The Liberal Arts have taken a bit of bad press recently: all the priority recently in the United Kingdom has been about STEM[1], in particular English and Mathematics, and the arts are left to founder with whatever is left over. In better-off areas it proves challenging to maintain arts teaching in schools, especially in music, which can be expensive to deliver. In more deprived areas, the lack of resources means that there is a real lack of arts and music teaching or even of having chances to experiencing them at all. Hopefully this will change. So why talk about Liberal Arts in such an environment?
The reason is that the Liberal Arts are crucially important for everything else we do. Aristotle and Plato set out the seven aspects of learning that would liberate people to be able to do anything. These were practical (“arts” then meant what we might now call the practical implementation of creativity). Actually the translation of these seven aspects is a little bit wrong. “Liberal” now can have a connotation of being free and undisciplined. Aristotle never thought that these Arts should be undisciplined. Quite the contrary, he thought they were a means of disciplined thought, and said “art arises when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgement about a class of objects is produced”[2] and “art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning[3]”. Definitely not undisciplined! Perhaps we should call them the “Liberating Arts” rather than Liberal Arts.
So what are the seven Liberating Arts? In simple headlines, they are in two groups: (1) Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric – the three arts necessary to express everything and communicate to others; and (2) Numbers, Geometry, Music, and Cosmology – the four arts necessary for implementation. From these seven arts, all other knowledge can be created, comprehended and communicated to others. It all might make sense to a 21st century person, but perhaps the surprising inclusion – and the only one that might be included in modern-day thinking as an ‘art’ – is Music.
So I am going to talk about Music.
Music, like other arts, is highly creative, emotive and technical. But why was it included as a Liberating Art? Basically because it was regarded as being the direct introduction to the soul. “Not only the theory but also the practice of music is liberal because, like the other liberal arts, it aims at ordering something which is an object for the intelligence”[4]. That blend of creativity and technicality is also neatly exposed: “The tendencies and practices in music are only observed and catalogued upon analysis, after the fact. It is the hearts and minds of human beings that shape and weave melodies, harmonies, and rhythms together into meaningful tapestries, imbued with the interior landscapes of their immediate experiences”[5]. That blend of time (“after the fact”) and interiority (“hearts and minds”) is what makes it so powerful emotionally, and also why it is so important in terms of everything else that we do: everything we do should have this sense of being created within, and that sense of “after the fact” means that we can only begin the process of perceiving after we have applied the technical practice. The fact that we can only apply the technical practice after we have decided what to do brings us straight into the world of Active Inference that I have written about before. It is creating that joining-together of predictive coding and the management of surprise that predetermines the “weaving” of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. So Music turns out to be the key to understanding how we interact with the environment.
This raised another question in my mind though. How do we hear music so that this complex creativity-technicality can actually introduce us to our soul? This means understanding about the relationship between the environment and the way in which our hearing system works. We have seen in previous articles how we used the understanding of how our hearing works to inform the design of the alert sound for e-scooters. In that work we found that the whole issue of how a sound starts affects the way you hear it. Therefore ‘starts’ are important: cut the ‘start’ of a particular note and you could not tell whether it is being played by a flute or a trumpet. Of course, the body of the sound is very important too. So a space where you hear music has to be good at both the starts and bodies of sounds. It needs to have enough reverberation to allow you to combine sounds together to hear harmony and yet not be so reverberant that you cannot distinguish different rhythms.
So it is complicated.
In recent years, acoustic engineers and architects have made massive progress in designing music spaces, and a lot of the challenges have been resolved, and yet, it is acknowledged (occasionally) that it doesn’t quite work in reality (“… I had a conversation with the concertmaster, principal clarinet, and other section leaders [who reported that] they were concerned with the conditions in the new hall and that the stage acoustics were problematic… However, this is a very normal occurrence”[6]). In such cases, sometimes the situation reported later is that the acoustics are fine (even though nothing has actually been done). Sometimes it is a matter of massive and expensive remediation.
But my own impression of several of these halls is a bit unsatisfactory: the sound has a glorious tone, but I don’t hear the ‘starts’. I wonder if the physics and architectural challenges have been satisfied but that the interiority question has been lost?
No concert hall has had the opportunity to test the combination of acoustics, visual effects, smell etc. with a real audience or performers before it has been built. Sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? And the modelling is very clever. But is the interiority being modelled? How does the hall perform in terms of Active Inference?
In PEARL, we could (with some adjustments which we are planning now) create a prospective concert hall during the design phase, with these features as being proposed and the proposed acoustics characteristics to see how actual performers and audiences respond to the multisensorial aspect of being, experiencing, performing, and listening in such a place. Maybe we can then understand more about the interiority of music and its place in the Liberating Arts.
[1] Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics
[2] Aristotle, Metaphysica, I, (1),981a 6
[3] Aristotle. Ethica Nicomachea, VI, (3), 1147a 10
[4] Smith, R. (1946). The Liberal Arts: Definition and Division. Laval théologique et philosophique, 2(2), 79–88. https://doi.org/10.7202/1019773ar
[5] Jason Martineau (2010) The elements of music, in Critchlow K (2010) Quadrivium, Wooden Books, p241
[6] Toyota Y, Komoda M, Beckmann, Quiquerez, Bergal E (2020) Concert halls by Nagata Acoustics, Springer, p 311
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