Vanessa Hawes

Welcome to my new website.

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of East Anglia, finishing in June 2008.

This website is desigend for anyone to look at who is interested in:

• Employing me at a University or College
• My work, which involves:
  • Music and scientific thought
  • Music in science fiction
  • Music theory and analysis
  • The development of the communication science in the 1950s and 60s
  • Mathematical models of music
  • Music and Information Theory
  • The music and theories of David Kraehenbuehl
  • And related topics
• My musical activity in various bands
• My writing

Many of these areas are represented by the categories at the side of the page; feel free to browse. Many of the items are papers I have presented at various conferences, and I am working on getting the full text of many of these up on this site, so watch this space!

Please do email me if you have any questions or comments.

Vanessa

In March 2005 I presented a paper at CUNY in New York in Rilm’s conference, ‘Music’s Intellectual History: Founders, Followers and Fads.’ My paper was entitled ‘Number Fetishism: The History of the Use of informaiton Theory as a Tool for Musical Analysis.’ I have just found out that it will be published in a forthcoming volume of conference proceedings!

Sunday 21st October saw a PROG WAR at the bull and gate. Thumpermonkey and I played Tam Lin live in front of an audience for the first time, and all those performing were in triumphant costume. The headline band were Sphere3 - progtastic! Some extremely good pictures of the night can be seen on William Burnett’s facebook album

The track audio can be found here, have a listen! This track can also be found on the brilliant Second Tooting Bizarre Compilation, more details to be found at the Tooting Bizarre MySpace site. Enjoy!

On 22nd September, various members of the Tooting Bizarre conglomerate went to High Wycombe to record a live album with Anthony Chapman. The highlight for me was definitely doing a cover of Tam Lin with Thumpermonkey, which can be downloaded off of the forum here

The powerful classic rock combo, Todger, also recorded some great tracks that day, and these have been put on an album together with a live recording from a couple of months ago. I have been doing some backing vocals for Todger - fun on a stick! Check out the new tracks here .

The whole live album from that day is awesome, and some great music came out of it. Check it out here

Derive II was very hard work to listen to. At 40 minutes long, it bombarded the senses with some of the most complex, and beautiful, music ever written.

I was inspired by the conductor’s performance as she took the ensemble in her power with Boulezian precision and exatitude. Reviews here.

See my review of the concert here.

The weekend just gone was ‘Supersonic’ at the Custard Factory in Birmingham. See the pictures on my facebook: here.

An extremely fun weekend of music for an unashamedly pretentious muso-festival.

Highlights were: Miasma and the Carousel of Headless Horses - brilliant theatrics, great music, brilliant violinist; and Chrome Hoof, great constumes triumphant Grace Jones-esque singer, and hilarious eight-foot sparkly puppet at the end. The best thing about it (apart from the music) was the fact that they were all dressed in glitter-ball suits.

The UEA hosted a conference, ‘Music and/as Right Action’ on the weekend 29th June - 1st July, and I was involved in the organisation of the event. The idea of the conference was to consider music as action and therefore as potentially right or wrong action. Themes included politics, violence, judgement, moral guide and aesthetics, and there was an emphasis on the ethics of music, with one speaker, Bettina Schergaut, brilliantly coining the term ‘aesthe(h)ics’ in her paper on Beethoven and Adorno - one of the best of the conference.

The full programme of events for the conference can be found here.

Although not a central interest to me, the ethics of music is interesting in my work for several reasons. The conference made me think about the ‘ethics’ of using a model from one field in another - the obvious example in my case being using the mathematical model of information theory in music analysis. The reason why there might be an ethical slant to consider is in the nature of the model itself. Like the development of many of the new mathematical models in the mid twentieth-century (game theory is a prime example - see Martin, Brian (1969) ‘The Selective Usefulness of Game Theory’ Social Studies of Science 8(1): 85-110) the structure of information theory has been affected by a) the opinions and methods of the people who invented it, b) its early uses and intended uses and c) what it ‘fits’ best with - what communication systems it was most readily and deeply applied to. If we take this to be true, then it follows that no model, mathematical or otherwise, can actually be called ‘neutral,’ there will always be an inbuilt bias, despite efforts otherwise. This goes against the popular conception of mathematical models and their neutrality.

