Nataraja

It semed like a good idea at the time, I guess.

Oolon Colluphid

Erm, because in order to reproduce, you have to stay alive long enough to do so: you have to make a living. And there are millions of ways of making a living, hence millions of species. Modern life is the product of billions of years of trying to find ways of staying alive long enough to reproduce.

As time went on, as simpler, more direct niches were already occupied, what had to be done to stay alive long enough became more indirect. Not just be RNA and make copies, but have a protein coat (eg viruses), put a membrane round yourself etc (eg bacteria), build a body, etc. After a long time of this, some organisms, such as orchids (flowers that look like bees), whiptail lizards (Cnemidophorus spp, which are parthenogenic but where females perform pseudocopulation which increases their fertility), bedbugs (homosexual stabbing rape in Xylocaris maculipennis) and people (nuff said) just happen to use extremely convoluted routes to living-long-enough-to-reproduce.
Some organisms do just that sort of thing. Angiosperms launch tons of pollen (= sperm) into the air (or water in the case of the seagrass Zostera marina); the cold virus you just picked up off that door handle was just sitting there waiting for a nice ‘vaginal’ nasal membrane to come along. In other words, some things are just reproductive bits. Other organisms, as I’ve said, have to take more circuitous routes, because the simpler ones are already taken.
As above: you’ve got to be around long enough to get to reproduce.
Depends what you mean by ‘purpose’, but yes, that is all there is to it. The rest of ‘the meaning of life’ is whatever meaning you bring to it. Personally, I feel that finding out how the world works is enough of a reason to keep going, because it is endlessly fascinating. What more rewarding way to spend our brief moment of consciousness than to understand the world around us?
Because we come from a v-e-r-y long line of organisms that did live long enough to reproduce. Not one of your ancestors died young or childless -- though many of their contemporaries did. So it should be no surprise that we are still here: natural selection has not looked kindly on anything that didn’t ‘want’ to be. By the trials of our ancestors and the errors of our non-ancestors, we’ve gotten very good at being here.

[Fair enough, so far. But then, for some reason, Zentraedi decides to move off in the opposite direction to the plot.]
Is ‘lame’ a verb?
Toward incomprehensibility...?
Yup, now orbiting Planet Gobbledygook....
Now that we don’t need them to explain thunder, they are the super-stimulus version of parents. Probably a side-effect of our neoteny.
Or as our parents were when we were infants, since dogs don’t worship things. Well maybe bones, or the odd tree or lamp-post.
What god?
Ah. It wasn’t Planet Gobbledygook we were circling after all. It was a black hole in the Idiocy galaxy.
The black hole got us. Funny, but the Idiocy galaxy appears to be located in your gluteus maximus. Astronomers call what you’re doing ‘autoproctology’.
And you know this how?
You already are. As in the phrase “God almighty, what are you on?!”
Everything... points... Here, let me point you to a therapist...
Gods are figments of our imagination. Now what exactly is going on in your imagination remains to be seen, but it would appear to involve lysergic acid diethylamide.

TTFN, DT

Wyz_sub10

This is very interesting. I'm curious as to the breadth of styles, however. If you are limiting the findings to western composers you are not addressing my point. In my example I cited Ethiopian music as providing a distinction. That, of course, is not western music.

Also, I would ask, satisfying to who? Are you speaking of music that was the most popular at the time or are you looking at composers with the longest-lasting influence?

Yes, I reached Grade 10 theory/history in the Royal Conservatory over 4 years of study (my playing, alas, was considerably lower). I do not disagree with your comments related to hymns, which is a good example. But again, it does not address the cultural association or ensdorse a biological one.

Confining the observations to western music puts a bias on the outcome that I was seeking to avoid. At most you could say that such chord resolutions at preferred among a percentage of western listeners (or listeners of western music).

DNAunion

DNAunion: Until someone tells us this topic is off track...

DNAunion: No, there's nothing inherently unstable about g-b-d-f. It is the trained human ear that wants that resolved to c-e-g. I can play the notes g-b-d-f on a piano all day and neither the notes nor nature is going to complain that I have left something unresolved. It takes intelligence to sense the tension and want it resolved.


DNAunion: Indeed - I played trumpet throughout Jr. High, High School, and even a bit in college. I also took music theory and composition classes and wrote a song or two, and a couple solos, for our jazz band.

