Alternate Tunings For Life

Last night I had a conversation with a friend about how we perceive music as guitar players. His way of looking at the instrument as patterns that can be placed at certain positions of the neck, and squaring that with what is being played against. It's an intuitive way of finding something that sounds right perhaps with an eye more towards style rather than something that is more technically standardized. My way of looking at music comes from a few fundamentals: the 12 major scales (from which other scales can be related, such as minor scales and pentatonics), triads and seventh chords, and intervals. Once you learn the major scales, however unusable they seem to be in and of themselves, then you know all the scalar variations derived from them. We were also talking about all the "10,000" books ("10,000 Chords for Piano" and so on. I remember those books from the 1980s and the equivalents now exist on the internet. That's another way lots of musicians look at music: something that's modular, which is what I use, but are rather building blocks rather than prefab elements that you string together).

Everyone has a unique perspective on knowledge and ways of achieving it regardless of its domain. Scholastic learning narrows it, as opposed to more a broad conceptual approach. I find this to be the case in visual art as well: When I've made art, it was usually conceptual or a series of some kind--such as the Intervals series and Black White & Red. I realized that musicians might be using a variation of that: since they aren't "studied" they can approach it from different angles. However, the downside of non-standard approaches is that they require explanations. For people to see it your way you have to tell them how to see it, but they have their own ways. Standardization obviates explanations and we just "get" it.  Some might not want to "get" it, so we go for the "traditional" ways. (This is why I think David Hockney's portraits are so popular--there's nothing to "get") In music, that's usually defined by things that are simplified, such as the idea that songs should have 3 or 4 diatonic chords. They could have a lot more based on the same simple rules or a major scale. Sometimes even simple things require explanations because we're locked into our own views.

Everyone's brain is wired differently both as individuals and groups. Say 10 people go to a plaza in a city and in the middle of the plaza there's a large geometric sculpture that has different angles that you could look at from where you're standing and cast different shadows at different times of the day. Some people will see different things based on where they're standing and people will be taking photos of different things. (Incidentally, photography is a way of seeing as well. Whenever we hold up our phone and take a picture of something we're defining how we see something or are homing in on an explanation (Photos are possible explanations of what reality might be). For me, I  like shadows or reflections because they already present shifting views. I see them as abstracted objects (pulled from or projected) as they could be used in art--a sculpture, for example.

What we want to do is try to understand more fully what's involved in seeing and make it an intentional mindful act instead of just walking by something and not fully seeing it. But again it redounds to how your brain is wired. People who operate from the left hemisphere tend to see the world as literal, codified, or well-explained. They tend to prefer representational things. Portrait or landscape paintings might mean more to them than abstract or conceptual art because it doesn't need explanations. But in music, when I'm doing things by the standards of notation and theory I find myself having to explain things. People want "round" versus "square", "bouba" versus "kiki". As humans, I think we want curvilinear rather than rectilinear experiences. This may explain why most people are averse to the oddities of parametric forms of architecture, even though the forms might be more “bouba”.

Iain McGilchrist: "The left hemisphere sees bits that it must put together in order to have a map of the world whereas the right hemisphere sees that we don't need to put things together because they're already connected deeply and they have meaning which is much greater than anything that could be in the map. The left hemisphere's map is useful but it doesn't contain most of what is worth knowing about in the world for that we need the right hemisphere." See: https://youtu.be/-IbOFaXvwIw?si=Xc84acp37DFCZkFf&t=488

I think it would be better for us to take a bird's eye view of the top of our brains and see how our left and right hemispheres are firing. If you see that your left hemisphere is firing all the time maybe you want to check out the other side and vice versa. I do this with alternate tunings on guitar: it takes away the map and I have to approach it more intuitively. But the interesting thing about that is that it can't exist in isolation or against the standards. When I take an idea from an alternate tuning to a standard-tuned piano, I have to use that as the standard. But it was the remapping that made the difference and I wouldn't have had that view had I not used an alternate tuning.

Perhaps we can use "alternate tunings" as a metaphor in other parts of life, but you have to be open to remappings. I think most people aren't but we're all using our own tunings and we don't realize it. But we're also having to come back to the piano, the main map that you will have to use if your new view can be understood. It makes understanding convenient.

The way we typically look at the world is as a form of convenience. All of us want to look at the world more conveniently--that way we don't have to do any work we just see things how we always see them and we're not going to be swayed to look at it any other way.

People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.--David Brooks (How To Know A Person)