[PD] RIP Stockhausen

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Tue Dec 11 19:56:06 CET 2007


On Tue, 11 Dec 2007, Andy Farnell wrote:

> Of course he will always be remembered as an avant garde composer, but 
> much of Stockhausens greatness is missed by artists who saw him as a 
> pseudo-scientist and scientists who dismissed him as an artist. He was 
> both at different times. A lack of rigor and precise voclabulary hides 
> his contribution to psychoacoustics, he basically provided experimental 
> support to Gabors theories, yet he is not mentioned once in critcal 
> textbooks like McAdams and Bigand.

Oh, that happens everywhere. If you're not part of a university or if 
you're just a student of some prof or if you're just a research assistant 
of some prof or if you write in a way that doesn't sound as stuck up as 
usual... in the latter case you might get told to just go the the 
philosophy department instead. of course, when you get there, the 
philosophers will wonder why anyone wanted to send you to the philosophy 
department in the first place.

It's sad, for example, that you can't talk about the aesthetics of 
mathematical proofs without first getting out of your main topic and write 
something specifically about the aesthetics of mathematical proofs so that 
you can support a certain way of making proofs that you want to use in 
your specialty field and that otherwise may look inferior to other proofs 
under statu-quo aesthetic standards of mathematics. Of course it sounds a 
lot better if you don't have to cite your own article for supporting 
yourself. If I were writing in math, perhaps I would have an extensive 
network of pseudonyms writing in different fields. But then if you're in 
the middle of your masters then most likely you can't pull that trick and 
you have to submit yourself to your advisor. In any case, chances are that 
anyone reading your citation of a philosophical thingie will not bother 
reading the philosophical article and will not think at all about whether 
they should change their minds about the corresponding issue, so, in that 
case, my method of proof would still suck.

(this is not all from personal experience, there's a little personal 
experience and the rest is extrapolation of what would happened if I had 
stayed 2 or 3 more years in the math dept. I only have a B.Sc. degree.)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


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