But I learned the rules to use to compose music: rules that were formulated over time by intelligent beings wishing to know what "pleased" other intelligent beings: giving their audience what they wanted (well, you aren't actually suppose to give the listener what he/she wants all the time because that makes the music too predictable and boring, whereas never giving the listener what he/she wants can leave him/her confused and irritated at you. And come to think about it, tastes have changed to the point that the first rule no longer applies to the most popular music).

By the way, does rap "music" tend to resolve G7 into C major? :-)

Bob K

Wyz_sub10:I continue to believe that there IS an inherent tension in the dominant seventh chord, such as G7, because of the tri-tone, the augmented fourth/diminished fifth interval, and that the basis of the ‘inherent’ tension is physiological, which is not unreasonable due to the fact that where music is controlled vibrations and we are all filled with vibrations from our elementary particles through our subatomic particles through our atoms through our molecules and on through our cells and organs and physical/external vibrations such as found in dominant seventh chords can have an effect upon or natural vibrations, our physiology, in such a way that we could interpret this effect as ‘tension’ and need therefore a ‘resolution’ just as we interpret other phenomena as ‘tensions’ in need of ‘resolutions,’ such as personal physiological reorganizations of the genito-urinary and gastro-intestinal kinds. [Kindly remember that you first read the phrase ‘personal physiological reorganizations of the genito-urinary and gastro-intestinal kinds’ here.]

I do not claim that humans want a state of nontension in preference to controlled tensions, but I observe that people tend to enjoy controlled tensions in repetitions of arts such as music and dance. Of course, while uncontrolled tensions can be positively exciting if they are not perceived as directly life-threatening [although not perceived as immediately life-threatening they may in fact be], as contrasted with being negative exciting if perceived as directly life-threatening, no person I am aware of needs continuous tension and prefers periods of tension-free down time, from time to time, so to speak.

I like to browse bookstores, especially those established by true marketing genii who realized that they could sell more books if bookbuyers had a chance to sit down, rest and relax, read books and mags, and therefore have more time to determine if or not their purchase is justified, therefore, the next time I so browse a bookstore I will look for information relating music to physiology as well as physics and determine if or not someone else has proof of the physiological basis of the ‘tension’ involved in a dominant seventh chord producing a ‘need’ for a ‘resolution’ to a chord built upon a major or a minor chord.

Consider this quote from Anthony Storr in Music and the Mind, Ballantine Books, Random House, New York, 1993, p. 171, discussing ‘consonance and dissonance distinctions among intervals’:Browsing through Storr’s book, I note that Leonard Bernstein believed that the physiological basis of the impact of music is the overtone series, and that the seventh interval, based upon the seventh overtone, was inherently unstable and thus produced natural physiological tension in normal humans. Others disagree, and thus the controversy continues. [Storr, Chapter Three: Basic Patterns]

And some theorist have noted that Western music tends to become accepted and therefore acculturated by individuals in societies which had different indigenous music systems and patterns prior to the Western music invasion. [Storr, Chapter Three] This observation supports the contention that music has a physiological basis which includes the tension generated by dominant seventh chords.

Perhaps more on Storr, and others, in later Replies.

Wyz_sub10:The point is that over time and through experience musicians realized that chord-tones which could be identified as belonging to dominant seventh chords, V7, more often than not were identified as creating tension that could be resolved to I or VIm chords, possibly a IIIm chord. Thus, chords appeared to have functions, unstable chords functioning to produce tension and a need for resolution and stable chords functioning to promote resolution and and enjoyment of musical peace. I have to conclude that the experience of musicians in developing traditional harmonies and tension->resolution/release harmonic functions is at least partially based upon physiology/biology and ‘basic patterns.’

Wyz_sub10:The fact that Western music is accepted and preferred to indigenous music by individuals in various cultures/societies strongly suggests that there is a physiological/biological basis for music that is satisfied best by the traditions of Western music.

DNAunion:We have a disagreement herein, and perhaps scientists will eventually provide additional evidence that proves one side or the other is correct, but until they do, my operational philosophy will continue to include the belief that music has a physiological basis that is best satisfied by Western music.

