“Music cannot be created without math” is true only in the same grossly misleading sense as “you can’t catch a ball without finding an approximate solution to a differential equation”.
That is not the same. A complex set of equations are not required to calculate how to make an object to throw at people, nor is it required to make a glove or to figure out where to place your hands to catch the ball, but generating resonance at a given volume and frequency is a very hard thing to do. Stradivari may not have been a great mathematician, but he still had to carefully measure, and set to very exacting specifications each one of his instruments. He had to follow the calculations even if he did not know those calculations. In the time of ancient Greece, before those calculations were completed, it did require a mathematician to devise a musical instrument more complex than a drum. This is why many cultures never got past the stage of drums and horns before the more complex instruments were imported from Europe. These equations can be used by those unfamiliar with them, but they can’t be created without someone learning those equations in the first place in the same sense that computer software cannot be created without engineering.
Catching a ball in midair is nothing like figuring out what sounds cool on an instrument.
Right, if anything catching the ball is far closer to “math” since it isn’t culturally dependent and has an objective set of solutions, whereas what sounds like good music is highly dependent on cultural contexts. So if only one of these two is labeled as math it should be the ball catching. But that’s connected to why neither should be called math or claimed that it takes math.
To play a riff on a guitar, let’s say you hit 5th fret 3rd string, 3rd fret 3rd string, then 5th fret 4th string. That’s about 1 second.
To play a song on a guitar, you do that a few hundred or more times with a few dozen or more different figures. That’s 3 minutes.
If it sounds like catching a ball engages the mathematical part of your brain more than that, I’ll just assume you’re an expert on these things and take your word for it.
At this point, two thirds of your post are simply repeating what you have already said.
If it sounds like catching a ball engages the mathematical part of your brain more than that, I’ll just assume you’re an expert on these things and take your word for it.
I’m not an expert on either ball-catching or on music, but that’s not terribly relevant. You seem to be repeatedly arguing as if this is really about personal experience but no one in this thread has made a personal experience argument except as a response to you. The central point about ball throwing is the argument that it involves implicitly approximating the solutions to differential equations. The point is that if you believe one of these “takes math” in any substantial fashion you have to believe that the other does about at least as much. And you still haven’t responded to this point, or to the many other points raised as objections to your position (such as the empirical existence of people who are very skilled musicians and who are completely incapable of doing any substantial amount of math).
The central point about ball throwing is the argument that it involves implicitly approximating the solutions to differential equations.
That’s a fact, eh?
So, when a mathematician is approximating solutions to differential equations, their brain is functioning the same as if they were catching a ball?
To catch a ball in midair, requires the same hand eye coordination as moving a drumstick to hit a drum at the right time.
But what I’m talking about, is not how the hand moves to catch the ball or hit the drum or find the right fret.
To catch a ball, the hand moves to catch a ball. The ball is the input, the catch the result.
What I’m talking about happens before hand-eye coordination ever begins.
To play music, you are mentally throwing multiple balls all the time, and then catching them at the right time. The part of music that engages in the brain is not catching the ball, it is mentally placing the ball on a discrete grid.
Again, if you disagree, I’ll take your word for it.
This isn’t sheet music. It’s guitar tab. It has 6 lines, one for each string, the number on each line is the fret to play.
If you weren’t arguing with me someone who plays music, but spent the same amount of time learning music, you’d probably have a more impressive brain this week.
You aren’t actually addressing the arguments that people are making. No one is claiming that there isn’t math involved in classifying music. Are you for example going to respond to the ball comparison in a way that isn’t just dismissal or are you going to address that there are people who are very skilled musicians who aren’t good at math and vice versa, or are you going to address the issue that whats sounds acceptable in music is highly culturally influenced? Repeating variations (if you’ll pardon the word) on the same basic argument you’ve made isn’t helpful.
If you can make a chord, you are counting the distance from the other keys.
This appears to me to be a highly nonstandard use of the word “counting”.
Nobody can count to 12 a thousand times a minute and be terrible at math.
They most certainly can. Counting to 12 is a teeny tiny weeny itsy bitsy fraction of mathematics. You can be very good at counting to 12 and terrible at mathematics overall.
The issue here is you think arithmetic isn’t math.
It seems more as if the issue is that you think arithmetic is all there is to mathematics. I’m sure you don’t actually think that, because it’s silly, but I don’t see how to make any sense of what you’re saying without an assumption along those lines.
