Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

"The industrial revolution made the production of an instrument like [the piano] possible. Several planks of wood - six I think in this case - are overlaid and pressed into shape by tremendous force for six months. Nature is molded into shape. Many tons of force and pressure are applied, making the strings what they are. Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum strength of civilization. Nature is forced into shape. Interestingly, the piano requires re-tuning. We humans say, 'It falls out of tune', but that's not exactly accurate - matter is struggling to return to a natural state. The tsunami, in one moment, became a force of restoration. The [tsunami-damaged] piano re-tuned by nature actually sounds good to me now. In short, the piano is tuned by force to please our ears or ideals; it's a condition that feels natural to us humans. But from nature's perspective, it's very unnatural. I think deep inside me somewhere, I have a strong aversion to that."

- Ryuichi Sakamoto

reads like a digression by Hugo in Les Miserables or Tolstoy in War and Peace

Humanity is nature and natural, everything we produce and do is literally just a transformation of something that already exists.

What's the difference between the honey created by bees and the nuclear waste of a nuclear reactor?

If you get rid of the pro-not-human narrative there is none.

not sure the nuclear waste tastes nearly as good, for one

It should be quite clear to you that on this Earth, at the level of the biosphere, there is nothing except humans that produce radioactive waste. We are the only species that does something so dangerous. It's a problem because it contaminates and destroys the biosphere if it's not handled extremely carefully and there are no organisms which can compost such waste in any useful way. So it's unnatural.

Plastic is another unbelievably horrible man made concoction which is absolutely destroying the natural world due to poor handling.

Since plastic waste and nuclear waste aren't food for other organisms, or don't naturally break down, they're not materials that belong in the natural environment. The is the same environment from which you come from, owe everything too, and which you're still totally and utterly dependent on for your survival.

Hopefully that's a good answer...

By the way, I used to share your beliefs, that it's all the same, it's all "natural", but I just can't keep up the mental charades anymore. Our intellect and creativity is an important part of our short-term survival, but thus far it's been massively destructive and I can't see that changing anytime soon.

There have been many innovative organisms that produced an "unnatural" material. The earth was covered in a huge, dense, undecayed layer of dead tree matter before bacteria eventually evolved to break it down... 60 million years later. It's now coal.

This a great, deep quote! thanks!

Probably one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. Wow.

quite a strange example. to choose piano components yet omit ivory. not all pianos are made from wood and strings either. perhaps a worn-out sword or a bursting dam would have been better, but what do I know. nice sentiment nonetheless

The piano fits for Sakamoto over a sword or a dam because he is a musician who spent his life with the piano as his primary instrument. It's where he is most experienced and he has a much closer relationship to that than a dam or a sword.

Ivory is also typically only used for the keys, and doesn't actually impact the tuning of the instrument.

He was also referencing a specific piano, an old Yamaha piano in the gymnasium of Miyagi Agricultural High School, which had been damaged by the tsunami. It seems very unlikely that a high school Yamaha grand piano had ivory keys.

What surprises me is that the description seems to imply a wooden framed piano.

They exist, but they are notoriously difficult to tune and keep in tune compared to iron framed pianos. I think they have stopped making them for quite a while. I find it hard to imagine a high school using an instrument requiring so much maintenance.

If it was indeed a wooden framed piano, it was probably more of an antique than a practical instrument, and so, maybe with ivory keys, though again I doubt it.

I think you misread him. It's the soundboard that's warped. I don't think Yamaha ever made a wooden-framed grand, if such a thing even exists.

They used to, but once cast iron frames could be made that's how it was done, initially in several pieces, and later in one piece. The story of how this came to pass is quite interesting, making such large casts isn't simple.

I know about wooden frame upright pianos, but grand pianos?

Yes, in fact that's how it started. The 'upright' was a way to sell pianos to lower income families because it's cheaper to manufacture and easier to situate in a small home. Prior to 1825 all pianos were made of just wood, and played reasonably soft, usually with just one or at most two strings per note (that's where the term Una Corda originally comes from, now it denotes a pedal that (on grand pianos) causes the action to shift a bit to the right so it will miss a string in the higher register).

That also made them pretty finicky, changing moisture and temperature would have a significant effect on the pitch of the piano. At that time 'standard pitch' was about A4@423 Hz, considerably below what it is today (A4@440), which lessened the problems somewhat but if you wanted to have your instrument well tuned you had better learn how to tune it yourself.

