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As a geek and a formerly classically trained musician, I found it interesting to see how a geek discovers musical conventions. I think his post raises interest
by fab13n 10y ago
As a geek and a formerly classically trained musician, I found it interesting to see how a geek discovers musical conventions.
I think his post raises interesting questions about western music's discoverability, something developers should be interested about.
And I believe, having spent a lot of time with many western classical musicians, that this poor discoverability is in part appreciated and encouraged by many professionals. When I read about the Sokal affair, about some humanities academic hiding their dubious competences and relevance behind some cryptic mumbo-jumbo, I first thought of my musical theory lectures.
- arnarbi 10y agoThis is a great point. Hiding behind "mumbo-jumbo" is certainly a big problem with many art forms, and actively prevents a lot of people from entering or even enjoying it. Classical music is sadly especially plagued by this. It's somewhat natural for humans to create exclusivity, especially for areas they have spent a lot of effort or resources on entering themselves. In the case of art and other humanities, I think this is detrimental. I think the shortcomings of notation and representation (and the pedagogy) of music theory is more the case of managing complexity. It's an evolved system, not a designed one, so it meets its goals in some sort of a local minima, and it'd take a large effort to move out of that minima. But the issues are different from what the blog post author points at. Most of those "features" are there for a very good reason, as most commenters here seem to support.