Harnessed by Mark Changizi

Author:Mark Changizi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biology
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

DON'T ROLL OVER, BEETHOVEN

The case for my theory is strong, I believe, and I hope to convince you that music sounds like human movement. If I am correct, then, with the movement-meaning of music in hand, we will be in a position to create a new generation of “supermusic”: music deliberately designed to be even more aesthetically pleasing, by far, than previous generations of music. Music has historically been “trying” to shape itself like expressive human behaviors, in the sense that that was what was culturally selected for. But individual composers didn’t know what music was trying to be—composers didn’t know that music works best when tapping into our human-movement auditory mechanisms. Musical works have heretofore tended to be sloppy mimickers of human movement. With music decoded, however, we can tune it perfectly for our mental software, and blow our minds. You’re toast, Beethoven! I’ve unraveled your secrets!

No. Just kidding. I’m afraid that the music research I’m describing to you will do no such thing, even if every last claim I make is true. To see why the magic of Beethoven is not unraveled by my theory, consider photographic art. Some photographs have evocative power; they count as art. Some photographs, however, are just photographs, and not art. What exactly distinguishes the art from the “not” is a genuine mystery, and certainly beyond me. But there is something that is obviously true about art photographs: they are photographs. Although that’s obvious to us, imagine for a moment that four-dimensional aliens stumble upon a pile of human artifacts, and that in the pile are photographs. Being four-dimensional creatures, they have poor intuitions about what a three-dimensional world looks like from a particular viewpoint inside it. Consequently, our human photographs are difficult to distinguish from the many other human artifacts that are flat with stuff printed upon them, such as wallpaper, clothing, and money. If they are to realize that the photographs are, in fact, photographs—two-dimensional representations of our 3-D world—they are going to have to discover this.

Luckily for them, one alien scientist who has been snooping around these artifacts has an idea. “What if,” he hypothesizes, “some of the flat pieces of paper with visual marks are photographs? Not of our 4-D world, but of their human 3-D world?” In an effort to test this idea, he works out what the signature properties of photographs of 3-D worlds would be, such as horizons, vanishing points, projective geometry, field of focus, partial occlusion, and so on. Then he searches among the human artifacts for pieces of paper or fabric having these properties. He can now easily conclude that wallpaper, clothing, and money are not photographs. And when he finds some of our human photographs, he’ll be able to establish that they are photographs, and convince his colleagues. This alien’s research would amount to a big step forward for those aliens interested in understanding our world and how we perceive it. A certain class of flat artifacts is meaningful in a way they

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