I've heard plenty of comments along the line that "The first (insert number here) of tunes take a while to learn, but after that they come very quickly, because by the time you've learnt (insert number here) tunes, you have heard enough to have learnt the common patterns, melodic shapes, etc, and so each new tune is 'internalised' much more quickly."
So really these questions are only for those of you with big repertoires:
1) Is that statement true?
2) If so, whats the magic no? How many "tunes in" were you when there was a significant speed up in your processing?
Serious replies appreciated,Thanks
For my first year and a half or so I didn't so much try to learn tunes in quantity, but instead I worked on perfecting only about a dozen of them over that time, especially the hard ones. After that I got done with that found I could learn tunes quickly and easily, so it's not always true.
Not so much the number of tunes, which once you get into 3 figures starts to become uncountable anyway, but the number of serious hours you put in, which those who know about these things put at around 4000.
Those 4000 hours will be used in acquiring a cast-iron fault-free technique which won't let you down, and also in learning a repertoire. It is said that practising a tune 200 times will really make it stick.
1) Yes, it was definitely true for me.
2) I have no idea how many "tunes in" I was . . . I wasn't counting. But I think it would totally depend on the individual. I know some people who are like sponges picking up new tunes, even after only a few years of playing. And I know other people who have been playing for many years and still aren't there. But I think the most important thing is to listen to the tunes you want to learn. A lot. Enough to drive your significant other nuts.
It is definitely something that happens to many people. From my own experience, and talking to others, there seems to be a pretty significant jump in how easily you learn tunes after anywhere from 60-100 tunes. For me, I felt it at about 75 tunes (and I *do* keep track, although that gets more difficult over time too...)
I found another bump at about 200 tunes, which is where I really felt like I was loosening my grip on how I internalize tunes (as shapes instead of notes...)
I think that process probably continues for the foreseeable future. In talking to <drop name here>, I asked if he could play anything as long as he had it in his head, and he said he could (on several instruments). I found that incredible at the time, but nowadays, I often play tunes in sessions that I don't know what they are, only to find out later that I had never learned the tune (formally, at least). It's always a surprise when that happens, but a welcome one...
This is surely a "how long is a piece of string" question. All you can really say is that learning lots of tunes, listening to lots of ITM and getting good technique makes it easier to learn new tunes. The easier bit is a progressive thing with very few sudden jumps or bumps.
I've read your profile and I was tempted to wind you up - just for a second, but as you've requested serious answers, here's one:
The question that you posed for me worked in this way - it IS the number of tunes, in a way - but the number depends on the significant patterns you have in these tunes. If I learn 7 tunes that are based on similar "finger memory tricks", it's much easier but drives me forward much less than learning well, say, 4 tunes with different patterns, which thus decrease the level of difficulty for a larger number of new tunes.
I've noticed that when I was learning guitar - after two years I could play a good number of tunes, but going forward was still pretty difficult, until I've noticed that the tunes that I played are generally the same stuff with minor changes (D mixo piping tunes). For the next year, I've deliberately learnt tunes that had something technically new for me, as well as some tunes from other traditions (Breton, Slovak and Polish), and that improved my learning skills.
I've noticed now that when I'm wheezing the flute every now and then, I tend to unconsciously pick tunes which have new patterns in them. As for now, I know about 30 tunes on the flute and it's still pretty difficult
Ha, ha, ha !
For some people, climbing the easy mountains is boring
For some people the 'impossible' option is the challenge that calls them. Heck, thinking about it, I don't want it ever to be easy. If I found it easy, I wouldn't feel much satisfaction. I like the difficulty, then I can feel I've actually accomplished something that I knew was very hard to do.
I have the same question as the above !
I am learning the whistle since September 2007, and I have 15 -20 Tunes learnt.. I have them okish, mixture between jigs and reels,
I do find I can learn tunes a lot quicker now, and I do practice them over and over believing of course it's best to have 15 ones played well, rather than 30 played badly.
Ah, that's naughty, that's like asking if I prefer my wife or my mistress. I'm just a man. I adore both. Why do I have to choose ?
I know, your recommendation would be to learn fiddle and/or flute. But I tried flute years ago and somehow it doesn't appeal. Fiddle is another matter. As a listener, solo Irish fiddle playing is probably the music that gives me greatest pleasure. I'd give a lot to be able to do it. I have the fiddle. But trying to get anything musical out of it, well, that is kinda daunting...
wolfbird:
"I don't want it ever to be easy. If I found it easy, I wouldn't feel much satisfaction. I like the difficulty, then I can feel I've actually accomplished something that I knew was very hard to do."
and
"I have the fiddle. But trying to get anything musical out of it, well, that is kinda daunting..."
there you have it.
