Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Of the options given in the Final Q; I would classify time, the number three, patriotism, god, morality, science, market capitalism, and war as entirely human constructions. I decided to put these all in this category because I believe them all to be purely human constructed ideas. Only humans have the ideals of time, morality, god, market capitalism and patriotism, and only humans use the number three and science to delineate amounts and describe things. Finally war is a purely human creation because no other species engages in war as we use it. They will defend their territory against invaders but they will not turn invaders themselves as humans do.

Those things only partly humanly constructed would be in my eyes music, the color red, the electron and apples. Personally I think that music is mostly not a human construction because it is there in the world and we merely define what’s there and create our own at times. Red is not something we created we just named it when we started the concept of named colors; therefore it is only vaguely a human construct. The same is true with electrons and apples. These things existed before we discovered and named them. We have since manipulated them to our uses but we did not create them.

This leaves nothing in the entirely not human constructions category. This does make a measure of sense to me because in a manner everything is at least somewhat a human construction because we have defined and named all those things which we interact with in our lives even if we did not actually create them.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Music

As the article assigned states there is much argument surrounding what constitutes music over the years. Personally I go with the idea of the types of music musica universalis, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. I think there are different levels of music. That produced by the world around us or musica universalis from birds, wind, running water or manmade things, that produced by humans or musica humana either by humming, clapping or singing, and finally musica intrumentalis or that produced by instruments such as piano, violin, etc.
Personally I enjoy all these to varying degrees. I think they are all parts of what music is in our world. I don’t think music necessarily needs a rhythm to be music. Some things are more pleasing to the ear than other but pretty much every sound in this world is part of the music of life. From the ticks of the clock to the solos of a saxophone in a jazz club to the sounds generated by the various fauna of our earth some of which can be very bizarre.