Music and 'us humans'

It's been a while. A long while. But I intend to start posting again, occasionally.

To start with: some music research journal recently tried to convince academics to publish by tweeting the following: "The sciences can help us to make sense of music and its significance in our lives. Contribute your #musicscience research to the academic journal Music & Science."

In order to interpret this tweet correctly, it is crucial that we first shed light on the fifth word of the first sentence of the tweet: "us". Who is this 'us'?

I can tell you one thing, from vast experience with my own and many others' musical lives: the 'us' is not a 'generalized us'. It is not 'us humans'. Because most humans have no trouble at all 'making sense of music and its significance in our lives'. Music has sense by definition and a priori - otherwise it wouldn't be there.

So if the tweet suggests that there is a problem (we, humans, have no clue about the 'sense of music') and that scientists are going to offer humanity the solution (they, scientists, will make sense of music for us, humans), it is just another instance of the usual academic hubris - academics will define 'our' true problems and then 'tell it as it really is'. Ignoring the fact that also academics are humans; they are 'situated' (as we say in social sciences' dialect), they speak from their own standpoint, and we should know about that standpoint if we want to discuss their findings in any meaningful way.

But there is a second reading. A reading in which the 'us' is not 'us humans' but 'us scientists', or 'us researchers', or 'us academics'. Then the tweet becomes different: it is not the academics' task to  answer humanity's questions but is their task to ask questions which normally, in our lives lived, are not asked at all.

(By the way: the reading of the word 'our' in the first sentence then requires extra attention - it suggests in this second reading that researchers, as humans, stand as pars pro toto for humanity. Is that realistic?)

It is this second reading I favour. Because it shifts attention from answer to question; from closure to openness; from convergence to divergence; from truths to suggestions; from seriousness to play.

I'm afraid the tweeters implicitly meant 'us humans'. But let's not bother, and feel free to think otherwise. To offer an alternative interpretation.

Just because academics' lives then become so much more fun.