Object-Oriented Musicology: Some Implications of Graham Harman\u27s Philosophy for Music Theory, History, and Criticism

This dissertation brings the ideas of the philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968) into a musicological context. His “object-oriented ontology” is widely known in continental philosophy, but it has not yet entered rigorous contact with musicology. Certain factors pose difficulties at first glance, such as Harman’s focus on metaphysical issues (originating in his critique of Martin Heidegger) and his rehabilitation of the widely criticized concept of aesthetic autonomy. But these are also sources of novelty that could make an object-oriented encounter with musicology fruitful. In the first chapter, I outline the main features of Harman’s thought. He critiques assumptions about the nature of reality that he interprets as reductive—and which are by no means restricted to philosophical discourse. According to him, real things are “withdrawn,” or irreducible to their genetic components and the outcomes of their encounters with other things. In short, literal knowledge cannot exhaust them. Yet an indirect approach to reality is still possible. Aesthetic encounters such as music epitomize indirect causation: a listener becomes absorbed with a musical object that is in tension with its own features and thus enters the interior of a new real entity like hydrogen in a water molecule. The next three chapters apply Harman’s ideas to specific topics in music theory, history, and criticism. Chapter 2 finds compelling parallels between Robert Gjerdingen’s galant schema theory and Harman’s philosophy. Still, an object-oriented schema theory requires that certain persistent reductionist tendencies are avoided. It also entails that the difference between a schema stage and event, noted by Gjerdingen, is taken more seriously as a necessary interpretive moment in the analysis of schemata. Chapter 3 discusses the topic of historical influence through the lens of the mid-twentieth-century encounter between the ragtime pianist, songwriter, and composer Eubie Blake and the music theories of Joseph Schillinger. The object-oriented viewpoint differs from both older and more recent tendencies to treat influence as a direct exchange of knowable properties. For Harman, influence is not cultivation, corruption, or a symptom of a larger relational system. Instead, it is an indirect fusion of one thing with the “style” of another. Furthermore, Harman’s historiography incorporates counterfactual speculation as a corrective to the assumption that what actually happened is more relevant to the being of historical objects than what could have happened. Finally, Chapter 4 addresses music criticism of the concert work De Staat (1976) by Louis Andriessen. (“Criticism” is meant in the sense of interpretive judgment.) In their impulse to reject formalism, critics of De Staat have tended to accept formalism’s basic taxonomic division between the sonic form “in itself” and its context. They emphasize the latter, meaning the conditions of the musical work’s genesis and the network of concepts and socio-political meanings around it. But according to criticism that is object-oriented rather than context-oriented, De Staat may contain supposedly “contextual” elements within its form through their aesthetic handling. Critics who attend to these aesthetic or nonliteral facets of experience may thus find common ground with object-oriented theorists and historians

Diagrammatic approaches in Computational Musicology: Some theoretical and Philosophical Aspects

10th International Conference, Diagrams 2018, Edinburgh, UK, June 18-22, 2018, ProceedingsInternational audienceDespite a long historical relationship between mathematics and music, the use of diagrammatic approaches in computational musicology is a relatively recent phenomenon. Within the different branches of formal methods in music analysis, the so-called "transformational" paradigm has progressively shifted from an object-oriented to a graph-theoretical and categorical approach. Both graph theory and category theory make large use of diagrams which enable the description of the inner relationships of musical structures. In the categorical framework recently proposed by the authors, whose results are summarized and discussed in this abstract, musical transformations are viewed as natural transformations between chords represented as labelled graphs with vertices corresponding to the notes and arrows corresponding to musical transpositions and inversions operations. The diagrammatic approach also provides a very powerful conceptual tool that can have crucial theoretical implications for music cognition. We discuss this aspect by showing some deep connections between transforma-tional music analysis and some mathematically-oriented directions in developmental psychology and cognition (such as Halford and Wilson's neostructural-istic approach, Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch's Memory Evolutive Systems, Phillips and Wilson's Categorical Compositionality, Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Blending and its structural extension proposed by Goguen) and epis-temology (Gaston-Granger's "objectal" and "operational" duality)

