I went to a concert in the Barbican a couple of weeks ago where the BBC SO played Tristan Murail's Gondwana. There were a number of other hybrid electronic/acoustic works. As a now-elder exponent of musical spectralism (where audio analysis of sound waves themselves informs dynamics, instrumentation and form), I found the Murail piece particularly fascinating. Perhaps more impressive than Gondwana, is his piano music - particularly this piece "Territoires de l'oubli":
Perhaps not the sort of thing one would want to listen to all the time, but it is fascinating because of the way the thumps and bangs resonate with the higher compass of the piano. I find it like listeneing to nature - rather in the same way as Messaien (who of course is the composer who springs to mind in listening to this). But this isn't about birdsong or God. It's fundamentally about physics.
I also think it's about difference. The art of Murail is an art of identifying small differences in the detail of a waveform, and reproducing these differences in instructions to players such that the reproduction of small differences is almost as imperceptible as they are in our auditory experience.
What is a "small difference"? It is clearly related to what Ernst Weber called a "just noticeable difference" - an idea which became the foundation of psychophysics. It subsequently became embedded as a principle in an AI innovation I was responsible for, so this is a bit personal for me. There are big philosophical questions around psychophysical principles because they appear to run against the Kantian notion that there is an unknowable thing-in-itself about which we can have no knowledge. Weber, and later Fechner, suggested that there were indeed empirical things we can do - and Murail is clearly experimenting with these.
A small difference is liminal - existing in the space between presence and absence. It is the beginning of where what Graham Priest calls paraconsistency (where true and false co-exist simultaneously) arises (Graham Priest - 4. What is paraconsistent logic?)
Increasingly it seems that paraconsistency is the only useful logical position to take in our incredibly tortured world at the moment. Warren McCulloch, in his first paper on neural networks in 1942, articulated something like this and prefigured a paraconsistent logic in discussing the circularity of the nervous system (A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets | Bulletin of Mathematical Biology). A "heterarchy of values" is a paraconsistent logic.
This isn't a new idea. It goes back to the idea of "synchronic contingency" which was a key feature of the philosophy of John Duns Scotus. That it has acquired new resonance with quantum mechanics is perhaps an indication that the medieval insights were correct. I'm revisiting some of this stuff: Improvisation Blog: Information and Syncretism: from Floridi to Piaget
Our distinction-making is never objective, yet it result in selections from possibilities where we take what we select to constitute "reality". The logic of selection is not Aristotelian, as McCulloch argued. Yet we take it to be so - particularly from an organisational perspective. This is what is producing the aporia that see unfold in the Trump/Russia/Ukraine pathology. If we examined this from a paraconsistent perspective, how would it look different?
Rather like Murail's music seeks to unite the form of music with the physics of music, what if we united the form of decision with the biology of decision? Could AI, which is also a paraconsistent technology, help us?