Dow's list is a good one, you can find it here, But remember the suggestion that Dow himself agrees with, which is that for aevery tune learned off his list, learn one that is not on it also.
seriously, that 75 figure seems like a good initial goal.
Priorities...well i guess my priority is to be able to play anything i love on my instrument of choice. that, after all is why they are called "instruments"- a means to an end. But you can love your instrument too.
I studied jazz pretty seriously for 3 yrs in Prague and jazz guitarists also have this curious kind of reverse snobbery about the guitar - its like you arent allowed to LIKE the guitar too much - its all about the music, cats. you have to be more into horn players.
My ultimate view is that music is essentially just maths..all it is is numbers and intervals and frequencies-and actually this is more obvious in some styles than others-baroque music and ITM the numbers and patterns really jump out at me. On a brutal reductionist level, the whole canon of ITM tunes can be seen as a mathematical exercise in permutations and combinations. the mystery and magic for me is how some of these combinations have such strong personalities.
but what is a musical instrument, guiar, flute, whatever? its a tool for processing numbers.
i digressed a bit there..
llig, yes, fair enough, but one mountain is learning to play tunes fingerstyle on guitar, a second mountain is learning to play fiddle.
Both mountains are very difficult, and somebody who achieves excellence in either has high status in my view.
But these things are relative, in a sense. Some young woman sails solo around the world and becomes a celebrity. But it can require similar determination and courage for a disabled old lady to get a mile to the shop and back once a week.
I'm all in favour of people attempting challenges. Most people are capable of far more than they realise. And it means you can look back on your life and be pleased that you didn't just waste the time. I did once achieve something that nobody else had ever done. Doesn't matter what it was, because the principles apply generally (except to idiot Guiness Book of Records crap, like eating the most hamburgers in three minutes). Part of being successful is estimating chances of success, and that's really hard when it's a new thing, because *everybody* will tell you it can't be done (obvious, because nobody did it) so you're on your own, and have to face your own doubts.
u aint wrong! The Liigs of the world are eternal, because as you say,anything new has the old school fighting it. then of course as time passes the new thing becomes the old thing., and it starts again. theres always a 17yr old whizz kid in the wings!
I'm with you on this one Wolfbird, with one proviso - sometimes a tune will just drop into your lap as it were and another may take ages to get, though, I think, learning a tune on the fiddle is hardly life threatening unless you annoy the neighbours!
1) yes
2) there's no "magic number" or threshold that once hit, the difficult suddenly becomes easy. It's a progressive thing: the more tunes you learn the more patterns are under your fingers, and thus the more quickly you can pick up the patterns of a new tune.
It's a tune-by-tune thing, because some new tunes you'll learn will be made up entirely of familiar patterns meaning that you will be able to grasp them quickly. Such tunes just "fall under the fingers".
But then some new tunes you'll learn will have quirky phrases that don't fit the usual patterns. These phrases will take a bit of work to figure out (our ear quickly identifies the familiar) and will take more time to get under the fingers (as your "muscle memory" won't help you).
But you are wrong, hakanozel...on two counts at least, first, llig is one of the best resources that this site has, because his counter argument is solid and based on real experience; second, music isn't numbers, (unless you're a computer), music is sounds, sensation via ears.
You just don't get it, it's about the vehicle. There are many ways you can cross the Atlantic. Fly, sail, you could even row across. And though no one has yet done it, it's thoretically possible to swim across. I wouldn't discount it. But trying to play Irish diddley tunes on the guitar is like trying to cross the atlantic in a car. Get the best and fastest car you can, an F1 car. You just ain't gonna make it.
Oh, I do understand your point, Michael. It's already been discussed quite often.
The target, on the other side of the Atlantic, is to play authentic diddley music. So, the vehicle to get there should be suitable. That's fair enough. You say the vehicle has to be flute, fiddle, or pipes.
But we already established that some people would disagree, and that harp would also get there. Maybe it arrives at a different part of the coastline, but it's still the same country.
Guitar can reproduce harp music quite effectively.
his counter arguments to me are usually dismissive one liners. My personal favourite of his "solid counter arguments" was "You are just ignorant, thats all". compare his responses to my initial question on this thread to that of the other respondees. As regards real, GENUINE debate, any response to him is a waste of time better spent practising.its fun sometimes, though, in a "shotting fish in a barrell" kind of way!