The ontology of musical objects in contemporary instrumental composition

The musical object occupies a strange place in music criticism. The new musicology schools influenced by post-structuralist continental thought have shied away from the object’s autonomous existence, exemplified by Christopher Small’s view of music as a cultural activity: “musicking.” Other theorists, such as Dennis Smalley, have created taxonomies of musical sound. Smalley’s spectromorphology defines sonic typologies that he claims to be based on an experiential understanding of sound, while simultaneously undertaking the technical project of a systematic cataloguing of sounds. Both views inhabit quite opposite positions in relation to the sound object – either a total rejection of its reality or a positivistic attempt at a catalogue of sound types. Both of these approaches suffer from distancing the sonic object through their respective discourse: by reducing the importance of the object for the sake of viewing music as a network of cultural relations, or by reducing it to an idealized and rationalized object, seeing it as just the product of a bundle of auditory qualities unified by perception. These views introduce a distance from auditory experience, which is at its core an object-oriented experience. In other words, neither meets the musical object on its own level, and because of this, they deny or caricature the musical object’s ontology. Graham Harman’s philosophical study of Object-oriented Ontology is a radicalization of Heideggerian phenomenology. Through a new reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Harman argues that objects – whether real, living, non-living, ideal or abstract – are the primary location of ontological investigation, and that objects exist both discretely and as a part of a wider network of possible relationships. By viewing the object this way, and by recognizing the multifaceted and multidimensional features of the musical object, we may be able to account for features of music that the trends above are unable to recognize or assess, such as the twentieth century aesthetic practices of György Ligeti, Salvatore Sciarrino, and the Spectral school of composition. It is possible to read these composer’s aesthetics as object-oriented because they are so strongly focused on examining sonic objects themselves –whether it is a physical event or modeling a natural process – instead of examining objects only through their affective potential towards human beings. This practice suggests that these qualities and processes are themselves areas for possible contemplation. Historically, this move away from an emphasis on the human-world binary goes against the nineteenth century aesthetic of Romanticism, which relies on an object’s affective potential. Also, an object-oriented position rejects formalism, because of its reduction of music to an intellectual activity. An object-oriented approach to music traverses the line between these two positions, acknowledging the subtle and shifting relationships between the affective and the analytic or, to locate this within Harman’s approach, between the sensual and real. The thesis will explore the implications of an object oriented approach to music, trace the history of its development in relation to music – chiefly that of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – as well as make object oriented analyses of selected works, including my own compositions

A streaming object-oriented implementation of the modal distribution

The Modal distribution is a time-frequency distribution specifically designed to model the quasi-harmonic, multi-sinusoidal, nature of music signals and belongs to the Cohen general class of time-frequency distributions. A streaming, object-oriented implementation of the Modal distribution is presented which forms the basis for designing other members of the Cohen class. Implementation of this routine in the C++ Sound Object Library provides a fully portable tool for time-frequency analysis across multiple platforms. The theoretical background to the Cohen general class is outlined followed by an explanation of the design and implementation of the Modal distribution in the SndObj library. Suggestions for future extensions to the new Modal class and its integration with the entire library are explored

Groupoids and Wreath Products of Musical Transformations: a Categorical Approach from poly-Klumpenhouwer Networks

Transformational music theory, pioneered by the work of Lewin, shifts the music-theoretical and analytical focus from the "object-oriented" musical content to an operational musical process, in which transformations between musical elements are emphasized. In the original framework of Lewin, the set of transformations often form a group, with a corresponding group action on a given set of musical objects. Klumpenhouwer networks have been introduced based on this framework: they are informally labelled graphs, the labels of the vertices being pitch classes, and the labels of the arrows being transformations that maps the corresponding pitch classes. Klumpenhouwer networks have been recently formalized and generalized in a categorical setting, called poly-Klumpenhouwer networks. This work proposes a new groupoid-based approach to transformational music theory, in which transformations of PK-nets are considered rather than ordinary sets of musical objects. We show how groupoids of musical transformations can be constructed, and an application of their use in post-tonal music analysis with Berg's Four pieces for clarinet and piano, Op. 5/2. In a second part, we show how groupoids are linked to wreath products (which feature prominently in transformational music analysis) through the notion of groupoid bisectionsComment: 16 pages, 9 figures; comments welcom

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen