The Packbats' Weblog

There's an interesting arc you can have with studying Toki Pona.

At first, you're learning words and phrases. That "toki" can mean "speech", "communication", "stories", and suchlike. That "pona" can mean "good", "acceptable", "approved of", and similar. That "jan" can mean "people", "characters", "humans", that kind of thing. That "jan pona" can mean "friend" - a person or people you approve of, that you like and endorse. That "insa" can mean "inside", "center", "stomach", and so forth. That "toki insa" can mean "inner monologue" or "thoughts". And learning all these things helps you understand what people are talking about.

And then you start unlearning them. Sort of.

Like, the thing about toki pona is that a lot of its strength is being not specific, is being contextual, is being personal. And you can translate the English word "think" with the toki pona phrase "toki insa", but there's a lot of things that a communication can be within - a house, a community, a back room, standard usage ... a lot of things. And "think" does a lot of work - I think that origami is delightful, but when I say that, I am saying that to me origami is delightful: musi pi lipu sitelen li pona tawa mi.

This isn't actually about Toki Pona - this is about Kyle Kallgren's analysis of the movie "Network", and the cover of "Land of Confusion" it ends with, and the idea of reading classic rock songs as saying something. Saying "things aren't okay, we're being lied to, and we need to stop the damage". Saying "justice for those American Indians who fight against poverty and police violence". Saying "the classist and racist status quo isn't actually a natural state, we can do something about it". Saying "The USA gave us a terrible life, sent us off to kill people who looked different than us, and left us with nothing when we got back, if we even made it back". All these words that got flattened into "angry" or "comforting" or "exciting" or whatever else, they were saying something.

People learn to ignore what a communication means.

Probably because if any of these people were allowed to be understood, we might not be okay with letting the rich get richer as everyone else kills each other.

Howard Beale was saying something. He was saying that you have to get mad because the other option is depression and not caring, and if we have any hope of not taking it any more, not letting all the evil be wrought upon us, we have to care.

And on a personal level, to paraphrase jan Sonja about Toki Pona: if a friend is a "jan pona", a good person? A bad friend is a contradiction in terms.

Words mean things. And caring about what words convey can mean caring about a lot else, too.

We were reminded today of this music video and how much of an absolute trip it was the first time we saw it:

Animated music video of a fight between a group of clowns and a group of vampires.

( Content warning (spoiler) )

We realized partway through our reading of Musicking: the meanings of performing and listening by Christopher Small that we no longer expected the reading of the book to be an event we appreciated - we expected it to be an obligation. So we halted there. We'll talk more about the book at the end.

( 845 words )

We found out about Christopher Small and the book (and word) "Musicking" through the YouTube videos of Adam Neely, and were prompted to read it specifically from its reference in Neely's video about hating CCM - Contemporary Christian Music - but trying to like it. It clearly left a strong and lasting impression on Neely, and for good reason: as a musician and especially as a working jazz musician, a musician in a heavily improvisational style of music seeking to make an income out of performance, the importance of music as an entire event is inescapable. And though we don't love the book and didn't finish it, this perspective was enriching to us as well.

So, last month we wrote a blog post about the limits of the music theory we learned as a tool for actual music invention, inspired in a significant part by David Bennett Piano's video "How much music theory did The Beatles know?".

The topic has been bouncing around in our head a bit more, though. And I think I want to pull on a different tangent to David Bennett's video (which, to be clear, was really interesting and well-researched): who gets to lay claim to the Beatles as one of their own? Who owns the Beatles?

Or rather: if people describe the music of the Beatles as a matter of academic music theory, where does that leave people for whom that academic world is an enemy?

...writing this now, I want to connect this to Adam Neely's recent video on "The Girl from Ipanema": a song which was made less than it was because musicians from outside the culture and community that created it - musicians at a college in the US listening to a bossa nova album by Brazilian composers - used their authority as academics to define it in their framework and discard a great deal of what was outside their framework. Academia has that power. And people outside academia know it.

I don't think that the hostility to music theory analysis of popular music is as simple as "music theory studies boring music for stuffed shirts, it can't study truly emotional and meaningful music I love". Or I don't know if it is. I can see more reasons than hostility to analysis as a thing to be hostile to analysis as an act.

So, we've been making a lot of music in PICO-8, and it's kind of been illuminating when it comes to our understanding of music theory.

What is music theory? The point of music theory is explaining the experience of listening to music.

...no, that's half true. The point of music theory should be and often is that - but can be and sometimes (often?) is snobbish condescension. People do wield the tools of music theory to argue that another person's taste in music is Wrong™, an exercise that is (a) cruel, (b) philosophically indefensible, (c) a waste of time, and (d) an entirely valid reason for hating music theory. This essay is about the music theory that explains the experience of listening to music, though.

Anyway. The point of music theory is explaining the experience of listening to music, and doing that is ... I guess three skills? Listening to music, understanding what in the music creates the effects one is feeling, and articulating how it does that. And now that we actually say that ... wow, this is embarrassing.

