Yes, I've played enough Chopin to know what you mean, jk.
The more I go back and look at that essay, the less I like in it.
When Jones looks at the exact numbers of beats in each group and matches coincidences to Fibonacci numbers, I think he's missed the point completely. It's like saying "Here is an example of a world champion athlete. He parts his hair exactly down the centre. See how that symmetry makes him an ideal model of an athlete?"
Nature, music and mathematics do share a lot of patterns. A lot of music has symmetry and recurring patterns. There are beautiful parallels to be drawn between improvisation and natural selection, between ensemble jazz and co-evolution. Let's face it, though, the mathematics here is much harder to define and even harder to write in simple terms. It doesn't make for a simple essay, and it's harder to show point by point correlations between the music and the numbers.
Since Jones's stated interests are "exploring the underlying relationships between music, science and culture" he is bound to look for patterns common to the three, and seems prone to assignation of special significance to them when he finds them. Since simple elegant patterns are easier to recognize in very structured music and in rhythmic light verse, his stated interests bias him toward a simple extension of the questionable foundations of western classicism: that perfection can be found in clarity, concision, balance and structure. By substituting the mathematics of recusive structures for the simple geometry of classicism, he's still locked himself to a classical idea that there exists a Grand Unifying Theory of mathematics and music.
I feel his predisposition to recognize patterns and highlight them is far more religious than scientific. To select just a few cases where he's discovered a pattern that ties verse, music and maths together, but ignore the wealth of counter examples, is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. A more intellectually honest thesis to take would be:
1. L-systems create interesting, layered, self-similar patterns.
2. There are some pleasing musical forms that can be modeled using L-systems.
3. Therefore L-systems have the potential to be used to help generate pleasing music.
If he's so certain there's an underlying pattern he could have even tried to model all Learian limericks with L-systems. If he could show that the Limericks most pleasing to an independent audience were also the ones that were flawlessly modeled by a simple system, he'd have at least a shred of evidence for his GUT assumption.
Instead he insists without support that "during the Twentieth Century the Fibonacci paradigm has emerged triumphant, and entered the mainstream to form a more subtle and natural structural template, or cultural point of reference, against which our minds can measure their aesthetic response."
What next? A return to the Pythagorean "music of the spheres" as the basis for understanding music and mathematics?
I know zero about limericks. I took a quick run through the article. Had similar problems/questions.
Ragtime is ragged time, march time played raggedly. We owe it to John Philip Sousa and the Sousa band phenomenon, which owes itself to the increase in band music in the Civil War and the weird interplay of brass instruments with African traditions. But to say that ragged time is called degenerate misses the point; it was the cacaphony, the dissonance and the blatant sexuality that was at issue, not the time. All good music breathes. Literally the hardest part in playing Chopin is the beautiful random quality of the time, as if the music were being created on the spot, impromptu. Empty Chopin is like "white jazz", played in straight time, without any sense of swing. Chopin's dance music swings. His friends noted that when he played his actual time signature shifted, moving from waltz time to half time, etc. slowing down and then speeding up. The degeneracy of dissonance - or then about atonality - is difficulty with the lack of resolution, when the harmonics combine in a rough fashion, when the music lacks a tonal center or when it fails to return to its "natural" end tones. Totally different thing. Excuse me if you know all this.
Thanks marcy.
The enjambment at the end of line 2 is a flaw in this limerick.
There are fine examples of limericks where lines 1 and 2 form a complete thought and fail to make sense in isolation. Similarly there are good limericks where lines 3-4, 4-5, or even 3-4-5 must be taken as a complete unit. Breaking a phrase at 2-3 (without humorous intent) causes a discontinuity that messes with the character of the limerick.
Aholiab: his life we'll condense
To 'a weaver'. You'll wonder from whence
Comes his fame. He's renowned
As a man who had found
His religious experience in tents.
It follows the rhyme scheme and has the requisite number of syllables, but you can't split lines like that. You have to be able to say a limerick in a singsong and have it make sense, or it's not a limerick.
Interesting. I've never had a long hair. Well not true. Found a kitten on the street. The mother was a short hair - she is the mother of our other cats - but the father must have been a Maine Coon. This guy was about 15 pounds at 1 year and, though he had long hair, his favorite activity was beating up other cats. Then he ran off. None of the wild cats I've caught has ever destroyed anything or bitten anyone. All of the bought cats - the expensive breeds - have done both. Our next cat will come from a shelter.
Lu-Tze is a Birman. To quote from the breed information at http://www.cfainc.org/breeds/profiles/birman.html :
"The Birman personality is marvelous - gentle, active, playful, but quiet and unobtrusive if you are busy with other things."
I hope Lu-Tze will live up to the Birman breed information. It sounds perfect for us. Gandalf (our blue-point Persian) was a very tolerant cat. He used to be vocal from time to time, but never was destructive.
