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Traditionally, the aesthetics of
music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty
and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance) of music. Aesthetics is a sub-discipline
of philosophy, however, many musicians, music critics, and other
non-philosophers have contributed to the aesthetics of music. The origin of this
philosophic sub-discipline is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the
eighteenth century, quickly followed by Kant. Through their writing, the ancient
term 'aesthetics', meaning sensory perception, received its present day
connotation. In recent decades philosophers have tended to emphasize issues
besides beauty and enjoyment.
It is often thought that music has the ability to affect our emotions,
intellect, and psychology; it can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions.
The philosopher Plato suggests in his book, the Republic that music has a direct
effect on the soul. Therefore he proposes that in the ideal regime music should
be closely regulated by the state.
It is commonly believed that human responses to music are culturally influenced.
For example, musical passages in Beethoven that sounded highly dissonant to his
contemporaries do not sound dissonant to listeners today. As such, music's
aesthetic appeal seems highly dependent upon the culture in which it is
practiced. However, there is a physical background which defines sound being
proper or improper. Proper sound is perceived as gentle sound while improper
sound is more or less considered nice sounding depending on what the listener is
used to listen to. Harry Partch and some other musicologists like for instance
Kyle Gann therefore have studied and tried to popularize microtonal music and
the usage of alternate musical scales. Also many modern composers like Lamonte
Young, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca paid much attention to a scale called just
intonation.
Some of issues aesthetics of music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism,
emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and color. However,
there has been a strong tendency in the aesthetics of music to emphasize musical
structure as the most important (or even only) aesthetic element that is
important in the experience of music.
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