I was hoping to find other comments processing the question of why such a lousy song was a hit beyond what the article describes…
3,931 karma · joined June 2, 2013
This is such a confused statement. I'm talking about the physical harmonic series, and OH!! I see the CONFUSION NOW HAHAHA. I do NOT MEAN the 3rd and 4th harmonics that HAPPEN to be on the 5th and 7th frets!!
I meant the actual harmonic series, the 5th and 7th, which is at the 4th fret and in the middle between the 2nd and 3rd frets (and also available at other nodes along the string).
The 5th and 7th HARMONICS in the harmonic series are a 5:7 ratio, which is a tritone!
What this means is:
The tritone is NOT based on the 11th harmonic which is not used in much Western music and is significantly flat. It's more of a 2.75 tone than a tri (3) tone. Yes, it's the closest tritone that is precisely a tritone above some octave of the fundamental, but octaves are a real thing. Saying that 11/8 is a tritone is not more compelling than saying that 7/5 is a tritone. The actual 11th harmonic isn't a tritone, it's three octaves plus an almost-tritone.
The idea of deferring to the harmonic series but sticking strictly to the fundamental as the reference and yet also ignoring octaves is a few layers of common mistake in this topic.
Here's how the 7/5 tritone works: It literally is the major third to the minor 7th of a harmonic 7th chord. In other words, when you play it on two notes of an instrument, you play that tritone, first, it sounds like a tritone because it is one. Second, the two notes are part of a harmonic series that starts a couple octaves and a major third below the notes you are playing. With difference tones on a distorted guitar, you'll actually generate the missing fundamental.
Put another way, when you play 7/5 tritone calling it C and G♭, what you're doing is creating a harmony that is part of an A♭7 chord and you're not playing the A♭. There's no reason that the concept of tritone above C needs to be within a harmonic series starting on C, that's not how this stuff works.
I'm not using letters because it's how I think. I understand the whole system of JI theory and prefer thinking in relations and ratios. I'm using letters so you can follow clearly.
The same issue arises with minor thirds. You could erroneously say that the first minor third in the harmonic series is the 19th harmonic because you are stuck on the idea of a minor third strictly above some octave of the fundamental. But the minor thirds that are prominent and make the harmonic basis for minor third intervals in blended chords are the ratios 6/5 and 7/6, which means the intervals from the fifth to the sixth and from the sixth to the seventh harmonics of the series. Incidentally, the 6/5 minor third might be called the upminor or large-minor, it's wider than 12edo. The 7/6 is septimal minor or small-minor or downminor. It's awesome and bluesy. Neither sounds just like 12edo, and they are different from one another, but there's no doubt that these are minor thirds. Consider the standard premise that the minor third is the difference between the major third and perfect fifth — that's what 6/5 is, 5/4 is the major third, and 5/4 * 6/5 = 3/2. And 7/6 is appropriately described as the minor third that you get from the fifth to the seventh of a harmonically-tuned dominant seventh chord.
> I still see some fairly clear impositions of "worldviews" on some of the material [at xen site]
Yes, I agree with you completely. In fact, I'm fairly critical of aspects of the xen community too. They get too dogmatic or mathy without enough give for psychology and real-world practice. I don't defer blindly to them or agree with the community on everything. But there are some people in the community with real depth of understanding without problematic dogma or cultural bias. Consider that Partch fits in a quirky part of that community effectively, and his works and concepts are valuable but are also a quite incomplete and debatable angle.
> I'm the author of a cross-platform DAW, and one of my goals for the next few years it to get support for arbitrary tuning systems deeply embedded into the software.
YES I KNOW, I'M A PAID MONTHLY SUPPORTER, and THANK YOU THANK YOU!
I am a dedicated Free/Libre/Open advocate who uses and promotes Ardour to students and everyone. And having good support for tuning is a key thing I value in music tools. I'm very excited to hear of your interest! Maybe I should post on the Ardour forum and have a different and more productive engagement than this awkward chat here.
The tritone point doesn't need any reference. Go and play the 5th harmonic and then the 7th harmonic on a string. That's an interval of a tritone. Tritone means 3 whole steps, 3 whole tones. It's a general scale-based interval amount.
The 7/5 ratio is 583¢, that's a tritone. It's an interval that takes 3 whole tones to reach.
Put in traditional language, the 5th harmonic is a major third (2 octaves above the fundamental) and the 7th is the minor 7th (2 octaves above the fundamental). And the interval from a major third to a minor seventh is a tritone.
There's no references needed.