Everything is numbers. Sound is numbers.
also, who would be the most dismissive of any non-boat way to cross the atlantic? Someone with shares in Cunard. Which brings us back to the old school vs new blood thing again.
hakanozel, llig isn't really 'old school'. He plays fiddle tunes because they are great tunes. But in the old days, they were mostly played for folks to dance to, not primarily as session music. What he's talking about is the particular capabilities of particular instruments. I thought we sorted this when you said that Bensusan's playing was like Seamus Ennis. Do we have to revisit that ?
everything reduces to physics. feel free to spout some pseudo "popular science " at me. you r right tho, the ability to acknowledge ones ignorance is a rare and precious thing found in 1 in a 1000 musicians, and in my professional musical life is probably the most important thing i look for in potential collaborators. The rest are Closed Systems. closed systems are fun to prod at sometimes but a waste of time when attempting any serious musical thing. Age does it the most, as people age they are less and less open to new input, especially from young upstarts. its the saddest thing in the world to me to see the petrification of talent in older musicians i meet, and i intend to fight it in myself till my dying day.
just as a curiosity,i wonder how many of Lligs contributions to this site have been in the form of questions, or requests for information.
"everything reduces to physics"....more cobblers....check out quantum physics and you see that everything reduces to some weird mind-boggling mystery, and anyway, I thought you were speaking as a guitarist, not a physicist. When I play music I don't hear no numbers, I hear sounds.
Not to my ears, hakanozel. It could be Breton or French folk dance or an English Morris tune. It could even be Irish. But when Seamus Ennis plays, there's no possibility of anything but Irish.
oh btw..."checkout quantum physics" - that is quote of the day. Do you play ITM-"I dabble". ie i've got the 1st half of Drowsy Maggie down on a d whistle.
I was responding, hakanozel, to your bad misunderstanding, your assertion that music reduces to numbers, and that everything reduces to physics. By that same (faulty) logic, physics reduces to quantum physics...and then where's your music, your numbers, your physics ? The answer is, that *nobody* knows. In the practical world of experiences, music is sound.
hakanozel, can I request a bit of information from you please? Where would you personally rate your level of ignorance with regards to Irish diddley music?
ok fair enough..I'll check it out. I'm assuming i can pick up the basics in, oh, say, 20 minutes? Because obviously i only need to be able to name drop huge areas of knowledge to impress people, right?
quantum fiddle players, String Theory
Don't be petulant, hakanozel. If you're going to set up a thread and argue a case, then you're bound to get flak and you need to have better arguments than just accusing people of name dropping.
Actually, there's a good point buried in there....There are people who know all that there is to be known about diddley music. I'm not one of them. The are people who know all that there is to be known about quantum physics. I'm not one of them. So, there's a big unknown area...and, if a person is interested, they learn...that's why I'm here. To learn as much as I can about Irish music.
my level in ITM, Llig, is i have 3 hrs of solo guitar repertoire, including probably 50 mins of Irish tunes, Carolan etc, arranged for solo guitar.
i do the whole crappy "backing guitar in sessions" thing but i hate it.
i have about 40 tunes that i flatpick on the guitar, which i try to use banjo articulation on, as it seems closest.
I can sit in a session and by the time a reel has been played 3 times ive picked up about a 3rd of it by ear.
So i'm basically a relative newbie to ITM.
HOWEVER, i am a professional guitarist (and singer) who has put in countless 1000s of hrs of practice and study in many different areas of music, so i DO have some insights to offer. I am fairly comfortable stating that as a GUITARIST, i feel i am far more capable and advanced than most guitarists ive heard in ITM. The other thing is i live and play down here in West Kerry, and a lot of "true" ITMers have a lot of respect for my abilities, as i have for theirs.
So my perspective is quite unusual-i feel that as a GUITARIST my insights on this site on guitar related issues have A LOT of weight - my insights on ITM generally far less so.
In fact, if you were to trawl thru my discussions etc, they r divided into 2 - guitar stuff where i pronounce and proclaim, and more general ITM stuff, where i almost NEVER give opinions, but am always searching for help and information. This thread is a good example- it started as a genuine request. I am comfortable in both my abilities and my ignorance.
If i could get you to acknowledge that you know WAY more about ITM than me and I know WAY more about guitar than you... well, we'd probably get on ok!
