The song’s provenance is unclear. In The Singing Englishman, A.L. Lloyd dates it to the peasants’ revolt of 1381. The despair caused by plague and oppression from the upper classes gave the folk songs of the era a rather dark vibe. The wren may be a symbol for the barony or the king or the police, i.e. not a small bird but a person of significant means—which would explain why it’s so difficult to kill, carry, cook, slice, and distribute.

Also possible is a Celtic mythical/religious interpretation, with the wren as a symbolic human sacrifice, cooked in the cauldron of Kerridwen. According to this page, the cauldron of Kerridwen was “the source of immortality and divine wisdom”, and the wren represents the Celtic god Bran, “an oracular hero, a being who linked the outer world with the Underworld”.

The way these two interpretations rub up against each other is fascinating. It seems like the song originally had a ritual, religious function, but was transformed into political commentary after the plague and the poll tax. Minton’s modern, surreal, expressionist solo brings the song into our current political/economic context, turning it into a commentary on globalization, seemingly endless war, widespread voter suppression, the near-nationalization of AIG, the $700,000,000,000 bailout budget, and other economic policies weighted in favor of the super-rich. In this climate, the sacrifice of the cutty wren brings a bit of a tear to my eye.

Simulation theories of emotional understanding posit the recognition of emotion necessarily involves some kind of internal simulation of that emotion. However, these internal simulations don’t necessarily have the same phenomenology as feeling (you can’t see it, but right here I am making a hand gesture to buttress my point!) elicited in a more direct way. The musical examples from Viellard’s library are a good example; they are (deliberately, rightly) cliché, boring, stripped of their expressive qualities. For the most part, I find myself recognizing the emotion I believe the music attempts to convey (with some exceptions, but as a composer I’m not an ideal candidate for this sort of thing), but experiencing nothing like emotion at all. Provisionally, I think this is a good thing. Music which elicits emotion rather than referencing it is slippery, different for different people, dependent upon context, maybe impossible to isolate and bottle. It’s nice to have a collection of musical examples which have been empirically assessed as accurately conveying a basic set of emotions, evocative sterility notwithstanding.

One fact which leaves me a little unsettled, mostly because these clips don’t cause me to experience any emotion, is that subjects performed better on the emotion identification task when they were told to focus on emotional experience instead of recognition:

“A significant effect of Instruction [i.e. the instruction to focus on experience versus recognition], F(1,37)=4.97; p=.032; h=.118, was observed, with a higher rating for the intended emotion in the experience condition (from .82 to .91 across emotional categories) than in the recognition condition (from .76 to .84 across emotional categories).”

I find that result very strange.

Another issue, somewhat less troubling, but still a bit problematic: A forced choice paradigm was used for categorization of the stimuli. For each stimulus, subjects were told to apply as many of the labels “happy”, “sad”, “scary”, and “peaceful” as they wanted, and the best label of those four was determined. Each of the stimuli were composed with one of those labels in mind, and so the intention of the composer was validated by the categorization task, but in a pretty weak way. What if, for example, an additional label had been allowed: “angry”? Would the categorization task then have clustered the stimuli into five groups, despite the compositional intention of conveying one of four emotions? It’d be nice to see a freer labeling procedure, it would make the library much more powerful.

References:

• Vieillard, S., Peretz, I., Gosselin, N., Khalfa, S., Gagnon, L. & Bouchard, B. (2008) Happy, sad, scary and peaceful musical excerpts for research on emotions. Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 22, Issue 4. 720-752.

Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch at Caltech offer up the first lab-tested reports of visual-audio synesthesia. They’ve found four people who hear sound when they see motion or flashes of light. The sounds they hear are “simple” (I’m not sure what that means) beeps, taps, and whirrs. No sound is perceived due to eye movement, so it really does seem to be triggered by the perception of stuff-tagged-as-motion, and not something lower-level, right off the retina.

To validate the claims of synesthesia, pairs of short rhythms were played to subjects, either as visual flashes or auditory beeps. Subjects reported whether they thought the rhythms in each pair were the same or different. Typically people are quite good at identifying auditory rhythms and bad with visual ones. As expected, everybody did well on the auditory task, but only the synesthetes could accurately compare the visual rhythms, presumably because they could hear them. Interestingly, over the course of the experiment, the synesthetes reported that the synesthetic sounds they heard along with the visuals changed to match the real sounds played during the auditory tests.

