11/10/13- More On Musical Notation

Some of the earliest forms of musical notation that were discovered in the form of cunieform tablets, and were found in Nippur, Sumer, which is now Iraq, and had been created about 2000 years Before Christ. They seem to use a diatonic scale, using tones that go up in thirds, although the musical language itself used in early examples like Mesopotamian songs are quite fragmented. Many of these tablets found are related to the tuning of a harp like instrument called a lyre, which was frequently used whenever accompanying Babylonian hymns. The lyre itself has become something of an icon in itself over the years, featured in artworks to symbolise gods and wisdom. 

An example of Sumerian cunieform music from 26thc BC,
it is a lexical list of harp strings and
one of the oldest existing examples of written music

The musical markings themselves are nothing like the universal modern day staff notation method, in that today's musical notation can be seen as it's own language, that has to be learned to be understood and conveys instructions to create sound almost exclusively through symbols, while the cunieform markings serve more as indications for the reader to interoperate, written over or under the words of the hymns. 

There have been countless excavations and discoveries of ancient musical writings all over the world, including a collection of Hurrian Songs dating from about 1400 BC, which were discovered in the city Ugarit and use Akkadin musical instructions, which is a now extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. Ancient Greek papyri writings have also been discovered, which seem to follow a very similar system to the Babylonian texts.

Of course, before the modern staff notation that the majority of musicians use worldwide today, musical notation differed between countries, due to different languages, instruments and culture, and a lot of music was not even written down, and was instead passed down from generation to generation through oral communication.

"Introit Gaudeamus omnus", an example of Gregorian Chant Music, 14th-15th Century
The earliest forms of Gregorian chants used indication symbols called neumes, before
the notation method progressed on to use square notation (shown above),
 a kind of staff notationsimilar to what we use today.

An example of Byzantine church music from Serbia, 18th Century.
A staffless notation method which uses indication marks to show change in pitch, kind of like
musical punctuation.

Modern Day Staff Notation
It is read from left to right and each horizontal line marks a whole tone
while the horizontal "bar" lines give a musical piece structure.
The notes themselves vary in appearance depending
on their length.

It seems that due to the invisible nature of music, the symbols developed to communicate musical instruction are not pictorial but rather mathematical, using certain lines to indicate change in tone and duration of notes. I think the wonderful thing about music is that it seems to bridge the gaps between science and art- by using a logical and mathematical language we are able to share and express ourselves through pure sound.  With the different variations all over the world and the progression of symbol development, believe that music is a language in itself.

14/10/13- Introduction to Musical Notation

Looking into the origins of musical notation, I have uncovered a lot about the development of musical symbols I was not aware of before, and most importantly, a lot of my findings have a pretty direct link to the topics we have already covered! 
Now, different sources have different versions of the history of music and its origins, and therefore it is very difficult to pinpoint the first ever use of symbolic notation to represent musical theory, but what is definite is that some of the first examples of such notation have been discovered in cunieform. 

The second of two hymns to Apollo written on the original stone
at Delphi. The musical notation is the occasional symbols above certain
parts of the Greek text

We know for certain that music has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and even before instruments, we can be sure that the earliest humans must have experimented with sounds and tones- it is just part of our nature. The problem is that wood rots very easily, so the earliest instruments will have been lost through the years, but the earliest form of instruments to be discovered to date are simple flutes made from bone and ivory, dating 42,000-43,000 years ago, found in Germany. This is prior to the concept of notation, however, when music and ideas were passed down through generations, so it is likely we will never know what the earliest forms of music actually sounded like.

It seems unclear which is the definite earliest forms of musical notation, as across the world there were independent communities finding their own methods and symbols to understand music, all of which are very different to the universal notation we use and understand in the present day.

