I didn’t need proof myself, but I suppose it’s comforting nevertheless to have it mathematically confirmed.
Phew. Finally. I was getting worried.
He was! But he overused the harpsichord, in my very humble and unfounded opinion, and it hurts my ears to listen to a lot of his creation. I get why he did (the piano was still a very new creation, and the harpsichord could be more easily heard in concert halls), but it sure does pierce the eardrum these days.
To provide a dissenting opinion, I’ve always preferred harpsichords to pianos, which is one of the reasons I love Bach so much.
Pianos somehow sound simultaneously harsher than harpsichords with the off-putting initial clunk of the keys, and boringly muted in comparison.
Harpsichord always seems so frilly and thin. Piano has more depth and range of emotion, more dynamics.
I do love a lot of his music. It’s just difficult to hear the shrill of the harpsichord, for me.
was this really a worthwhile expenditure of effort? certainly mathematicians could have found something better to do with their time?
One one hand, sure, this seems like a waste of time. On the other, I did get paid to get a masters in literature. So I don’t think I’m in a position to judge :P
I have an MfA. Nobody will convince me that our education holds no value.
and, fwiw, I’m not judging— and if you’ll check out my other comments, it didn’t take much for others to remind me how silly I was being. :)
You may enjoy perusing the various winners of the Ig Nobel Prize.
Some fantastic stuff in there.
Is it worth the effort? Do they have anything better to do? I’d say the answer to both of those is “maybe”.
I personally enjoy these wild kinds of studies and hope they never stop.
Depends. Will this research allow creating AIs that can compose “in the style of Bach”, or even compose “ideal music”… and make a ton of money by selling it as a service to large music producers?
Coming soon: Song of the year, by [some figurehead] (composed and interpreted by AI)
Describing subjective art with numbers means it’s objectively good now! No. >.<
Math, and even merely counting, as applied to the real world always has a human element intangled with it, even though people like to pretend otherwise. Like, you can’t count apples without first deciding what an apple is, where the boundaries of that category are, and declaring them all to be equivalent for your purposes (e.g. one fresh apple = one barely still edible apple). The abstraction of it adds subjectivity.
Anyway the relationship of math with music is interesting nonetheless. It just doesn’t have to be about making art objective somehow.
Now do Aphex Twin. No need to convert his music into numerical data either - am sure he would supply it if asked nicely.
If any composer was going to be mathematically proven to be anything, it pretty much had to be Bach…
