Dear Les and Vocalister:
Welcome back Les. We have missed you.
You completed your recent musings about the place of science in
singing with this statement:
"Isn't singing all about achieving the desired effect and isn't desire
subjective?"
Are you then suggesting that objective study has no place in
suggestive pursuits? That idea brings forward a whole new
discussion, albeit it a good one. In my own life I know of no
subjective study or pursuit that is not informed, indeed permeated,
with objective concerns and criteria. The corollary is the same. I
have not experienced an objective pursuit that is not filled-in with
subjective attitudes and desires.
Although science has a primary concern with measurement and
identification and recording and hypothesis, it organizes information
or data in a manner that is more accurately recalled and assimilated.
Once assimilated data becomes less objective and more subjective.
The manner of thought is influenced. The mind is capable of growing
beyond its present limits, not only in understanding but in that form
of "knowing" that we like to label as subjective.
I quote from an article by Michael Shermer in the latest issue of
Scientific American:
"In the first half of the 19th century the theory of evolution was
mired in conjecture until Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
compiled a body o evidence and posited a mechanism--natural
selection-- for powering the evolutionary machine."
"The theory of continental drift, proposed in 1915 by Alfred Wegener,
was not accepted by most scientists until the 1960s, with the
discovery of midoceanic ridges, geomagnetic patterns corresponding to
continental plate movement, and plate tectonics as the driving motor."
"DATA and THEORY, EVIDENCE and MECHANISM. These are the twin pillars
of sound science. Without data and evidence, there is nothing for a
theory or mechanism to explain. Without a theory and mechanism, data
and evidence drift aimlessly on a boundless sea."
And all of this from the small thought that it would me helpful,
perhaps even nice, to have more accurate descriptions of vocal
functions, descriptions that are objective enough to be universal
without removing the obvious connection of singing as a primarily
subjective expression
--
Lloyd W. Hanson
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