New study: Musical talent linked to "Open" personality

[stillshaded]

Lol this Harry guy has got to be pulling ya'lls chain. I mean.. I hope that's the case.

[jancivil]

Let me ask you this then, are you 100 percent sure that Mozart didn't use chaos in his compositions? And if you are... why would you be?

I've rather well articulated why I would be. You clearly aren't reading what I write, which tends to be irritating to a person. Why don't you go through Mozart's repertoire and select for us which compositions you believe would have employed 'chaos', and why.

I'm too busy trying to improve my language weaknesses and playing speed scrabble and trying to write basic pop songs to listen to Mozart's entire music catalogue to determine which ones may have been treated with chaos. Besides, I think it's just as unprovable as determining which of his music was NOT treated with chaos.

First, what a cop out. You're too busy to give a crap about what Mozart actually did, but you're going to keep pushing.

You're actually going with this, prove a negative. That's wholly illogical. It's the same idiot argument the religious person does, prove there is no god. The burden is on the person making the extraordinary claim. There is nothing here to talk about really. I'll reiterate once again, for this to work FOR A PRETTY MINUET, A COMPLETELY FORMAL EXERCISE where the harmonies have to be completely normal, and cadence properly in order for the form to work, the bits have to have been prefabricated. So even as you have revised your notion from assigning a die to each of seven notes to acknowledging you will be doing prefabricated snippets for your hypothetical pop ditty, you are going to stick with this story.

[jancivil]

Well, Mozart was still a human. If he was playing his piano too much he should still be subject to what QWERTY typists call "muscle memory".

Except that, while your guitarists examples are of people that (supposedly) mainly composse through thair guitar, Mozart mainly composed using score, therefore, he would not be influenced by "muscle memory".

Trained composers, even when they use an instrument as na auxiliary tool (reportedly, Stravinsky did, for example), composse through their minds, and have a musical thinking that is not at all dependent on any instrument. It seems you are attached to a certain way of doing things that has nothing to do with that praxis.

This was something I was wondering about. There seems to be a very big difference between those who create music as composers working in notation for various instruments they don't necessarily play, and those who create via playing specific instruments. The former is way more involved with the theory, while the latter is influenced by what the instrument is suited to.

Unnecessary dichotomy. I do both. I think there are tendencies on the guitar that are just fun to work with, I tend towards subverting that when I don't want that, I have facility with it as the chief melodic instrument in a track, and I create most of the track from a different perspective, entering it via keyboard control which is not idiomatic for me. I sing lines in my head essentially and I know enough to realize the notes with some facility.

Also, on open-mindedness... There's a limit before it becomes credulity.

And there's a thing where the person making unsupportable claims likes to frame the skeptic as closed-minded. That hasn't happened literally but now we've seen prove a negative which is unreasonable and a sign of failure.

[harryupbabble]

Lol this Harry guy has got to be pulling ya'lls chain. I mean.. I hope that's the case.

I'm not. I'm asking questions that I really want answered. New question: if the music that Mozart's dice game generates could pass as minuets then why can't the rest of Mozart's music pass as dice generated?

[jancivil]

He was creating his music like everyone else creates that kind of music. By working with musical materials. There is no magical process to look for. It strikes me that you want music to be like this, or more like scrabble, in lieu of what actually must happen, which takes years to obtain mastery.

This sends me off on another tangent on the psychology of human beings... still vaguely relevant to the thread...

i have to say this seems to be a common issue in the arts and sciences: People looking for a "formula" to produce successful/popular "hits". Believing there must be one, because ... "Math!!!"

Such mystical codes/algorithms are particularly attractive to those that don't understand the concepts of whatever the subject is. Ignorance enables the imagination (not always bad, but the positives are often wrongly presumed in hard sciences where ignorance does NOT normally enable discovery).

It's like the way people are willing to believe in nonsensical magical technologies showcased in popular scifi. The ones most likely to accept these things as "might be possible some day" are those who don't have physics/technology training. They just say "who knows what will be possible in 20 years"... when some things are clearly never going to be possible if you know the physics.

It's easy for a person to assume something magical must be hidden in a thing when he/she doesn't really know the thing themselves. Such people easily make another logical error: they presume their level of ignorance is universal and that everyone else is as equally ignorant. If they don't know why a magical thing doesn't exist, they won't allow others to tell them that it doesn't and why. The why usually requires a level of expertise that cannot be imparted in the time available to converse about a topic.

This is exactly where we are in this discussion. So Harry tells us Mozart was only human, and if he played the keyboard too much he's going to fall into the same trap as Santana, or whatever he wanted with that. No, Harry, you have no business at all talking about Mozart. He was useful only insofar as this dice game idea you want to promote, which is something in your wheelhouse where musical form is not. It's actually a type of intellectual dishonesty, and is frustrating as hell to me.

[jancivil]

Lol this Harry guy has got to be pulling ya'lls chain. I mean.. I hope that's the case.