I have to make a pledge. I have to stand up for physics, and they have nothing to do in this thread. yeah, sound production relies on physics, and the scale of these physics is to big for quantum mechanics to interfere, therefore technically speaking sound can be stripped down to numbers. And yes, there are a lot of patterns in ITM to find. I guess thats due to the fact that strong patterns cater to the dancers (maybe this guess couldn't be farther off the truth, i don't know). On the other hand, you don't need to know the frequency relations between to octaves to play them in tune, and you don't have to APPLY mathematics and physics so you can find its traces. just leave them. you internalise the patterns this thread talks about because the meldy is in your hand and your fingers, not because you envisioned the function.
Well it's probably true that I am more familiar with diddley music than you, though not as familiar as I could be ... who is? As far as guitars go, I don't play the guitar though I have dabbled in other fretted string instruments, though not for decades. However, I have detailed knowledge of the mechanics of playing the thing I appreciate it's subtleties and strengths while understanding its limitations. And I have no problem in giving you the benefit of doubt that you are adept at overcoming these limitations.
Okay, TMB, I'm always a sucker for off-topic diversions. At what scale does quantum mechanics cease being a consideration ?
hakanozel hijacked his own thread by saying 'everything is numbers'. Numbers are just a way of counting stuff. I'm sitting here on a chair on a mountain. Not a number to be seen anywhere. I'm picking guitar. No numbers. I can hear birds singing, I don't hear any numbers singing.
It's daft science fiction isn't it. Like the end of The Matrix when keanu reeves sees the world melting into the matrix code. Does it help to type into a computer screen and visualise all that binary confuguration instead of the letters and words they make up? Does it help to try to understand down to the quantum level what no body understands of what's really going on in the micro chips?
So, Michael, with a reference back to the previous 'articulation' thread, that guy on youtube above could make Bensusan's 'Merrily kissed the quaker', sound Irish, if he could play the appropriate articulations/ornaments ? But that's not possible to achieve because the Irish slow roll can't work on guitar ? Or maybe you agree with hakanozel that it already sounds like Seamus Ennis ?
Jesus, I wanted to keep it OUT of the thread The biggest object that has shown quantum attributes in experiment is a single molecule, and a small one for that matter. Now compare this to the size of your instruments you either play the smallest guitar in the world or you can ignore quantum effects. (would be a great excuse for bum notes tho, "sorry, it wasn't me, it was quantum effects messing with my strings")
Well, TMB, you dipped your toe into the pool full of piranha fishes....
I'm open to correction, because I'm not a physicist, TMB, but I spent some time reading up on quantum stuff recently, and I read in one paper that the upper end of the scale was something like 90 nanometers. That's big for nuclear physicists, but small for the rest of us. But the I also read in another source that the upper limit is amoeba size. That's a lot bigger than a standard human cell. I could well be wrong, but to the extent that I've grasped it, there's no reason that quantum effects would not be relevant on the everyday human scale, other than, we are made of billions of atoms, so, as it only takes one to collapse the probability wave, we appear to have a continuous solid reality. But the more I delved to try and get a clearer view, the more I came up against the 'nobody knows' barrier. There are at least six different interpretations on offer, and they are all very peculiar...
Yes, it's all about the appropriate articulations, including the subtle stresses and torques in the rhythm, not just the rolls etc.
Though our minds have an ability to recognise stuff when very little of what actually makes up what we are recognising is actually perceived. So yes, it's quite possible to make a guitar recognisably sounding Irish. Just so long as you have enough of the articulations and you are very careful not to clutter it up with ones that aren't in the tradition. Better to leave gaps. In fact, a lot of the traditional sounding articulations are gaps anyway.
So no, the guy in the clip above has a very very long way to go before it even remotely sounds Irish. For a start, most people who play that tune think it's a jig.
if thats the case, i'll jump in, and pull you in with me
the most obvious reason your body is not suffering the effects as a whole probably would be stuff like, you don't look the same when you turn around, you warp, you are dead and alive at the same time, ...
right now i am at a similar state of knowledge, i also read about it (but hopefully this will change when i start studying in october, when you come to vienna, mail me and we'll fight this out over a pint), so pretty much the fact that there are no anomalities in your daily life prove that it doesn't really affect your life. i read about the interference experiment, and allegedly a fulleren (C14) was the biggest mollecule yet to show wave interference, something that would really bother me if my flute was doing it-i was referring to this. but even at amoeba size, the probability of the amoeba reaching such a state (while by definition of the science can't be excluded anyway) is in my amateur knowledge so small that it won't happen to enough cells of your body at the same time to let you feel a difference. but hey, i am a geek, i always love to learn more - but don't mix it up with music, i don't want to hear about physics when i'm playing a tune
Good. Thanks, Michael. That's very helpful to me, and it's nice to be in agreement on that area. I'm trying to learn 'Eel in the sink'. It'll take me a long while yet before I begin to be happy with how it sounds, but if/when I think it's moderately well played, I'll ask you and others to tell me everything that's wrong with it, ok ?
