I’m with you on “music feels language-like”, I think even just looking at spectrograms of music and speech, and comparing those to the spectrograms of random soundscapes, makes it visible that music at least plays with the same types of rhythmic, pitch, and formant patterns in our “sound view”, but they have a difference similar to the difference between how a textbook “plays with the patterns of letters and punctuation” to convey an idea, and a Celtic knot “plays with patterns” to create a pattern that is sort of just… intrinsically nice to have around? I ’ve started thinking of melodies as sort of “null sentences”, sentences with the semiotics intentionally stripped out, leaving behind just the feeling. You can of course sort of “stretch” or “push” most systems of patterns and make it Turing complete (do some crazy stuff with Conway’s Game of Life or something), but with music that’s usually not the point, music feels like… the “RNA” to language’s “DNA”, in a way. Or rather, music is an artform that plays with the RNA.
However, I have a counter-anecdote to how you feel like your thoughts “spawn” in either language or not-language: I speak only English, but began speaking very late. When my thoughts spawn, especially when I have in high intensity mode and thinking clearly, they spawn as… I’ve best been able to describe them as “clouds”? A “concept-graph” is also close. Not just strings of words, but also complete spatial understandings in my head (i.e. similar to the fidelity and depth of memories I have of real places), sounds, tastes, smells, emotions, connections and causal graphs, I’m able to rotate this new place around in my head and see how it operates and watch rules connecting together and causing little behaviors… not at all once though, at first it’s very vague impressions, and as it gets more ‘filled in’, none of it involves me thinking any words like ‘spatial understanding’ or ‘systemic behaviors’ though. It’s more like gradually more and more understanding “appears from the mists” as I think. I don’t even really know what my brain is doing step to step other than I sort of can “feel” the effort.
But then, as a secondary process, I try to translate those thoughts into English. When I am alone, and don’t need to do this, I think orders of magnitude faster and more clearly. When I am with others, I cannot stop myself from always preparing and translating my thoughts into English “just in case”. I do this habitually most of my waking time anyway. However, while I do feel that part of me which does the translating is resource-hungry (a little emotionally draining even, on bad days), it is also very well-developed and practiced at this point and can translate or even predict what I would say as fast as I can think most of the time, but for anything I haven’t seriously thought through before, I full on have to simply stop and shut down my language processing for brief moments to let my thinking get ahead a bit more so I can understand what I’m trying to say and figure out how to say it. Sometimes there is no way to say it, but a diagram helps. But for the most complex thoughts, often direct demonstration is the only feasible way to explain it. Things like modular synthesis really opened up music for me because I have so many different ways to go from the musical ideas I have into some sort of real world outcome of sound, behavior, pattern, sequence, shape, etc. which can all be organized in flexible ways.
EDIT: A more straightforward metaphor: I feel like I am a Diffusion model, not a token predictor model. Being able to edit my writing is crucial to me being able to function, because I’m just sort of incrementally getting the final product out of my head piece by piece as it is ready. Non-linear editors in general are also helpful, as is asynchronous communication.
Thanks for reading! Could you realize the same thought-cloud twice using, for example, language and music? And if so, do you think the end results would count as “translations” of each other in some sense? If the answer is yes I’d be very curious to see/hear an example.
The clouds are sort of permanent- as they are filled in, whatever degree of detail it’s at is where it stays in my head, wherever they’re “stored”, and it just sort of sticks in there. It feels a lot like just putting energy into some sort of “progress bar”, my best thinking I really do in just a meditation sort of behavior- closed eyes, relaxed pose, slow breathing [I’ll shift back and forth into this as I’m reading challenging books for instance, or when working on a project there’s a lot of “lean back and sit quietly for a moment, staring into the middle distance], but there’s diminishing returns (you can’t make a bad idea better than it is by thinking it harder, and very simple ideas even just… “finish”). Then it’s just sort of “in there”, available to be translated out into the word in various physical forms, be it a sentence, an Excel sheet, a process design, a sculpture, a music video, etc. It feels like the underlying “data” is multimodal or maybe even typeless, and it’s the expressions of it I create are all imperfect models of it, but can all be different and make different features visible or not, or obvious or not. But the line gets blurred, because those physical manifestations themselves, my memories of speaking them, etc. do end up getting fed back in and become part of the cloud.
And really, even the above is simplifying, because it doesn’t feel like I have separate clouds for separate thoughts, I just have one gigantic internal cloud of everything I’ve ever thought, and I’m just adding to that with what ‘comes out of the mists’. And I use that metaphor ‘comes out of the mists’ only to describe the feeling- the thoughts don’t seem like they are literally coming from “nowhere”, they feel like they come from me, they just come in very diffusely in across a lot of different conceptual dimensions besides just words, all at once and gradually and in a very “diffuse but coming into focus” way.
