:: Insert Title Here ::

:: 2001-08-12 ::

I have Winamp set to load a new skin every time a new song plays - and it used to suck: I didn’t have a high enough cool skin / OK skin ratio. But now that I’ve downloaded cooler skins and deleted some I didn’t like, the visual vibe is much better, and at times can have a sort of simbiosis with the music. Listening to a bunch of tunes I hadn’t played in awhile, and Slava ended and the first notes of Chet Baker’s version of Autumn Leaves were accompanied by a beautiful blue skin. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

Despite all the changes in thought pattern over the centuries and across the continents, there have been a few constants. One of them is the fact of emotion being drawn through music and dance. Go wherever and whenever you want - New York in 1955, Vienna in 1780, Sydney in 589 B.C., and you’ll find, at the very least, singing and dancing of some kind. There are non-universal but independently-popping-up patterns with regard to music, as well: it’s often used, for example, for spiritual purposes, from the Cathedrals of medieval Europe to the ceremonies of North American natives to Hendrix’s Church of the Electric Lady and Coltraine’s transcendant “Love Supreme”; often, as well, a song will tell a story, be it Homer’s Odyssey, Beethoven’s Symphonie Pastoral or “Gangsta’s Paradise” (though that’s really more of a haiku).

It’s things like this that lead to the conclusion that music is somehow wired sidelong into our neural structure, like Asimov’s 3 Laws, that the patterns of chords and rhythms are created in ways that are parallel to the patterns in the way we think about ideas and experience emotions.

Of course, there’s a lot of elasticity in the way concepts are mapped into sounds - in fact, a tremendous amount, so much that it begs the question “how in the world did music then get started in the first place, with no environmental connection between, say, minor chords and sadness?” It’s important to remember that there is some underlying non-relative physicality - the shape of sound waves, for example, is not something purely in-the-mind but something definite: play two notes an octave apart and the sound wave that produces the higher note has a frequency exactly twice as great as the one that produces the lower note, which means that the even peaks of the high sound wave (every other peak, that is) line up with the peaks of the low sound wave, and the odd peaks (the remaining ones) line up with the troughs of the low sound wave - and to our ears, it’s easy to see why both notes are called C (or A, or E, etc., depending on which were played). A note with a frequency 1.5 times that of the first (or 3-divided-by-2 times) is half an octave (or a fifth) higher, and one with a frequency 1.75 times that of the first (or 5-divided-by-four times) is three-quarters of an octave (or a minor seventh) higher. There are mathematical relations between other pairs of notes as well, and generally the more complex or distant the relation, the more dissonant the sound.

One thing common to almost all music is the buildup and release of tension - this often comprises a good portion of, if you will, the “information content” of the music. But not all music has the information stored in the same place: in traditional western music, it’s stored in the type of chord (and the changes between varying degrees of consonance and dissonance), which is the type of mathematical relationship between a few notes; in latin music, it’s often the type of counterhythm placed against the main ongoing rhythm, which is the mathematical relationship between a few beats (which, come to think of it, can be thought of as notes scattered out in time - rhythms 1.5 times as fast are analogous to notes 1.5 times as high, and three beats per measure put against four is analogous to one sound wave put against another with a frequency a 1.25 times higher). Other types of music store information in other locations still, and if you grow up hearing the information stored in one way, it’s often difficult to extract information stored in a different way, and the music sounds like noise (in the case of bebop to 1950s traditionalists)—or sounds satanic (in the case of punk rock to christian fundamentalists). (In the case of misinterpretations like these, I suspect that the information content of the used-to music and the now-heard music may be different, but the interpretation is generally flawed as well. For example, speaking of differences in information content, Charlie Parker once said that “music is finding the beautiful notes,” which is immediately reflected in his playing, and also is probably not how, say, Stravinsky would have defined it.)

(

Hmm…when writing anything complex, I’m usually thinking too many things at once to get down quickly. I wrote a snippet a few minutes ago that I was planning on integrating into a yet-to-be-written paragraph, and now I can’t remember exactly where I was going with it. (maybe that has something to do with the fact that I’m writing this at 3:30 in the morning, to post when I get on the net tomorrow - er, later today):

The third iteration of a Bach fugue’s melody, this time 2 octaves below everything else, always registers, but often only on a subconscious level if you’re not listening for it.

Well, it’s entertaining as it stands. Back to the main. . .