> the majority of the community of experts appears to have deliberately constrained their expertise to a somewhat narrow view of tuning
Exactly, that's my point. All those so-called experts are basically ignorant to be blunt. What I mean is that there ARE people out there (on the margins to a degree), all the people who develop https://en.xen.wiki/ for example, and from their (okay, our, I'm one of them) perspective, all the chatter here is a mix of thoughtful people like you trying to talk some sense with a bunch of ignorant folks who are clueless.
So, you have more than some clues, you seem to have some knowledge, but you would be a beginning student in the world of people who actually understand the topic of tuning. So, understanding of this stuff exists in the world, and the reasons that it remains on the margins are themselves also understood. Suffice to say, Partch being a reference known by the already small subset of clued-in people is already pretty tiny. His work is foundational but quirky and old and nowhere near reaching real understanding. A lot of people into tuning are intentionally weird sounding, so it's hard to separate that form the topic. And if you're NOT weird sounding, then nobody is noticing the tuning. As soon as the tuning draws your attention, it's already weird. It's all too much to get into here. It does seem that there's some prospect of breaking out of this situation in the next few years finally, but don't hold your breath.
But the 5+5=9 part is correct. It's a weird artifact of note-counting. C D E F G is 5 letters. C to G is called "a fifth" (which is a horrendous use of language, but it's a perversion of saying "we got to the fifth letter"). G to D is also "a fifth". Stacking them means C to G and G to D, and you don't count the G twice, that's why 5+5=9 instead of 5+5=10. But if we had actually counted the steps through the letters instead of counting the starting note, it would be 4+4=8, and that's logical and correct, but you can't say that to musicians because that's not how music jargon works.
Harmonics means all the multiples of the fundamental. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)
People talk about primes because of their significance in mapping harmonic relationships.
Please don't talk about "overtonal stacking" that's not a thing. "Overtones" means any of the actual tones in a sound that are higher than the lowest one, whether the sound is harmonic or not.
Your piano claim is wrong also. What's happening is that the 4th harmonic of the major ninth matches the 9th harmonic of the lower note. And you do not fill in the "missing 5th" unless you happen to have trained yourself to imagine it.
You can try this on a guitar. If you pluck a string right in the middle to kill all the even harmonics, major 7ths and minor 9ths don't sound so dissonant as they did when the original string had its 2nd harmonic octave present.
> The Tritone for instance, never appears in the harmonic series
The first of multiple tritones that show up is the one from harmonic 5 to harmonic 7. We're not talking weird abstract, esoteric harmonics here.
The major scale has SOMETHING to do with harmonics of course. It's true that Just Intonation purists can be dogmatic and make claims that don't hold up to scrutiny, but jumping to the conclusion that their claims have NOTHING to them is even more stupid a position.
The major scale became the reference scale in chordal music specifically because of the way it facilitates blended harmonies in closely related chords. It's because people discovered the blend of the major chord which is a thing because of how harmonics work. And you put three overlapping major chords together and you get the major scale.
Before chordal-harmony, other modes and scales were just as or more prominent.
Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Karl_Mar... and https://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-... and such trying to make sense of the "Labor Theory of Value" and Marx, it seems clear that Marx never even supported the idea let alone had it as a foundational principle. But I find trudging through what Marx actually said or wrote not enjoyable or worthwhile generally.
In the end, it doesn't matter what Marx said or not, what matters is whether specific ideas have merit. I'm pretty sure I would not agree with everything Marx did actually say. The point is that it is completely irrelevant who said something, which is why the trend to label the source as a way to dismiss things is such a problem intellectually.
I haven't heard anything from Varoufakis that seems like BS along the lines of Labor Theory of Value. Everything I've heard from him is pretty solid. But that doesn't mean I stand by anything you ever get from him. IMO, it's useful to have good sources, but not so useful to make a big deal over aligning with any particular dogmatic school of thought. Making up one's mind to be a somethingist is a way to get away from curiosity and feel like you just already understand everything. The utility in such labels is just to help communicate in cases where shared label understanding actually exists.
Anyway, I'll just accept your points. When I tried to think of an analogy that was as silly as "inflation has nothing to do with price" I failed. I can't think of anything as wrongly silly apparently.
The whole discussion here is about the idea of power dynamics. It isn't about the boring waste-of-time topic of just attributing "value" conceptually. If you enjoy playing Mozart's music on the piano, that has "value" to you, but "extraction" is a poor metaphor, and there's no power dynamics at play, it's just life.