We studied the vocabulary of music theory in college. How to articulate what music is doing. We started at that end, and we never really connected that back to the feeling of listening to music - we just learned rules. (Mostly part writing - a specific set of rules describing how musicians a few hundred years ago in the vaguely north-western part of Eurasia would create a sense of harmony as consonances formed out of the independent motion of multiple melodic lines. Part writing is extremely valid and a lot of fun, by the way.) So when we first started writing PICO-8 music, we ... okay, first we transcribed a section of an out-of-copyright piece to learn the UI, but next we tried to apply the chord progression rules we'd learned - this language for articulating a specific style for making each chord lead into the next - directly to the production of music with no idea how that would sound.

And it didn't sound how we wanted. Being able to articulate the rules that we'd been taught got us nowhere as far as making feelings that we wanted.

This was largely prompted by having watched a video about the Beatles and whether they knew music theory, a story which ties into our own experience tracking music in PICO-8. What the Beatles lacked, for the most part, was just and only an academic language for articulating what they were doing - they knew what feelings they were hearing, and they understood a great deal about how they could create those feelings with their music, but they couldn't on their own put that into standardized language.

And we ... understand a little bit about how to create feelings with our music. And a lot less than we expected about how to articulate the feelings we like that we create. The theory is helping a lot - knowing what notes are in standard tertian-harmony chords and what notes are in the scales of the modes of major and minor mean we can make a lot of good guesses as to what notes would fit with what notes are already there - but we're guessing and checking a lot. We're hearing something that we like and rolling with it. And we're putting a lot less weight on finding chord progression than shaping lines and finding chord progressions within them.

And sometimes we can articulate how an effect was achieved and often we can't.

...I think we might try to make something with an extremely standard chord progression just for fun. But we have to do it like we did that part writing piece we linked earlier: demanding that it sound right while we search the space of options within the rules, and editing-editing-editing until it does.

I think, in the context of PICO-8, the best definition of music may be "a schedule of sounds". Every PICO-8 music tick - by default, about 1/120 s - each of the four channels of the hypothetical sound card decides what sound it will be producing based on the instructions it was given and makes that sound happen. The job of a composer working in PICO-8 is to invent a schedule of sounds that produces the effect they want and state it as instructions using SFX and, usually, music patterns.

The range of possible detail at which these schedules may be written is pretty interesting. Something happening every 120th of a second is happening at 120 Hz, and a note playing at 120 Hz is actually only a little over an octave under middle C - by working at such a fine scale, a SPD of 1 tick per line, one designs sounds more than melodies. At the other end, a SPD of 255 ticks per line, the notes pass by so slowly that it becomes difficult to even understand them as a rhythm - as a steady pulse one could bob one's head to. There is enough room at both ends of the scale to design original sounds that take a fraction of a second to produce and, in theory, to schedule an hour's performance of sound in sixty-four patterns. There is that breadth of space.

I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.

I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.

( Content warnings: homophobia, classism, sexism and racism mentions, hospital mention, and a brief rant about 1978 made-for-TV movie 'Rescue from Gilligan's Island' )

This mashup is seriously the most awesome thing I've seen all week. Thanks, tacit! (And thanks nationelectric, who linked tacit's essay the other day!)

EDIT: Substitute remix79 in the parenthetical - goes to show why you should check your sources...

Via jfs: http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/



It's a map of many (all but ~17000) of the artists indexed on last.fm, spread out in two dimensions* according to the similarity data that site has between each pair of artists. One of the cooler features here is the Interactive Map - you can look up any indexed artists and they mark them with flags. I generated the following map shown by entering a comma-delineated list** of my favorite artists and taking a screenshot.

* What would happen if it were three dimensions or more? I guess it's inconvenient to render...

** Names separated by commas. Example: Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, XTC. If you enter the list of your favorite artists this way, it works - even if the names have commas, like Peter, Paul and Mary.



I assume some interpretation could be put to why my flags all fall on a line between Avril Lavinge and Muse, but I'm not going to.

I just got back from the Janis Joplin concert at Wolftrap ... it was amazing, but when she was talking about her time in California, and said she almost fell into full-out addiction, almost ruined her life - well, it made me think. What would have happened? Would tattoos still be the provenance of outcasts? Would we ever have had the inrush of female voices into the rock-and-roll scene, people like Stevie Nicks even have played rock? A tiny change to history - if we had Joni Mitchell still playing and Janis Joplin died young - and so much would have been different.

What might Jimi Hendrix have accomplished, if he lived as long as Jim Morrison? Where would Simon & Garfunkel have gone if Paul Simon hadn't died in a car crash in 1965 - would they have just been another obscure one-hit wonder? What could R.E.M. have accomplished if it were Marc Bolan died young and Michael Stipe still alive today? Heck, would Tommy Allsup be remembered the way Ritchie Valens is, if the coin toss had gone the other way?

I guess we'll never know.