Running is something that trigger creative mind activity for me. And a form of flow. I wouldn't be surprised if other physical activity would do the same: climbing, even body building when done in a meditative manner (maybe?).
Around that time I started learning music theory and playing in the school band, and learning jazz on the bass. The next year I was at the top of all of my math classes. My teachers thought I was cheating since I had developed a reputation as a "burnout" by that time (there's nothing more satisfying than getting called in after class to take a test in front of a smug teacher and acing it).
Also, even though I quit playing music about 10 years ago, to this day I can map out a melody in my head (I can immediately tell the interval between any two notes and string them together to play a melody on the first attempt), and I can pick apart mult-part harmonies because I can hear them in my head. I very clearly remember walking home from school one day and realizing that for the first time I could hear more than one note at a time in my head.
Music definitely rewires the brain in amazing ways.
I believe that this "explains" more about music than 10 years of music theory classes.
ps: That's why I'm often thinking we should teach math to kids with actual activities. Involving your sense is to me critical to internalization of concepts. Later on you can drop the notation.
pps: indeed that's the kind of brain rewire I never expected. It opens your mind to other sensations too; and also, even pushing it, it change my view of European geometric explanation of everything. If people, cultures didn't have written music but understood music as you describe .. who has the knowledge here ?
I sometimes wonder if it's because I play a single monophonic instrument rather than a polyphonic instrument.
There's a thing you get after a while on drums, the internal clock becomes stable. You can play whatever, if you feel you don't make sense, a part of your mind is still ready to catch the groove as if you never played outside the click.
In Harmony there's a similar sensation, you don't care about the note, any note on any chord will taste something, but you learn to swerve back into the harmonic movement if you think you're turning into noise, or if you want to express something sweeter to the ear, depending on your emotions and the overall flow.
I believe to learn that, the best way is to play off. Off time, off key. And feel what it is to lock in again. Then play on that sensation.
Also jazzfusion guitar chord progression got me to focus on funny progression. John scofield, tribal tech, r. Gatto, return to forever...) All reach your ears.
For some anecdata, I consistently find myself in a better frame of mind after lifting as long as I was properly focused on form, challenging myself rather than going through the motions, etc.
My university education revolved around cello performance, and I find many similarities in the state of mind after a good practice session compared with a good lifting session.
When I was working out, since I was out of shape, I used the music "slowness" as a guide to doing push ups. Always going slow, very slow, and very smooth.
Even on every day chores, I realize that anything done in this fashion is relaxing, body and mind wise.
I was once obsessed with climbing for almost a decade. When climbing I was 100% focused on climbing, my mind wasn't really free to wander and think of other things. Even when I was done climbing, I would still be thinking about climbing. Climbing problems were always the biggest problems in my life, they had a way of eclipsing everything else, which is what it means to get the 'climbing bug'.
-- German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), who co-discovered calculus
The first assumption you make is that we actually know how pre-18th century music sounded like. We have guesses, some better than others, but we know that we are likely wrong.
The second assumption is based on the idea that music somehow improves in complexity and quality. We have many scores that have survived the test of time, but these provide a huge selection bias. Only scores that were popular, widely copied and preserved due to timelessness are currently available. Musical ideas that could not be expressed using the scoring techniques didn't survive. Nor did musical ideas that didn't mesh with following eras. Therefor, what we see is a pattern of scores that are popular (of low complexity), easy to write (of low complexity) and similar to following eras (of lower or equal complexity). See the selection bias?
Lastly, and more concretely: 18th century musicians didn't suddenly start caring about bending time. They started caring about sharing musical ideas outside of their direct sphere of influence (printing press), so they understood the need to add extra markings on sheet music, such as rubato and accelerando.
And saying you try to understand jazz is akin to saying you try to understand philosophy. It cannot be done, too much has been written and one cannot understand all standpoints simultaneously. Try to understand a specific era, like Bebop, or a specific musician, like Chick Corea.
I don't think all was lost, things that weren't writeable could be passed orally as virtuoso techniques that weren't deemed useful to be written for the average player anyway. See how Spanish guitar technique has survived time.
