Is there music without sound? I don't know the answer to this. Can a melody arise in the mind of a child who has never heard music? I suspect it can. Is the melody not a melody in the split second before it is vocalized by the child? I don't know. All I can say is that is that I mistrust the assumption that it is not.
Sound and music
Forgetting about the sound of our systems for a moment, there is a larger question of how sound by itself integrates into our appreciation and comprehension of music. Those notes written by composers have no really significant meaning unless physically heard.
How much of a part does the sensual aspect of music play in its apprehension, and what part does the stringing of those notes together play? A musician can read a score and visualize ( or audio-ize) the meaning of the music but without the physical sound how much is missing?
This has significance in the debate over how one listens to a system: for the sound or for the music.
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You have a point here... Music is organized sound by an expressive gesture ( of the musician ) recorded not only a s playing memory in the brain but engrammed in the body as a "wave" of emotion answering by the body gesture of the listener to the playing body of the musician... Music is sensible meaning incarnated in sound body which live in time more than in space...
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It's only just occurred to me that it is one thing for a child who has never heard music to "hear" a melody in their head and and another for a child born deaf to do so. A child who has never heard music will most likely have heard the sound of birds, for example. I suspect this physiological/vibrational aspect tends to be overlooked in western culture! |
As a retired concert pianist I do look at music from the perspective of a performer. I performed classical music which in most cases adheres strictly to the printed page (although there are exceptions.). I gather from your posting that you deal in improvisation, quite a difference, as you make it up as you go along. |
Western culture in general admit and claim with his reductionist bias on the one hand and also with his Platonic opposite bias on the other hand, disconnected from one another that music is in the "physical waves" or /and in the abstract numerical ratio...( Goethe, Husserl and Whitehead are not in this game for example ) Music is in the vibrating body sound sources and in the productive gesturing body acting on it in some way to let him speak his own language ... Qualities come in time and in pre-conscious sensation way before the reflective post thinking or theorizing conscious moment ... This drum TALK because the "drummer" a master, listen to his instrument and do not merely play it for another reason other than talking with it... The source of music is in the productive gesturing body...But it is true even in piano interpretation of written classical music ...Musical time is a dual dimension of his own, completely different of physical metronomical unidimensional time...Pianist must play and interpret or better said EXPRESS themselves and the written score in this dual time dimension where the emotional body live and it is not written in the score how to do it... Nobody taught the heart how to beat or how to talk ...Human speech gesture is born with music gesture... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4oQJZ2TEVI Then you are right...
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