Musical vs everyday listening

[Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think it -- 'aesthetic vs functional' listening was proposed much 
earlier than than 1993.

There is the anecdotal (?) John Cage quote: "Music is all around us, 
if we only had ears, we wouldn't need concert halls. "This was cited 
by the narrator of the Everest LP of Variations IV from a 1965 
recording in Los Angeles. Luc Ferrari in Presque Rien 
http://emfinstitute.emf.org/exhibits/ferraririen.html is only one of 
many 'soundscape' composers who propose to hear the universe in a 
drop of sonic time. (There is also a 1971 (?) Broomhilda comic strip 
with the single caption about 'music' appearing in the environment 
... "It's always there, you just have to know how to coax it out.")

Composers and writers have spoken / written about this for a long 
time, and my experience is that music from a radio can either be a 
'musical' experience or an 'everyday' experience. Most of my early 
life was lived with sound as an aesthetic experience, but there 
again, I have also not seen a definition or description of 'musical' 
proposed on this list.

http://cec.concordia.ca/electrobox/sonus02/Feist_Diptych.mp3
Nobody 'na lissen, one crazy ol' birrd.
http://www.sonus.ca/app/ui/more.php?Language=en&MediaID=109

As I recall, in a more general sense, the idea of 'aesthetic 
perception' as distinct and contrasted to 'functional' perception 
occupies in about 35-40% of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel 
Proust, which means about 400,000 + words, perhaps not a concise 
formal proposition, but one well documented across the senses. A 
madeleine anyone?


Best wishes for the New Year

Kevin



> Brian Gygi wrote:
>
> Peter -
>
> ... this distinction between "musical" and "everyday" listening was 
> first formally proposed, as far as I know, by Bill Gaver in What Do 
> We Hear in the World (1993).
> Best
>
> Brian