My attempt at understanding jazz is that it revolves rhytmically around swing. And that core swing can be described through a tinier and principled abstraction rather than a crude ternary feel mark left for the student to figure out. Also from trying to make sense of jazz music without the traditional formalisms (I barely know two modes, and never learned that many progressions). There are some tiny tiny notes in Herbie Hancock playing that shifts the whole world. I'm sure "the" truth lies in there. see the finale solo https://www.youpak.com/watch?v=95TAfOWJKwg
Music is not _like_ mathematics, music _is_ mathematics, it’s just a different way of expressing it.
I can understand if you say that music (in general, or at least in the west) conforms to a system of patterns and relationships, but I question whether those patterns and relationships are integral to the experience of music. I suspect that they are more a result of our expectations than a fundamental property of music.
Thus, when listening to syncopation, you constantly comparing what your brain hears to a steady 4/4 it ‘expects' to hear. And when listening to a soloist improvise, you are comparing the notes your brain hears to the melody it ‘expects’ to hear.
This is obviously not the only effect, not by a long shot, but is that what you mean by “inertia?"
There's a lot of "feels" that you cannot represent without that. But these aren't studied formally, funk, latin, caribean music. Jazz is but I think the people studying jazz don't explain everything because they're talking among themselves and already have internalized all this. So they just write "swing this" above a measure and the cats will deal with it.
oh: and I just thought of something else. The idea of prediction; since I relate everything to physics, often feels similar to a sense of internal balance. I mean your body position, as in not tripping. Syncopated music often feels like falling. Maybe it's synesthesia but considering that all these music were linked to parties and dance I think it's not far fetched that our musical prediction is the same as the one that tries to predict how to balance movements and body.
Swing feel isn't a closely guarded secret among jazz musicians - it just isn't quick to explain. There's a sliding scale of the ratio between the first and second eighth note, where at slow tempos it's 2:1, and at fast tempos it's 1:1. The exact ratio at a given tempo is something that's passed down aurally. There's also a harder articulation on the second eighth note. There are other nuances too, but those are the most important ones.
The 1,2 ratio is nice, but I use to see response curves... a bit like interpolated splines...
The trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Or in computing terms: input (parsing), processing, and output.
The quadrivium: maths, geometry, music, and astronomy. "What's the connection?" you ask?
Numbers.
Numbers in space.
Numbers in time.
Numbers in space and time.
Might a modern pentivium add numbers in n-dimensional space (matrices / calculus), or a sextivium explorations and representations of infinity? Or would these fall under the subsequent study of philosophy? How about parallel/concurrent systems? It certainly seems to me as a layman that large swathes of research mathematics and theoretical physics are approaching subject areas traditionally ascribed to philosophy. I wonder what the latin word for GPU would be.
I'm finding the content and descriptions mostly interesting in a retrospective sense -- I'm not ent
advocating that the mediaeval curriculum be implemented in its original form today. At the same time, I find the notion of input, processing, and output to be quite useful, and one which might be considered as part of a modern curriculum.
For the maths progression of the quadrivium, there are a few other possible clusters or progressions. We've made some advances in maths as well.
I see a general structure of: quantitative notations and operations (arithmetic), solving for unknowns (algebra), geometry and trigenometry, integrals and derivatives, matrixes, differential equations and approximations (FFT). There's also logic (informal, formal, programmatic), programming, and artificial intelligence / machine learning. Genetic engineering seems also to fall somewhere on this axis.
Collectively, all of this falls under inforamtion acquisition, processing, storage, and transmission.
I've been trying to learn to play guitar on and off for 25 years now. It's a huge struggle for me. For a while I'll practice daily, make very little progress, get frustrated and bored, then quit. A year later I start over and no progress is ever made. I've had different teachers and different instruments (I love the gear part of it) and I know what's really needed is grit.
I do get the feeling though that my 46 year old brain is a little calcified and doesn't want to learn something entirely new. That's part of the reason I think I really need to work on it.
My kids take music lessons and after the first week, they accomplished more than I had in years.
