Tuesday November 5, 2007
Good 'Ol Emacs, book on Musicical Abilities and Neurology
As my vision age-deteoriates, the quality of font sets becomes more and more of a factor in the comfort I have with editing tasks. Linux is imfamous for having lousey fonts and even though I am drawn back to editing web pages and programs with emacs over and over again after trying different editors, especially ones designed for web pages, different distros short-change emacs in decent font sets and characters like curley bracket become harder to distinguish from parenthesis. this makes coding perl, java, and lately javescript a chore. The editor that comes with KDE is a help. It does high-light brackets, but I had a particularly hard time finding a mismatched parenthesis or bracket pair in emacs last night largely due to the crapy font sets in this distro of Linux. I had to resort to Kedit to get past that problem. This distro, Slackware-12 has an emacs that doesn't seem to support font size changes, which would help a great deal.
I saw a most interesting book on Musical ability and Neuro-science called Musicophilia by Oliver Sachs, who is obviously a doctor who treats patients with brain function changes mostly as a result of trauma or seizsures or Cancer that causes amomg other things changes in musical perception or abilities. He discusses all the recent research, which has vastly increased since 1980 due to the use of functional MRI and other tools that can localize function in living brain tissue.He describes abilities I have and suggests that my history of brain damage at birth my lead to these abilities as well as being related to the importance of music to most people. It is clearly mediated by genetic as well as developmental and environmental factors, being as specfic as injury to specfic places in the brain as well as development of parts of the brain in response to trauma to other parts. In general heightened musical abilities are revealed by assymetries in brain anatomy and function and can be revealed by functional studies as well as in MRI and post-mortum studies.
Sach's description of the range of abilities in people clearly indicates to me that I have very good musical memory, but leaves so much in my experience unexplained from reading the first half of his book. I will go back to the bookstore and look at the rest of the book and if I can get the resources, buy the book. One area of deep mystery is absolute or perfect pitch which Sachs describes as something basically different from its less developed pitch memory, in my experiance there is a connection. I don't have absolute pitch most of the time, but sometimes I develop good pitch memory that persists for a time, and I can get the key of a piece right, that is, sing in the right key, if I don't try too hard. That sounds like an ability that I have but haven't learned to use. It is true that people with absolute pitch often don't have to work at what they percieve, it asserts itself on them, and can be painful and disconcerting. What I think is missing from Sach's discussion is the connection with tonal memory, which is not the same thing as relative pitch or interval memory.
Another area that is deeply mysterious is the urge to compose music as opposed to rote memory of it and enjoyment of it. I have the latter two, but almost no development of the first. People who know of my passion for music often ask if I write music assuming that such an interest automatically entails a desire to create in it. My experience is that it does not. There is some suggestion in Sach's book that such gaps in people's abilities are common. That to have a heightened awareness in one way doesn't necessarily give one creative tools to use it. Creativity requires a different set of developments in the psyche. It appears that music and language are related in some fundemental way, both in auditory processing but also in semantics and symbolic processing, and that putting notes together is somewhat like putting words together. I seem to have more skill at putting words together than composing music, even though I am far more passionate about music than I am about speech or writing. Words are cheap. I think that for most people music is quite secondary to lyrics and in popular music lyrics are for more important even to the extant that harmonic complexity or contrpuntal complexity are painful to most people. This goes a long to explaining the simplicity of most music.
Along those lines an idea has been germinating in my mind about computer music and music editors on computers. I have known for some time that I have almost no creative talent in creating musical figures, much less melodies, and so would natureally approach composition more from a mathematical side. Once I can get through the phrase level I can expand into larger forms with comparitive ease. The idea I have for a music editor is one that comes directly out of Schoenberg's book on composition, the creation and variation on musical figures with techniques based on learned counterpoint that approach mathematical transforms, inversion, retrograde, augmentaion and diminuation and permutations. If an expression language could be devised to allow for experiments on figures, then aesthetic reactions can take over and off you go, but figure generation needs a kick. If truth be told I do create music, but the ideas either go nowhere or I can't write them down. A music editor based on figure manupilation and counterpoint would help. The editors I've seen are all brute force and have none of the hooks I am thinking about.
More on Javascript
In addition to ripping out my hair over brackets, I have discovered a limitation in me and in Javascript. The problem I seem to have in programming is getting loop bounds to work properly. I frequently get off by one or off by two problems, I encountered this last night in trying to get javascript to put out a calender in a table. The second thing is a serious lack in javascript itself, no modulus operator like "%" in C or java.
