aesthetics

[eugmac]

things like the golden ratio seems to imply a universal concept of beauty as well. the ratio also happens to occur often in nature. also related is how different musical intervals (the distance between one pitch and another) evokes universal emotional responses regardless of cultural background. major chord is associated with happy, minor with sad. tritones are dissonant and cause tension.... and this can be explained through physics and how the waves interact with one another. fascinating topic.

[surviva316]

things like the golden ratio seems to imply a universal concept of beauty as well. the ratio also happens to occur often in nature. also related is how different musical intervals (the distance between one pitch and another) evokes universal emotional responses regardless of cultural background. major chord is associated with happy, minor with sad. tritones are dissonant and cause tension.... and this can be explained through physics and how the waves interact with one another. fascinating topic.

Yes, science has found a lot more inherent value found in music than I know of for plot-based arts, and it is all very interesting. It is very very important to keep in mind with these sorts of things that they are all proof of inherent value, not intrinsic value. In fact, some of these common responses to music can be the result of societal cues, which might seem unimportant, but the further you get away from the fact that it's caused by the fact that we're human, the further we get away from universal human value.

Anyway, as I demonstrated in other posts, intrinsic value is still an instrumental value, so even if Mozart is objectively relaxing and objectively in-sync with our brain waves which objectively increases function in certain areas, every human still holds a different value to relaxation, in-syncness with brain waves and increased functionality in doing crossword puzzles. This is exceedingly problematic when we want to talk about something being "good" or "bad" or tastes being "right" or "wrong" because you can't really demonstrate how being entertained quantitatively compares with being relaxed.

Also, this starts to get into the fallacy I alluded to in Wuf's post about how the fact that some level of objectivity exists in aesthetics means that ultimate determinations of good and bad can be objectively veracious. I could probably turn this into a poker analogy of how there are some aspects of poker decisions that are situationally-independent, but that does not prove that any decision is correct regardless of situation. I won't though. Either you get that sentence or you don't; I've typed enough for one day lol.

Anyway, they can find a large handful of aspects of music that boil down to things that are universal among the human race, and some people take this as some sort of hope that even more things will be found and this will end up dominating the study of music, but I have my sincere doubts. I think that far too much of even the music genre comes down to things that are culturally-dependent (for example), so these will be neat little caveats in the study of music but will always be overwhelmed by other things.