When information theory, then, is applied to the analysis of music, the analyst no longer sees the music as ‘music’ (whatever that is) because the inbuilt bias of information theory forces him to see it as a communication system - a linear communication system at that - with the structure of a typical Shannon diagram of information (’music’) travelling from a sender to a receiver. Moreover, these same biases necessarily void the emotional aspect of music because Shannon’s information theory is all about the movement of some kind of information (it does not matter what it is) from a sender to a receiver, the concept of meaning does not enter into the equation at this point. This, then, may lead to the use of information theory to look at the meaningful level of music (because what is music if it is not meaning - it is difficult to separate the pure act of communication from the act of influencing someone else’s behaviour or opinions), and that is something it was never designed for. This second mistake is what leads to the accusations by musicologists that using mathematical models to analyse music devalues its emotional impact. In short, there is an ethical question of whether it is appropriate to use any models for purposes other than what they were designed for.

I organised a day at UEA for local sixth-form music students to come in and see, not only what it would be like to do a music degree, but also what it actually means to do a music degree in terms of careers, experiences and opportunity.

There were several presentations by UEA lecturers and associate tutors talking about specific courses and the overall philosophy of the UEA music school. One interesting thing I thought about while watching the presentations was that there is an emphasis on music as practice at UEA - the students are always encouraged to think of music as an experience; as something a real person does, rather than as an artefact. Seeing music as an activity opens up the subject to new points of view and alternate ways of looking at both the history of music and performance itself, for example, considering the reasons behind the works of certain composers. Jonathan Impett talked about some differences between the music of Bach and the music of Beethoven in terms of composition as a job - the character of some music might be partly explained (because it is by no means the full story) by the function of the piece - whether it is written because your employer has told you to and you have to or you won’t get paid (as in the case of many of Bach’s works), or you compose because you feel as if you have to, to let ’something’ out or express something. The dynamics of each situation are very different, and looking at music as an activity (see also the ‘Music and/as Right Action’ Conference Programme) allows us to address New Musicology (which is essentially what it is) in this way and see some of the human reasons behind music.

The day ended with some words from former UEA music students who had gone on to do teaching, sound production, research and other things. I was surprised - and I don’t know why - to learn that UEA music has an extremely good employment record for past students. I still don’t have a job, though.

This conference took place at Cambridge University, with the usual pomp and circumstance personified in the long list of sponsors of the event, and the fact that the conference booklet had an index…

The full conference programme can be found here.

I was delighted to see some heroes of mine talk, like Jamshed Bharucha, whose inspiring keynote address, ‘Musical Communication as Alignment of Non-Propositional Brain States’ was the highlight of the conference for me, and very relevant to my work. Another highlight was a paper on the second day by Marcus Pearce and Geraint Wiggins called, ‘Information Dynamics in Music Perception and Cognition.’ They had taken the idea of the analysis of music using information theory to another level, redressing past mistakes and drawing on Wiggins’ background of mathematical modelling to create and extremely convincing argument for the method. On asking Wiggins why they were pursuing the topic, he told me that he believed that the time had come when we actually have the tools and know-how to be able to do what the pioneers in the 1950s and 60s could only make a very small start on. Faster, better computers and far better software now allow the ‘information-musicologist’ (copyright V.Hawes 2007) the power to analyse layer upon layer of music, voiding the usual argument against information theory analysis - which is that it assumes music to be linear, which it is not.

Later in the conference, Wiggins, in a response to another paper talked about models in music theory. He said exactly what my colleague Richard had been talking to me on the train about, which is, the decreased worth of a model for music if it is a description model only, in other words it is designed, on using it to ‘test’ music (supervised learning of a system), to give the answer that is already there so it cannot be wrong. The model is a metaphor of what the experimenter/analyst already knows. Many systems in music theory are like this, including some that had already been talked about at the conference - a little like backwards engineering the structure of the music. A better model is one that does not utilise supervised learning for its development, but learns from what actually happens in rigorous testing, developing on the basis of real results. This creates a model that is far more able to describe a variety of music, rather than just the one piece or oeuvre it was designed to ‘explain.’ This kind of model, Wiggins explains, is explanatory, because the structure of the system goes some way to explaining WHY the music’s structure is the way that it is. In this sense, it is a true model and not just a metaphor for the musical structure. This whole approach is reminiscent of one of my pet topics, the explanatory gap between the humanities and the physical sciences. The supervised learning, top-down approach represents one, and the unsupervised learning, bottom-up approach represents the other. Hopefully, expressed Wiggins, they will someday meet in the middle.

Pearce and Wiggins have a project going at Goldsmiths using their new information-based system and this, along with other projects I have been made aware of in recent years, gives me new hope for the relevance of my work in current musicology, and the possibility of having an interested audience for my finished thesis. The time has finally come, says Wiggins, for us to find the baby, extract it from the bathwater (see Musical Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) dust it down, plug it into a computer and tell it all the new things we have learned.