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You can perfectly represent music using a 1D representation, or 2D, it doesn't really matter because Musical notation is a cognitive problem, not a technical on

You can perfectly represent music using a 1D representation, or 2D, it doesn't really matter because Musical notation is a cognitive problem, not a technical one (the latter was solved by Shannon). It's not so much how do you encode pitches and timing information (this is trivial today), but how to convey the meaning of the encoding and how effectively a musician can recreate the piece from the representation. Weaver pointed this in his forward to Shannon's magnum opus [1], on the topic of the three levels problems in communication. The first level, the "technical problems" are those of encoding information into symbols for transmission (in the abstract sense), whereas the "semantic" problems cover how one conveys intent or meaning behind the information (and that it is impossible for meaning to be clarified by the sender, in general), and finally the "effectiveness" problems which cover how the receiver conducts action based on the information communicated. Musical notation is purely a semantic and effectiveness problem, and over the past few thousand years we have found that there is no optimal solution, and that listening to the original music and having direction or instruction are as important as the symbols on the page. The notation itself is a simplex transmission from the author (or transcriber) to the performer, instruction/direction helps make it somewhat duplex to improve (but not solve) the semantic problem, while listening is the end-all, be-all solution provided you have source material recorded and training to interpret it. The forward to Shannon's theory of communication is really essential reading for all software/electrical engineers imo: [1] The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Weaver & Shannon http://www.magmamater.cl/MatheComm.pdf http://www.magmamater.cl/MatheComm.pdf

nixpulvis 8y ago
I really, REALLY like these 3 "levels". They map to programming language perfectly (as we'd expect), syntax is encoding, semantics is the logic we think we're going to get (hypothesis, remember it's computer "science"), and the effectiveness is what actually happens. We love computers because they almost always do what we want them to do, but people like to forget that nothing is perfect. All communication, regardless of with whom or what, is lossy.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
A piece of classical music is not a static data structure that can be compressed and sent over a channel. Classical musicians don't recreate pieces, they actively create them. The fact that scores allow different interpretations is a feature, not a bug. There is no definitive interpretation, and there is no "semantic problem" to "solve." And there is a lot more involved than playing the right notes at the right times in the right order. Not even a performance by the composer is definitive.

nixpulvis 8y ago

I really, REALLY like these 3 "levels". They map to programming language perfectly (as we'd expect), syntax is encoding, semantics is the logic we think we're going to get (hypothesis, remember it's computer "science"), and the effectiveness is what actually happens. We love computers because they almost always do what we want them to do, but people like to forget that nothing is perfect. All communication, regardless of with whom or what, is lossy.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

A piece of classical music is not a static data structure that can be compressed and sent over a channel. Classical musicians don't recreate pieces, they actively create them. The fact that scores allow different interpretations is a feature, not a bug. There is no definitive interpretation, and there is no "semantic problem" to "solve." And there is a lot more involved than playing the right notes at the right times in the right order. Not even a performance by the composer is definitive.