The Black Box of Feeling:
Music between intuition and algorithms
ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ΗΝ ΑΡΙΘΜΟΣ
The black box – both a common metaphor for the opacity of generative AI and an apt description of the impenetrability of human thinking and feeling. While the development of artificial neural networks is advancing through iterative techniques for understanding their non-linear behaviour (saliency maps; reverse engineering; inceptionism; recursive segmentation), a profound understanding about our inner human selves remains fragmentary, diffuse – mystical – due to a division of aesthetics in either psychological matters or metaphysical speculation. The race to unlock the function of organismic, random thinking (and feeling), and mathematical and deterministic processing has been underway for some time – so as has our intellectual entanglement with such structures.
Conceiving of mind as embodied, and more like a transformer, than a switchboard, influenced both by immediate experience and hidden symbolistic connotations, is fundamental to Susanne K. Langer’s philosophy, which positions music at its core. It forms the sensual-emotional matrix that stimulates the inaccessible complex of sedimented experiences. Logical syntax is, from this perspective, only a small refuge in a much greater ocean of symbolic articulations that encompass an entire spectrum of logics. As a prompt for human feeling, artistic form thus serves to iterate human psychophysical entanglement.
What happens when we expand the transformative-creative process with technological agents that can recognise recursive patterns in musical styles, combine sounds and use emotional gradients with utmost precision (becoming doppelgängers of the great composers) but are incapable of solving simple mathematical problems due to their internal text-based heuristics? Isn’t arithmetic, in addition to the ability to solve computational problems, also characterised by a sense of proportion, rhythm, special awareness, intervals? In other words, also composed of intuitive elements? What happens when no longer ‘inner singing drives the musically talented to invent a musical piece’ (Hanslick, 1874), but rather an emulation of the simulation of feeling (‘Good composers borrow, great composers steal’ – David Cope)?
This research aims at an in-depth look at the thought of logician and philosopher Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985) and her conceptualisation of primary and secondary illusions in music that unfold in listening as a combination of virtual experience of time and the perception of space as tonal volume. Perception, understood by Langer as reciprocal exchange between autogenous action and exogenous influences (individuation, involvement) within a matrix of interwoven events (acts) thinks feeling and form. Her highly analytical approach, which includes theories from artistic practice, offers a toolkit to make comprehensible the gradients of perception. The epistemological implications of her theory of symbolistic expression (beyond language) are expanded by media and music theoretical discourses (McLuhan, 1964; Lerdahl & Jackendorff, 1996; Kittler, 2005; Harper, 2011). Discussions build on and update the critique of technological rationalism (Adorno, 1956; Marcuse, 1964).
Mathematical foundations and generative techniques are inherent to musical composition. This lecture will highlight historical examples from music, such as Mozart’s Würfelspiel, John Cage’s 4:33, John Conway’s Game of Life, and Laurie Spiegel’s MusicMouse, as well as experiments involving AI in musical co-creation (David Cope, Rebekah Wilson, Holly Herndon). We’ll explore, in parallel, the significance of physical resonance in psychoacoustics (Maryanne Amacher) and a phenomenology of electroacoustics (Annette Vande Gorne) as techniques for re-embodying sound.
Given that the essence of everything might truly be numbers (not words), will the logic of the industrial society 4.0 really culminate in its synchronisation with syntactic structures? Or is there a more vibrant, polyphonic reality that we have yet to invent?
KEYWORDS
generative music, algorithms, phenomenology, empirical musicology, psychoacoustics, electroacoustics
AIMS
An introduction to and critical reflection of Susanne K. Langer’s philosophy; the historical development of the concept of “feeling” in philosophy and the processuality of “recursivity” and “contingency”. Moreover, possible approaches for empirical musicology through Susanne K. Langer’s theory of the arts.
LITERATURE (DRAFT):
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Cope, David. 1996. Experiments in Musical Intelligence. Madison: A-R Editions.
Gaikis, Lona. 2024. “Music as the DNA of Feeling”. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Susanne K. Langer. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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