Sound is my life. It is my study, my career, and my hobby. Though I am (relatively) new to exploring and studying Objectivism, and its associated sciences, sound is an area of self-proclaimed expertise for me. I recently finished reading Ayn Rand’s brilliant The Romantic Manifesto but I have a few quibbles that I would like addressed.
Ayn Rand defines music as an art, which “employs the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, and evokes man’s sense-of-life emotions.” She claimed that works employing techniques such as musique concrete , and other forms which employ non-traditional instrumentation, were not periodic, and therefore were not actually fit to be “music” as she defines it.
My problem with this is that an average human being would be quite hard pressed to find an example of periodic sonorous activity. If a clarinetist, or a violinist, were able to produce a truly periodic result from playing their instrument, it would be a miraculous physical achievement, and much study would need to go into both the performer’s mind and the instrument’s construction. The fact is that sounds fluctuate in frequency, amplitude, and timbrel quality, due to a number of both personal and environmental factors. The only way the average human being could ever be exposed to a sound that was even close to periodic would be to employ a digital sound oscillator, which featured a VERY high sampling rate and bit depth, and then played through VERY high-fidelity playback equipment, in an acoustically-sound room. That being said, it is of particular interest that the only composers to probably ever achieve this are the very composers that Ms. Rand likely was addressing in her writings on music - Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varese, and others who utilized analog audio equipment as part of their concert-hall performances, are likely the only individuals to ever make music according to Ayn Rand’s own standards.
The other problem with her definition of music is that it, by definition, labels all non-periodic traditional western instruments, like percussive instruments, as “noise” - not music. Instruments which are struck are of a particular sonic interest because they do not produce overtones which are harmonically-consistent with its fundamental striking frequency. These sounds, by definition, are aperiodic, which makes me wonder what Ayn Rand thought of music which featured percussion instrumentation. It should also be noted that any “noisy” sound could be made into a periodic waveform by means of either analog or digital manipulation. You will find almost all composers of the musique concrete persuasion are doing this.
Ayn Rand also made the claim that Western music was the best music ever made because its musical scales are the most capable in extending the possibilities of consonant spacings. She drew a connection between the cultures of societies and their respective musics. However, the North-Indian musical tradition, which has employed the use of raga for centuries (far before the first Romantic classical composers of the 19th century, and even before Bach), in fact has more consonant possibilities than Western scales, and also features heavy emphasis on improvisation. This doesn’t gel with Ayn Rand’s claims, as we all know what the Hindu cultural history consists of. She claimed that the Western individual has no ability to understand the musics of the “Oriental” persuasion, similar to how language barriers exist among different cultures. But we know from the countless numbers of people who enjoy both classical and raga music equally, and who, like myself, find just as much validity, pleasure, and - most importantly - musical possibilities - in them both, that the number of notes in a scale is not indicative of musical complexity. Musicologists have shown that where one type of possibility is limited in a particular musical form, another is greatly expanded. Rhythmic lines and counterpoints exist on a much greater conceptual scale in several cultural musics, including the Japanese, the Indian, and the Pakistani forms. And even those have varying degrees of sonic and harmonic complexity - ranging from five-note scales, all the way up to scales which feature different interval spacings in different octaves. The Qawaali tradition in Pakistan, for example, is a beautiful indicator of Romantic (big R, not little r) music, performed by savage peoples. Look into the recently-deceased Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who carried on a centuries-old family tradition in the Qawaali tradition. The rhythmic potential is vast, the performances are heart-felt, and the form and style is far from mathematically-dull (her claim was that music which did not feature mathematical-complexity would bore the listener, and only appeal to those whose philosophical premises were incorrect).
This is information that was available to anybody at the time when Ayn Rand wrote these things. Psychoacousticians, physicists, and musicologists alike, have been pursuing these topics, and it only takes an individual of great musical and sonic experience to understand the validity to my claims.
I want to side with Ayn Rand on these issues, but doing so would completely obliterate my reasonably strong knowledge of the physics of sound, the human perceptions of sound, and the musics of various cultures and time periods. Doing so would be nothing more than taking another person’s words on faith, when I know well enough that they are not valid. What I wonder, after having said all of this, is if Ayn Rand addressed any of these issues at a later date than The Romantic Manifesto, or if there are any objections to my claims. Anybody?