The plot twist was that it turned into "how to learn". Because you can try things blind forever and never make progress. There's a million way to be wrong in music. It teaches you patience and sensitivity. All the beautiful rhythms are very small details invisible to the newcomer, you have to go slow in order not to miss them.
The "between" trick is important. I told above about inertia and thinking about moving as constantly flowing and not as spaced points.
All instruments are different though. Guitars require quite a large amount of time to adapt your left hand (neck). It's easy to never make progress there. Bass guitar is a tad easier because you play melodies and not a blend of this + chords, which are demanding in dexterity and stamina.
The frustration, abort, guilt cycle is hard to avoid. Even guys who took lessons as kids have off days. They told us on boards that when they struggle to play, they just take it easy and make it a rudiment day. Stupid patterns at slow pace, just to keep warm.
Do not ocmpare yourself to kids, it's mostly masochism. It's like comparing the speed of a fresh windows 95 install vs a 2 yo one. They have natural excitement and smoother fingers, I believe their brain is just a nasty pattern cruncher and most things end up intuitive the next day. That says nothing about your own ability to learn or take pleasure. <= pleasure which should be the goal.
One question, do you use a metronome ? everytime I struggle, 2 minutes of metronome backed practice suddenly realigns my hand and my ears and everything gets smoother. Not perfect but it helps to get properly warmed up and enjoy the feeling.
One thing that I think music teachers would probably frown on is that I picked up Rocksmith and made more progress with that than practicing chord changes, scales, and Hal Leonard songs. The score for being on time on the right note with the software always adding a few more notes than I can play works really well for me.
Plus I can play it with my daughter.
For me a metronome is not a source of frustration, it probably calibrate my sense of time and is like a wingman for locking into place. Usually it makes warm up efficient, and when my hands are loose I can just walk the neck as I feel.
I've heard the RockSmith critics. I can understand but I felt it's not a bad step, although it's quite incomparable from making your instrument sing. Kinda like driving a car vs Gran Turismo.
Both require 'synchronising' the left and right sides of your body (and also, presumably, the left and right hemispheres of your brain). Although, occasionally, they require 'un-synchronising': for example when the beat is syncopated. As a pianist, it's such a strange feeling when a syncopated piece 'clicks': it almost feels like your left & right hands (and brain hemispheres) are operating completely independent of each other; almost like it's two separate people playing two separate pieces at the same time.
Also, both are arguably percussion instruments :)
And one from my favourite composer, Claude Debussy, the first in his pair of Arabesques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fle2CP8gR0 . The Arabesque is really nice: it starts off synchronised and then transitions to a really beautiful syncopated flowing section.
And although this has nothing to do with syncopation or off-beat rhythms, I highly recommend this video from Valentina Lisitsa (one of the most technically brilliant pianists alive, IMHO) playing a Beethoven Sonata with a GoPro strapped to her chest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0m2RW4m8xE
Although you might want to avoid that last one if you're prone to motion sickness :)
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Listening to classic music like this is relaxing, I currently listen to things like:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbklUUuhHgs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFaVOruNRck (guitar only, tell me what you think about this piece, which is a cover from metheny in a classical guitar rewrite)
otherwise
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3s3dne0d8Q (this is the piece that made me think I should start listening to classical music more openly. I used to be in jazzfusion, but the piano introduction felt mostly classical in tone and quite beautiful. The rest isn't bad either, strings, bass, guitar... a very nice crescendo)
Talking about off beat syncopation, not sure if that's what you mean, I think of this kind of rhythm (warning not classical music):
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nahPAXPFYPQ
I consider the dude who created this album a genius, his pianistic style is messy, lightweight, with diagonal solos (see next song finale) toying with the bar in all directions.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGh-7RnafpU
I hope you'll enjoy some of this (maybe you already know them)
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I get what you're saying about Lisitsa; if I has to make one criticism, it's that she can play a little 'mechanically' at times. This is often the case with talented 'technicians'. Well, with the exception of Horowitz, who was some sort of freakishly talented mutant, with his crazy 'flat-fingered' technique and heavily modified Steinway (that most people find unplayable). Although, given the level of her technical talent, Lisitsa is not so bad in this regard. If you really want to see a concert pianist with no feel for what he is playing, take a look at some of Lang Lang's performances. I suppose a lot of people must like him, given his success, but he just isn't for me.
