Music painted on wall of a Venetian orphanage will be heard 250 years later | Hacker News Reader

Music painted on wall of a Venetian orphanage will be heard 250 years later

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106 pointssaikatsg43 comments

Going by the article, the piece wasn't actually recovered from the wall. Rather the wall just inspired Tacconi to look for it elsewhere, and she found it in a library. It hasn't been heard for 250 years simply because it's fairly obscure, not because the only copy was on a wall and no paper copies existed; in fact a paper copy did exist.

Wait.. a headline written entirely for sensationalism, that in fact misleads the reader solely in an effort to gain click revenue, in today's media world?

Perish the thought.

Reminds me of the work of Philharmonia Baroque. Their concerts are period music on period instruments and at times they play recovered pieces like this.

https://philharmonia.org/

It’s amazing to imagine how much of human history was never preserved.

> It’s amazing to imagine how much of human history was never preserved

period instruments in this case made me fear that the orphans were future castrati, but thankfully that piece of history was not preserved. Turns out this was an orphanage for girls, putte, who were in fact trained to sing, and they are depicted in the painting. (the term putto, boy", was used to refer to male cherubs)

I think I read about these orphanages, which mainly took in children from prostitutes after they got pregnant, in that book "Range: generealists are better" or whatever it was called. I'm not sure if its the same ones mentioned in the book. They trained the orphans in a wide variety of musical instruments to perform for patrons or at events, it was their main source of income for the orphanage, and the orphans were in fact very skilled. A lot of the baroque period musicians wrote music to be performed by them.

> (the term putto, boy", was used to refer to male cherubs)

I grew up in a Latino neighborhood, and there’s a word pronounced like that that definitely didn’t mean cherub

In Italian a double T is pronounced as two Ts so it would sound different. Of course it may sound homophonous to many.

I do in fact know that. I still wouldn’t risk it in my old hood.

I’m not an expert but I could definitely see an entomological connection between putto in Italian meaning castrated orphan if what the above poster says is true and puto in Spanish which is often a slur against gay men.

Well, puto in Spanish is the male form of puta, meaning hooker. There might still be an etymological connection with putto in Italian, but more likely via "putta" also meaning prostitute in Latin (putana in Italian).

The extra t is the kicker there. I might just have to start using cherub.

Much of human history hasn’t been preserved or has been suppressed

What’s amazing about the Romans is that theirs was and how many primary sources still exists.

That’s why I keep my mind open on Atlantis and psychic phenomena and other conspiracy theories

I don't see how it follows that primary sources from Roman times that still exist should lead to keeping an open mind about Atlantis, psychic phenomena and other conspiracy theories.

I suspect they were referring to the previous sentence about lost and suppressed history. Not that this is any better reason, but at least it follows the usual argument from ignorance path rather than being a weird non-sequitur about Roman times.

What about the word conspiracy makes all conspiracies false? This is yalls logical fallacy

“Guy fawkes is about to destroy Westminster palace!”

“Tinfoil hats”

Well part of that is that what we consider "Roman" culture and history is actually the culture and history of hundreds of societies that the Romans became administrators of. That's one reason why there were so many places like Austria, Romania, Byzantium, and Catalonia that claimed to be Roman successor states. It could be argued that true Roman history ended in 90BCE and from that point on it became more "Classical Imperial Europe" history because their administration had become so massive and encompassing. So much of that supposedly Roman history details the people of Iberia, Asia Minor, North Africa, and the Rhineland. Through their own biased lens they were really historians of the cultures they turned into protectorates.

No psychic phenomena has ever survived the scientific method.

Even most of science does not survive the scientific method...

The stuff we actually use does, though, like GPS and surface tension and anti-coagulants. The replication crisis is mostly an issue on the cutting edge.

I'd put my money on most research that wouldn't be replicated successfully if eventually tested being industry propaganda, psychology, and sociology. There's likely a lot of unchallenged complete garbage that goes back many many years.

The cool cutting edge scientific research that's just too new (or too difficult) to have been replicated yet is always going to be somewhat of an issue, but it's the wrong stuff that's been around for ages that worries me most. Not only because of what it's influenced in all this time, but because when something believed to be true for a long time is invalidated it can cause problems for a lot of other research that was built off those lies, not to mention huge amounts of wasted time/effort/money.

> but because when something believed to be true for a long time is invalidated it can cause problems for a lot of other research that was built off those lies,

Most of the examples of flawed research (e.g. Thenaros; single-factor treatments of cancer/aging/neurodegeneration (e.g. Aβ*56, telomeres); those MMR vaccine claims in 1998) were known to be erroneous by experts in the field long before they were officially debunked.

