{"id":1831,"date":"2014-07-22T17:32:44","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T00:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2018-03-03T17:34:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T01:34:43","slug":"machine-with-an-esthetic-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/archives\/1831","title":{"rendered":"Machine with an Esthetic Purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Gerry Sussman<\/a>, of MIT, called to ask if I\u2019d anything to say on parallelism of art and engineering. (He was preparing a talk.) I did have a remark that I\u2019d never shared with anyone. \u201cA work of art,\u201d said I, \u201cis a machine with an esthetic purpose.\u201d Gerry got a kick out of this, and used it in his talk, later commenting to me,<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I was trying to point out that the thought processes of artists are not extremely different from the thought processes of engineers, or scientists, or mathematicians. [Gerry is all three of these, and a watchmaker too.]<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In particular, an engineer designs a machine for a purpose. To do so he\/she selects parts that will contribute to the desired behavior of the machine and interconnects those parts in such a way as to obtain that behavior. The interconnection may not be easy and the parts may have to be modified or interfaces constructed to fix various bugs that will appear.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Quite similarly, an artist, a poet for example, may design a poem to have a particular emotional impact on the reader. The poet may select certain patterns of words that have part of the effect and glue them together, with great precision, to build the desired impact. They may not go together easily, so there is an inevitable snipping and filing and sanding and polishing, and otherwise manipulating the interfaces to make the poem work.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This was forcefully brought to my attention by the essay \u201cPhilosophy of Composition\u201d<\/a> by Edgar Allen Poe. In this essay Poe explains the construction of \u201cThe Raven\u201d. He says: \u201cI select \u2018The Raven\u2019, as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition\u2014that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.\u201d There are similar comments by Baudelaire.<\/i> \u2014Gerald Jay Sussman.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve discovered similar comments by the poets William Carlos Williams (\u201cA poem is a small machine made out of words\u201d) and Paul Val\u00e9ry (\u201cA poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words\u201d).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s said that the painter Edgar Degas wanted to write poems, and complained to the poet Mallarm\u00e9 that he couldn\u2019t seem to write well, though he was \u201cfull of ideas.\u201d Mallarm\u00e9 replied, \u201cMy dear Degas, poems are not made out of ideas. They\u2019re made out of words.\u201d There we see the necessity for Sussman\u2019s engineer to \u201cselect parts that will contribute to the desired behavior\u201d: not ideas but words.<\/p>\n

To some people, the idea of \u201ca machine with an esthetic purpose\u201d will be natural. A piano is a machine with an esthetic purpose. An audio recorder is another. So is a player-piano. Thinking of a piece of music itself as a machine is not a difficult step.<\/p>\n

Other people are repelled by the idea; I ask them to notice that the \u201cmachine\u201d point of view is useful<\/i>, as it leads us to look for, and expect to find, understandable structures and processes, which are indeed there to be found.<\/p>\n

Two examples in music:<\/p>\n

Some fugues have strettos, passages where the \u201csubject\u201d of the fugue appears once in each voice, each time beginning before the previous one has finished. This overlapping will not have occurred earlier in the fugue, so the stretto is a formal intensification. Not all fugues have one; but when present, it comes at or near the end, to help create the climax. Thus a stretto has a purpose<\/i>\u2014intensification\u2014 and a mechanism<\/i> appropriate to the purpose\u2014overlapping of the subject.<\/p>\n

Or consider the opening of Schubert\u2019s Sonata in B\u266d, D. 960. Four of the five notes of the first chord (B\u266d,B\u266d,F,B\u266d) begin a harmonic series. The next note in the series, D, should appear above the fourth harmonic; instead it shows up two octaves lower. This displacement (to my way of thinking) creates potential energy which becomes kinetic, so that this voice moves twice as fast as the others: in 8th-notes, not quarters. This passage functions to get the movement under way (always an interesting compositional task) using an appropriate mechanism\u2014harmonic displacement.<\/p>\n

It would be fun to analyze an entire piece of music at this level of detail; but the proposition reminds me of Harvard mathematics professor Andrew Gleason telling me he\u2019d once analyzed some math in terms of set theory\u2014it\u2019s a clich\u00e9 that all math is reducible to set theory\u2014and how very much harder it was than you\u2019d expect from what a clich\u00e9 it is. \u201cLet them try it!\u201d said Gleason.<\/p>\n

One who did \u201ctry it,\u201d and I think succeeded, was Deryck Cooke, in his brilliant book The Language of Music<\/i><\/a>. Cooke\u2019s thesis is that the main characteristic of music is to express and evoke emotion; and that tonal music uses the same, or closely similar, melodic phrases, harmonies, and rhythms to express and evoke the same emotions. Ranging from plainsong to Stravinsky, Cooke argues that music is a language in the sense that idioms can be identified and a list of meanings compiled; and he analyzes symphonies by Mozart and Vaughan Williams.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my class at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1973, we tested student perceptions of emotions attached to the degrees of the chromatic scale\u2014for Cooke the basic units of meaning\u2014and found excellent agreement with Cooke.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Gerry Sussman, of MIT, called to ask if I\u2019d anything to say on parallelism of art and engineering. (He was preparing a talk.) I did have a remark that I\u2019d never shared with anyone. \u201cA work of art,\u201d said I, \u201cis a machine with an esthetic purpose.\u201d Gerry got a kick out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1832,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions\/1832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}