)

Don’t ask me how a minor chord came to indicate sadness; I suspect, however, that the chord’s mathematical structure has some relation to the mathematical structure of the neural construct used to access that emotion. People who due to their lives develop different neural constructs will therefore create music with different mathematical structure (and, perhaps, the brains of people who listen to music during childhood - and, to a lesser extent, adulthood - will be nudged into forming the neural neural constructs parallel to that music). In that sense, music is encrypted thought and emotion that our brains learn how to decrypt (perhaps using some of the same processes used to decrypt language, which is, of course, encrypted thought and emotion of a different kind).

If a person’s eyes are the windows to their own soul, their ears are windows to other people’s.

:: 4:56 PM [+] ::

I'm starting college in a month. Less than a month.

Surreal.

As it turns out, I'll be in the Sophomore dorm; apparently the Freshman one filled up before I got my moderately late application in. [Homer Simpson voice] mmmmm....Ethernet (drools)

Talked to my roommate on the phone. Cool guy.

- - -

You know, I used to think anthropology was mostly crap, that a lot of their "science" was stilted biased observation and that what they attributed to culture was in fact merely genetics at play. However. For some reason (perhaps a very smart anthropology proffessor who frequents a discussion forum I visit) that's changed - when I look closely, I now see culture instead of genetics.

Of course, genes play a role - more than likely, they focus initial tendencies, make basic emotional signals to certain events. Environment (especially the wider culture) interacts with genetics in complex dance, however - and that is something that our culture often overlooks.

- - -

I'm planning to do some tape-recorded interviews with my mom and her parents - not writing down a family history as interesting as mine (a penniless immigrant, a suicide, anti-semitism experienced, racism acted upon) would be unconcinable. Except spelled right.

:: 4:41 PM [+] ::

So I finally got a weblog.

So...

You know, it actually is possible to surf with only the keyboard. They said it wasn't on Tech TV very late at night a couple days ago--and, voila, I found myself forced, a couple hours later, to dispense with the mouse by an error that made the little round arrow thing stick permantly in place, refusing to change back into an arrow or act like one. I couldn't reset the computer beacuse it was my mom's (my own is upstairs sitting in isolation from the rest of the world) and I need her password to get on the net. So I spent two early morning hours browsing Turing Test transcripts and random cyberphilosophy webpages with alt, tab, F6, the arrow keys, and the spacebar.

Pathetic. But sort of zen.

I'm learning programming in my spare time. Neat, eh? They say it's best to start with Python (except for those who say it's best to start with C++, but their opinions are discarded as their language isn't named after a funny show), so I am, and it's--yes--neat. Getting a feel for the sytax. Nice, somewhat grammatically-challenged tutorial at a page I don't feel like digging up the URL for.

You can tell I'm writing this late at night, can't you? Better just cut and paste a really nice explanation I wrote about how entropy differs from chaos. Really, it's nice. Read it. If you don't like it you can send me a bitter email.

. . .

Pretend you have one of those "Store of Knowledge" type gizmos consisting of a bit of water and multicolored sand between two thin sheets of glass, placed in a framework that allows it to be turned upside down. The sand is all together, neatly arranged in perfectly straight bands of decreasing luminosity, with the water above it (and perhpaps a thin layer of air above that). It's okay to look at, but nothing special. It's also a very low entropy system.

Now turn it upside down. The sand floats from what is now the top through the water, with the different colors (which, you see now, are also different sizes of grain) falling at slightly different speeds. Entropy! The patterns traced by the sand are complex, beautiful. The finishing swirls as the final grains settle are cool-looking. The perfectly straight lines are replaced with intreaging, complex, non-random patterns generated by the interacting particles as they fell. Complexity has increased.

If you shake the gizmo enough, perhaps the sand will mix together completely, leaving a uniform sludge: entropy's maximum destroys complexity--but so does entropy's minimum; there wasn't much that was interesting in the set of parallel sand bands.

States of very high and very low entropy often have much in common. In the beginning, the universe (under current theories) was in a state of total non-entropy, an ultadense, completely uniform pinprick in which all mass and energy were concentrated. The big bang occured, the turning upside down of the gizmo, and the matter and energy (the universe itself, to be more precise) exploded outward, degrading entropically but at the same time increasing in complexity. In the end, trillions of years hence, the universe will approach the uniform sludge of the overshaken gizmo; in the meantime, there are beautiful sand patters: atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, Earth, life, and people.

:: 2:20 AM [+] ::