08/10/13- The Initial Lectures

Week 1
So far we have had three contextual lectures, illustrating the progress and development of human communication starting off with “The Birth of Symbolic Language”, from the very beginning of human existence, right through to the idea of online personas, texting and emailing, so I think it’s fair to say we covered a lot. What particularly captured my interest initially was the Chauvet Caves, examples of prehistoric cave art which were open for interpretation- while some believe they are informative and for descriptive uses to convey lessons in hunting, others see them as evidence that the early homo sapiens were not in as much danger as it is commonly conveyed, and they had time for storytelling and had the capacity for fantasy and imagination. Meanwhile, it was pointed out that the more abstract and symbolic Bhimbetka Cave Painting in India displayed signs of possible ordering and maybe even the concept of movement, or “animation”. This made me think of the 2003 Disney animation “Brother Bear”, which seemed to have picked up on this idea. It contains several scenes where the animal spirits, styled around the imagery in famous cave painting sites, are seen in the northern lights and are spiralling and circling, much like you would imagine the cave paintings to move. It is pleasing to think that ideas and images that were not possible to express thousands of years ago are now being conveyed countless generations later, using the resources we now have.

Chauvet Cave, FranceVery pictorial and descriptive,
with 13 types of animals in total

Bhimbetka Cave Painting, India
Symbolic and abstract, possibly markers
for travelling, with more human figures

Screenshot from "Brother Bear" 2003

After that, the main theme of our discussions was development through abstraction, and the idea that while humans became more advanced our languages and symbols required more learning, due to the simplification of the imagery.

One of these semi-symbolic languages is the Cuneiform script, which uses images and condenses them into structured grids of symbols. Evidence of the development of this system were found in Sumer, in the form of Mesopotamian 9000 year old 'trading tabs' as well as larger tablets. 

Sumerian Inscription, 26th Century B.C
Cuneiform was usually printed into wet clay, or 
sometimes carved.

This idea of structure and grid work struck a chord in me, reminding me of the way music is notated, begging the question of how written music came about, especially taking into consideration the fact that the musical language doesn't have an image to abstract from, unlike the cuneiform scripts themselves.
It is certainly worth considering. 

Week 2
A week later we explored Cognition- the process of making sense out of what is perceived. This was also the week I was in the discussion group, so it was important that I understood what was going on.

List of Sumerian Gods and Deities, 2400 B.C

Our main topic was Semiotics/Semiology, the process of signs and the processes behind them. Part of this was understanding that humans are especially good at understanding abstracted and simplified images, for example the human face. 

The above image is a circle containing two dots
 and a straight line, yet due to psychology
 we automatically perceive it as a face.

Seeing faces in objects or inhuman things is known as Pareidolia. We touched on the question as to why we do this, and weather it is hardwired in our brains, and I mentioned the idea that we are best suited to understand and convey emotion biologically due to the fact we over all animals have more whites in our eyes. I may not have conveyed the idea correctly, so I decided to do some more research on the matter to back it up.
The reason we identify human faces so easily is partly due to the fact that the human face is the very first thing we can actually see as a baby. Between birth and four months, a baby can only focus on what is 8-10 inches away from it, which is mainly the mother's face while breast feeding, therefore we learn to detect faces from a very early age. This is a very useful thing for humans to do, considering that we are a co-operative race, so to be able to convey and understand emotion is invaluable to us, as is detecting the gaze of another human, which brings us back to my original point. Predators which depend on their ability to not be detected usually have very little whites in their eyes, so that their gaze is not picked up by their prey; meanwhile, recent studies show that through the action of human eye morphology, humans have uniquely white scleras (the area of the eye that borders the iris), and this is no accident. This is to allow us, at a glance, to ascertain the direction of another person's gaze, and to make our own gaze clear to others. There are also neurons in our brains that become active when someone is staring directly at us, and become inactive even if the gaze is shifted by a few degrees, therefore, humans are very sensitive to direct gaze, as long as the other person's eyes are somewhere within our line of sight. There is actually a fear of being stared at, called Scopophobia. So in conclusion, Pareidolia is indeed biological and fundamentally important to the communication between humans.    

We also covered the categorising and identifying the different kinds of symbols, like Icons, Indexes and Symbols. This is where it gets a bit more difficult, as some symbols fit into more than one category, and it can be hard to define the line between abstraction and resemblance.

My own attempt at identifying symbols and the thoughts they automatically trigger.

Symbols are usually a very abstracted form of a visual image, so what about musical notes?
It seems I'll have to do some investigation into musical notation.