Cue (pdf) twilight zone music and speculation about "The Deep ones".
In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents.
We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause.
Note that this is posted in pop-ph so not very scientific, probably a grad student's hobby project.
Crash Course World History is now complete, as is Crash Course Biology. They are both awesome. Hank is now doing a 10 episode series on Ecology while John will start a "mini-series" on literature next week.
A lot of the stuff that guy says is really misleading. The point is though that humans have hardwired preferences in regards to what is comfortable in music which is completely true. Just don't take anything more away from it than that.
He claims that the ear can't distinguish intervals smaller than the ones in the western 12 tone scale, which is just flat-out wrong. Classical Indian music uses quarter tones, and the ear can distinguish those tones. Same with if you were to make a non-pythagorean scale.
The examples he gives for songs sounding alike are really bad. Twinkle Twinkle/ABCs/Ba Ba Black Sheep are the same melody with different words by design, as are a lot of folk tunes. My Country/God Save the Queen too, both are patriotic songs that one nation adopted from the other. Given the time periods, Elvis would have heard Aura Lea since the time he was a kid. And obviously the Spongebob theme takes influence from sea-faring songs on purpose, duhhhh. Simon and Garfunkle vs. Cecillia, yeah, both songs have people going "oh oh oh" in chorus, but they're completely different melodies that start vaguely the same way.
He said "lyrics" but what he talked about was rhythm. 'Nuff said. If he was going to criticize the widespread use of common meter, why not common time?
The compression thing, read the actual source article, the way he explains it is just messy.
A lot of the stuff that guy says is really misleading. The point is though that humans have hardwired preferences in regards to what is comfortable in music which is completely true. Just don't take anything more away from it than that.
He claims that the ear can't distinguish intervals smaller than the ones in the western 12 tone scale, which is just flat-out wrong. Classical Indian music uses quarter tones, and the ear can distinguish those tones. Same with if you were to make a non-pythagorean scale.
The examples he gives for songs sounding alike are really bad. Twinkle Twinkle/ABCs/Ba Ba Black Sheep are the same melody with different words by design, as are a lot of folk tunes. My Country/God Save the Queen too, both are patriotic songs that one nation adopted from the other. Given the time periods, Elvis would have heard Aura Lea since the time he was a kid. And obviously the Spongebob theme takes influence from sea-faring songs on purpose, duhhhh. Simon and Garfunkle vs. Cecillia, yeah, both songs have people going "oh oh oh" in chorus, but they're completely different melodies that start vaguely the same way.
He said "lyrics" but what he talked about was rhythm. 'Nuff said. If he was going to criticize the widespread use of common meter, why not common time?
The compression thing, read the actual source article, the way he explains it is just messy.
Forget that timber is differentiates two of the same tones. (Middle C on piano vs violin, for example).
Most of these criticisms do not really relate to the thrust of the video.
The calculations were obviously back-of-the-envelope; the assumptions made were clearly significant simplifications, and the point was to demonstrate that even under highly restrictive conditions (as, perhaps, a reasonable lower bound), the space of possible music is still very large. I don't think he said anywhere that "the ear can't distinguish intervals smaller than the ones in the western 12 tone scale".
The examples of similarity were simply meant to illustrate the general (and rather obvious) point that human taste in music and/or music composed to date is concentrated in very narrow bands of the space of possible music.
The trick becomes programming a computer to do one thing well is one thing, programming it to automatically record RAM (basically "learn") and be able to access it appropriately is the problem. Replicating the human brain is no small feat.
Comments
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/earth-exoplanet-alpha-centauri/
I now want this to happen...
Apples are more interesting than I had assumed.
Also, vampire numbers (and arithmomania):
Also, here is Vihart's video on the same subject.
The examples he gives for songs sounding alike are really bad. Twinkle Twinkle/ABCs/Ba Ba Black Sheep are the same melody with different words by design, as are a lot of folk tunes. My Country/God Save the Queen too, both are patriotic songs that one nation adopted from the other. Given the time periods, Elvis would have heard Aura Lea since the time he was a kid. And obviously the Spongebob theme takes influence from sea-faring songs on purpose, duhhhh. Simon and Garfunkle vs. Cecillia, yeah, both songs have people going "oh oh oh" in chorus, but they're completely different melodies that start vaguely the same way.
He said "lyrics" but what he talked about was rhythm. 'Nuff said. If he was going to criticize the widespread use of common meter, why not common time?
The compression thing, read the actual source article, the way he explains it is just messy.
The calculations were obviously back-of-the-envelope; the assumptions made were clearly significant simplifications, and the point was to demonstrate that even under highly restrictive conditions (as, perhaps, a reasonable lower bound), the space of possible music is still very large. I don't think he said anywhere that "the ear can't distinguish intervals smaller than the ones in the western 12 tone scale".
The examples of similarity were simply meant to illustrate the general (and rather obvious) point that human taste in music and/or music composed to date is concentrated in very narrow bands of the space of possible music.
But that doesn't mean we're wrong, either.