In addition to the excellent points made by gjm (all of which I agree with and we’re probably stated better than I would), I’d like to address your comment that:
Nobody can be good at music that can’t count to 12.
Nobody can be a good chef if they can’t count to 30. Nobody can be a good car mechanic if they can’t count to around 15. Et cetera. Unless you are arguing that all of these disciplines also involve being good at math, something is wrong here.
And your reply still didn’t actually deal with any of the major issues in question. You haven’t explained why throwing a ball doesn’t count. You haven’t addressed that empirically people can be good at one of math or music and not the other (unless you count claiming that being good at counting is identical to being good at math and I interpret your entire comment above as responding to that question). You’ve ignored the entire issue of music being culturally dependent, and in fact have made it worse by focusing on numbers which are specific to the Western musical system.
How many times a minute does the Chef count to 30?
For a musician, its probably around 100, or many more.
I’m literally at a restaurant right now, and the owner asks me to play piano. After I finish, another guy asks if he can play. Broken English, he tells me after he’s done “I know nothing about music, I have my own formula”.
Face it, you’re arguing with me because you don’t like my views on materialism, not because you know what playing music is like.
How many times a minute does the Chef count to 30?
Sure, not as frequently as a musician. So what? We can play this game with the chef asking how often does a musician need to quickly scale a whole collection of different things by the same factor, or more by almost the same factor (since some spices end up scaling in what amounts to a non-linear rate).
After I finish, another guy asks if he can play. Broken English, he tells me after he’s done “I know nothing about music, I have my own formula”.
Anecdotal evidence, and not even very relevant: no one here is arguing that one can’t use math in music. That’s not the same thing as the claim you have been making.
Face it, you’re arguing with me because you don’t like my views on materialism, not because you know what playing music is like.
Attacking people’s motivations is generally rude. If you want to claim I have a particular bias we can go and check that. I’ve spent the last few minutes introspecting, and I’m pretty sure that there’s a serious failure to model going on here, since I had to go back and reread a bunch of your older comments to even remind myself what your attitude was on materialism (and after reading them I’m not actually completely sure what it is). There are statements that I had more of an active memory disagreeing with you on (especially your heavy other optimizing in the life-hacks thread) but I’m fairly confident that that wasn’t a substantial impact. I’m not aware of a single viewpoint you’ve asserted that is anything I’m emotionally attached to one way or another (and I’ll readily acknowledge that there are many issues that I’m attached to emotionally when I shouldn’t be).
But if you want to make this personal, we can. Your statements in this subthread, together with many of your other comments (like your aforementioned comments in the lifehack thread) show that you have a serious bias in terms of assuming that other people think the same ways you do. You are underestimating human mental diversity in a way that is generally termed engaging in the typical mind fallacy (which now that I think about it also covers thinking that I care strongly about attitudes about materialism because it is an important issue to you)..
And you still haven’t addressed any of the objections I listed earlier and repeated again in the last paragraph of the above post. I’m not going to bother retyping them, simply noting that you still haven’t responded substantially to them.
Finally, if we are throwing personal experience in here, which you seem to want to focus on (despite its general lack of reliability), I’m a post-doc in number theory at a decent university. I’m not musically gifted at all (and probably below the average musical ability) and playing music doesn’t feel like it is accessing almost any of the same parts as doing math. For every anecdote there’s an equal and opposite anecdote; that’s why that sort of argument isn’t terribly helpful.
This is part of what you don’t seem to be getting. Repeatedly doing the exact same piece of extremely simple arithmetic doesn’t require being good at math unless your definition of being “good at math” is at best highly non-standard. The ability to repeatedly count the exact same thing doesn’t make one good at math and isn’t even seriously indicative of it. That’s aside from the fact that even if one did buy into this, this still doesn’t address the fact that empirically there are people who by any sane notion of “good at math” are are terrible at music and people who have the reverse. This is one of many objections to your position that you seem intent on avoiding answering.
I said music is math. To perform it, you are consistently engaged in simple math problems. In music there are “figures” both for what is happening at any moment, and for what is happening over time. Instruments have discrete states that involve mathematical translations of such figures.
I never said you have to be “good” at math, especially if that means knowing more than arthimetic, or being as smart as you.
