Music 256a hw5
Reading response
When reading the Interlude of Artful Design, one of Perry’s quotes particularly stuck out to me — this idea of the:
“present-day separation between engineering and arts / humanities.”
As someone who majored in Symbolic Systems, I feel like this is a question I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating.
When I came to Stanford, I felt (and sometimes still feel) really conflicted about having to define, or what feels like “constrain,” my areas of study to a specific set of bounds. Labeling myself as a History or Human Biology major felt so reductive when I knew that my interests went beyond just the ideologies or perceptions associated with each of these fields.
One idea that I couldn’t let go of is that life, or existence itself, doesn’t make this distinction between majors — or more broadly, between fields — so why should I? It’s not like a human body exists and has arteries for anatomy’s sake, cells for biology’s sake, and a mind for philosophy’s sake. It’s not like cities exist and have housing for urban studies’s sake, climates for earth system’s sake, and an electric grid for engineering’s sake. These components all work together and are classified under certain umbrellas solely for simplification or organization. I agree with Perry that there can be value in re-mutualizing these disciplines and learning to think across them.
One thing I’ve really appreciated about my experience with Symbolic Systems is this opportunity to think across disciplines. I think I my desire to major in Symbolic Systems started because I wanted to make progress toward a degree without drastically having to choose between these interests. I wanted to learn about psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, and I feel lucky that Symbolic Systems has allowed me to do that all under one goal. I’ve loved the moments when I see the same concept come up in multiple classes, and I can learn to analyze the same topic through a number of different lenses and frameworks. For example, I first encountered the idea of natural language models in Linguist 121A: The Syntax of English, in which we were tasked with writing our own grammars. However, I soon found myself revisiting this topic in following quarters, viewing it from a different cross-section each time. These models came up again in Psych 140: Intro to Psycholingustics when we studied diagrams of long-distance dependencies, and then in CS 103, when we formulated context-free grammars. Finally, in Phil 181: Philosophy of Language, we questioned what all of these models of language actually represent, and how we derive meaning from them.
Ultimately, I agree that this distinction between disciplines certainly has practical purposes, but like Perry, I also question whether they may have gone too far in prematurely defining things without definition. There’s one funny story that my friends and I often retell about a time that my friend Caroline took the extra time to separate the food from its container to sort by compost vs. recycling, and my friend Ruth looked puzzled and said, “Wait, Caroline, you’re not an EarthSys major?” I think this mini-interaction illustrates the ways that these distinctions may limit who a certain type of major is “supposed” to be or how they’re “supposed” to think. I’m excited by the idea of blending them together to get things like humanist engineers, where all people contribute to everything rather than having the engineers work solely on the tech and the humanists work solely on the aesthetics.