I'm not. I'm asking questions that I really want answered. New question: if the music that Mozart's dice game generates could pass as minuets then why can't the rest of Mozart's music pass as dice generated?

No, you really do not want to know. You want to keep talking about nonsense. If you paid attention to what I showed you, you would realize that there isn't really any room for 'chaos' with such a formal expectation. You actually revised your notion from such as sides of dice corresponding with notes of the scale to prefab snippets of a pop tune, once you actually did some thought but you still want to push this argument. Mozart's music as 'dice-generated' has never been shown. It should be clear from the page you promoted that 'generated' is not what that is. There is no further point in talking about that, except for you justifying your own half-baked (that's charitable) guess.

[fmr]

Lol this Harry guy has got to be pulling ya'lls chain. I mean.. I hope that's the case.

I'm not. I'm asking questions that I really want answered. New question: if the music that Mozart's dice game generates could pass as minuets then why can't the rest of Mozart's music pass as dice generated?

Because it has an inherent logical thought (and musical thought) in it, that any musical analysis easily demonstrates. Did you EVER listened (and I mean LISTENED) to any Mozart piece? I advise you to listen to a very simple yet well elaborated and formally well crafted piece - the Piano Sonata in C Major K 565. Then come back and try to explain us how a dice game could achieve that.

[jancivil]

That'll never happen. I already basically asked for that, and it's only a rhetorical question now. He insisted on prove a negative in avoidance of the actual, honest consideration of what such a composition is about. There is an inherent musical idea, which randomness would disrupt. (IE: generated by a melody, or a bass line/harmonic scheme (such as passacaglia.) It seems plausible with what we have, at least as a story, that Mozart could have been interested in playing games like that, but to result in an acceptable minuet, let alone his high standards, he's rigged the game.

[harryupbabble]

Lol this Harry guy has got to be pulling ya'lls chain. I mean.. I hope that's the case.

I'm not. I'm asking questions that I really want answered. New question: if the music that Mozart's dice game generates could pass as minuets then why can't the rest of Mozart's music pass as dice generated?

Because it has an inherent logical thought (and musical thought) in it, that any musical analysis easily demonstrates. Did you EVER listened (and I mean LISTENED) to any Mozart piece? I advise you to listen to a very simple yet well elaborated and formally well crafted piece - the Piano Sonata in C Major K 565. Then come back and try to explain us how a dice game could achieve that.

I have to admit, of the big three (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven) I have listened less to Mozart. Beethoven is my guy. Ludwig reminds me most of Jimmy Page. Ludwig is the original punk. The snippets music in the Mozart dice game is supposedly made by Mozart himself so there's that. Also, I take out a lot of BBC TV programs and documentaries from the library and many times the ending credits say the music is by Mozart. His music doesn't seem to linger in my memory the way Beethoven's and Bach's does. I have about 2 dozen Mozart music in my mp3 collection. it's in my other computer but if you want I can make a list of it and paste it here.

I guess by "dice generated" I mean the sequences, as in the dice game's sequences generated by the dice.

[Michael L]

Heres a new game for improvising music using cards with guidelines, and dice with pitch. Not necessarily to sound good, but to try something different. Free download or buy the box:
http://tonicgame.com

[harryupbabble]

Jan, you can try to obliterate the chaos part in that dice game but it's there. It's a DICE game. Dice is chaos

[jancivil]

Trained composers, even when they use an instrument as na auxiliary tool (reportedly, Stravinsky did, for example), composse through their minds, and have a musical thinking that is not at all dependent on any instrument.

This was something I was wondering about. There seems to be a very big difference between those who create music as composers working in notation for various instruments they don't necessarily play, and those who create via playing specific instruments.

Stravinsky said he wants to touch the notes, via the keyboard. This being hampered by the instrument is a problem of technique. I don't think the idiomatic nature in a Santana guitar break is a problem for that music, for instance Frank Zappa loved some idiom and often moved to blues tendencies in a climate that allows for the other interests; but when it came to composing for the rest of the band/orchestra, there is no problem necessarily following that other thing. And he would get for instance Steve Vai in the band who could play things never conceived as a guitar part and prior to that believed impossible as a guitar part. Vai credited for 'impossible guitar parts and stunt guitar'.

[jancivil]

Jan, you can try to obliterate the chaos part in that dice game but it's there. It's a DICE game. Dice is chaos.

Quit trying to bullshit me. You can try to obliterate musical form, but it isn't going to do anything but keep you ignorant. Also look up the word chaos. (in your use, synonymous with randomness: a lack of intelligible pattern or combination.) The music is ordered.

[harryupbabble]

Ordered music can be by chaos-based as demonstrated by Mozart's dice game.

[jancivil]

Ordered music can be generated by chaos as demonstrated by Mozart's dice game.

This is the end. Mozart's music as generated by dice has not been demonstrated. Your sentence is utter nonsense, the only thing it does is seek to justify your other crap. And show me the extent of your preference for bullshitting.