I said music is math. To perform it, you are consistently engaged in simple math problems.
Again (and for what will likely be the final time unless you make a really striking novel statement in your reply to this to actually make me think this conversation is worth continuing), by this argument the person catching a ball is constantly and consistently engaging in math, and much more math than music.
I never said you have to be “good” at math, especially if that means knowing more than arthimetic, or being as smart as you.
True. You said
“It’s pretty much all math” and “Nobody can count to 12 a thousand times a minute and be terrible at math.” And you put this in a thread asking for activities similar to programming.
Now, it is possible that I’m misinterpreting what you mean by the second statement, and that you mean that they have to be able to be at least mediocre at math. But that’s not true either unless one’s idea of mediocrity is being able to do math a 5th grader is expected of. Empirically there are skilled musicians who are by most notions “terrible” at math. And if the sole ability you are focusing on is the ability to count, then saying that means one isn’t terrible at math seems off. My 4 year old nephew can count very high (for some reason he occasionally skips numbers ending in 7, especially 37,47 and 67) but any adult or even any 12 year old at that level would be “terrible” at math by any notion of terrible that captures most people’s intuitions. If you want, maybe taboo the word terrible and state what you mean more explicitly.
And being able to do something quickly and regularly isn’t a big deal either: If you sped up a dog’s brain a hundred times, you’d get a dog that took 100th the time to figure out it wanted to hump the sofa, and maybe it would get bored slightly faster and then go and decide 100 times as fast that it wanted to pee in the living room. Sheer increase in speed, without ability for sophisticated long-term storage doesn’t matter. To extend the analogy a slightly different way: The complexity class of computations bounded in log space and exponential time is the same as the set of computations bounded by just log space.
Edit to respond to last line since I think this may be worth noting:
Sorry for upsetting you.
You haven’t upset me. If I have to make a guess, you are again projecting on to other people your own attitudes. My only other explanation is that you are attempting to use the rhetorical trick where you ask someone to calm down or apologize for upsetting them intending to use that to get them to be upset or to make them appear upset to bystanders. Sometimes people seem to do that almost unconsciously, but if that’s what you are trying you are going to need to find a much more subtle way of doing it here.
ADBOC
“Music cannot be created without math” is true only in the same grossly misleading sense as “you can’t catch a ball without finding an approximate solution to a differential equation”.
That is not the same. A complex set of equations are not required to calculate how to make an object to throw at people, nor is it required to make a glove or to figure out where to place your hands to catch the ball, but generating resonance at a given volume and frequency is a very hard thing to do. Stradivari may not have been a great mathematician, but he still had to carefully measure, and set to very exacting specifications each one of his instruments. He had to follow the calculations even if he did not know those calculations. In the time of ancient Greece, before those calculations were completed, it did require a mathematician to devise a musical instrument more complex than a drum. This is why many cultures never got past the stage of drums and horns before the more complex instruments were imported from Europe. These equations can be used by those unfamiliar with them, but they can’t be created without someone learning those equations in the first place in the same sense that computer software cannot be created without engineering.
Look at a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. Pick a note at random.
To make a particular chord, the next notes are not random.
It doesn’t require advanced math, but there are discrete states the instrument can be in.
Catching a ball in midair is nothing like figuring out what sounds cool on an instrument.
Right, if anything catching the ball is far closer to “math” since it isn’t culturally dependent and has an objective set of solutions, whereas what sounds like good music is highly dependent on cultural contexts. So if only one of these two is labeled as math it should be the ball catching. But that’s connected to why neither should be called math or claimed that it takes math.
To play a riff on a guitar, let’s say you hit 5th fret 3rd string, 3rd fret 3rd string, then 5th fret 4th string. That’s about 1 second.
To play a song on a guitar, you do that a few hundred or more times with a few dozen or more different figures. That’s 3 minutes.
If it sounds like catching a ball engages the mathematical part of your brain more than that, I’ll just assume you’re an expert on these things and take your word for it.
At this point, two thirds of your post are simply repeating what you have already said.
I’m not an expert on either ball-catching or on music, but that’s not terribly relevant. You seem to be repeatedly arguing as if this is really about personal experience but no one in this thread has made a personal experience argument except as a response to you. The central point about ball throwing is the argument that it involves implicitly approximating the solutions to differential equations. The point is that if you believe one of these “takes math” in any substantial fashion you have to believe that the other does about at least as much. And you still haven’t responded to this point, or to the many other points raised as objections to your position (such as the empirical existence of people who are very skilled musicians and who are completely incapable of doing any substantial amount of math).
