“Yes, actually. It’s been discussed over and over again in Techdirt that everyone borrows from the past. So if we program computers in the right way, they will creatively do the job for us.”

Thus are centuries of tradition reduced to a cheap slogan.

I won’t try to convince you of it, but I think I should at least mention the possibility that there might be more to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony than you are seeing (or rather, hearing).

I love it when people talk about algorithmic music like it will fill the same function as real music. I wonder, will algorithmic science take the place of real science?

What, science can’t be created by an iPhone app? Why not?

Why is it always music that is going to be made by machines and not, say, physics papers? I mean, you’d think that computers would be more into doing science than art, wouldn’t you? And yet, one hears nothing about science being done by some clever computer algorithm.

In science, computers are the slaves, but in music they are in line to be the next Beethoven.

Almost like these fantasies are conceived by scientists who mistake their own very shallow conception of music for music-in-itself.

It’s possible, right now, to have an algorithm that could create music that would fool people who know nothing about music. It’s also possible, right now, for anyone with half a brain to invent an encryption method that would stymie people who know nothing about codes.

And in both of these cases, the proper response is: ‘So what?’.

“I’m sorry, I had to reply because you’re so horribly wrong, Herodotus.”

Don’t be sorry.

“Time, and the ‘ticking’ of time, and time as small measurable quantities, was long, long, long, long before the catholic church, let alone musicians hired by the catholic church.”

Of course it was. For instance the Chinese were making astronomical clocks as far back as the year 979 of the common era. The thing is, that they didn’t ‘take’ in that context. There weren’t numerous clocks that could be checked against each other, nor were the clocks public. They were private playthings of the imperial household. Modern scientific clock time is inherently public, and uniquely western in origin.

Sorry if that offends you, but the historical record does seem to bear this out. Check out David Landes’ book ‘Revolution in Time’ for an overview. It has extensive and detailed notes if you want to investigate the matter further. There is also a good bit about more or less the same subject in the early chapters of Boorstin’s book ‘The Discoverers’, and the bibliography is awesome.

“For an example, let us simply look at hourglasses and water clocks, which may predate the catholic church by millenia, and were around in the times BCE. Nearly older than the church by tens of millenia, actually.
They clearly break down time into small measurable bits.”

Clearly you can see that hourglasses, which tell different time depending on shape, the kind and fineness of the sand, and the humidity; and water clocks, which are influenced by temperature variations and other weather conditions, are unlikely to be the basis of a consistent, universal method of time measurement?

“I think that you greatly misunderstood what the book meant; I don’t have the book or a copy…”

What, you haven’t even seen the book and you are still certain that I didn’t understand it? That’s rather uncharitable, don’t you think?

Here’s the deal: the notion of a universal, public, measured chronometric time is a specific thing. It has similarities to older attempts at time measurement, but that is all they are, similarities.

The specific origin of this notion of time is, indeed, shrouded in obscurity, but the evidence is quite clear that it developed in the west from the 13th century onward, which was exactly when the notion of polyphonic musical notation was first developed.

The reason Geza Szamosi thinks that the origin of clock time AS A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK came from the notation of early polyphonic music was that this was the first occasion known that time durations were tied to an abstract symbolic framework.

13th and 14th century composers wrote out the separate ‘parts’ of their compositions (e.g. ‘Soprano 1’, ‘Soprano 2’, ‘Alto’, ‘Bass’, and so on) in separate part books. In many cases, these parts were rhythmically and metrically independent of each other. The ‘Ars Nova’ notation as it has come to be called, was a practical innovation that allowed composers to be certain that all of the parts would meet up at the right time. Any notational idea that didn’t add up would becoming glaringly obvious as soon as the singers started singing and the parts didn’t synchronize properly. For example, each section of each musical piece ended with a cadence sung together by the whole choir. If the parts were out of sync there would be a major train wreck at the cadence, if not long before. And so this whole system of symbolic time measurement was developed in a context where every new conception was subject to a rigorous series of practical tests. Any false notions would be audibly and painfully obvious as soon as they were employed.

So a couple of hundred years pass, and Galileo has

the realization that all of the important features of motion–the distance covered, the speed, the change of speed–could be expressed in terms of the time elapsed…Galileo saw that time is the independent variable in the description of motion.

And yet…

Galileo himself did not make much of his discovery. He treated it as just another mathematical trick and never seemed to realize its revolutionary character.

Why? Because

In the four centuries preceding Galileo, an important sensory model had been created in Western Europe by which a numerically well defined, exactly measurable, and exactly measured structure was imposed upon the experience of what we call the flow of time….the theory and praxis of polyphonic music and it’s measured notations

And finally, he points out that educated Europeans would all be aware of these concepts because “the study of music theory, like the study of geometry and astronomy, was compulsory in higher education.”

(Gosh, I hope all of those quotes are fair use.) 😉

Now, it’s possible that Mr Szamosi is completely wrong, but I have certainly never seen anyone even try to refute him, much less succeed in doing so. If you can find someone, by all means, tell me about their work.

So to continue with your objections:

“But if you would say music time measurement systems, period, not just the current system, you’d still be wrong because the first metronomes also belong to BCE.”

Again see above regarding the idea of universal, public, measured chronometric time and it’s specific origins.

“And evenso, you seem to not understand that the physical idea of simultaneity is entirely false. There is no such thing as two simultaneous events, as in some viewpoint of some observer moving at some relative speed, the two events will happen at different times.”

None of which has much bearing on any of this. But even so, all of these conception have the notion of measured chronometric time at their basis. Relativity didn’t supersede the concept of measured time, it used it.

“We have to specify the frame of reference they are simultaneous in. Thus, we measure clocktime in the rate of radiations of some Caesium-133 that is in the same frame of reference as us.”

Well, sure.

“That frame of reference bit is important, because it entirely changes the idea of time.”

Entirely changes the idea of time?

So in other frames of reference, some seconds are longer than others? Sometimes hours have 65 minutes and sometimes only 49? Can this other kind of time be measured at all, or is it just sort of understood intuitively?

Because, if it can be measured, it is simply a refinement of the same notion of time.

Now, I’m sorry but I must bow out of this conversation, because I have a great deal yet to do tonight, but it’s been a pleasure.