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Isn't that "what things look like"? Like what you see when you see a tree isn't actually a tree but the interpretation of light waves hitting your eye. It's a
by botfly 10y ago
Isn't that "what things look like"? Like what you see when you see a tree isn't actually a tree but the interpretation of light waves hitting your eye. It's a rendering of the light in a particular way and we somewhat casually call this "what a tree looks like". Often when we talk about the projection of a thing into some visual form we us this kinda casual language. I think to your point, any one of those methods of rendering the information into visual form has equal claim to "what the notes look like"
- lisper 10y agoYes, that's true, but in the case of macroscopic physical objects like trees there is a "natural" rendering designed by evolution that is reasonably called what the thing "actually" looks like. In the case of sounds, there is no such a natural rendering. Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound.
- botfly 10y agoSo the problem in this view is the primacy of one particular projection asserted by the word "actually"? Fair enough.
- rhizome 10y agoIt's important to recognize pretenses of objectivity.
- lisper 10y agoYes, exactly. If the headline had been, "A neat way to turn sounds into pretty pictures" I would have had no problem with it.
- burkaman 10y agoBut the current headline is "What Musical Notes Can Look Like", emphasis on the "Can". Your suggestion is basically just a condescending way to rephrase that.
- lisper 10y agoThe headline has been changed. When I posted my original comment, the headline was the original headline: "This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like"
- runeks 10y ago> Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's > no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound. Turning light into images necessarily invokes a design, too: an eye. And depending on whether this eye is that of a human, a fish, or a fly, a different image will be experienced. So here, too, there is no basis for calling any particular image, that you experience from the light that an object reflects, the actual appearance of that object. It's just one instance of an appearance of an object in your field of experience at one particular point in time. Not even you will ever experience that object in exactly the same way again. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing if there, some place on earth or elsewhere, exists a life form that experiences sound exactly as these two-dimensional images. If there has been an evolutionary advantage to doing so, I see nothing preventing a sensory organ from picking up these vibrations and creating this experience out of it.
- lisper 10y ago> there is no basis for calling any particular image, that you experience from the light that an object reflects, the actual appearance of that object Sure, but "the actual appearance of an object" is generally understood to mean, "the actual appearance of an object relative to a typical human visual system", at least when the phrase is uttered by one human to another.