Thanks for the offer of a pint in Vienna, TMB. Unfortunately, my quantum ability to be in two places at the same time is not as good as I'd like, otherwise I'd be there now
Yes, I also read about the big C14 molecule. I forgot that one. But we might be collapsing probability wave in our brains, as Penrose suggests, so each instant, we may be 'making' reality out of many (infinite ?) possibilities ?
I really must go and do other things, see ya later
I was going to ask this question today. Frustrating lesson yesterday.
1. What are "serious hours of practise" I think Lazyhound referred to? When I get really tight and focused, I don't remember things as well and usually make a bloody mess of my lesson performance.
2. I tend to rush when I am playing (doesn't matter what instrument. As Church Organist, I have a reputation of being able to play a 50 second "Hundredth"). Metronomes and such never have helped. They work great in practice. Forgotten during when it comes time to perform.
3. Short of the obvious normal beta blocker, drugs and alcohol suggestions, does anyone have any techniques they use to calm down?
The question does not mention the "playing" of tunes, only the "learning". A non-player can still learn tunes and could face different problems to someone trying to play all the tunes they have learned.
I have certainly learned more tunes than I have ever played, can learn a tune without ever playing it, and can play a tune out of my head that I have heard before, but never played before.
Isn't it quicker to learn a tune without bothering about playing it? Less to worry about?
Zippy, its all about self control....... controling your fingers etc to play the right notes in the right place.....controling our inclination to 'rush'. controling our muscles and attitude to stay relaxed, aware , loose and cool while the music might be blasting at full pelt......
Weighing in on the physics and numbers part of this debate, trying to quantify this music with numbers is useless. Saying that it's all "numbers, intervals, and frequencies" is looking at it the wrong way.
You use those things (numbers, intervals, and frequencies) as an overlay to explain why it sounds like it does, but the music exists outside of that artificial overlay, and trying to put a repeatable structure over it will drive you mad, because the music is way too fluid to be reduced to a kind of formula.
This is a similar debate to the sheet music one. The sheet music is another artificial overlay that can't really describe the full essence of the music. Just as sheet music can be a useful tool, the "numbers" might be useful too. But if you're approaching the music entirely from that direction, you'll never get it.
Learn your tunes by listening to Irish players playing them. Push yourself to do it that way. If you spend your time worrying about the numerical difference in intervals between the 1-2 and 2-3 notes in a jig pattern, you'll never *feel* that interval, and it's going by too fast for your brain to process it as a number or ratio anyway - you *have* to feel it to play it. (And that's not an interval ratio that stays constant, BTW. The tune will drive that interval to change, which is part of what makes this music so beautiful IMO)
If you push yourself, you'll find several jumps and plateaus in both your playing ability, and your ability to learn tunes. (And pretty soon, you'll not feel any need to quantify what you feel)
Having studied jazz guitar for several years myself, I understand where hakanozel is coming from. On a superficial leval he is correct. Understanding the maths of a particular style of music makes it easy to figure out the basics of a style. It is easy to listen to a variety of music and work out what modes etc are used. But to actually play the music with any depth or integrity? That is way beyond maths and requires far greater depth in the study. To state that it all comes down to the maths is to only skim the surface of any style of music.
And as wonderful a guitarist as Bensussan is, that didn't sound Irish to me at all.
I am working to transition from an accompanist who plays a few tunes here and there, to a tune player who accompanies a tune here and there. I am finding that, as I approach a hundred or so tunes in my head, that learning new tunes is getting easier. And tunes that I have accompanied, but never learned, are suddenly appearing under my fingers, needing only to be polished up. I am not the greatest musician, but I find that I am better than I ever thought I could be, and have the potential to get even better. So hang in there, keep plugging away, and enjoy the ride!
I got this from another site I frequent (trumpetherald.com) ;
Eat three bananas two hours before you play, to avoid the nerves. This must be in conjunction with avoiding caffeine and alcohol; being rested; and of course, thoroughly prepared.
hakanozel has a good point about music and math/numbers. We've all heard "inspirational" recordings. When it comes right down to it, a CD recording is nothing but zeros and ones.
Well, gosh, pbassnote. So what *you* hear when you put a CD into the player is zeros and ones ? What do they sound like ? It must be horrid, you poor thing. When I play my CDs I hear wonderful music.
