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Small is Beautiful

synthcode.com

29 pointsdharmatech14 comments

I'll buy it, save for the music. Simple music is .. simple, `if it sounds good, it is good`.

Who after a certain age can sit down, turn on the radio and honestly enjoy the new cookie cutter tunes pushed out of LA? Good music changes the rules. See the hair standing on your arms - you didn't expect that chord change.

It goes further than that - Take a favorite piece. find a *.mid version of it. load it into a sequencer, take out all the dynamics and rhythm so the song is just chord changes, one per measure. It's unbearable. Unlistenable - except maybe to a student of music theory.

It takes a human ear to bend the sound and forge emotion clearly enough that the receiving end gleans something from it.

anyways, in music, more nuance is always better.

I disagree. I think the more primal idea (to be taken with all the requisite salt) is that you need to make things as simple as possible but no simpler.

[Maybe attributed to Einstein? I'm not sure]

In music "more nuance" often can go to far. I went to a concert a few days ago that was had a green noise-pop band as an opener. I really enjoyed their concept, but I wanted to go up there and physically remove some of their nuance. It was too layered, too complex, too cerebral.

The pivotal thing though is that I liked their concept. I think the things they were trying to build, and the emotions they were trying to invoke were great. They just needed to spend more time whittling away to that solid core and less time playing with loops on their laptops.

So yeah. "If it sounds good, it is good." But that's the kind of statement that takes "simpler is better" more or less axiomatically.

by nuance, I mean the precision of that moment, not layers of masks, which I agree take away from the whole thing. -- A slight accent staggered across multiple instruments, the subtlety and artfulness of the performers. So maybe resolution would a better term, surely who could argue against too much resolution?

One of the best criticisms of the Scheme philosophy is that making the language so "simple" doesn't actually simplify programs you would want to write in it--it just pushes the complexity somewhere else. It's still Lisp, you can extend the language to be suitable, but it requires a surprising amount of work.

I'm curious if anybody has thoughts regarding the work of maximalists. The only person coming to mind right now is the prolix writer David Foster Wallace. Is his method of writing entirely flawed? Or are there cases where being over-the-top is preferable?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo

I'm aware of the style - even have a Rococo polo shirt. I was referring more to this philosophy wherein smaller and more compact is better. Does it allow for the more maximalist expressions, or does it hold that they're flawed in their philosophy?

I think if adherence to simplicity prevents you from creating what you want to create they you're doing it wrong.

mos def! "as simple as possible" might in fact be quite complex. the mantra is more of an implementation of how to be direct and efficient.

Keep it Simple and Scalable.

Simple is beautiful.

Only if it's not too simple. "Too simple" -- subjective -- YMMV.

That is not what she said! (go ahead vote me down)

Great post!

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