perception of consonance depends on the volume of the notes, the frequency range of the notes, and the acoustic context of the notes, not just the individual note frequencies. I know I'm getting down in the weeds with the "technical details", but there is an important point here: the wavelength of a tone does not determine the musical perception of a tone. (Our auditory system must do a lot of work to help us perceive two notes as an octave apart! It's not just "given" to us by
particular sound waves.)
It's useful here to come back to the music/linguistic parallels. The position that Miles is articulating here in relation to music recalls the founding dogma of Saussurean linguistics, namely the arbitrainess of the sign. I call it a dogma because, while it was a productive proposition a hundred years ago that led to a century of linguistic debate (I hesitate to say research), it eventually became a straightjacket for linguistics.
BTW it is worth mentioning that the arbitrariness of the sign was the one insight -- dodgy as it is -- that poststructuralism took from linguistics. You take that away from them and the whole edifice collapses, from Lacan to Derrida to Barthes to Althusser and the rest (perhaps not Zizek), as well as a generation of French semiotician-linguists from Benveniste to Greimas to Rastier and many many more. I have a certain respect for members of this latter group -- I had a very enlightening discussion with Rastier himself at a conference in Italy last year, in which he explained to me how it was that French structuralism had very little to do with the structuralist movement in the US, which was mainly a phenomenon of the 1930s, that rather "French 'structuralism' was in fact post-structuralism from the very beginning".
Now I don't mean to say that the arbitrariness of the sign is 'false'. What it is, at its most useful, is a speculative proposition. It affords the opportunity for reflection on its own truth and falsity alike. But if you lose the speculative sense of a proposition like that, as Saussure himself most certainly did, you are into the terrain of dogma and ideology. And let's be clear, a sweeping assertion that linguistic or other signs are arbitrary through and through has turned out to be unprovable. For most schools of linguistics today this principle, insofar as it even appears at all, is properly tempered by its opposite (also mentioned but donwplayed in Saussure), namely the MOTIVATION of the sign.
So how does this relate to the music discussion? Miles has suggested, similarly, that not only the divisions of the octave, but even the octave itself is arbitrary. From the point of view of pure form, this is true, just as it is true in Saussurean linguistics. (Saussure: "Language is a form not a substance"). So, one could argue, that a pure form, once it is fixed in consciousness, tends to reify and naturalise itself, so that its seems substantial rather than arbitrary. So one gets into debates about whether this interval or that interval is motivated by some natural criterion or whether it is entirely arbitrary, a pure form and nothing more. Mathematics (the purest form of all) is enlisted to show how arbtirary these tonal divisions actually are. It varies from culture to culture and they're all just different measurements and no one is more natural than the other, etc. etc.
But this leaves too many things unexplained. For one thing it helps not a bit in the discussion that we have seen here about the border between music and non-music. If birdsong and the sounds of machines and factories, and even the sounds of normal human speech, are all potentially music, then really 'music' is just a synonym for 'sound'. But the issue is why do certain sounds become considered as music? Secondly, why do some of them become heard as music within certain cultures and at certain places or times in history? Why do they become aesthetically pleasing for large groups of people at those points in history? Our formalists and their calculations can't help us there. The answer of course lies precisely in the fact that these incorporations of sounds into music are not really arbitrary in nature. They are things that sound good, or interesting, to people for reasons. When a composer like Messiaen incorporates birdsong into his music, or industrial bands incorporate the sounds of machines, one has to see this as a reaction that is motivated within the discourse of musical art in a context. It is a reaction to the environment, and a drawing of attention to a changed sensibility in relation to the environment, a 'statement', if you will, about the environment. As subjective intention this must be substantial, not just arbitarary formalism, otherwise it will literally 'not mean anything' to those who apprehend it and would not become established as music.
Coming back to less conceptual and more traditional music and the western scales and octave that were being debated: Given that people perceive certain modes or scales as having different colours and moods -- the well known phenomenon of synesthesia (consider the word 'chromatic') -- one would want to know what motivates these sorts of perceptions and responses. The significance of Cassirer here has got a bit lost. But the point is that Cassirer was the last of the great neo-kantians, and my reading of him suggests to me that he would explain these phenomena as much by the natural endowment of the cogniser as by the properties of the thing being cognised. Take the octave for example. Is it an arbitrary and incidental fact that when a man and a woman sing in unison, that their voices will tend to be an octave apart? Can that really be arbitrary? I submit that the origin of the octave is not at all arbitrary; it has its motivation right there in a fact of human nature. An essence, if you will; in this case the approximate gap in pitch between men's and women's voices.
In linguistics there is more than a tendency to move back from the post-structuralist abyss and the various imbecilities of postmodernism that flow from the dogma of the arbitrary sign. This broad movement draws on, inter alia: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception; Gestaltist and cognitivist psychology; the catastrophe theory semantics (and math) of Rene Thom, Jean Petitot and Wolfgang Wildgen; Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; and, more recently the autopoiesis of Maturana and Varela. See the recent work of Yves-Marie Visetti (2004), Visetti and Pierre Cadiot (2002) and Alexander Kravchenko (2006; 2007) for some examples. In American linguistics, some of the Cognitive Linguistics school can be regarded as a roughly cognate development, e.g. Langacker et al. Saussure finds very little space in all of this. BTW the most emphatically anti-Saussure and anti-poststructuralist school is the 'intergrationist linguistics' group that is clustered around the Oxford professor Roy Harris, but that is another story for another day.
I hope that the requirement of names, dates, facts, etc. has been satsified here. But it is not always needed. Sometimes people really need to be able to respond to the propositional content of the arguments presented rather than the presence or omission of their favourite brand names.
Tahir
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