That is what i wanted to say all along. you can find numbers, if you look for them. But rather than searching vor digits, enjoy the music, the numbers might be there but thinking about them only distracts you from the underlying beauty. (besides wolfbird, i wouldn't want to talk to someone who has already put himself in a superposition, but wait another couple of hundreds of years and you can use the mechanics to warp over...talking of warp, imagine you wouldn't have to bother about going to a session, at any time jump there, whether in the USA, in japan or in ireland, does that sound desirable or not? i cant decide)
It's when you see someone walking towards you and suddenly recognize that it's you, that's when it can get a little bit spooky, TMB.
You know, an amoeba size object is just at the threshold of what is visible to the naked eye, not so small. Maybe quantum effects are relevant to everyday scale of chairs and tables ?
Seriously, I don't think there's going to be anyone around in a couple of hundred years
wolfbird, your sarcasm is loudly apparent, despite the fact that it's really just a bunch of zeros and ones. Actually, I have heard them and seen them as well as I've designed, built, and tested network circuitry. Nothing horrid about it. It is what it is. I am not commenting upon any emotional or spiritual (for lack of a better term) aspect of the music, as I'm here for the same reasons as you - I love the diddley. Music affects most of us on many levels, conscience and subconscience, logical and illogical, perceptive and artistic, organized and chaotic, etc. Music is also temporal, finite, and subject to the same laws of physics as any other natural phenomenon.
pbassnote, I like to live in the real world. In the real world, music is sound. I thought some of the threads here where people insist that dots on a piece of paper are music, where totally daft, but to insist that music is zeroes and ones is even dafter.
Anyway, there are no zeroes and ones on a CD. It's just sculpted plastic. All that physics is, is a sophisticated mental model, devised to try and describe and measure aspects of reality with a view to explaining phenomena. Compared with the reality it attempts to model, it's merely a trivial human conceit.
Btw, pbassnote, a conscience is the part of the mind that tells you what's good and bad, the thing that causes guilt if you've been a wrong doer. Conscious and subconscious are something very different.
I don't know if you've conceded the point just to avoid an argument, or because you understand the point. Look, to say that 'music is numbers' is like saying that a great theatrical production of Shakespeare's Macbeth is merely Morse code, just because the text could be converted into dots and dashes and sent down a telegraph wire.
If I seem sarcastic or aggressive about this, it's because it really does make me annoyed. Just because my body is made of molecules doesn't mean that's *all* I am. Just because you can count the stars doesn't explain why they exist. The way of thinking which says 'everything is numbers' diminishes what we are, it reduces us, it's demeaning.
It's mistaking the map for the territory, mistaking the pointing finger for the Moon. As Magritte painted, " This is not a pipe!"
Interesting points, wolfbird. You've continued on where my "artificial overlay" idea left off.
Numbers do not *exist* in the same way that music exists. Numbers themselves are a purely human fabrication to help us explain and control our surroundings, and they're handy for doing that. But the universe existed before numbers were invented.
Music is a purely human fabrication, as well, but it is something that exists in a physical way - sound waves generated by some physical source. But if you think about it as organized sound waves of different frequencies, put together in a recognizable pattern, you're missing the beauty that is there.
When you refer to music on CDs as ones and zeros, you're correct, although, that's not how you experience them. We create machinery that turns them back into very real sound waves that are experienced in a very different way than the ones and zeros.
Not quite certain if I'm agreeing with you or not, Reverend, but it's stuff I like to think about anyway...
One part is very straightforward. Music is sound, and by study over centuries it's been established that it's vibrations through air. And the vibrations can be trapped, recorded, transformed and transmitted, recorded and reproduced, etc, etc. I'm really grateful for CDs and computers because the music quality and variety is so much higher fidelity than ever before. And I understand pretty well how it all works. No problem there.
The earlier point, I'm not quite so clear about. I said to Sean Lead Liath the other day, that 'no humans, no numbers' is obvious. But he maintains that numbers exist regardless of humans. I think that's called the Platonic Idealism position, isn't it ? The philosophizing gets heavy in that region, after a couple of millennia of smart people digging it over and over. I think I still hold to the view that numbers do exist, and can only exist, as electro chemical traces in people's brains, part of our modelling equipment. But I'm a bit wobbly on that topic.
But the point which does get me seriously agitated is this: Because we have these fancy brains, which can model reality, we fool ourselves into living inside those models, instead of the glorious raw reality itself. I think it's got a lot to do with cities and pressurized life styles. If I had to spend hours everyday standing up in a crammed tube train, with all the noise and stress, I'd want to live in an internal fantasy rather than real world.
