRI was used to examine the effect of experience with a type of music on listeners' neural responses to the music. (Margulis et al. 2007. "Selective Neurophysiologic Responses to Music in Instrumentalists with Different Listening Biographies.") This study found that practice, training and experience develop a musician's ear and abilities. When violinists listened to the violin and flutists listened to the flute, they engaged many more areas of the brain related to sense of self, motor control and suppression of unwanted movements. They found “auditory self-relevance and expertise was a mechanism of perceptual-neural plasticity, and implicate neural tuning that includes and extends beyond acoustic and communication-relevant structures”. I believe this is neurophysiological evidence supporting the anecdotal evidence Davies presented that musicians’ have dissolved at least some of the boundaries between themselves and their instruments. However, I do not think this study can be extrapolated to include non-musicians.
I think the nature of our musical aesthetic includes social and ethical constructs born from neurophysiological responses to the vibrations of the sounds produced from all instruments, and includes all music producing beings.

My Question
Davies claims that “Musical instruments retain an autonomy and independence of the musicians who use them,” and that “the instrument extends the musician’s body and inner life.” Given that instruments possess an inherent pattern facilitating active partnership in the co-creation of music, should their creative potential be sufficient to ensure their freedom from abuse? Do musical instruments qualify for moral patient status?

Comment on Keane's Comment

I can understand Cage's willingness to roll dice. I do the same thing some times with something I'm passionate about - animals. From a lifetime of observing animals, I can often predict what their response will be under certain circumstances. These days I often find myself pushing a boundary with animals - moving from unobtrusive observer to inserting a minute element of myself into the environment equation, and watching for their response. I feel I'm growing in understanding wildlife, I'm proactively learning and when they stay - it is exhilarating; when they depart it is humbling. But I found another boundary and it was a learning experience. Not knowing the outcome of playing with some thing you love creates great excitement and I believe, keeps the intensity in one's passion.

Choose to Move

This is a response to Keane's question, "When we roll the dice to extricate ourselves from choice; do we consider the choice to roll (the dice) as having weight?"

If I understand your question correctly (as you intended it to be understood), I would definitely consider the choice to roll the dice as a weighty choice.
Before making the decision to remove myself from choice, I would actively explore what I would consider as the possible outcomes of choosing the options other than not choosing. Deciding not to exercise any of the options leading to one of the possible outcomes of my choice would occur under the weighted examination of my cognitive and ethical systems. I can list three viable reasons why I would choose to extricate myself from choice.
One would be that I have insufficient knowledge to exercise the best choice (ignorance of subject matter) AND the object of choice holds little value to me. Examples: color of phone, computer, key ring, car, etc. - material objects rate low on the value scale relative to living being or the ability of environment to sufficiently meet my needs.
The 2nd reason would be that I have insufficient data to choose well (other living beings involved - I can not accurately predict their response) and I would find any of the potential outcomes interesting. This is what I regard as my experiment position - wait to see what the other being's move will be, and re-examine situation with new data.
The 3rd reason has the greatest weight. I find no acceptable choice, so I choose not to choose any of the options presented to me. While this path of inaction has an element of experimentalism in it, it is often accompanied by a sense of fatalism or resignation.
Choosing not to proactively exercise our option of choice is radically different from operating out of a position of choice-lessness, which can be a weight upon our heart, our mind, or our soul.

Silence, Music, and Disorganized Sounds

Our class discussion of what music is and is not, and what silence is and is not, led me to think more about the noise made by my cats and dogs. My lab does not howl/sing like Pup. I believe some breeds are more natural howlers/singers than others are. Pup is very musical, he sings on key when he is expressing happiness or sadness. However, after class I realized that there are times when he is attempting to relate to another four-legged, his vocalizations sound disharmonious to me. I believe this happens when he’s unsure of how he should be feeling, or he’s not fully certain about a situation – for instance when he sees, or meets, other dogs that he can’t get a clear read on – either because we’re driving by them, or they are communicating in barks, not howls. I have noticed that both my dogs are likely to start barking in respond to other dogs barking, and that if the barking gets faster and raises in pitch, then they answer in kind. I find this disharmonious noise to be disorganized sound, and definitely not music. I have seen dogs whip themselves into frenzy through this activity. I know Cesar Millan would say they are in an unbalanced state. The dogs are communicating their unbalanced state through their disorganized sound.

My Question:

Can we create music, which is endurable to others, when we are in a very unbalanced state? Or, like dogs, can we only create disorganized, disharmonious sound from an unbalanced state?