

What's Wrong with Western Music? Part III. "Passacaglia in Cm" - initself
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002490.html

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mechanical_fish
This is kind of rambling and idiosyncratic, but it turned into a decent
discussion of temperment and tuning systems, and the associated design
compromises.

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dejb
Startup Task XXX : The western 12 tone music scale is limited and out of tune.
Many of the reasons for it being useful (instrument construction, notational
complexity) are no longer show stoppers. Anyone who can create software that
makes it practical and intuitive to create good-sounding music using natural
'just' intervals or/and alternative scales could shake up the entire world of
music. 'Scala' is a nice tool but it doesn't count. Bonus points for being
able to automatically convert existing 12-tone music to just intervals in a
way that makes it sound better.

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mynameishere
The mathematical approach to music has one endgame, and it isn't pretty.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACCAF04wSs>

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Goladus
Huh, I watch that and chuckle at how dated it is, and totally missing the
point. Should we all point and laugh at how "Why So Serious?" from _The Dark
Knight_ soundtrack isn't something you can sing in the shower?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB5tbTpQvsM>

And 12-tone music isn't the result of an especially "mathematical approach" to
music. It's the result of the attempt to break the boundaries of the
traditional tonal systems using the musical language that existed at the time.
It's the primary endgame of atonality within equal temperament system.
Traditional western music is all tonal. It's all in "keys." 12-tone music is
an attempt to create meaningful, coherent music that avoids relying on
tonality. It's an attempt to create music that can't be identified as being in
"C Major" or any other key.

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mynameishere
It's just a parody. The "point" is that 12 tone music is:

1\. Not enjoyable or successful in the popular, "catchy" sense,

2\. Stylistically uniform,

3\. Suitable as incidental music for scenes of horror and carnage.

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Goladus
1\. The particular popular, "catchy" sense that was fashionable when the
parody was created. If that's a "point" then sure. To me it's like calling a
stone fortress on not being a tent.

2\. Anything can be called 'stylistically uniform' if you ignore enough
details, and music is all about details.

3\. This "point" is applied carelessly, merely pairing up random recordings
with video seemingly at random and with no taste. Furthermore, attempt to
dismiss something as suitable as "incidental music" for movie scenes is
hilarious in itself, given the importance music currently plays in movies.

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lisper
> "You lying cunt" is an eloquent affirmation of love.

Why am I suddenly reminded of Alan Sokal?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair>

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omouse
Heh. It only seems like bullshit because we're missing out on the visual and
audio aspect, so we have to take this guy's word for it.

Has anyone seen that movie and can confirm that it's an affirmation of love?

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ars
It's so hard to understand this topic when I just can't hear it. I've tried to
understand equal temperament, but I just don't hear the difference.

I'm not tone deaf as far as I know (I can tell the difference between
different tones), and I enjoy music, but I can't hear when something is out of
tune.

Or that 12 tone commercial that someone posted - the comments say it's funny -
but what's funny about it? Presumably I'm missing something massive, but what?

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Goladus
Here's a piece I found googling for "meantone temperament"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2XNAJPgqhU>

You might be able to pick up the difference in tuning. As for being able to
hear when something is "out of tune," everyone has a different ability to pick
up on subtleties like that. In some cases, I'd guess you hear a pitch when
it's wrong, it just doesn't bother you enough to make a judgment on it so you
don't remember hearing it.

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bdr
It seems like laymen refer to any superlinear growth as "exponential". Newbs.

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hc
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Chazelle>

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jcl
I had a post prepared saying basically the same thing (Chazelle's algorithm
work is awesome), but then I realized that bdr is, strictly speaking, correct:
the number of combinations of notes you can play is a factorial of the number
of notes, and factorials grow faster than exponential functions.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial#Rate_of_growth>

Of course, when you're writing an essay on the relationship of music and very
simple math, I think it's forgivable to use "exponential" to mean "growing at
or faster than an exponential rate". Using a more specific term like
"factorial", "combinatorial", or "super-exponential" sounds pedantic and out-
of-place.

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akd
I don't understand. If you have 300 notes, and 12 tones, the number of
different melodies you can play is 12^300 (12 choices at each step). Why is it
300 factorial? You don't have 300 distinct entities to permute.

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bdr
It was in the context of drawing the diagonals on the polygon, so I thought of
quadratic growth. I guess everyone interpreted it differently, and the author
is justified in using 'exponential' in an informal way.

