Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Beethoven’s piano sonatas were so brilliant and difficult that they were often beyond
the capabilities of amateur performers who had mastered Haydn and Mozart. His
symphonies were intended to speak “to a humanity that the creative artist had raised
to his own level” (p. 38). The subjectivity and individualism of musical Romanticism
is one reason that there is no typical symphony, art-song, piano piece or composer
from this era (Longyear, 1988).
Individualism was also reflected in the popularity of musical virtuosos, for
whom the Romantic period was a golden age (Claudon, 1980). These included the
violinists Paganini and Baillot, and the pianists Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann. They
were famous not only for their musical prowess, but also for a commercialization
of their character that exploited Romanticist ideals (Plantinga, 1984). Paganini and
Liszt were “transformed by the Romantic imagination into a particular sort of hero:
mysterious, sickly, and bearing the faint marks of dark associations with another
world” (Plantinga, 1984, p. 185).
Individualism is also a fundamental characteristic of connectionism. It is
not a characteristic of connectionist researchers themselves (but see below), but
is instead a characteristic of the networks that they describe. When connectionist
simulations are reported, the results are almost invariably provided for individual
networks. This was demonstrated in Chapter 4; the interpretations of internal
structure presented there are always of individual networks. This is because there
are many sources of variation between networks as a result of the manner in which
they are randomly initialized (Dawson, 2005). Thus it is unlikely that one network
will be identical to another, even though both have learned the same task. Rather
than exploring “typical” network properties, it is more expedient to investigate the
interesting characteristics that can be found in one of the networks that were successfully
trained.
There are famous individual networks that are analogous to musical virtuosos.
These include the Jets-Sharks network used to illustrate the interactive activation
with competition (IAC) architecture (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1988); a multilayered
network that converted English verbs from present to past tense (Pinker &
Prince, 1988; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986a); and the NETTALK system that
learned to read aloud (Sejnowski & Rosenberg, 1988).
Individualism revealed itself in another way in musical Romanticism. When
Romantic composers wrote music for its own sake, they assumed that its audience
would be found later (Einstein, 1947). Unfortunately, “few artists gained recognition
without long, difficult struggles” (Riedel, 1969, p. 6). The isolation of the composer
from the audience was an example of another Romantic invention: the composer was
the misunderstood genius who idealistically pursued art for art’s sake. “The Romantic
musician . . . was proud of his isolation. In earlier centuries the idea of misunderstood
genius was not only unknown; it was inconceivable” (Einstein, 1947, p. 16).
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