On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Folderol <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 25 May 2010 12:31:57 -0700 > Niels Mayer <[email protected]> wrote: >> Mathematics is fundamental to music -- everything from the >> relationship of notes to frequency, to what people consider musical, >> or rhythmic... has to do with math, group theory, etc. > > This is putting the cart before the horse. People were making music > long before there was any remotest concept of mathematics. Many of us > still work on the basis of just noodling about and 'ooo, that sounds > nice' without the slightest thought of relationships etc.
I think the point Neils has is just that the outcome of your noodling is somewhat independent of your explicit intention. Notes that sound satisfying together are probably going to sound satisfying largely because of some intrinsic mathematical relationship, or at least something that is probably open to analysis to some extent but that you don't yourself understand or plan. Quite an interesting philosophical avenue here, and one that's fairly well trodden in other fields (ask an English theory student about Wimsatt and Beardsley). As an angle for compositional software, this suggests that if you can begin to model what "actually happens", you may be able to help to short-circuit your limited understanding of your own work. The problem with that (as I think Paul was saying?) is that as long as the model can be comprehended, the departures from it will continue to be more interesting than the model itself. Excuse me, I've probably had a glass of interesting Croatian red too many. Chris _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