That’s a fact, eh?
So, when a mathematician is approximating solutions to differential equations, their brain is functioning the same as if they were catching a ball?
To catch a ball in midair, requires the same hand eye coordination as moving a drumstick to hit a drum at the right time.
But what I’m talking about, is not how the hand moves to catch the ball or hit the drum or find the right fret.
To catch a ball, the hand moves to catch a ball. The ball is the input, the catch the result.
What I’m talking about happens before hand-eye coordination ever begins.
To play music, you are mentally throwing multiple balls all the time, and then catching them at the right time. The part of music that engages in the brain is not catching the ball, it is mentally placing the ball on a discrete grid.
Again, if you disagree, I’ll take your word for it.
A guitar has 6 string, and 22 frets.
You have to put your fingers on the strings on a certain fret to make a noise.
To make a melody, you could try to move around to random. frets
Sooner or later, you learn which mathematical patterns produce “music” and which do not.
If you knew nothing about music, no sharps no flats, no idea what a scale was or how many notes, then you can play guitar like this:
http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/d/deep_purple/smoke_on_the_water_tab.htm
This isn’t sheet music. It’s guitar tab. It has 6 lines, one for each string, the number on each line is the fret to play.
If you weren’t arguing with me someone who plays music, but spent the same amount of time learning music, you’d probably have a more impressive brain this week.
You aren’t actually addressing the arguments that people are making. No one is claiming that there isn’t math involved in classifying music. Are you for example going to respond to the ball comparison in a way that isn’t just dismissal or are you going to address that there are people who are very skilled musicians who aren’t good at math and vice versa, or are you going to address the issue that whats sounds acceptable in music is highly culturally influenced? Repeating variations (if you’ll pardon the word) on the same basic argument you’ve made isn’t helpful.
Nobody can be good at music that can’t count to 12.
There are 88 keys on a keyboard. If you can make a chord, you are counting the distance from the other keys.
Nobody can count to 12 a thousand times a minute and be terrible at math.
The issue here is you think arthimetic isn’t math.
This appears to me to be a highly nonstandard use of the word “counting”.
They most certainly can. Counting to 12 is a teeny tiny weeny itsy bitsy fraction of mathematics. You can be very good at counting to 12 and terrible at mathematics overall.
It seems more as if the issue is that you think arithmetic is all there is to mathematics. I’m sure you don’t actually think that, because it’s silly, but I don’t see how to make any sense of what you’re saying without an assumption along those lines.
In addition to the excellent points made by gjm (all of which I agree with and we’re probably stated better than I would), I’d like to address your comment that:
Nobody can be a good chef if they can’t count to 30. Nobody can be a good car mechanic if they can’t count to around 15. Et cetera. Unless you are arguing that all of these disciplines also involve being good at math, something is wrong here.
And your reply still didn’t actually deal with any of the major issues in question. You haven’t explained why throwing a ball doesn’t count. You haven’t addressed that empirically people can be good at one of math or music and not the other (unless you count claiming that being good at counting is identical to being good at math and I interpret your entire comment above as responding to that question). You’ve ignored the entire issue of music being culturally dependent, and in fact have made it worse by focusing on numbers which are specific to the Western musical system.
How many times a minute does the Chef count to 30?
For a musician, its probably around 100, or many more.
I’m literally at a restaurant right now, and the owner asks me to play piano. After I finish, another guy asks if he can play. Broken English, he tells me after he’s done “I know nothing about music, I have my own formula”.
Face it, you’re arguing with me because you don’t like my views on materialism, not because you know what playing music is like.
Sure, not as frequently as a musician. So what? We can play this game with the chef asking how often does a musician need to quickly scale a whole collection of different things by the same factor, or more by almost the same factor (since some spices end up scaling in what amounts to a non-linear rate).
Anecdotal evidence, and not even very relevant: no one here is arguing that one can’t use math in music. That’s not the same thing as the claim you have been making.
