These days, I mostly post my tech musings on Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmcgrath/
Friday, December 12, 2014
It all boils down to this
A lot of what I work on, a lot of what I think about, a lot of my own journey into epistemology, Zen, Music. Semiotics, Legisprudence and computer science can be neatly summarized thus:
Music Theory tries to differentiate between different *types* of things. In western music, the biggest type system is the concept of keys. So, we have this big theory corpus about how keys can explain musical forms...but much of the interesting stuff - take blues for example, or Irish Traditional Music - breaks the type system. So you end up with a taxonomy that says something like this: "music splits into two types: the type that works cos people clearly like it, and the type that doesn't" Having a type system that fails to enumerate all the types and allows for the type field to be *anything* can thus either be because the designer has not thought it through to find the enumeration of types *OR* because the design has thought it through and concluded than no bounded type system is in fact. possible.
2 comments:
Thanks for leaving out the angle brackets. My are are hurting from the work week.
Curiously, what is the application to music?
Music Theory tries to differentiate between different *types* of things. In western music, the biggest type system is the concept of keys. So, we have this big theory corpus about how keys can explain musical forms...but much of the interesting stuff - take blues for example, or Irish Traditional Music - breaks the type system.
So you end up with a taxonomy that says something like this:
"music splits into two types: the type that works cos people clearly like it, and the type that doesn't"
Having a type system that fails to enumerate all the types and allows for the type field to be *anything* can thus either be because the designer has not thought it through to find the enumeration of types *OR* because the design has thought it through and concluded than no bounded type system is in fact. possible.
Post a Comment