Re: Musical languistics - Mass Reply

Sally Caves scripsit:

> The latter, though, I can imagine: aleatory means "random,"
> "left to chance."
The founder of this style was no less than Mozart, who published a
Musikalisches Würfelspiel or Musical Dice Game, which consisted of a
set of musical measures and a procedure for selecting them based on the
throwing of a number of dice.

The resulting music is pretty feeble.

> I imagine this is the music I was complaining about in
> another post: the pings, the pongs, the silences, the drum rolls, the
> silences.  On the other hand, though, I like surprises in music.  Again, who
> is most representative?
Surprise is only interesting when contemplated against a patterned
background.  The digits of pi (the number 3.1415926535 8979323846
2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899
8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172
5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 ...)
are perfectly random as far as we know, but no digit of it is *surprising*
-- there's not enough pattern to set any expectation.  (It is cool,
though, that after 761 decimal digits of chaos it suddenly goes "999999"
and then back to chaos.)

Analysis of the random numbers used for cryptography by Soviet spies in the
60s showed a faint pattern of 1-5 alternating with 6-0, suggesting that
they were being invented by typists who were tending to alternate hands.

--
If you understand,                      John Cowan
   things are just as they are;         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
if you do not understand,               http://www.reutershealth.com
   things are just as they are.         jcowan@reutershealth.com

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