Your brain chooses for you, it chooses whichever chord sounds the best to it.

false, I choose the chords... my brain is only one part of me

Your conscious self is not a discrete entity

false

Your favorite might be vanilla, but your subconscious brain is really what makes the decision.

Perhaps, but if we're talking about brains then I'd argue that it's my concious brain that makes the decision. I know I like vanilla better. If I didn't know that but still liked vanilla better, that would be a subconcious desire. Since I do know it, that means that it's my conciousness which is making the decision, not some part of me of which I am unaware.

If I painted your bedroom rainbow, you would probably dislike it, especially if I did it in the brightest, most luminous paints I could find.

X^5 + (8*3) / (6^33) = 57

therfor that was a bad analogy

subtle differences in arrangements of neurons cause huge differences in personality, the same way switching two tiny functional groups on a comparatively huge strand of dna may change your eye color, or may make you unable to process certain proteins.

Sure, but we're talking about music, not DNA. Though there might be some corollations they are very very distinct and entirely different subjects.

I was asking someone to refute the answers which I thought would be entirely visible as to what I meant. I thought wrong.

yes I would say you did... especially since I already refuted the answers which were "obvious" to you.. no, which you assumed... there are no obvious answers - the obvious answers are the ones that don't matter... 2+2=4 never payed my bills.

when you lose part of your memory in a car accident, or for an even better example, if I chopped a piece off of your frontal lobe, then if your soul carries memory, how can this be if heaven is an 'eternal paradise' where true happiness would include memories of good events in your former life?

your logic is F8CKED my friend... f8cked!

you make WAY too many assumptions. there is absolutely no way you can arrive at some of your conclusions or even arrive at the questions you ask without an entirely twised and warped perception of the assumptions you are using and then logic which connects them. Your current thought flow requires WAY too much assumption regarding the nature of things like a soul and heaven and hell and all kinds of other metaphysical issues which you have no real basis in reality for arriving at the conclusions you've arrived at. Essentially you would, here, be claiming to have knowlege of the fundamental nature of "heaven" itself in order to be able to think with the data you have presented. It would also pre-suppose that heaven actually exists, which is rather detrimental to your argument.

If you discount memory from the soul, you can continue to discount other features through cases where changing something physical in the human body led to a change in what appeared to be in the soul.

this requires altogether too much to say. first you must define "memory from the soul" then you must dfine "features" then you must define "change" and THEN you must define "appeared to be the soul" ...

then you must actually have a valid thought flow pattern. you simply amaze me with your ability to connect two entirely unconnectable things via your ability to make assinine assumptions. your ideas are rediculous to me, honestly... rediculous... and I am a very open minded person, I can put myself in just about anyone's shoes... your "propositions" however, defy all the most fundamental bases of logic I can comprehend.

i was tryin to read as much as i could but it all got a bit crazy, i thought it was music philosiphy not the meaning of life

yup... it is supposed to be... that's why I'm gonna move this to The Pit pretty soon

cuz it no longer really belongs in the Music Theory thread

Just because the debate happens to involve life the universe and everyything doesn't mean its not a debate about music theory... I think its the most interesting discussion of music theory I've ever read

heheh, true dat Orlando... though in general... this has sort of trancended most people's calssical notions of music theory and begun to delve into many other areas

I'll agree that it's still music theory, because for me music is life, so anything that's debated in regards to life is also debated in regards to music, and they're all theories... however "music theory" in the classical sense usually involves those constructs such as the notions of chords and how they move and etc etc melody harmony blah blah, the technical components of music... the word theory in this case has begun to take on two different distinct meanings, though related. which is why I will probably move this to "the pit" eventually... and, actually, eventually I'll probably turn it into a stickie once I get that feature up and running...

but yeah, I agree, still the most interesting discussion on music theory I've ever read

Alright- I lost some post stats after the server went wacko- time to get down to business!

My theory on music: It is for the you- you the preformer, you the listener, you the critic, etc. If you play music to impress people, get chicks, or "just for the money" that's not music. It's as pure as any human experience, so it can naturally be as corrupted as any human experience.

But... what makes good music to listen to? hmmmm...

maybe that will get some long posts* (hears to hope)





*that is, long music-related posts

just realized, i forgot to share reoger water's teory on what makes music good... but i'll keep that to myself until this topic becomes alive!

becomes alive eh? when will that be?

i suppose it's "alive," just in ill health 

mmmkay just for answering the original question, from my point of view, keeping it as short and basic as reasonably possible:

Music is... metapsychology, capable of causing mass hysteria and driving individuals to (and over) the edge of sanity.

It can also be used for transcendent(al) meditation, it can soothe little children, it can also disturb and even upset old people.

It may very well be matricised telepathy. In this case it's a fairly direct translation of the artist's mind to something other people can instantly access and explore. Since different artists take different stands toward making music (some just want to bounce around on boinky beats while others make great effort at creating something terribly aesthetically complex, if not complicated, and some just want to physically abuse their instruments, be politically (in)correct about something and completely wear themselves out in the process), there are a lot of different soundscapes out there, just like there are a lot of different ways human beings can align, calibrate and set their minds to perceive and act to what's up next in life, the universe, and everything... and everything in between.

It has probably all been said before and perhaps somewhere up this thread even but I didn't bother to read it all. I understand that physically speaking, music is vibrations through air (usually) that set off the mechanics of hearing, but also vibrate through the entire body, causing both positive and negative physical sensations. Now "brown notes" have sufficiently been disproven, but certain frequencies can cause distress and nausea while other frequencies generally make you feel more relaxed, awake. The difference between listening to music through headphones (however top quality they may be) or having sonic waves wash all around you - is pretty obvious in this light. My theory on this is the effect of sound vibrations on H2O molecules, quite a large component of the human body, even more so: a quite important ingredient for life itself, as we know it. Staccato saw and square waves cause way different resonation than smooth sines do (this effect can be seen in the different shapes of ice crystals forming while being exposed to different types of music and / or waveforms), and I believe that it is the resonation which eventually cause a person to feel comfortable with the presented audio, or not: all things associated with feeling good or bad - metalheads prefer a different set of resonations than trance clubbers do. It is that simple.

Didn't understand much of what I did read from earlier in this thread, so I thought, well, let's start all over again, and see what it brings. It's also what I usually do when I position myself in my sort of studio, so I guess that's pretty much what music means to me. 

(sorry, I just finished reading "Mostly Harmless" and it left me a bit... I don't know)

as for smileys... this one    sometimes appears really weird to me. The "disappointed face" just seems to scroll from one side to the other, it's not like an actual shake where the head rotates, it's more like looking through a tiny hole and seeing some weird being wobble about behind it. Try it, focus on the smiley and try to see what I mean... 

good times

it's funny to look back on what you wrote 5 years ago and realize how you didn't really know anything but you thought you knew everything... lol

my, how things change

- peace

Holy sh*t!

I disagree...unless you were 10 years old 5 years ago!
You've always known everything you just haven't known how to say it.
And anyway it's a bit like a Monday....you may hate it but you've got to get through it to get to Tuesday ! 

GO ROGER WATERS!!!!