Before I go into my introduction I would like to apologize for getting my blog set up so late. I’ve been dealing with some personal things, however they have been resolved and I ready, as well as excited, to start philosophizing with you all. That being said, my name is Rob and I am a fourth year philosophy major. I am taking this class because I love philosophy as well as art.
For the topic of my first post I wanted to focus on something Aristotle says in part nine of the Poetics:
“… … Incidents have the very greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvelous in them than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance.”
My concern with this passage is why this is the case? I believe the claim being made is accurate. I know that when I am watching a movie the events that occur out of nowhere, so to say, have much more of an effect on me than that of the ones I can predict. However, why are viewers/listeners/readers moved more by events that are unexpected rather than ones which are expected? It seems as if the events which are unpredictable have some sort of greater value than that of predictable events. However, this seems to suggest that we like to be fooled in some sense. We enjoy not being able to predict or know certain things before we come to know them. I suppose another way of thinking about this is that we enjoy when a story is going in one direction but then goes a complete other.
I believe it is easy to come up with a lot of support for this claim with reference to movies, however, I would really like to think about it with regard to music. The only one I can think of at the moment is dubstep music—although I am not personally a fan, the genre is becoming more and more popular. Wikipedia explains dubstep as “a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South East London. Its overall sound has been described as tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals”. Moreover, what this explanation fails to mention is what the listeners refer to as “the drop”. What is meant by the term is the moment when the song goes from a relatively simple melody to one which includes the “overwhelming bass lines”. Although when one is listening to a dubstep song he/she can almost feel, so to say, the “drop” coming, the “overwhelming bass lines” seem to offer a degree of unpredictability.Furthermore, the “drop” is typically the part of the song people value or enjoy the most.
an example of a dubstep song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emu0vQ4bUiw
Perhaps another example could be breakdowns or solos which occur in the middle of a song. Since the breakdown or solo of a song, typically, have different rhythms or melodies maybe we can think about them with regard to what I have been discussing.
I am not quite sure if either of the music examples I mentioned offer the same effect that unexpected events in movies provide, however I would love to hear what you guys think about this. Also, if anyone can think of different examples in music I would really like to hear about them.