Some of them have yet to be officially debunked (e.g. Sigmund Freud's theories of psychosexual development; the high-/low-functioning autism distinction; "ABA is harmless and curative"; Blanchard's typology; most use of revealed preference theory; "React is fast"), so many outsiders (e.g. people who decide who gets grant funding) still consider their advocates experts in their respective fields – but the claimed results are just so obviously wrong that they're ignored wherever you can get away with ignoring them.

Academic science is eventually correct, but sometimes it takes a long time getting there. Even so, you can usually tell the difference between "academia knows this" and "academia claims this but something went wrong": all the examples I've given are of the same, largely-social, phenomenon.

How would you characterize the difference between ‘science’ and ‘the scientific method’ in your statements

True, but there's no shortage of liars, scammers, etc. For instance, last year I had a lawyer friend telling me "science has proven there is life after death", and in the end it was a shitty paper with no logic whatsoever (the method was not even on the horizon), but funded by some rich university in the USA. Truth is the scientific method is a quite complex subject to understand and 6 months in uni is just not enough (in quality, not necessarily quantity). Problem is it's one of the main pillars of science, so doesn't surprise me the recent up-rise in anti-science "ideas". Analog to that, the way I see it, there's also a fundamental and severe problem with journalism that needs to be addressed, and can be seen clearly through the up-rise of fake news in last years.

No scientist has ever survived psychic phenomena.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2grEJPw70

The silence is deafening.

> What’s amazing about the Romans is that theirs was and how many primary sources still exists.

Because they had writing and used it.

Also, no one bothered to systematically eliminate the Roman books.

This is different from, say, the Spanish systematically looking for and destroying Aztec and Mayan codices; and the Aztecs before them had systematically looked for and destroyed Mayan works.

If the rulers of the the eastern emperors are regarded as Romans, then the Roman Empire did not fall until the 15 century. Many historians would prefer 1453 as the date of the fall of the Roman Empire.

That’s a fair bit later than people realize.

Well said! Troy alone is a great example.

Which example do you mean in particular?

If it is Iliad - that one was written ~400 years later. And the war was probably during the late Bronze Age collapse. So I wonder how many contemporary accounts were preserved at that time.

It’s so cool that an artist took the extra time to precisely paint the score on a wall.

I agreed... but turns out the musical score was already available in a library in Montecassino

https://www.internetculturale.it/jmms/iccuviewer/iccu.jsp?id...

> Because the music of the past was written in a notation that’s different from that used today, it’s necessary to translate and input every mark of the original score – notes, dynamics and other expressive marks – into a music notation software to produce a modern score that can be easily read by today’s musicians.

I guess the key word is easily read. That score looks perfectly readable to me, although modern musicians might find the spacing somewhat cramped

Yeah. There is a whole academic and performance culture around historical music, and it's taught at music conservatoires and colleges. My wife for example plays and teaches music from the medieval, renaissance and baroque period extensively so I'm actually typing this in a room with shelves and shelves of facsimilies of scores from those periods all in original notation. With a bit of practise and training, people read this stuff just fine. From the Renaissance on there are lots of surviving treatises so we have a very good idea how they were performed etc and can in many cases be pretty confident that we're performing things pretty close to how they were done in the time.

This is quite modern music notation. I expected something like neume notation, which I first saw painted on a mural inside a McDonalds, oddly enough.

I asked midjourney for a painting of someone (Chopin, Bach, the devil) holding a music score sheet. And it returned what I asked for. Just don't know if it's actual music, since I'm not a musician. Can someone try it and let me know. Just curious ... if midjourney can compose music.

That depends on the model's training set. If the training set involves images of a lot of valid music, then probably it could generate "valid" sounding music.

Otherwise, it may be generating garbage. Can you post the image somewhere? I'd love to take a look.

It would be interesting that you take a look, but expect garbage. A few days ago someone posted AI generated poster of movies for children, and in one of them he studio was "Dixxar" (with a nice cursive D). I don't expect long text or music to make sense in an AI generated image for now.

I don't know how to do this without doxxing myself, other wise I would.

You can finetune image diffusion to just generate waveforms of audio and that works well, so it's definitely possible. Probably not without specific training though.

Very cool, kind of reminds me of Ocarina of Time or something

That, my friend, is the power of open source.

But (pun intended) surely I'm not the only person reminded of this piece:

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/bosch-butt-music-garden-ear...

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