3 ms·
This is a great point that I never thought of. Seems like a general example of the idea that lowering the cost of some action sufficiently low can lead to not j
by probablynish 4y ago
This is a great point that I never thought of. Seems like a general example of the idea that lowering the cost of some action sufficiently low can lead to not just efficiency gains in areas where that action is currently used, but also new and surprising uses of that action.
For example, I once read an economics book that characterized computers as lowering the cost of integer arithmetic by an extreme amount. That led to things like digital music/pictures - no-one would have previously thought of using a ton of numbers to represent a song - not just efficiency gains in accounting.
- tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y agoClaude Shannon showed that everything is just data, that's why it wasn't done previously. It seems obvious today, but wasn't always.
- thwarted 4y ago> no-one would have previously thought of using a ton of numbers to represent a song Music has long been represented using math and math concepts. Musical notation is a cartesian plane with time on the x-axis and pitch on the y. But that's the representation, and it's not about the representation, it's the ability to manipulate at extremely high speed.
- probablynish 4y agoI see what you're saying, but musical notation isn't a precise representation of the audio. Given the same score, two musicians can produce very different interpretations. Perhaps I should have said 'audio' instead of 'song'. (I took classical piano exams as a kid, and at some point a group of us would perform our prepared pieces for each other as practice, and I remember always being surprised at how different everyone's pieces sounded. I'd thought mine was the One True Way!)