The way I see it, there's many, many ways of modelling reality. It's like mapping a city. You can map the drains, or the roads, or the bus routes, or the pedestrian flows. They're all 'true' in a sense, and have utility, but none of them *are* the actual city.
(Philosophically, it's called perspectivism, I believe)
Same goes for the world, and our selves. We can view our selves using a medical map, or a spiritual map, or a moral map, or a social status map, or a career cv, or whatever. But all those are just different angles of view. Just like you could draw a house as an architectural plan, an isometric projection, or an artist's sketch, or an aerial photo. They're all valid ways of assembling data, according to the job in hand. But the actual house is the actual house, and what it means to you if you've lived in it for a lifetime is way beyond any sort of mapping.
So, what I'm arguing for, is to recognise human dignity, and the miracle of existence on this planet, and avoiding the trap of thinking that says we are 'just' biological machines, or that the world is 'just' a lump of rock in Space...does that make any sense ?
Some folks seem to think this is a dumb mystical nonsense, but I reject that. I like science. I like physics. I check out the physics, which everybody likes so much because it 'explains' what, e.g. music, is....and, well, golly gee, the smartest physicists say it's ALL totally baffling...superpositions, and entanglement, and time travelling backward and forward, and all the rest....there aint no solid foundation, it's an illusion..
wolfbird, I'd love to hang out with you one day, but I fear we'd get very little music done and spend the time babbling about these philosophical matters.
Better make it two days, one for music one for philosphy.
You better make it snappy, SWFL, coz I only got the rest of my life and it's pretty much fully booked up...might just be able to spare an afternoon, squeeze you in somehow, yes, howbout, August 17th ? That suit ? August 2015, that'd be...any use ?
just kidding Thanks for the compliment. Isn't this music a kind of practical applied philosophy ? I believe it is..
You know, SWFL, I'm like Buckminster Fuller, I can talk almost non-stop, about everything under the sun, for about four or five days. Then I'm done. That's on topics that's worth talking about. IMO, the most important stuff can't even be said in words. Playing music is a great antidote for too much talking and thinking.
I think we agree, wolfbird, at least for the most part. But you have a way of putting it more eloquently
I might be able to be convinced that numbers exist without humans, in the sense that the universe (as we understand it) is finite, which makes it inherently numerical. But Math and Physics would not exist as an extension of that reasoning. The world can be explained by physics in a lot of ways, but that's because we developed physics to explain the world.
I agree with you, the physics are there to map the world, not *be* the world. In the same way that musical notation can map the music, but not *be* the music.
And I, too, I like science. I like trying to understand how things work. And I don't mind breaking down the music into formulas and numbers to try to understand it better. But if someone were to approach the music from that direction, instead of from listening to it, and internalizing how it *feels* (to our highly-advanced pattern matching brains), I don't know that they'd ever really get it. We can make computers play music, but even with sampled sounds, and fancy stress programming (like Barfly has) for swing, it still doesn't sound like a human.
And SWFL, count me in on the two day music/philosophy get-together!
In answer to the original question, I'm increasingly finding it harder to remember tunes...although once I get started on a tune I can usually get going on it. Must have more Kombucha.
Reverend and SWFL, about the numbers....it's easy for me to visualize how they began, when some guy wanted to know if he'd still got all his sheep, so he matched them, one to one, on his fingers, and every time he used up the fingers, scratched a mark on a stone. That sort of thing. Obviously a very useful discovery.
But when it starts getting weird, is when the philosophers and mathematicians get to work on the subject. If we just invented numbers for our own convenience, how come they suddenly slip out of control and take on a life of their own, with all sorts of strange unexpected properties and patterns ? They are deeply, deeply mysterious...
I mean, it's impossible to calculate an infinite series of numbers, because they go on forever (whatever that means ?) But hang on, you can have an infinite series, and then another infinite series to which you add one. The you've got two infinite series, but they're not the same. One is larger (by one) than the other. Crazy stuff. Does my brain in. Worse than drugs.
An infinite series is only infinite in length, not size... It's pretty easy for one to be bigger than the other... Because the digits get infinitely less significant.
What's more mind boggling to me is the report I heard on Paul Harvey the other day about scientists noting some evidence of the soul down at the quantum level, which is inherently timeless... Must do some more research, Mr. Harvey didn't go into much depth
Naah, Reverend...look, you've got two absolutely identical infinite series, doesn't matter about how significant the digits are. You can't say anything about them, except they go on forever. But if you add one digit to one serie, you can, logically, say that it *must* be larger, or longer, than the other. No ? I know it's utterly useless (to me, anyway) but I don't understand, if we invented numbers, why the effing heck do we find crazy things like Pi ?
