Context

In another class, I was reading some text that was referring to the way in which industrialization would influence the way people perceived sound, and thus change how people composed and related to music. This seems somewhat simplistic at first – is there any weight to a statement that affirms people would be drawn to noise because noise surrounds them?

If you look at the way in which music has evolved in the last century, I think it's rather hard to assert that there has been an entirely homogeneous progression towards the embrace of noise, but I do feel like noise plays a big part in how most music is being made nowadays, even if it's not always exactly deliberate or conscious. I'd also mention that not embracing noise turns certain types of music into breaks from the expected.

I must admit, I believe that “noise” is a deeply complex subject where semantics can get fuzzy (pun intended). Where the implications of how noise can manifest in music (and what music even is) can be time-consuming to describe with precision. My point in mentioning the progression of noise in 20th century music wasn't necessarily to have a fully coherent and deep discussion on noise, but rather, to point out other things.

The context in which things are done is a huge part of what those things mean. I believe that the usage of noise in music is a beautiful example of how contextualization shapes definitions and arguments. A random waveform with frequency components between 4k and 7k might be an undesirable hiss in one context, but it might be the right sound for another composition. Ideas and concepts can't be understood simply by what they are on their own, being seen as manifestations from readings from technical devices, but they must be understood by what they're surrounded in their containing structure. Furthermore, a single musical composition can't be understood on its own – it too needs to be contextualized. Soon, we realize that ideas are simply fractals of contextualized meaning.

I believe that this relates to notions of how we relate to concepts as well. I think that wanting to have an absolute and objective understanding of how things can be conceived is something that is simply untenable, and somewhat pointless.

This is why webs, networks (or whatever synonym you can think of for a collection of mutually interconnected and co-dependent elements that form a whole) are so important. If things can only be understood and explored by the context that they're in, then it's important to leverage the systems that enable the contextualization and relation of said elements.

An interesting, and somewhat lyrical, observation would be to point out that ideas connect and relate just like bursts of electrons through different circuits of neurons in the brain. Forgive my poor neurological description, but it's simply interesting to point out that this seems that just like definitions are like fractals of context, it seems like the way in which humans perceive and structure context as a concept might be derived from the way in which our brains operate in the first place.