Attacking people’s motivations is generally rude. If you want to claim I have a particular bias we can go and check that. I’ve spent the last few minutes introspecting, and I’m pretty sure that there’s a serious failure to model going on here, since I had to go back and reread a bunch of your older comments to even remind myself what your attitude was on materialism (and after reading them I’m not actually completely sure what it is). There are statements that I had more of an active memory disagreeing with you on (especially your heavy other optimizing in the life-hacks thread) but I’m fairly confident that that wasn’t a substantial impact. I’m not aware of a single viewpoint you’ve asserted that is anything I’m emotionally attached to one way or another (and I’ll readily acknowledge that there are many issues that I’m attached to emotionally when I shouldn’t be).
But if you want to make this personal, we can. Your statements in this subthread, together with many of your other comments (like your aforementioned comments in the lifehack thread) show that you have a serious bias in terms of assuming that other people think the same ways you do. You are underestimating human mental diversity in a way that is generally termed engaging in the typical mind fallacy (which now that I think about it also covers thinking that I care strongly about attitudes about materialism because it is an important issue to you)..
And you still haven’t addressed any of the objections I listed earlier and repeated again in the last paragraph of the above post. I’m not going to bother retyping them, simply noting that you still haven’t responded substantially to them.
Finally, if we are throwing personal experience in here, which you seem to want to focus on (despite its general lack of reliability), I’m a post-doc in number theory at a decent university. I’m not musically gifted at all (and probably below the average musical ability) and playing music doesn’t feel like it is accessing almost any of the same parts as doing math. For every anecdote there’s an equal and opposite anecdote; that’s why that sort of argument isn’t terribly helpful.
So if you’re doing simple math problems a hundred times a minute, your brain is doing lots of math.
This is part of what you don’t seem to be getting. Repeatedly doing the exact same piece of extremely simple arithmetic doesn’t require being good at math unless your definition of being “good at math” is at best highly non-standard. The ability to repeatedly count the exact same thing doesn’t make one good at math and isn’t even seriously indicative of it. That’s aside from the fact that even if one did buy into this, this still doesn’t address the fact that empirically there are people who by any sane notion of “good at math” are are terrible at music and people who have the reverse. This is one of many objections to your position that you seem intent on avoiding answering.
I said music is math. To perform it, you are consistently engaged in simple math problems. In music there are “figures” both for what is happening at any moment, and for what is happening over time. Instruments have discrete states that involve mathematical translations of such figures.
I never said you have to be “good” at math, especially if that means knowing more than arthimetic, or being as smart as you.
Sorry for upsetting you.
Again (and for what will likely be the final time unless you make a really striking novel statement in your reply to this to actually make me think this conversation is worth continuing), by this argument the person catching a ball is constantly and consistently engaging in math, and much more math than music.
True. You said
“It’s pretty much all math” and “Nobody can count to 12 a thousand times a minute and be terrible at math.” And you put this in a thread asking for activities similar to programming.
Now, it is possible that I’m misinterpreting what you mean by the second statement, and that you mean that they have to be able to be at least mediocre at math. But that’s not true either unless one’s idea of mediocrity is being able to do math a 5th grader is expected of. Empirically there are skilled musicians who are by most notions “terrible” at math. And if the sole ability you are focusing on is the ability to count, then saying that means one isn’t terrible at math seems off. My 4 year old nephew can count very high (for some reason he occasionally skips numbers ending in 7, especially 37,47 and 67) but any adult or even any 12 year old at that level would be “terrible” at math by any notion of terrible that captures most people’s intuitions. If you want, maybe taboo the word terrible and state what you mean more explicitly.
And being able to do something quickly and regularly isn’t a big deal either: If you sped up a dog’s brain a hundred times, you’d get a dog that took 100th the time to figure out it wanted to hump the sofa, and maybe it would get bored slightly faster and then go and decide 100 times as fast that it wanted to pee in the living room. Sheer increase in speed, without ability for sophisticated long-term storage doesn’t matter. To extend the analogy a slightly different way: The complexity class of computations bounded in log space and exponential time is the same as the set of computations bounded by just log space.
Edit to respond to last line since I think this may be worth noting:
You haven’t upset me. If I have to make a guess, you are again projecting on to other people your own attitudes. My only other explanation is that you are attempting to use the rhetorical trick where you ask someone to calm down or apologize for upsetting them intending to use that to get them to be upset or to make them appear upset to bystanders. Sometimes people seem to do that almost unconsciously, but if that’s what you are trying you are going to need to find a much more subtle way of doing it here.