A neat direction to go with this would be to play various visual stimuli for the synesthetes and collect phenomenological descriptions of the sounds heard, with the aim of mapping the visual-audio mapping. Are the sounds similar in dynamic profile to the visuals which trigger them? What causes the sounds to change even as the visuals stay the same, as they did during the experiment? What are the intersubjective differences in the synesthetic sounds?

References:

• Saenz, M.; Koch, C. The sound of change: visually-induced auditory synesthesia. Current Biology (2008) vol. 18 (15) pp. R650-R651

My method of actually learning the piece involved first cutting out each bar and gluing it on graph paper so that I could better calculate rhythmical relationships. Then I made all decisions regarding sticking and mallet choice and memorized them before going on to the next measure. The advantage to this approach was that, by memorizing as the first and not the last step in the process, I could more quickly embed the material I was learning in the realm of physical gesture. As a result, from the first instant the piece became a theatrical arena where physical gesture was not the simple by-product of performance, but an integral part of a growing interpretive point of view. The instrument became a kind of stage for the enactment of, in Ferneyhough’s words, “a theatre of the body.”

Ross Karre has recorded his interpretation of Bone Alphabet and put it on YouTube. Unfortunately embedding is disabled, so to view it you’ll have to follow these links:

• Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough 1/2
• Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough 2/2

And, finally, a couple of quotes from Ferneyhough to round this all out. From his essay Duration and rhythm as compositional resources:

Whilst the impulse-structure and its audibility are clearly variably perceptible in concrete compositional situations, I maintain that enough of a correspondence is maintained in the middle to long term to enable the flow of space/density ratios demonstrated capable of carrying the main weight of formal organization. According to this principle, degrees of compression, distortion, convergence or mutual interference are calculable in respect of the degree to which the sense of clock time is supported or subverted by the specific tactility of impulse density setting the ‘inner clock’ of a particular metric space.

—

As always in the discussion of matters artistic, it is not the clear-cut cases which prove most pertinent, but the ill-defined and fluctuating ‘grey zones’ where a given rhythmic phenomenon may be called on to assume multiple functional roles.

References:

• Schick, S. (1994) Developing an Interpretive Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 32, No. 1: 132-153
• Ferneyhough, B. “Duration and rhythm as compositional resources.” Collected Writings Eds. Boros, J.; Toop, R. Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.

Aniruddh Patel got on the case, did some experiments and wrote a paper on the cockatoo. He concludes that, while it’s confined to a relatively small range of tempos and isn’t particularly reliable, the dancing bird is basically for real. The paper is a great read. Its final sentence is oddly touching:

It will be interesting to determine whether the range of tempi to which Snowball can synchronize is expanded when dancing with a partner.

Here’s the paper:

• Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R., Bregman, M.B., Schulz, I., & Schulz, C. (in press). Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC10), August 2008, Sapporo, Japan. M. Adachi et al. (Eds.), Adelaide: Causal Productions.

More videos on Patel’s publications page.

From an essay by Karkowski written in 1992:

When an artist creates a new work, whether it’s a new book or poem or painting or piece of music, he presents new information. And what follows with it – new ways to process information. This is a social function, we create options and we have to take responsibility for it. It’s very simple, you either have something to say or, if not, you just create more information pollution. And if there is one general thing that one can say about most of the modern composers, it is that they may write well but they often have nothing to say. All good art has only one purpose – to show man his own true face, and its only prerogative must be the necessity to find out the truth at all costs. The truly evolutionary art must be concerned more with living than creating and must realize that the despair of our culture and civilization can only be defeated by acts of total honesty and a faith in the true condition of all men – perfection and the state of Godhead.

Noisejihad has two live sets by Karkowski up in their space on archive.org:

• Karkowski live at Splab, 15/04/2005
• Karkowski live at Splab, 12/10/2006

You’ve got to listen loud to get the full effect. There are a few moments in that second one which are really startling.

Marchetti has a YouTube account with bunches of videos about his obsession with UFOs, or maybe his obsession with how the idea of UFOs generates obsession. Some highlights:

I was just video recording from my plane, in my dream, near Mont Pilat, in Lyon – France, in jannuary 2008. Suddenly, a strange light was under the clouds, with an incredible sound : with my DAT i recorded this… it’s now possible to listen this…
Lionel Marchetti : is it UFO sounds ?
Help me !

I met a very strange double-face E.T., in my dream, and i recorded our stange electronic contact…