appears to be an inherent difference in the way we (or at least me) treat these different forms of entertainment. books and movies which are visual are relegated to the status of one-time events --> once you know the story/plot/main theme you are unlikely to read/watch it again .. whereas with music you tend to repeat the stuff you like and listen to it over and over again .. is it because auditory phenomena are treated fundamentally differently from visual phenomena or is it because books/movies are interesting because of the plot/storyline and once it is revealed they lose the charm ..
of course it can be argued that if you are reading/watching from the point of view of understanding the aesthetics behind it then nothing prevents you from going for it a second time .. unfortunately these things seem to be secondary if not completely irrelevant
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7 comments:
I am not sure movies can be clubbed in the same league as books...probably the shock endings like Shyamalan movies can be seen only once, but most good movies can always been seen multiple times.
It still cant be compared to music which can be heard 100's of times. But I think your comparison is flawed cos the time involved in each process is very different.
For example, you can see an advertisement 100's of times, although you know the punchline, climax or whatever...its same with music...Its just a question of time !!
I think it depends on what you want to/expect to extract from each form of entertainment, and how quickly you extract it. e.g., you could imagine expert listeners getting bored at a second listening of a particular rendition. But it might not sound repetitive to me because I can't pick out those patterns that easily; esp. with western classical music, I've noticed that my friends often call immediately boring what I do after a semester.
But then there is another aspect to repetition -- the comfort of familiarity. And in that sense, some people (at least, I :) have many favourite books they can read over and over again, and seeing something in the book that you've forgotten about, even though you know what eventually happens, evokes some nostalgic happiness. :)
it is more the case of form/content opposition. we expect content from books/movies whereas music is supposed to be pure form. what does a piece of music 'mean'(we have to construct a metalanguage to answer that whereas any discussion of the semantics of a novel or a movie is simple)? in the visual domain the analogous thing is painting/sculpture where we admire the form. there is meaning but it is subsidiary and what we return to is the form that we find pleasing. to use an extremely politically incorrect analogy, we keep leching at women because of the form - the content, for us, is subsidiary to it; but with a man once we know where he stands, since content is more important and not the form(most often), we dont mind if we dont 'see' them often(of course for women i suppose we can invert the analogy :D) in other words, whereas we associate something like music only by its form and secondary associations(i hear this when i am sad as i have done all the time; this sounds like crying etc) we remember the ideas in a movie or a book as much as(or more than) we do the images portrayed and filter unimportant things out. so we dont tend to go back to them except by way of associating newer ideas to the old ones obtained from these earlier memories.
point5:
"I think your comparison is flawed cos the time involved in each process is very different."
My hypothesis was that the process by which the brain accepts/treats different media is vastly different .. not just the time ..
And abt ads .. there are those who may argue and empirical evidence anr market trends (read tivo sales) suggest that people do not want to watch ads!
svr:
im an advocate of memorylessness .. so nostalgia has no appeal however enticing the idea may sound
madatadam:
agree with hypothesis abt form/content .. bad example though which would incidentally have to make me upgrade the ratings of this space from G to PG-13 or whatever .. though i would have no qualms whatsoever :-)
While I agree that people like to hear the same patterns again and again I feel that even after listening to a rAga several times I can't mentally, forget vocally, reproduce certain phrases to my satisfaction - of course this doesn't seem to hold with film music etc. There is a kind of "resolution" in understanding that gets finer w.r.t. time.
madatadam : is it possible for a man to keep leching at the same picture/video of a woman ( another example, sort of obvious one, comes to mind but then the rating would become "R" )?
i agree there is a certain fine resolution in understanding but i believe it is because we like to recreate rather than reproduce - what u r trying to do is synthesize wat u have heard with both memory and creativity trying to get at the 'root' of a phrase; a tape-recorder which has to do merely with memory has no trouble in playing the exact phrase over and over again after 'listening' to it once. This is seen also in the way people remember things - if u had seen a movie named 'The Amazing Mrs Bainsworth'(a bow to 12 angry men) u might have told ur friends that u saw 'The Remarkable Mrs Bainsworth' - what u essentially remembered was not the name of the movie but wat u believe was the content behind those simple letters. So, depending on the level of ur creativity/inability to reproduce(both r two sides of the same coin) u might listen to a piece of music repeatedly to get the 'content' in it but the 'content' itself is wat u force on the music conditioned on ur behavioral patterns as the 'content' is merely 'form' expressed in a metalanguage. In other words, wat I am saying is that form and content are equivalent if u create a metalanguage for form - the only difference is that content is expressed in 'natural' language and form in the metalanguage.
As for leching, I meant the general idea of leching at 'woman' rather than A woman/a picure/video of a woman etc - the reason why we get bored after a while with a particular woman is because there is a certain 'content' content(not necessarily intellectual etc) in specific objects and, even if it doesnt exist, we create one for ourselves just as in the name of a movie or a piece of music(diverse examples with content meaning different things), and when we feel we've grasped it, there is the feeling of having gotten everything out of that particular woman and we move on. if we keep leching it is either because our content-mongering mind is not satisfied yet or simply because we like the form.
@madatadam
Agree wholeheartedly, esp with "In other words, wat I am saying is that form and content are equivalent if u create a metalanguage for form - the only difference is that content is expressed in 'natural' language and form in the metalanguage."
For example, guys who are have a ear for music, like say frog in the well, find listening repeatedly to some kinds of music boring though the lay men don't. I'm guessing that this is because they have a better understanding of the "metalanguage" -- the scale, tempo etc. Which is possibly why the learned carnatic rasika will prefer listening to a live concert that introduces some interesting variations in the music at the metalanguage level(interesting use of a gandharam or watever), than listen to the same recording repeatedly.
In contrast, for someone not attuned to these variations, it probably does not make much of a difference.
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