Original scientific paper

Recognition of Music and Beauty by the Language Game

Yako Masato ; Department of Acoustic Design, Faculty of Design, Kyusku University, Fukuoka, Japan

Abstract

What is most difficult with any discussion on music is that it cannot be objectively determined whether or not the music in question is a matter of beauty. In this paper, by introducing Wittgenstein's idea of the "language game", the author proposes a theoretical model for recognition of various kinds of music, moving from the cultural areas where beauty is not known in connection with music, through those where beauty is intrinsic to it. According to the Witgenstein, what supports personal feeling and experience is not the interior of experience, but the behavior that forms these two. Wittgenstein called this behavior the "language game". Therefore, the beauty of music, whose experience cannot possibly be certified, should be recognized as an operative effect created by the language game. For this purpose, four kinds of musical game, that is, "the game of the gesture of approval", "the game of continuing and repeating a sound", "the game of the aesthetic black box" and "the game of change" are defined. One can then recognize any musical act as one these four games in the light of the mutually circulative process, resulting in the appearance and disappearance of beauty as an operative effect of such process. It follows that music and its beauty can successfully be described by the language game.

Keywords

Wittgenstein; Language game; Musical beauty; Gesture of approval; Primary game; Circulation model; Aesthetic formation

Hrčak ID:

71860

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/71860

Publication date:

26.2.2007.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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