The only thing interesting in this topic is the question of concentrated power and who has power to control decisions about how things are set up in society. Google has set up an arrangement where they are extremely profitable and a relatively small number of people get to decide how their platforms work, and the divided users only have the choice to take-it-or-leave-it (and network effects push them into it, schools and businesses and others use the systems, you better also, and the mere fact of all the value captured there makes it hard for competition to arise).
This is a question of organizing, collective action etc. The executives at Google can make decisions and they have a whole organizational system to carry out their will. There's no organized power for the users. The label "techno-feudalism" doesn't argue that value doesn't exist or that the serfs are literal slaves.
There's no way to have up and down without gravity. It's meaningless. It's not that gravity can't exist without up and down. Gravity exists independently of anyone perceiving anything. But up and down do not exist without gravity. Either up and down are the perception of gravity, even though indirectly through our perceptual mechanisms, or they don't exist and have no meaning.
If a single dollar gets pushed around a small economy a thousand times in a day, it is facilitating economic activity, but that doesn't increase or decrease the money supply.
Up and down aren't anything but appearances. And since we evolved on Earth, with gravity, our experience of "up" and "down" are specifically caused by indicators that tell us which way the center of our planet's mass is. Sure, it's all perception via our sensory systems, and they can get distorted, so we could sense "up" as toward the earth if something in our sensory system gets messed up (pun in that metaphor hah).
Marx was basically just inspired by French Revolution idea of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and dismayed that it didn't work out. He came to some real insights about why capitalism doesn't achieve that vision. He changed his views over time and wrote strongly about cases where he was wrong. He didn't want anyone to idolize him in some static way or be "Marxist". He actually wasn't prescriptive, he didn't say what to do or how to structure a socialist society. He mostly diagnosed problem patterns in capitalism without proposing what the alternatives should be. Or so I've heard, none of this is my original insights or understanding.
Of people who are "Marxists" by self-description, some have been dangerous and destructive, but there are various versions and they often abhor each other. The worst of them are just as self-righteous as the worst of the Austrians.
FWIW, I think the Austrian models almost all have some truth in them. The problem is how they treat them as complete and dogmatic. They think they have it all figured out, and so they just take any situation and insist that their simplistic models are all there is to it. As a snarky critique, I think the Austrians just believe Wikipedia doesn't exist — or maybe they think it exists precisely because of the lack of government intrusion or something. They just have no insight, no model, no perspective of value on how it is that Wikipedia does exist. They are more interested in their models than in human beings (well, to be fair, I think that's similar for mainstream economists too).
Anything interesting has to engage with real facts like energy consumption, pollution, harvesting of raw materials, and somehow acknowledge the huge portion of human activities that are not measured in money. I don't know of anyone within economics who really does this, but if they exist, I am certain they are a pariah in the field, treated with contempt if even acknowledged by the rest of the folks.
I think there's something like "environmental economics" but I'm not sure the quality of it. I haven't looked in depth, but https://doughnuteconomics.org seems good, I just have the impression that it's enough work to just get people to even accept the basic premise, so there's not yet the depth of study that would get into the deep complexities, though I see no reason it couldn't get there.
On studying real humans as economic actors (rather than homo economicus), the best might be "behavioral economics" which is psychology, empirical, interested in real science (but arguably too behaviorist and not cognitive enough). I think they mostly only grapple with microeconomics and not macro. (I have the impression that the field of economics today, Austrians included, just have this say-so assertion that there is no macroeconomics beyond being just the sum of microeconomic patterns, and this leads to them refusing to study things on a macro level).
I have a friend who went to Japan to do economics grad-school work with some professor he thought was onto some better view, but it turned out that guy was a pariah of course who had no respect from colleagues, and the whole thing was a dead-end, and he eventually just gave up on economics having any hope as a field.
FWIW, I'm skeptical about aspects of what Marxists say often, but there's a good portion at least of concepts Marx talked about that are pretty darn sensible, and they are basically verboten because of the political biases in the field. When some topics that are intellectually sound enough are barred from discussion for political reasons, then it's just not an intellectually honest field of study. I've heard incidentally that Marx himself was anti-Marxist. There's a lot of confusion that gets wrapped up in associations people have with economic concepts versus the assertions of dogmatic political activists. I do respect Yanis Varoufakis (he calls himself an "erratic Marxist" to emphasize a non-dogmatic view that includes and respects ideas from Marx). If I have to pick one reference to suggest, I'd go with him at this point.
If anyone else has a good reference that really engages with these things, I'm curious too
Uh no, cryptocurrencies can't generate USD. But if you meant "dollars" as a generic term for currency, then sure, kinda yeah, to the degree that cryptocurrencies are actually working as currencies (which they mostly are not).
