# Making Events  ## Metadata - Author: [[Simon Evnine]] - Full Title: Making Events - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The paper argues that musical experience is an artifactual event. Such events can be made by producing matter, by arranging others' actions (performances), or by a listener imposing concepts on hearing. Listening can be an active, creative act that turns mere hearing into a musical experience. - Source File: Making Objects and Events by Evnine.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > The problem concerns listening to music for more than a couple of minutes and can be put in a nutshell: I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing when I'm listening. Or perhaps, I don't know what listening is. (I will add that I have a degree in musicology, so it's not that music is somehow alien to me.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5v6rvcr1myammwm45b1hp63)) > The answer I shall give here is that listening is an act of making and so the thoughts one should be having are the thoughts required for acts of creation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5v6sk3xg5dwazqs97rjh4kd)) > A clock is what a clock most fundamentally is, and being a clock requires being made by a certain kind of intentional activity. (In technical terms, clock is a mind-dependent substance sortal and not, like prince, an accidental or phasal one.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xa1bd466ddqr0n1sz0ntj2)) > How will this look if we want to apply my account to artifacts which are events? I will assume that whatever the matter of an artifactual event may be, it too must be event-like and of equal duration to the event that is made out of it. This seems overwhelmingly plausible, but it is also the source of the difficulty in applying the account I sketched for artifactual objects to events. If the matter isn't all there for the maker to work on at once, how does she work on it to impose some concept onto it? We will evidently need to broaden our thinking about matter and work on matter. I can think of three ways in which the account might apply to artifactual events, differing with respect to how they understand what the matter is and how the maker works on it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xa4k167dh2vapqer66x8xz)) > I think she is onto something here, but it is not an argument against the possibility of events with temporal parts but only objects. Humans (and perhaps other animals) are in the remarkable position of being able to initiate certain events by will. For we can, deliberately, move our bodies. Thus, our production of bodily movements is a kind of creation ex nihilo. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5v7qn2m06zan4zcf55mag6a)) > My intentionally moving my finger is made out of, has as its matter, the event of my finger's moving, which is not itself an artifact (and hence not an intentional action) but a mere bodily movement created by me ex nihilo. In such a case, the work on the matter, in virtue of which there exists something of which it is the matter, consists simply in my producing it to serve as the matter of the action made out of it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5v7scjjetwc3kx9gz99t85s)) > In this case, the work itself, as opposed to the product of the work, is not co-terminous with the matter. It resembles the object case in that the work, the intentional bringing about of the bodily movement, occurs momentarily at the outset. Since I have discussed this view of intentional action at length in (S. Evnine, 2016), I will not say more about it here. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xad100feh0eqc07vkgse68)) - Note: ???? > In both the two previous models, the maker of the artifactual event is also responsible for the production of the matter out of which the event is made - in the first instance, directly, in the form of bodily movements, and in the second instance, indirectly, by arranging for actions (or other occurrences, come to that) that will collectively form the matter of the artifact being made. On the third conception, the matter is not produced or arranged for by the maker of the event at all (except perhaps incidentally). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xap87ktybd3rckq2aqzd2m)) > "No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back," breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xaxw775adqzh6pafs192ez)) > The nature of this conceptual imposition can take various forms, but what they have in common is that they involve the application of further concepts to that experience. Here, application is not always to be distinguished from predication. Tibby, for examples, predicates the concept transitional passage on the drum of something which is a transitional passage on the drum and the concept German 6th onto a chord that is a German 6th. He may also make a mistake in such predications, perhaps predicating the concept Neapolitan 6th of the, in reality, German 6th. But it need not always take the form of predication. When Helen hears shipwrecks or goblins stalking across the universe in the music, she is not judging, even incorrectly, that what she hears are shipwrecks or Goblins stalking. Perhaps she is deploying the concept as one does in hearing in or seeing in. I am not sure about this. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xb6qjye6s4m6avqaz7xyth)) > Returning to my personal problem, it turns out that what I need to do, when I listen to music, is to listen to what I am hearing. (Big surprise, right?) And listening to it means, in essence, thinking about it. What I need is to be mentally active in relation to the event of hearing it, imposing on it the concept musical experience by applying other concepts to it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xb8aj51dahmnrwrdn6r7cq)) > It will probably not have escaped your notice that what I say here about hearing, listening, and musical experience bears a resemblance to the "myth of the given," a view about perceptual experience on which it arises through passive, non-conceptual intake through the senses and the application to that intake of concepts supplied by the understanding - or something like that. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xbaj0hrjsmsn30z8pg9ypf)) > What is important, from my perspective, isn't so much the distinction between sensation, which is concept free, and thought, but rather the distinction between what is passive (which may already be the product of processes that endow it with a conceptual element) and what is actively and deliberately added to it as part of a process of artifactual creation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xbd4w0npyr8gvr46h8k03m)) > Nor have I encountered the same problem as I did with regard to listening to music of not knowing what to do with my mind. And I suspect that this has something to do with the conceptual richness of the input. To put it bluntly, and no doubt too crudely, I don't have to worry about what to do with my mind when I am reading a novel because my head is already so full of thought just in taking in the text. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xbevrqexx6ch9x0tgt436x)) > I will finish here. Perhaps the main thing I have come to realize in working on this paper is just how easy it is to lump all music together and look for a theory that will cover over distinctions between different kinds of music, and different contexts of listening, that may be associated with extremely different kinds of experiences. The response I have focused on here is a constructive model, in terms of matter and making, because I come to the issue from thinking about artifacts. But when we talk about our experiences of music, there might be many other kinds of responses besides that. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k5xc1znvvhmacg22p8hc21zr))