What breed is that? Looks Siamese-ish. Had a lilac-point Siamese for 14 years. Died last winter. Very loving but extraordinarily loud, kind of destructive (ate a blanket off a sleeping child, tore up couches) and literally the most persistent creature I've ever met. Could push her away 40 times and then you'd look down and she'd be on your lap / have eaten your food.
With that particular expression on his face, your kitten-to-be bears a striking resemblance to my rat-that-is...right down to the demented sparkle in the eyes.
The Face Blind, they love your limericks! It can be a pretty comical condition (though not as devastating as the inability to recognize roosters would be...)
I get all nostalgic whenever I hear a good piano story, me. I don't remember much of anything from a quarter of a century ago, but ten years, fifteen--man, time flies.
These remind me of a more clever and more disciplined Ogden Nash. Darker but also deeper. A selection of these would be a terrific short book - you know, the kind they sell near the registers - some illustrated and some not.
While sipping an aged Chianti
She pondered the man Virgilanti.
"Does he write for the money?
Or just to be funny?
Does it pay for each year's new Avanti?"
Your limericks are the most brilliant of all. Are you right-brained/left-brained as a scientist-poet? Seemingly. Anyway, they're addictive and an inspiration to a budding limericist.
Did you enter the WP contest? I did.
Perhaps by the time you get to P, "packbawky" will have entered the official compendium, and, as such, merit a limerick of its own. Maybe even "impandemonate", "bepeeved", and "hosebanger"!
(My money's on the packbawky. Those things get everywhere.)
Yes, Gandalf passed away yesterday. He didn't suffer; he just slowed down, slept more and more, and over the last couple of days completely lost his appetite. He went to sleep under the bed and didn't wake up.
Yes, I've played enough Chopin to know what you mean, jk.
The more I go back and look at that essay, the less I like in it.
When Jones looks at the exact numbers of beats in each group and matches coincidences to Fibonacci numbers, I think he's missed the point completely. It's like saying "Here is an example of a world champion athlete. He parts his hair exactly down the centre. See how that symmetry makes him an ideal model of an athlete?"
Nature, music and mathematics do share a lot of patterns. A lot of music has symmetry and recurring patterns. There are beautiful parallels to be drawn between improvisation and natural selection, between ensemble jazz and co-evolution. Let's face it, though, the mathematics here is much harder to define and even harder to write in simple terms. It doesn't make for a simple essay, and it's harder to show point by point correlations between the music and the numbers.
Since Jones's stated interests are "exploring the underlying relationships between music, science and culture" he is bound to look for patterns common to the three, and seems prone to assignation of special significance to them when he finds them. Since simple elegant patterns are easier to recognize in very structured music and in rhythmic light verse, his stated interests bias him toward a simple extension of the questionable foundations of western classicism: that perfection can be found in clarity, concision, balance and structure. By substituting the mathematics of recusive structures for the simple geometry of classicism, he's still locked himself to a classical idea that there exists a Grand Unifying Theory of mathematics and music.
I feel his predisposition to recognize patterns and highlight them is far more religious than scientific. To select just a few cases where he's discovered a pattern that ties verse, music and maths together, but ignore the wealth of counter examples, is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. A more intellectually honest thesis to take would be:
1. L-systems create interesting, layered, self-similar patterns.
2. There are some pleasing musical forms that can be modeled using L-systems.
3. Therefore L-systems have the potential to be used to help generate pleasing music.
If he's so certain there's an underlying pattern he could have even tried to model all Learian limericks with L-systems. If he could show that the Limericks most pleasing to an independent audience were also the ones that were flawlessly modeled by a simple system, he'd have at least a shred of evidence for his GUT assumption.
Instead he insists without support that "during the Twentieth Century the Fibonacci paradigm has emerged triumphant, and entered the mainstream to form a more subtle and natural structural template, or cultural point of reference, against which our minds can measure their aesthetic response."
What next? A return to the Pythagorean "music of the spheres" as the basis for understanding music and mathematics?
I know zero about limericks. I took a quick run through the article. Had similar problems/questions.
Ragtime is ragged time, march time played raggedly. We owe it to John Philip Sousa and the Sousa band phenomenon, which owes itself to the increase in band music in the Civil War and the weird interplay of brass instruments with African traditions. But to say that ragged time is called degenerate misses the point; it was the cacaphony, the dissonance and the blatant sexuality that was at issue, not the time. All good music breathes. Literally the hardest part in playing Chopin is the beautiful random quality of the time, as if the music were being created on the spot, impromptu. Empty Chopin is like "white jazz", played in straight time, without any sense of swing. Chopin's dance music swings. His friends noted that when he played his actual time signature shifted, moving from waltz time to half time, etc. slowing down and then speeding up. The degeneracy of dissonance - or then about atonality - is difficulty with the lack of resolution, when the harmonics combine in a rough fashion, when the music lacks a tonal center or when it fails to return to its "natural" end tones. Totally different thing. Excuse me if you know all this.