Anyway, the "deflationary" claim is internal to a cryptocurrency. Nobody is asserting that cryptocurrencies cause deflation of USD.
People on either pole looking away from the planet are both looking up. That's what "up" is. It's funny to realize that two people can look "up" in opposite directions, but that's what's going on. Neither of them is looking "down", even though each one is looking in the direction of the other person's down.
> Arguably, the current best economic theory basically says that because exchange takes place assuming users are rational enough, the exchanged value is identical.
I'll take that argument. If that's the best economic theory, it just validates my assertion that the field of economics is mostly a farce.
That "theory" is nothing but a say-so assertion that doesn't even try to look for evidence. It's unfalsifiable BS.
Some platforms provide great value. But the world is full of cases of middle-men and gatekeepers that have worked their way into that position and are little more than extractive. They might as well not exist. The reason people choose to go through them is for the value they get from the end exchange, not because they prefer to go through the middle-man. It all depends on the particular cases. The phenomenon of rent-seeking middle-men is not some myth.
You might as well say that gravity has nothing to do with up and down.
The only thing anyone MEANS when they say "inflation" is that it's short for "price inflation".
But to deal with your point directly: if the U.S. Treasury literally printed a quadrillion dollar bill but then gave it to someone with a contract saying that they agree never to spend it, it will have zero effect on anything. And if people get dollars and never spend them, it's the same effect in practice. Or if someone with a quadrillion-dollar bill gives it as a gift to someone else who then later gifts it, and that's all that ever happens… again, no effect on inflation.
Inflation is one thing and one thing only: it's when people who make the decisions about setting prices for things choose to inflate (increase) the prices and that this happens on a noticeable system-wide scale. If the people who set prices chose not to change them, there would be no inflation, period. The interesting thing in studying inflation amounts to studying what patterns correlate with people making the decision to increase prices. And yes, knowledge that buyers have more dollars to spend is a factor that could (and does) influence those decisions on setting prices.
The same thing happens with "demand" (so, that professor I summarized above is still not quite right when he asserts that demand and spending is what causes inflation). Sellers can very well (and do often enough) keep prices unchanged even when demand is high and everything just sells out quickly. The result of that isn't inflation, it's shortages — unless the shortages somehow motivate people to just produce more — in which case increased spending just leads to increased production and consumption without inflation or shortages.
Shortages don't mathematically cause inflation. Inflation ONLY EVER happens if price-setters choose to increase prices. Nobody is EVER forced to increase prices. You just have the ramifications of doing so or not. Maybe keeping prices the same means less profit. Or maybe it means going bankrupt.
And yes, any one decision to change a price has an impact on other people who may choose other prices. That's why all the interacting decisions from all the actors adds up to patterns we can potentially (but always imperfectly) predict.
This is human beings making decisions and taking action in a complex game we play around money. Yes, there are mathematical aspects to it. But it's not some pure math abstraction. And relying too heavily on math abstractions is one of the deepest flaws in the whole field of economics.
The whole field of economics is overall messed up. It's insular, arrogant, and extremely resistant to outside criticism. And it's dangerous as economics claims are used to justify so much.
Random amazing example:
In https://www.npr.org/transcripts/980841456 and from "My question is, what is the M1 money supply, and the M2 money supply, for that matter?" last third of it, insanely clear and amazing. In short:
Q: more money! does that mean inflation? check with this econ textbook author
Author: oh, that's embarrassing, that chapter shouldn't be there
Q: so what causes inflation?
Author: people buying stuff more, demand going up (unless it's insane money supply like Venezuela or Zimbabwe level insane)
Q: so why is the chapter in your textbook?
Author: um, publisher said that if we don't say that more money means inflation then econ professors won't use our textbook. They learned that idea in their original studies, so they will only use a textbook that lets them teach it. But it's wrong, and we shouldn't have put it in the book.
The utter misunderstanding is something I imagine comes from the fact that in this particular article, he's critical of the particular ways that cryptocurrency movements are shifting power. He doesn't think they are shifting it in a useful enough way and is skeptical that they really will end up shifting it much at all.
What if everyone gave their data to Open Street Map instead?
But sure, there's a point about users that generate the value in these tech platforms do also get value from the services. Whether the value is worth the cost is another matter. What's clear is that users don't have much say in the arrangement. The corporations have the organized power, the users are divided and disorganized. There's no users' union.
Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it.
There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be.
This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.