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I used to hang out with musicians and play music with them and jam into the late hours of the early morning. Sometimes we would record our jams, but most of th

I used to hang out with musicians and play music with them and jam into the late hours of the early morning. Sometimes we would record our jams, but most of the time we would not. Listening to these old recordings, you would occasionally find magic and "endless wonder" (see Warehouse 13 episode "Resonance"), and that got me thinking: how much incredible music has been lost to time, music that wasn’t written down and composed and was never recorded?

wolverine876 4y ago
Even if you wrote it down, would that capture the endless wonder?
- sammalloy 4y ago
  I won’t go into too much detail, but the magic and endless wonder I’m describing was caught on tape. Where it starts to get strange, and this is difficult to describe, is that in the course of playing live music, it turns out, the /music created its own music/. This could only be caught live. You could conceivably attribute this to stochastic sound waves bouncing around and interacting with each other, overtones, distortion, echoes, etc. And what I’m describing isn’t all that unknown. But it was caught on tape. And the music we were hearing wasn’t created by any one of us in an intentional manner. It had taken on a life of its own and became a living entity of some kind. Again, it’s hard to explain, but anyone who goes to concerts or is familiar with a live aural environment knows that shit happens and it’s often weird and unexplained. A similar phenomenon has been reported by writers, known as writer’s trance. Often times an author will claim that they didn’t actually write the book, it wrote itself. On one level, there’s the question of where ideas come from, but on another, there’s a way these ideas are expressed and manifested that becomes more than just the person creating them. In the example of the music, it felt like the music had taken on a life of its own when the different parts all came into contact with each other. One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. On the one hand, these ideas only exist in the mind of the writer, but once on the page, they begin to enter other minds, including the minds of the characters themselves. It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Thank you for sharing that experience with us. It makes me think also of static arts like (minimalism, IIRC), where the creation - or the viewer thinking about the creation - is part of what's expressed. My thinking in the GP was that every time that happened before recorded music, it was lost - writing it down, even if possible, doesn't capture it. > It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling. I've read about the other parts, but not this implication of it. Do you know who said that? I'd like to read more about it.
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      > > It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling. > Do you know who said that? I'd like to read more about it. It’s an old idea that lurks on the fringes of academia but resurfaces every now and then to rear its fuzzy head. I think I first heard it in the late 1980s, saw it come back in the 1990s, and then disappear until the mid-2000s when people started talking about it again. Google scholar notes that Raymond A. Mar (York University) and Keith Oatley (University of Toronto) were writing about it in cognitive psychology at least twenty years ago, but I suspect it’s a topic in computational narratology in some way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Oatley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Oatley "[Fiction] is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers".
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        Thank you. Returning to your prior comment: > One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. I've definitely heard writers say characters become almost independent persons with their own perceptions, ideas, decisions, etc., and interact with each other and the story.
anamax 4y ago
Rick Beato claims that there are thousands of unreleased albums where the artist couldn't afford distribution. Or, the artist couldn't afford to pay the engineer or producer and the master is held hostage, waiting for a payment that will never happen. (The engineer/producer doesn't own the copyright so they can't release it on their own.)
- sammalloy 4y ago
  How wildly serendipitous. Are you aware that you just described the exact details of the major subplot to the Warehouse 13 episode I mentioned up above? In the event that you are not, please, go watch it. It basically describes what you wrote. It’s season one, episode two.
derbOac 4y ago
Maybe not the same but in the modern era, with film, maybe: acting. In my region live theater is pretty well-developed, and there are amazing actors and actresses who never achieve the fame of film actors and actresses largely because their work isn't in a recorded medium.

wolverine876 4y ago

Even if you wrote it down, would that capture the endless wonder?

sammalloy 4y ago
I won’t go into too much detail, but the magic and endless wonder I’m describing was caught on tape. Where it starts to get strange, and this is difficult to describe, is that in the course of playing live music, it turns out, the /music created its own music/. This could only be caught live. You could conceivably attribute this to stochastic sound waves bouncing around and interacting with each other, overtones, distortion, echoes, etc. And what I’m describing isn’t all that unknown. But it was caught on tape. And the music we were hearing wasn’t created by any one of us in an intentional manner. It had taken on a life of its own and became a living entity of some kind. Again, it’s hard to explain, but anyone who goes to concerts or is familiar with a live aural environment knows that shit happens and it’s often weird and unexplained. A similar phenomenon has been reported by writers, known as writer’s trance. Often times an author will claim that they didn’t actually write the book, it wrote itself. On one level, there’s the question of where ideas come from, but on another, there’s a way these ideas are expressed and manifested that becomes more than just the person creating them. In the example of the music, it felt like the music had taken on a life of its own when the different parts all came into contact with each other. One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. On the one hand, these ideas only exist in the mind of the writer, but once on the page, they begin to enter other minds, including the minds of the characters themselves. It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing that experience with us. It makes me think also of static arts like (minimalism, IIRC), where the creation - or the viewer thinking about the creation - is part of what's expressed. My thinking in the GP was that every time that happened before recorded music, it was lost - writing it down, even if possible, doesn't capture it. > It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling. I've read about the other parts, but not this implication of it. Do you know who said that? I'd like to read more about it.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > > It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling. > Do you know who said that? I'd like to read more about it. It’s an old idea that lurks on the fringes of academia but resurfaces every now and then to rear its fuzzy head. I think I first heard it in the late 1980s, saw it come back in the 1990s, and then disappear until the mid-2000s when people started talking about it again. Google scholar notes that Raymond A. Mar (York University) and Keith Oatley (University of Toronto) were writing about it in cognitive psychology at least twenty years ago, but I suspect it’s a topic in computational narratology in some way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Oatley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Oatley "[Fiction] is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers".
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      Thank you. Returning to your prior comment: > One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. I've definitely heard writers say characters become almost independent persons with their own perceptions, ideas, decisions, etc., and interact with each other and the story.

anamax 4y ago

Rick Beato claims that there are thousands of unreleased albums where the artist couldn't afford distribution. Or, the artist couldn't afford to pay the engineer or producer and the master is held hostage, waiting for a payment that will never happen. (The engineer/producer doesn't own the copyright so they can't release it on their own.)

sammalloy 4y ago
How wildly serendipitous. Are you aware that you just described the exact details of the major subplot to the Warehouse 13 episode I mentioned up above? In the event that you are not, please, go watch it. It basically describes what you wrote. It’s season one, episode two.

derbOac 4y ago

Maybe not the same but in the modern era, with film, maybe: acting. In my region live theater is pretty well-developed, and there are amazing actors and actresses who never achieve the fame of film actors and actresses largely because their work isn't in a recorded medium.