As for nice harmonies, I'm a little unsure what to recommend. I only did a little formal study of music theory (mostly forgotten), so am not the greatest theorist... Maybe try Liszt's third 'Liebestraum' (which has an interesting, and bloody difficult, 'three hands' technique where both hands contribute to a 'middle melody' in sections of the piece): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuoHL45Y . Also, a famous Chopin Ballade that you've probably heard before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce8p0VcTbuA
As for the term 'syncopation', I think it has fairly broad meaning. The kind I was referring to is when the timing/tempo of one clef doesn't neatly divide into (or 'match up' with) the other. For example, see page 2, line 3 here: http://www.mediaphorie.com/pdf/PSU_Demo_En.pdf
And first page, line 2 here: https://www.ibiblio.org/mutopia/ftp/ChopinFF/O66/chopin_fant...
Talking about virtuoso, I was surprised by Joey Alexander, he does have a musical feel and is not just a technician child prodigy. Pretty cool to see.
Thanks for the links too.
- drumming often lead to learning things slow. Focusing on minute details that are ignored, also meditative (you have to be slow and low energy but it's dense, you pay attention at the 10th of a second so you're constantly mentally and physically active)
- limb independance is akin to meditation for me, playing patterns involving all limbs massages my brain. It's like trying to balance on a virtual wire. It's a game of doing more with less and abstracting the motion of each limb into another form of data. You must not think of one limb in particular. You feel rhythm and accents, and you distribute to some limbs... I feel like a live compiler.
- oddly technique also required revisiting my understanding of physics. It's all about angular momentum, shifting gravity center and inertia. Also doing less with more by distributing the effort on every possible muscle. Makes you reflect on a global basis about each hit. Oh and I forgot, to do lengthy single hand rolls with accents, you don't rotate your wrist, you wave your forearm, hand and stick (it has to be smooth like low basketball dribbling, you'll see if you look for moeller technique later) accents are just a blip in amplitude at the forearm wave; the hand wave will keeps as it is so you'll keep time and won't feel tired because waving doesn't require much energy (half the energy comes from sensitivity and reusing the response of the skin to let the stick go up).
It was through this that I started to "see" music. I played bass too, and along the way melody and harmony started to make sense at the intuitive level (I only took 1 year of accelerated formal theory training on piano as a teen, taught me approximately nothing about "music")
All in all, I'm a brainiac (for better or worse) .. different people will see other things in drumming.
ps: One last thing, at first drumming felt like an immense beast to tame. Famous drummers did things I could barely see, even less understand. My mind skipped to conclusion thinking to reach that level I had to do more and play like a fighter jet. It's the other way around, it changed your view about your perception and interpretation of the world through your senses. As I told before it's all a game of economy, but you have to experience each cymbal, skin, sticks, subtle space and time placement to finally see that just a few strokes well placed are enough to recreate that "complex" thing. It's a bit like when you finally understand a software architecture, you realize how small it is, but you connected the dots and see how much it can do.
Isn't it amazing that "relaxation" improves things that much ? it makes you tap in the system much more efficiently. Goes well with my notion of minimalism and also the ways of elders [1]. Did you understand the high school 'fast is slow' motto or was it flying over your head ?
Latin has a proverb precisely for that: "in festina lente". Seems like antique knowledge ...
ps: Also, I kept trying wrong "fast" intuition for something like 6 years until I started to break it all apart and starts back from scratch and slow. One thing that helped me is leading left hand (I'm right handed). Even playing anything with any limb. You just cannot go fast, you have to relearn bit by bit. Surprisingly everything starts to have a better ring. It also corrected things that could flow fast on the right but were mostly luck. Another enlightenment.
Since we're on HN, I could suggest you to search "clojure music" on youtube. There are a few talks about a dude revisiting music theory from wave freq. all up to Bach all in a few pages of clojure code. Very Very very cool.