Simulacrum and the Abstraction of Tonality (Part 1)

What has become rather famous now in the faux-academic sphere is Jean Baudrillard's 1981 work Simulacra and Simulation, more specifically his idea of the phases of the image, which he describes as phases of the abstraction of a profound reality. 

1. It is the reflection of a profound reality;
2. It masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. It masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 1981, 6)

Starting with the profound reality, Baudrillard presents four subsequent stages of the image, distilled and stemming from the preceding stage. Most examples of Baudrillard's theory uses cultural objects to represent these stages. A well known meme example is this one on pumpkins:

In comparison with the four stages: the pumpkin 1) is a representation of itself. Then the pumpkin 2) is turned into pumpkin pie, which is still made from pumpkins, albeit not looking like a pumpkin. Then 3) into a pumpkin spiced latte, which merely engages the taste of pumpkins, without the presence (absence) of a pumpkin. Then 4) with the coffee creamer, the pumpkin has absolutely nothing to do with the creamer itself; it is an abstraction so deep of the pumpkin that it becomes a pure simulacrum, a flavour of coffee creamer.

In general, the concrete image can be transformed into an shadow of an image, an abstraction of the concrete image that gives the image-creator more to play with. If we move towards music and the creation of music, can this same idea be applied to strip down difficult to understand ideas of music into it's fundamental parts, and likewise, build from fundamental parts the difficult ideas of music?

Peter Kivy (1984) writes in Sound and Semblance that, "The artist [...] does not give us a copy or counterfeit [...] rather he re-presents it in his own medium, giving it coherence, designing a pattern." (17) 

I choose to accept this general idea and re-present it (see what I did there) into the general idea of tonality. As the pumpkin is transformed into the pumpkin pie creamer, how are the axioms of music, the true fundamental, real, building blocks of music transformed into the idea of tonality? And then, how do all tonality-based works stem from this transformation?

What I am most interested in with this exploration is not the historical or cognative aspects of tonality; these ideas have been researched by people far smarter and with far greater resources than I and have recived little answer on the function of tonality. It is the very process of the transformation that I am interested in. I am less interested in the idea that Baudrillard had, but instead in the process that one idea/object might be related to other objects. Simulacrums are simulacrums as they contain some essence of the previous iteration closer to reality. 

The current popularity of LLMs and data sets where objects are related by "closeness" and "relation" I think can be easily applied to music. From the abstraction of complex concepts such as tonality, are we able to find how the individual pieces of tonal function, whether that might be pitch, voice-leading, harmony, form, rhythm, or anything like that, would be more or less related to other objects of the same type, thus finding the key pieces that make tonality function. These pieces, objects, are in the realm of an observable and measureable reality. Concepts such as tonality cannot be measured. 

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kivy, Peter. 1984. Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation. Cornell University Press.