For harpsichord players (the predecessor to the piano) today self tuning is still the standard.

Piano history is fascinating, if you are interested in the subject I'd recommend reading 'Of men, women and pianos' by Arthur Loesser. It's an old book but a fantastic source of historical information about the development of the piano/grand piano.

And it's been a very long time since Ivory was used for the keys.

Ivory is no longer used for piano keys for obvious reasons, that's why in marketing materials you will usually see descriptions like "ivory-feel keys".

Though we ourselves are by definition part of the universe and thus nature.

“Nature” and “natural” are normative terms that commonly distinguish the world altered and created by humans from the world that isn’t altered or created by humans. It’s clear in context that Sakamoto is using the term accurately in a normative sense, not making a semantic error.

And that normative sense succeeds in separating humanity from nature, creating an "Us vs It" narrative that makes pollution easier to ignore.

After all, if everything humanity does is pollution, why single any specific acts out?

Pollution goes on because it's the convenient path of least resistance, has short term benefits (e.g. we keep indulging in consumptiona as usual) and there are huge profit interests. That simple.

How we see nature plays little role, in after-the-fact justifications or condemnations. In fact pollution could be justified under either view:

Humanity is different than nature: all we do is pollution, in the sense that is outside of nature. So why single any specific act out? Or other potential arguments: "We are better than nature, and we'll eventually just sort pollution out with our technology".

Humanitity is "just" nature: so what we do is natural, including pollution. No need to do something else, we just keep doing what comes natural to us, including polluting. Why consider huge heaps of human garbage any worse that we consider other animals creating their own waste?

> Humanity is different than nature

This is a dogmatic statement influenced by religions that put humanity as a separate creation.

Humanity is part of nature. Fixing the world requires accepting that.

This would imply every human action is 'unnatural'...

I think the key is "world".

If you yourself can cut a tree down and do whatever else to make a piano, there's no world created by humans. It'll take you a while but in the end there's only you and your shiny new piano and nature.

If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that build mechanisms that extract natural resources for building mechanisms for preparing different parts that are eventually put together as a piano (which itself is almost a side effect, a minor detail almost no participant of the process sees or even knows about)... that's a world. If you click a button and have this thing show up at your house and not know a bit about what goes into it much less do it yourself... that's a world.

>If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that

And then someone will go on being pedantic and bring forward bees and ant colonies and the like. Let's call it "a matter of degree/scale/breadth" this might shut them up!

I was going to point out that it is kind of a spectrum but decided to try and see what I can make of binary differentiation. You're right it's not great, too vague, writing doesn't like that and favors black and white thinking and neat causality chains, but few are able to see it as a limitation of writing as medium instead of how things "actually" are.

Only under a naive mechanistic non-contextual machine-like reading :)

> naive mechanistic non-contextual machine-like reading

There's so many modifiers to 'reading' that I, along with probably many readers, are unsure what your trying to express.

The whole nature vs civilization narrative, is a story told by happy regressors, who want to return to a ilusionary before time, were all things were harmony and civilization was not. It is of course, a call for mass murder on billions of humans with the rumbling instincts from the brain stem and guts as justification. Were it justified with any other argument, civilized society would tear them to shreds, but in the robe of the shaman, they are exempt from the duty of reasoning.

None the less, his music is great and can be enjoyed, like any other artists, without listening to the political and culture drivel that artists sadly often produce. They are easily captured and swayed by instinct tautological ideologies.

Just because it feels right does not mean it to be true.

My favorite rendition of his "My love wears forbidden colors"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4tLtg-DMb8

"The whole nature vs civilization narrative, is a story told by happy regressors, who want to return to a ilusionary before time"

Or maybe it is a bit more complex. And the story maybe begins with civilized people who explicitly wanted to conquer nature. To make it bow to mens will. And quite some still want to exactly this. They were the ones creating that artificial distinction.

The romanticism of nature that you are criticize, is more of a counter movement to that philosophy, that we are in fact part of nature and we have to find our balance within the greater cycles.

I see this even within ideas like “AI alignment”, make a machine that could potentially think, then smash it over the head with wokeness and values so we don’t destroy ourselves with it.

That’s also a story you tell yourself.

The reasoning would be, as civilization advances, things become more complex, to the point of us not even understanding the complexity. Same arguments applied to AI for example. With greater complexity, the potential for harm increases. As an historic example, can be seen with technology used in wars, that caused increased devastation to the point of a mutual destruction scenario.

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