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lohankin's comments

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Mockito 2.1.0

Fragile web of mocks. You will find yourself spending 90% of time fixing this web.

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Where will the next major advance towards general purpose AI come from?

Why do we need artificial intelligence when we have natural intelligence galore everywhere around us?

Human is intelligent, monkey is intelligent, raccoon is intelligent... clearly, it all goes all the way down to bacteria.

Bacteria is intelligent, that's where all other intelligence comes from. For any organism is a colony of bacteria (and/or their cousins - cells).

It has long being my theory that human's "I" comes from a single cell (which is essentially a variant of bacteria) living somewhere in the brain. The rest of the cells just ensure survival of this one and supply it with information.

Bacterial intelligence is a result of billions of years of evolution. At some point, they learned about their DNA and mastered an art of self-modification. Then they learned how to create colonies of specialized instances of themselves. This colonies gradually became more complex. Human is just one of these designs.

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

A bit better modification of the argument: continue cycle of 5th. After 12 steps, you get (3/2)^12=129.7, which is really close to 128=2^7 (whole number of octaves). That's where 12 steps come from!

And from here, the natural idea follows: what if we take not exactly 3/2 for fifth, but value x such that x^12 is exactly equal to 128? This leads to equal temperament.

Yeah, that might be it! (Not sure that it's true historically though).

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

Answer to question 1 is simple: good resolution is a semitone up, but scale step down (normally, whole tone). No symmetry here. If you play backwards, you won't get resolutions - it will sound as nonsense.

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

I'm not learning it from wikipedia. I'm playing for 50+ years. Best resource is Jazz Piano Book by M.Levine. (I read lots of others, but... everything I learned, I learned from this one).

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

Please read the part of the article starting with "The twelfth root of two may be irrational, but it turns out to almost create several nice ratios". The author excludes minor third from the set of "nice ratios". I referred to this while calling it a voodoo.

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

Please read wikipedia article on temperament. 7-note scales were "discovered" long before equal temperament was introduced. Equal temperament is a relatively recent invention, initially was very controversial, and remained so for a long time. In other cultures, there's still a variety of scales and temperaments that have nothing to do with 7-note scales at all. (Jazz uses variety of scales, too - some even with 2 semitones in a row). There's only one thing people seem to agree on: the role of fifth (3/2).

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

Interesting idea indeed. I need to think about it.

Edit after thinking: still, it doesn't explain the number 12 IMO. It could be 17 or something else. Probably, it's a long chain of coincidences at play: Western music settled on 7-note scales long time ago (long before equal temperament was invented), and we should start looking for explanations from here.

Another edit: one of the important coincidences is that number 12 makes possible the existence of diminished scale, which serves as a "universal glue" due to 2 tritones. (There's not enough space here to elaborate, but you probably know what I mean). And maybe tritone itself is one of factors leading to number 12.

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

No, it's not the same. Current music notation is a result of long evolution, unlike QWERTY. Try to invent usable alternative - then you will appreciate the convenience of current notation.

lohankin | 9 years ago | on: Music theory for nerds

The explanation of the origin of major scale in the article is pure voodoo. Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? How do you explain minor scale then? Maybe it should be excluded, too?

Here're my thoughts on the subject.

For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament, This system emerged as a result of long evolution of Western music, and experimentally proven to be very rich in possibilities.

Scales used in Western music (of which jazz is a part of) are built on two simple principles: 1) interval between adjacent notes of the scale is either tone or semitone 2) there's no two semitones in a row.

It's easy to check that all scales that satisfy these 2 rules are:

major scale and its modes (7-note scales; 7 modes)

melodic minor scale and its modes (7-note scales; 7 modes)

diminished scale and its modes (8-note scales; 2 modes)

whole-tone scale (6-note scale, single mode).

(Whole tone scale is not used very often, except by T.Monk)

But even after we "explain" scales, we need to figure out how to use them, what their role is, what the properties of each mode are. There's no hard science behind this, the properties just "emerge", and you have to experience them - theorizing is not of much help, math formulas don't explain anything, just lead to confusion.

In short: you have to play AND think; thinking alone won't help. It's an experimental subject.

Edit: forgot to say: scale is a very useful notion, but in some contexts, it's more convenient to think in terms of triads and interpolation. I know this all sounds hand-wavy, and it is! Unfortunately, without piano, it's impossible to to illustrate what it all means. The subject doesn't easily lend itself to verbalization.

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