I’m with you on “music feels language-like”, I think even just looking at spectrograms of music and speech, and comparing those to the spectrograms of random soundscapes, makes it visible that music at least plays with the same types of rhythmic, pitch, and formant patterns in our “sound view”, but they have a difference similar to the difference between how a textbook “plays with the patterns of letters and punctuation” to convey an idea, and a Celtic knot “plays with patterns” to create a pattern that is sort of just… intrinsically nice to have around? I ’ve started thinking of melodies as sort of “null sentences”, sentences with the semiotics intentionally stripped out, leaving behind just the feeling. You can of course sort of “stretch” or “push” most systems of patterns and make it Turing complete (do some crazy stuff with Conway’s Game of Life or something), but with music that’s usually not the point, music feels like… the “RNA” to language’s “DNA”, in a way. Or rather, music is an artform that plays with the RNA.
However, I have a counter-anecdote to how you feel like your thoughts “spawn” in either language or not-language: I speak only English, but began speaking very late. When my thoughts spawn, especially when I have in high intensity mode and thinking clearly, they spawn as… I’ve best been able to describe them as “clouds”? A “concept-graph” is also close. Not just strings of words, but also complete spatial understandings in my head (i.e. similar to the fidelity and depth of memories I have of real places), sounds, tastes, smells, emotions, connections and causal graphs, I’m able to rotate this new place around in my head and see how it operates and watch rules connecting together and causing little behaviors… not at all once though, at first it’s very vague impressions, and as it gets more ‘filled in’, none of it involves me thinking any words like ‘spatial understanding’ or ‘systemic behaviors’ though. It’s more like gradually more and more understanding “appears from the mists” as I think. I don’t even really know what my brain is doing step to step other than I sort of can “feel” the effort.
But then, as a secondary process, I try to translate those thoughts into English. When I am alone, and don’t need to do this, I think orders of magnitude faster and more clearly. When I am with others, I cannot stop myself from always preparing and translating my thoughts into English “just in case”. I do this habitually most of my waking time anyway. However, while I do feel that part of me which does the translating is resource-hungry (a little emotionally draining even, on bad days), it is also very well-developed and practiced at this point and can translate or even predict what I would say as fast as I can think most of the time, but for anything I haven’t seriously thought through before, I full on have to simply stop and shut down my language processing for brief moments to let my thinking get ahead a bit more so I can understand what I’m trying to say and figure out how to say it. Sometimes there is no way to say it, but a diagram helps. But for the most complex thoughts, often direct demonstration is the only feasible way to explain it. Things like modular synthesis really opened up music for me because I have so many different ways to go from the musical ideas I have into some sort of real world outcome of sound, behavior, pattern, sequence, shape, etc. which can all be organized in flexible ways.
EDIT: A more straightforward metaphor: I feel like I am a Diffusion model, not a token predictor model. Being able to edit my writing is crucial to me being able to function, because I’m just sort of incrementally getting the final product out of my head piece by piece as it is ready. Non-linear editors in general are also helpful, as is asynchronous communication.
Thanks for reading! Could you realize the same thought-cloud twice using, for example, language and music? And if so, do you think the end results would count as “translations” of each other in some sense? If the answer is yes I’d be very curious to see/hear an example.
The clouds are sort of permanent- as they are filled in, whatever degree of detail it’s at is where it stays in my head, wherever they’re “stored”, and it just sort of sticks in there. It feels a lot like just putting energy into some sort of “progress bar”, my best thinking I really do in just a meditation sort of behavior- closed eyes, relaxed pose, slow breathing [I’ll shift back and forth into this as I’m reading challenging books for instance, or when working on a project there’s a lot of “lean back and sit quietly for a moment, staring into the middle distance], but there’s diminishing returns (you can’t make a bad idea better than it is by thinking it harder, and very simple ideas even just… “finish”). Then it’s just sort of “in there”, available to be translated out into the word in various physical forms, be it a sentence, an Excel sheet, a process design, a sculpture, a music video, etc. It feels like the underlying “data” is multimodal or maybe even typeless, and it’s the expressions of it I create are all imperfect models of it, but can all be different and make different features visible or not, or obvious or not. But the line gets blurred, because those physical manifestations themselves, my memories of speaking them, etc. do end up getting fed back in and become part of the cloud.
And really, even the above is simplifying, because it doesn’t feel like I have separate clouds for separate thoughts, I just have one gigantic internal cloud of everything I’ve ever thought, and I’m just adding to that with what ‘comes out of the mists’. And I use that metaphor ‘comes out of the mists’ only to describe the feeling- the thoughts don’t seem like they are literally coming from “nowhere”, they feel like they come from me, they just come in very diffusely in across a lot of different conceptual dimensions besides just words, all at once and gradually and in a very “diffuse but coming into focus” way.