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Title: Language, Music, and Mind by Diana Raffman ISBN: 0-262-18150-9 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 02 March, 1993 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.00

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Average Customer Rating: 2 (1 review)

Rating: 2
Summary: I found it flawed
Comment: I apologize if I misunderstood it (and it has been some time since I read it) but Raffman's book seemed to build upon some questionable and shaky initial assumptions, and some over-generalizations or mis-characterizations of prior work (e.g. Goodman, and Lerdahl-Jackendoff).

The point that I would get from her book, which I don't think is quite the one she intended, is that IF you restrict yourself to considering music based on the Western 12-note equal-tempered "classical" (e.g. "grammatical" a la Lerdahl-Jackendoff) pitch system, and IF you restrict yourself to musical scores which are only notated in terms of those 12 pitches and the classical grammar, and IF you restrict yourself to only listeners and performers who also have restricted themselves to those same 12 pitches and the classical grammar, THEN you can say that anything else, variations in those pitches or exceptions to the grammar, etc., is "ineffable".

But that just seems like a tautology, e.g. if you restrict yourself to only using the 2 words "white" and "black", then of course you cannot describe any colors!

There are many many people who have learned to perceive and reproduce other intervals, besides the Western equal-tempered dodecaphonic semitone, and who have become quite comfortable with music that does not conform at all to Lerdahl-Jackendoff's grammar. In fact I believe that the music she considers as her entire universe is a very small subset of the music that has been made over the course of human history.

So for any listener of any music outside that limited universe, the same nuances that Raffman calls "ineffable" would perhaps be easy to describe, if those nuances fell into categories that they recognized.

This appears to disprove Raffman's whole thesis, unless I misunderstand it. If she acknowledged the restricted universe she was operating in, that would be different (unless I missed such an acknowledgement?). My impression was that she tried to generalize, to all listeners with all possible experience and training.

On the other hand, she did introduce me to an idea which IS potentially interesting, if one considers the broader implications beyond her narrow application of it. Roughly speaking, this is Goodman's notion that if you only have a ruler with finite measured markings on it, then you can't precisely measure in the spaces between the markings. You can add more markings, but there will always be spaces in between. Mathematically this is just the notion that there are different kinds of infinity, i.e. countable rational numbers, and uncountable real numbers in between them. Of course you cannot "count" the "uncountable"; this was proved a long time ago by Cantor (?) with a "diagonalization" proof.

So I would be more comfortable with Raffman's approach if she considered it in this abstract sense, that the Western 12-tone equal-tempered classical grammar is only one of many possible "rulers" (counting systems) with only one of many possible sets of measured marks.

But then the whole point seems too obvious (you can't count things, if they fall in between the indices you use to count them), so again I must be missing something -- if so, I apologize.

But being involved in communities of electro-acoustic musicians and composers, who have worked for years on ways to "effably" describe the nuances in sounds that are NOT based on the system that Raffman takes as a given assumption, I was disappointed in her work.

Even Fred Lerdahl himself once suggested to me that he wasn't so sure of the applicability of the grammatical approach to musical analysis that he derived with Jackendoff. Again, it only works for a very restricted universe of possible musical gestures and intervals, and perhaps this restriction is too severe to be useful anywhere beyond a purely academic discussion.