> Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.
Are you sure it's more sentimental than technical? Like, with-your-ears sure?
Note that it took something like 140 years for someone to write a tempo fugue using a piano technique in Chopin's 4th Ballade. That is to say-- sentimental composers are as good at hiding their technique as audiences are at missing it.
Because when I go to view an old website from the 90s that's missing a closing tag for something, I don't want the content-- I want a big red XML parse error with a gigantic horizontal scrollbar.
The history of programmers blithely attempting to add new parsing errors to existing problems instead of obviating them is long and storied. Your sentence would look right at home as part of the BS generated for the test subjects from the article.
> The tension arises because the "Seventh" (A) is not a new addition, but a residue of the previous geometric state.
That residue in m.2 is common-tone voice leading. It's a technique that was used throughout the common-practice period to avoid tension, not introduce it. I'd bet the progression in m. 1-2 could be found in the figured bass at the beginning of a slow movement by Telemann or another Baroque composer.
Speaking of Baroque composers-- in the Coda of the 4th Ballade, Chopin has an exquisite passage of basso continuo plus accompaniment that would be right at home in a minor key aria by Handel. Except that:
1. There's no melody being accompanied.
2. It moves about 4x faster than it would have in the Baroque era.
I'd love to see a pianist play that passage by suddenly looking up and frantically nodding cues to an invisible, demonic singer.
You are absolutely right about the voice leading. Acoustically, it is the definition of smoothness.
When I wrote 'tension,' I was describing the Geometric Re-contextualization visible in the visualizer. The note (A) stays put, but the 'world' (the Surface) rotates underneath it.
To be clear: The Grammar is simply my attempt to describe the movements I observed in the 3D structure. I am not a theorist; I am a builder. I see the Structure itself (the lattice) as the real contribution.
My hope is that theorists will see this structure and develop their own grammars for it. I would love to see a 'Baroque Grammar' or a 'Jazz Grammar' that maps these geometric paths according to their specific stylistic rules. The geometry is neutral; the grammar is just the lens I used to read it.
> But, as other comments have said, there have been at this point a good slew of blind tests, and Strads are hardly ever recognized better than chance when compared to modern instruments, even when played by experts and judged by experts.
Others are also commenting about audiophiles. But there's a big difference: an audiophile's sentiment about their gold wires doesn't change the sound coming out of the speakers for the rest of the listening audience. On the other hand, a violinist's sentiment typically does.
Also, just to be clear-- are you saying there are blind tests where an expert tried playing multiple violins and couldn't guess better than chance which one was the Strad?
> Also, just to be clear-- are you saying there are blind tests where an expert tried playing multiple violins and couldn't guess better than chance which one was the Strad?
Now I'm curious-- what happens if the author adds a manual garbage collection call at the end of _audio_callback? Can it still Moog, or will that cause it to eternally miss deadlines?
In other words, the system is designed so that any learning the speaker attempts somehow ends up being scored wrong, forcing the speaker to conclude they will always be identified by the system as an error-prone, non-native speaker yearning for acceptance by ears trained from childhood to hear cracks in any facade the speaker slaps together, forever and ever...
Sounds like the author unwittingly taught you the first lesson. :)
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