In my web wanderings, I stumbled once again on the writings of Marvin Minsky, a big-brained gentleman at MIT, who has contributed seminal thoughts to the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics, among others.
Within his diverse interests, Minsky also has a fascination for music as a cognitive process…what it does, why we like it, how we can think about those things. While the reading is fairly thick, it’s a fascinating perspective for anyone that has to market, engage, educate, fundraise, or otherwise advocate the role of music in our lives.
In one paper, ”Music, Mind, and Meaning,” he spins out some of his thinking on why we like music, and why traditional theory and analysis miss the mark by miles:
It has become taboo for music theorists to ask why we like what we like: our seekers have forgotten what they are searching for. To be sure, we can’t account for tastes, in general, because people have various preferences. But this means only that we have to find the causes of this diversity of tastes, and this in turn means we must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Minsky explores our engagement with music from a cognitive perspective — as a way of thinking, a way of learning, a way of focusing or redirecting our brain activity (to calm, to challenge, to reinforce). That exploration quickly leads him through emotions, reasoning, and other curiosities of the human brain.
Also worth a moment (or 20 minutes, actually), is Minsky’s September 2004 interview on BBC (available in MP3 format), in which he discusses Beethoven, emotions, reason, and where they all combine.
