> I pretty much agree with the rest of your post, but I disagree about this
> point.
> Yes, sometimes have ideas with potential but that are not fleshed out,
but
> there
> are other circumstances where someone can actually have a great idea but
> honestly have trouble translating it into written or spoken words (or
other
> equivalent symbols).
Dan replied:
One of the interesting parts of this is that this question is not well suited to empirical verification. We are discussing ideas that are worthwhile, but never get communicated to the outside world. I think it is safe to say that there exists at least some BS artists who insist that they had great ideas for a number of different things but they just can't put them into words. They also cannot put them into code, they cannot sketch them out, they cannot build them, etc.
Agreed.
Me:
> For example, as a composer, I sometimes think in sound. Most of the time if
> I hear a certain melody or harmony or tone color in my head, I can
>translate that to written music or synthesizer settings or code in c-sound, but
>sometimes I hear one of the above (especially tone colors) that I can't translate immediately
>into any written, verbal, or "setting" form.
Dan:
Why not? If it is fully formed, what keeps you from it? I'm not trying to criticize you, I just don't understand how you cannot know exactly what you want but not be able to map it onto any nominal means of recording musical thought.
I originally wrote that when I was pretty tired, and have two replies to that.
1) I sometimes will hear a complex orchestral timbre made of several instruments
playing together, and sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to exactly recreate
the combination of sounds I'm hearing. For example, I may first thing a flute is
playing the highest note and a clarinet the next highest, and that doesn't sound
quite right, so I try switching those, or replace the clarinet with another flute, or
have the second note be a clarinet and a flute together, etc. I can eventually
get to the sound I'm looking for, but it may take a while. The same is true only
moreso with electronic music. Complex electronic timbres can be hard to pin
down right away, but I can usually create the sound I'm hearing in my head with
some time and trial and error.
2) As I said, I was tired when I wrote the original, and realize that the examples
I gave in 1) do not really contradict what you were saying. You were talking
about not being able to translate ideas into another format, and my personal
examples are ideas that eventually get translated, just not immediately.
Me:
> Sometimes I think in images. For example, I might be able to see in my
>head the way I want to rearrange furniture in a room. But sometimes I
have
>trouble translating that to a drawn map, or verbalizing it well enough for
my
>wife to understand what I'm saying. It may be a great idea for how to
organize
>that space, but I can't find a way to put it into words that my wife will
>understand.
Dan:
I'm not arguing that there can't be difficulties in communications apart from having the ideas. But, can you at least sketch something out that you understand?
Yep. Again, see my comments above about being tired :-) My examples were faulty since they were things that can eventually be communicated, it just takes some time and work from both the communicator and communicatee.
Dan:
So, let me take a step back and restate my generality in a form that tries to include these type of examples.
An idea that cannot be expressed in terms of either concrete forms or abstract symbols is not really an idea. Ideas that are hard to communicate do exist; but ideas do not exist free floating without respect to anything else.
In another post, a programmer who could not explain how his code worked was given as an example of someone who had a great idea that they could not express in language. I'd argue that, by definition, if it can be coded, it can be expressed in a language.
I more or less agree, but do you think there are ideas that could be expressed
in a language that has not been developed yet? For example, 100 years before
Newton, could someone have thought of a concept that required calculus to
express? Or can ideas in calculus be expressed (albiet not as succintly) in other
forms of math that existed at the time? (I've never taken calculus, so I really
am curious.)
Reggie Bautista
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