Re: Musical languistics - Mass Reply

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@...>


> 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.
You said it!  The ping pong music can't surprise.  All of it is "surprise,"
which strikes me as mush.

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.
Exactly.  Great mysterious number, though!

> (It is cool,
> though, that after 761 decimal digits of chaos it suddenly goes "999999"
> and then back to chaos.)
There's our magic number 9 again.  9 seems to be the number of the day.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."