David Dunn

In many ways our most cherished uses for music and our assumptions about
values of authorship, communicative intention, emotional expression and
musical genius may be, in evolutionary terms, short-term aberrations. Despite
the beauty and entertainment value that such assumptions afford our lives, they
may even be distractions from a more profound significance for music.
From a much wider cultural and environmental viewpoint I believe that music
has been a significant means through which humans communicate with,
participate within, and give back to the larger systems of mind that comprise our
natural and social environments. In the daily circumstances of life, we are
surrounded with a fabric of sound that is the voice of a generative source. When
we make music, it is to match this fabric that speaks to us. Most of human music
making throughout our history has been outdoors. It hasn't been made in
cathedrals or concert halls. That is a very recent circumstance. We may believe
that we are somehow divorced from that generative source when we move
indoors but I think that one of the meanings of music has to do with conserving
that original intention. I believe that when we talk about the integrative and
spiritual aspects of music, what we are really doing is trying to re-stimulate, or
trying to find some recapitulation to these other levels of music as a
communicative source with a living world.

http://paulscriver.com/Thesis%202007/David%20Dunn/Cybernetics.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ6yDfx2new

https://www.discogs.com/David-Dunn-Angels-And-Insects/release/659010
https://www.discogs.com/David-Dunn-Music-Language-And-Environment/release/302454

David Dunn - Arcana

One

Music is a form of operational closure defined through sonic patterns as a parallel way of thinking to the visually dominant metaphors of human speech and written symbols. It is also a kind of conserving strategy for ways of communicating that are closer to how other forms of life may communicate and only tangentially related to human linguistic structures. It may therefore be a traditional means for structurally coupling to nonhuman living systems. The fact that we have yet to discover a human society without it says something significant, as do recent discoveries about the ability of music making to alter the hardwiring of brain development. As this vast terrain of human activity and inheritance of our species, music may provide us with important clues to our future survival.

Two

Assumptions about values of musical authorship, communicative intention, emotional expression and musical genius are, in evolutionary terms, short-term aberrations. Despite the beauty and entertainment value that such assumptions afford us, they may even be distractions from a more profound significance for music. From an environmental viewpoint, music has been a means through which humans structurally couple to the larger systems of mind that comprise our natural and social environments. Discussion about the integrative and spiritual aspects of music is largely a recapitulation to the experience of music as a communicative source with a living world.

Three

The meaning of music does not reside within the structure of notes as semiotic referents. There is no simple point-to-point correspondence of communicative intent and reception. The failed attempts to identify objective content of expression within the musical object are merely post-Kantian confusions that try to assign mind to a specific locus. Music is a distributed network of signification where meaning emerges from an infinite set of superabundant associations and uses. Unfortunately, most of our assumptions about music are determined by our culture’s cherished belief in the ideals of self-expression, emotional content, intentionality and authorship. We also tend to assign cultural value to music by identifying musical experience with these same beliefs. What might be left of music in the absence of these assumptions?

Four

Our capacity to hear the soundscape as music is simultaneously one of the most archaic ways of listening and the most modern. Music is both a conserving action for keeping alive a mode of communication similar to non-human forms of cognition and an intuition to a future communication modality that we are actively evolving. Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of social bonding, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.

Conclusion

Taken together, the confusions of mainstream musical aesthetics about emotive communication, the limits of aesthetic taste and preference, new scientific understandings of the autonomous basis of life, perception, and language, and ideas about a deeper evolutionary continuity between human language and music, all point me toward an interest in a more expansive view of musical function than that which is generally encouraged by the reflections of mainstream musical commentators of the vested interests of the music industry.

In the attempt to “express ourselves” and create social cohesion - in the unique way that music performs that function - we are also evolving new ways of exercising our aural sense. Musical phenomena participate in the expansion of the boundary of our perception and how we relate through sound to our world. Every piece of music does this even if it was not the conscious intent of the individual(s) that made it. I’m most interested in listening to a musical phenomenon for how it informs me about novel ways to perceive things and how that perception takes place.

Music is never fixed and its evolution into new forms and uses is not hierarchical. This position is not intended to negate prior musical forms and assumptions but to celebrate the diversity of our musical experiences. Like any living ecosystem, a near infinite diversity of music realities can coexist and be widely valued. The challenge is to not merely perpetuate familiar aesthetic constructs but to also embrace the necessity for understanding and preserving the continuity and richness of human and non-human communication as essential components of the complex networks from which both perception and evolution arise.

http://soundamerican.org/theemergentmagician.html

"emergent mind": like the first and last five minutes, esp. strong last, but my mind wanders during middle, as with many other long segments of sound and music, more than I like. First passage of writing v. appealing, re reconnecting etc.