NOTE: This is intended to be an objective observation rather than a subjective prejudice against nonWestern individuals, music and cultures.

DNAunion:I am content at this time to believe that there is a physiological basis for the satisfaction experienced when tension chords are resolved to resolution chords, when unstable chords are resolved to stable chords.

Wyz_sub10

Well, I cannot agree with this. Even is musical vibrations were in some way connected with particle 'vibratons', how does one influence the other? How do all the other vibrations around us factor in?

This is a bold statement, and one that I see no evidence to support.

I can scarcely remember what I had for breakfast. And that was real.

Sure. But I don't see how it is possible to define "controlled tensions", nor do I see this relating back to a dominant seventh chord.

I'll be interested in what you find. Perhaps I'll do a little digging myself.

Why did he think that? A legendary composer and conducter, to be sure, but what on earth does Bernstein know about human physiology?

It's like Dawkins critiquing Diane Krull's latest offering, or Einstein trying to explain the importance of dadaism in contemporary art.

And vice versa. But often the acceptance of music has to do with the proliferation of foreign culture, as a whole.

Many North Americans are big on manga or anime art. Does that mean there is something inherently satisfying in Japanese art to human physiology?

This is a possibility, but you are still overreaching in connecting the dots. You assume a function, you assume a similar 'need for resolution' across cultures, you assume a preference for western music.

I think you need to assert each of these independently, and go from there.

Again, an assumption on your part.

Western music scores big in Japan and southeast Asia. Not so much in northern, central and eastern Africa, the South American interior, or Asia minor, for example.

Hawkingfan

I'm afraid I have to join the critics on this one and disagree. This is an extremely narrow-minded concept. It is true, but only in the context of triadic, diatonic harmony. The V7 chord is unstable because of what our ears have been trained to hear and our ears could be trained to hear that way for physiological reasons, but it is still in a context where tensions are already defined by other harmonies in a key as to what is tense and what isn't.

In another setting, the G7 chord could be very stable. Like if it was preceeded by clusters. Also, you seem to be assuming that if someone had never heard a note of music in their life, and someone else played a G7 chord, they would want it to be followed by a C chord because of the physiology. I strongly disagree with that assumption. The idea of stabilty in musical intervals is in the ear of the listener.

Not only is this in the context of triads, but it is in the context of a specific intonation (Just Intonation). Stability would be redefined in an Exact Intonation context or for instance a musical scale that was divided into quarter-steps.

And BTW, jazz musicians would cringe at pure triads, but feel relieved at 7th chords.

To say that molecules chose physiologically to become stable, I think implies thought and purpose behind it. When in actuality, I believe, the necessary requirements for early macromolecules to survive was determined by chance (certain errors in reproduction due to the uncertainty principle and the thermal motion of atoms by chance proved to be advantageous with the molecules's surroundings at certain times and conditions). But that's IMO.

(And just a note on Bernstein--anybody who feels the need to tell others what music is--as in his lecture "What is Music?"--or what jazz is--as in "What is Jazz?"--or "What is American Music?"--is a moron. And anyone who needs Bernstein to tell him/her what those things are is a moron, IMO. In other words, I could care less what he has to say about most musical subjects).

TomboyMom

The first entity that could have reproduced didn't, and so its genetic heritage is extinct. It was actually the 1,432,298th one that reproduced, and we are all descended from that one. It's just random, followed by basic evolutionary principles.

Nataraja

It just happened to, which is why there is life on this planet.

abe smith

Could we please stop REIFYING the *not-an-entity*, manmade category-box, "LIFE" (sic) as if "it" were "something"?

Some guys-who-got-published made lists of behaviours which they"ve labelled "life-processes". So whut? Anybody can make lists & label them whatever.

Lemme spoil your day by reiterating:
THERE'S NO SUCH *THING* as "LIFE". Reiterate it:
THERE"S NO SUCH *THING* AS "LIFE".
There're only certain "events" or (possibly, indeterminably?) chains? of "events", which some "guys" choose to call "living creatures" and which those guys group into groups, under that manmade label, because those "creatures" (seem to) evince certain similar & categorizable sets? of behaviours.

:You have this -here skepticism from your local category-rejecting
"nominalist" (sic), Abe. ( If/since there are no REAL "categories", I cannot label myself as a member of one.)