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Music notation does not express concurrency easily. It expresses parallelism easily. It can do this each part can be played in isolation - in other words, they
by crntaylor 13y ago
Music notation does not express concurrency easily. It expresses parallelism easily.
It can do this each part can be played in isolation - in other words, they are pure.
- danbruc 13y agoConcurrency is a prerequisite for parallelism.
- dllthomas 13y ago"Music notation does not express concurrency easily [in enough generality to do most of the interesting things that aren't simple parallelism]. It expresses parallelism easily."
- btilly 13y agoI'm not sure what the right words are for the post you replied to, but they are honestly different and have different capabilities. For "concurrency" think of the operation, "You go off and take care of that. I'll take care of this. We might meet up later." For "parallelism" think of performing a sequence of operations in lock step, while standing next to each other. That these are independent can be seen in programming when you compare multi-threaded programming (concurrent but in no way parallel) with programming for the GPU (very parallel, but none of the type of concurrency that I'm discussing). Returning to music notation, it is like a GPU - everything goes in lock step. Stuff happens simultaneously, but not independently.
- Gonzih 13y agoNope. Concurrency and parallelism need different tools.
- mrbrowning 13y agoThere's an analog in music to the notion of concurrency, which is the polyphonic melody -- a single melodic line that, by jumping between disparate registers, expresses the simultaneous sounding of two (abstract) voices moving against each other. Of course, this depends on the assumption that pitches can be implied even at times when they're not sounding, which intuitively seems to hold: see Bach's Cello Suites for a canonical example of this practice in action.
- jerluc 13y agoI completely agree with this. Perhaps expanding the idea further however, it makes sense IMHO to see a multi-staff score (this could mean either a score written for multiple parts, or as something like piano scores which typically have a staff for each hand) as parallelism.