That is a great quote. I used it in the dedication section of a book I wrote recently. Bach is fascinating on many levels - lots of C.S. types quickly appreciate the structure/counterpoint in all of his instrumental music. But because so much of his music was written for a worship context, a whole additional dimension can be seen where he uses musical devices to comment on or support words being sung.
No, I wasn't asking to be patronized. If I want to know what counterpoint is I'll look it up. I'm asking what on earth it has to do with computer science. Sure there's the Hofstadter book but with no explanation this comes off as merely pretentious. Do resist the temptation to patronize and mansplain though; I know it is one if the things we as a profession excel at.
Clearly we both know you can look up "counterpoint" if you want to, so I read into your post you were a tiny bit interested but not so interested as to bother looking it up.
I'd hoped the shorthand would give you enough additional idea that you could decide whether doing so was worth it for you, the link between interesting patterns and computer science being hopefully obvious.
The timing in most modern music is metrical rather than driven by speech. Gregorian chant (or other forms of chant) are closer to what much ancient music was like in my understanding . This is also why a lot of poetry of the time is not characterized by huge amounts of metered syllabification and rhymes and the like (though some are cited in the article). I am basing this a bit on the idea that Jewish chant that later impacted the early church a few hundred years later is somewhat reflective of musical practice of the time.
Is Gregorian chant based on speech (when it comes to rhythm)? Despite having sung a few pieces back in my musical days, this question never came into my head and I don't know nearly enough about Latin to make the comparison. It's late here in the UK so am about to sleep, but will Google around a bit tomorrow..
Yes. It is also the case in plainchant in the C of E tradition (the "ancient office hymns" as well as the psalm, the Benedicite, the Sanctus and Benedictus, Te Deum etc.). It is only somewhat stylized so that it can be sung by groups of people (otherwise people's own idiosyncratic rhythms would produce a cacophony), and terminal syllables of verses tend to be held and elaborated, but it is very much based on the rhythms of ordinary speech.
It is at least heavily weighted towards speech like the previous comment mentioned. This is difficult for modern folk to understand. In Anglican chant, the term "Anglican Thump" is used to describe a common problem where singers race in the initial section of the chant up to the cadence and then stop to pound out the last few notes in metered time.
Would have been nice if a standard format for hyperlinks were added. This lacks the elegance of pure JavaScript but it would make it possible to create strict RESTful APIs that don't violate HATEOAS or includes links as some sort of extension.
They were helpful to me as demonstrations of building simple Angular Apps from the ground up and compelling enough that I bothered to shell out a few bucks for the IDE (the first one I purchased in years).
We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity.
Yes - really a rather profound change. The entire way new books are produced has changed as a result as well. Print-on-demand in particular can result in you literally having a "one-off" edition of a book. The benefit is quicker integration of corrections. Am not sure we really fully understand some of the negative consequences...