I was reminded of GEB a couple of days ago when reading a short essay on limericks, Fibonacci and L-systems. See http://www.virgilanti.com/journal/pivot/entry.php?id=396
John Hollander has a tribute to Appollinaire:
A
Pole
In
Air
But this reminds me more of Douglas Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach.
Socar wrote:
Socar wrote:
Socar wrote:
I EEL YOUR PAIN!
Oops! That would be "feel".
Best limerick ever! This limerick template had me laughing aloud.
Thanks marcy.
The enjambment at the end of line 2 is a flaw in this limerick.
There are fine examples of limericks where lines 1 and 2 form a complete thought and fail to make sense in isolation. Similarly there are good limericks where lines 3-4, 4-5, or even 3-4-5 must be taken as a complete unit. Breaking a phrase at 2-3 (without humorous intent) causes a discontinuity that messes with the character of the limerick.
I'll raise this as a forum topic on OEDILF.COM.
Hey, virge, this is not a limerick:
Aholiab: his life we'll condense
To 'a weaver'. You'll wonder from whence
Comes his fame. He's renowned
As a man who had found
His religious experience in tents.
It follows the rhyme scheme and has the requisite number of syllables, but you can't split lines like that. You have to be able to say a limerick in a singsong and have it make sense, or it's not a limerick.
Loved the Tromba da gamba hoax.
Interesting. I've never had a long hair. Well not true. Found a kitten on the street. The mother was a short hair - she is the mother of our other cats - but the father must have been a Maine Coon. This guy was about 15 pounds at 1 year and, though he had long hair, his favorite activity was beating up other cats. Then he ran off. None of the wild cats I've caught has ever destroyed anything or bitten anyone. All of the bought cats - the expensive breeds - have done both. Our next cat will come from a shelter.
Enjoy Lu-Tze.
Lu-Tze is a Birman. To quote from the breed information at http://www.cfainc.org/breeds/profiles/birman.html :
"The Birman personality is marvelous - gentle, active, playful, but quiet and unobtrusive if you are busy with other things."
I hope Lu-Tze will live up to the Birman breed information. It sounds perfect for us. Gandalf (our blue-point Persian) was a very tolerant cat. He used to be vocal from time to time, but never was destructive.
What breed is that? Looks Siamese-ish. Had a lilac-point Siamese for 14 years. Died last winter. Very loving but extraordinarily loud, kind of destructive (ate a blanket off a sleeping child, tore up couches) and literally the most persistent creature I've ever met. Could push her away 40 times and then you'd look down and she'd be on your lap / have eaten your food.
With that particular expression on his face, your kitten-to-be bears a striking resemblance to my rat-that-is...right down to the demented sparkle in the eyes.
The Face Blind, they love your limericks! It can be a pretty comical condition (though not as devastating as the inability to recognize roosters would be...)
Isn't it odd, the things that'll spark a memory?
I get all nostalgic whenever I hear a good piano story, me. I don't remember much of anything from a quarter of a century ago, but ten years, fifteen--man, time flies.
Thank you jk. It's a major boost to receive praise from the erudite.
I'm having a circus-full of fun with OEDILF project. I'm delighted to find there's an audience for my warped words.
These remind me of a more clever and more disciplined Ogden Nash. Darker but also deeper. A selection of these would be a terrific short book - you know, the kind they sell near the registers - some illustrated and some not.
I enjoy your obvious enjoyment.
While sipping an aged Chianti
She pondered the man Virgilanti.
"Does he write for the money?
Or just to be funny?
Does it pay for each year's new Avanti?"
Your limericks are the most brilliant of all. Are you right-brained/left-brained as a scientist-poet? Seemingly. Anyway, they're addictive and an inspiration to a budding limericist.
Did you enter the WP contest? I did.
Perhaps by the time you get to P, "packbawky" will have entered the official compendium, and, as such, merit a limerick of its own. Maybe even "impandemonate", "bepeeved", and "hosebanger"!
(My money's on the packbawky. Those things get everywhere.)
The last verse was a lovely memorial, says me. And it sounds like he had a good death. I hope mine is as peaceful...but not as soon.
I'm sorry to hear about Gandalf. He was a good cat.
Yes, Gandalf passed away yesterday. He didn't suffer; he just slowed down, slept more and more, and over the last couple of days completely lost his appetite. He went to sleep under the bed and didn't wake up.
October 1987 - July 2004
Are you saying your cat died? I'm sorry to hear it. He looked friendly.