Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | BigTTYGothGF's commentslogin

> I read many years ago that psychedelics are what lead to the formation of consciousness

I have never taken psychedelics but I believe myself to be conscious.


Also quarter step bends in guitar and vibrato in general.

That's clearly not what was meant, even without the context of this following bit:

> To describe tones that exist in music, we can describe tones that exist on a piano. There are only two rules:

> the first key must play a tone of 27.5 Hz each next key must play a tone 6% higher than the previous key

(This is not to mention that at a 1.06x increase per half step you're going to be sharp by 1 cent / octave which starts to add up).


> It's all about the integers modulo 12.

Only in 12TET.


24, 128, approach infinity -- I know there are microtonal systems, but if you want to understand them, choose the nearest multiple-of-twelve (or really, choose whatever TET contains the closest approximations to the exact notes) TET and look where their intervals land with respect to the symmetries (factors) within that TET, and where those symmetries are broken by a note moving by a perceptual 'slide' (one note 'moves' into the other position) rather than sounding like a new distinct voice.

More like, only if you're playing Schoenberg it's about modulo 12.

Almost all sheet music that you play uses 5 or 7 unequal subdivisions of the octave, and occasionally the rest. Sure, sometimes you'll have one or two of the rest on a regular basis (blues, harmonic/melodic minor), but still most music won't use all twelve.


Isn't modulo-twelve (if we ignore microtonal) the core underlying structure, and then you pick scale (like 2 2 1 2 2 2 1) and a key as a mapping, and then use degree as an 1-based index into the scale?

I don't really know a thing about music, so I could be wrong here - but that mental model at least made some sense to me when I tried to map all the concepts I've heard about into some sort of a mental system.


The point is that to a player the mapping is more important than the core 12-note structure, because highly chromatic (12-note) passages happen but they are the exception.

At least in western music you pick the seven basic notes on the scale, and that gives you the sharps and flats you place at the beginning of each line. That choice, from the point of view of notation, is even more important than the exact scale. And the choice is constrained to 15 sets of sharps and flats because it implicitly tells the player (veeeery roughly) to expect some patterns that probably will occur.

It doesn't always work great, for example if you want to write the Simpsons theme the set of notes in the scale doesn't fit any of those 15 sets. But it uses an unfamiliar scale in any case, so there's not much to gain and as a player you just deal with it.

See around 32:30 in https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?t=1950


Because of circumstances I was involved in running several birthday parties for children these past few years. All of them had pinatas. In my experience:

> Adults hate them

This is absolutely not the case.


> On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly

You need more practice doing it (with your brain, not the model).


Meanwhile someone went and did the experiment on the equivalent problem in a virus: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mutate-em-all-and-...

And various dedicated AI models all made poor predictions of the results of that experiment, which casts doubts about the value of the AlphaGenome predictive map.

A virus is much simpler than a human, but even for that simple virus the effects of most of the mutations could not be predicted. A half of the mutations had harmful effects, and for a half of those it is unknown for now why they were harmful.

For a human the uncertainty about the effects of a mutation will be far greater than for one of the simplest viruses.


> A virus is much simpler than a human, but even for that simple virus the effects of most of the mutations could not be predicted.

Is this the correct logic? I (very naively) would think that a small mutation of a virus, with the percent change that is being made, would be more of a fundamental change in the nature of the thing, so maybe less predictable. Where poking genes of a human being more of a (possibly strong!) statistical nudge, since most things seem to be spread across many genes, what's being expressed for sometimes environmental reasons, and even influenced by "junk DNA".


I think you have it completely backwards. A smaller genome makes small tweaks much more likely to produce measurable effects, which means your data quality is much better. A larger genome with more gene interaction is more likely to produce non-measurable or non-subtle effects with perturbations of a single parameter. If a positive effect can only be measured by simultaneously mutating multiple inter-dependent genes, and you don't have a data point with those mutations, the effect can never be predicted. The model may even predict the exact opposite: if you have a bunch of data points showing that varying one gene at a time causes the organism to die, the model will predict that the sum of those mutations also causes death. With larger genomes you need exponentially more data points to discover subtle effects.

Vampires aren't any more fantastical than FTL travel, and yet we're perfectly happy to have that in SF.

I agree the line between fantasy and sci Fi is very thin. In general I would say if the author intends for it to be a natural explanation like wormholes or something it's sci fi, if it's a magic teleportation spell it is fantasy. There is a series I read once Starships Mage which plays with this, it's hard sci fi for most things but magic exists and FTL is solved through teleportation. Everything non magic has to obey relativity and such.

> Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. .... 100%

That's certainly a revealing example. TTLS is entirely melody, and the article says basically nothing about melody. At a stretch you could say "the article talks about the major scale, TTLS uses notes from a major scale" and if your conclusion is "that's why I like it", then you should feel the same way about any permutation of the notes in TTLS, or indeed anything you get from hitting the white notes on a piano one at a time.


> the article says basically nothing about melody

Its 13 mentions of melody sufficed for me.


Most of those are variable names. The rest: > Why a melody wants to land where it lands is still mostly opaque to me

> A key, its diatonic chords, a progression, those chords broken into an arpeggio one note at a time, and a melody that sticks to the scale

> Change the melody array to anything at all and it will still fit

The first part of TTLS (in C) is: C C G G A A G F F E E D D C. Let's follow the guidance of this last part and change the "melody array"; for neatness we can alphabetize it: A A C C C D D E E F F G G G. Now that you understand melody, please tell me why even though it "still fit"s it doesn't sound as nice.


"Seem" is doing a lot of work there.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: