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Overview
In a visual culture, hearing is the second sense, and music is the art of hearing. Kandinsky believed that music transcended painting and visual representation because it had the power to act directly and invisibly on the human spirit. Because it is the only art to deal unequivocally with the real world of sound and its attendant perceptions of time, motion, and human mortality, music remains a powerful and often controversial influence on human behavior. Defining music in the broadest sense as 'any acoustic activity intended to influence the behavior of others', and written in a clear, conversational style for a non-specialist readership, The Second Sense draws on over 100 examples of recorded musical sources from throat singing to Beethoven, and from traditional Japan to Boulez, including a great many popular classics. On the basis that 'Everything you hear is true: true of yourself, true of the music, and true of the relationship between what you hear and how you hear it' the author teases out the signs, symbols, and patterns of thought that arise from the way people hear, the sounds people make, and the instruments and environments that are designed and constructed to enhance the listening experience. Maconie aims to do for music what Klee and Kandinsky did for art education and Marshall McLuhan for media studies.
Synopsis
A vigorous non-technical discussion of basic acoustical, auditory, and communications processes that guide and connect musical behaviors of every age. Developed as a source book for students of art and design it offers illuminating commentaries on more than 100 cd recorded items from classical and world music traditions.
Booknews
Drawing on 100-plus examples of various types of recorded music, Maconie (performing arts, Savannah College of Art and Design) explores the signs, symbols, and patterns of thought that arise from the way people hear, the sounds they make, and the instruments and environments that are designed and constructed to enhance the listening experience. The 20 chapters explore music's connections with language, feelings and memory, with an emphasis upon acoustic and classical music that can be performed live without microphones or speakers. They discuss how the same aspects of critical listening involved in other areas of life can be applied to music. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Editorials
Musicae Scientiae: The Journal Of Escom
In many ways this is a refreshing book to read. Maconie displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the last five hundred years of western music and other art forms in this admittedly personal account of his teaching....This is what is refreshing about this book. After several books and papers in recent years on the sociology of music, which loudly proclaim the fact that popular music is the most frequently heard genre of music for the whole human race, and that it (mostly popular music) is the sole source of emotional 'food' for identity construction, here we have someone who is saying something different....he makes many interesting connections between music, science, visual art, literature, and daily life....there are hints of Habermas's notion of consensus as truth in Maconie's arguments about how music affects us. The idea of discourse is paramount in Habermas's consensus truth, and Maconie engages the reader in such a discourse throughout the book with information derived from many fields: physics and musical acoustics, psychology, musicology, sociology, and philosophy. It is through these fields and Maconie's creative explanations of music and sound in everyday life to illustrate how we apprehend the sounds of music in all the ways defined by these discrete disciplines that the book achieves its impact on the reader....The richness of Maconie's pedagogical approach is its refreshingly contextual approach whereby a whole gamut of culturally based communication and functioning, scientific knowledge of perception and cognition, as well as the impact of the socio-cultural and political is called upon....Maconie brings both a more up-to-date scientific perspective than was apparent with these older traditions, and a more sympathetic awareness of how the students are situated 'in-the-world' and need to be led into this knowledge from their 'in-the-world' status, rather than just be regarded as objects into which knowledge is poured by the expert.— Robert Walker, European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music