KML knows all about this stuff. I feel he's duty bound to offer us half an hour of his precious time to a full explanation, I'm sure he's get Godel well sussed...
Pi can be expressed as an infinite series... But Pi + 1 is still approximately 4.14159, it's easy to note that it is bigger than something that is approximately 3.14159. If you have an infinite series that is expanding exponentially, then it is really the same as infinity, and infinity plus one is infinity...
(Strangely enough, I am wearing a Pi shirt today, that has the Pi symbol written out as digits of Pi...)
Paul Harvey is an old radio news man from Chicago. He has a quirky style of delivering the day's headlines. Not sure what the soul thing was about actually... Googling too...
This guy sums up what I was attempting to say above, far better than I did :
"An important experiment carried out as recently as summer 1982 by the French physicist, Aspect, has unequivocally demonstrated the fact that physicists cannot get round the Uncertainty Principle and simultaneously determine the quantum states of particles, and confirmed that physicists cannot divorce the consciousness of the observer from the events observed. This experiment (in disproving the separabilty of quantum measurements) has confirmed what Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg were only able to philosophically debate over - that with quantum theory we have to leave behind our naive picture of reality as an intricate clockwork. We are challenged by quantum theory to build new ways in which to picture reality, a physics, moreover, in which consciousness plays a central role, in which the observer is inextricably interwoven in the fabric of reality."
There are several types of infinity in mathematics. The simplest to get to grips with is the infinity of the integers (the numbers you use to count with). The is called, not surprisingly, "countably infinite". But another one is the infinity of _all_ numbers, including fractions, and other more exotic numbers like the square root of 2 and pi, which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinity of the integers - i.e. we have an infinity which is uncountably infinite and can be simplistically thought of as "bigger" than the countable infinity of integers. And there are other types of mathematical infinities that are even "bigger". Go any further into this topic and you've got to get very serious with set theory (and I don't mean acoustically optimum pub seating arrangements or how you select three tunes that sound good played one after the other).
This is the light relief: some mathematicians have devised different kinds of "zero" that can (again simplistically) be thought of as the reciprocals of the different types of infinity.
Playing the fiddle, flute, guitar or whatever may, and should, get asymptotically easier with time, but this stuff gets exponentially more difficult the more you go into it.
Different kinds of zero, lazyhound ? I feel urged to investigate...
I like Leibniz' poetic approach to the character of zero, " a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit - almost an amphibian between being and non-being."
Wolfbird, I heard about the concept of different zeros during a group tutorial at uni many years ago. The tutor mentioned it in passing when he was talking about Cantor's continuum hypothesis, but I never followed it up (no internet in those days!).
I think that the breakthrough in terms of learning tunes comes when you start to play them regularly in session with others. Everyone has their individual way of playing the same tune and if you really know the tune in your head then you can carry on with it while others play their version. With the noise and musical distraction going on, you don't have as much of a chance to hear what you're playing so it can be a great test of your muscle memory ;)
To get to that stage unfortunately took me about 2 years, topped by a final 3 months of solid 6-8 hours a day practice with a few sessions a week thrown in for good measure. After that I could pick up the bones of a tune and play it without any practice 'cause my fingers just knew where the tune was without me really having to think about it.
Good point, biccy. I agree that starting to get out in sessions is something that can generate a great jump in ability. Which is why I encourage people to do just that even before they feel they're "ready", because you're never going to *be* ready until you get out and do it.
(I'm not suggesting that you get out to sessions if you only play 3 tunes poorly, but once you have at least a small stable of tunes, playing them with other people is key! For me, just the sheer embarrassment of how bad I was when I was first going to sessions was motivation to work at it too...)
How long before it's easy?
How long before it's easy?
I've heard plenty of comments along the line that "The first (insert number here) of tunes take a while to learn, but after that they come very quickly, because by the time you've learnt (insert number here) tunes, you have heard enough to have learnt the common patterns, melodic shapes, etc, and so each new tune is 'internalised' much more quickly."
So really these questions are only for those of you with big repertoires:
1) Is that statement true?
2) If so, whats the magic no? How many "tunes in" were you when there was a significant speed up in your processing?
Serious replies appreciated,Thanks
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
For my first year and a half or so I didn't so much try to learn tunes in quantity, but instead I worked on perfecting only about a dozen of them over that time, especially the hard ones. After that I got done with that found I could learn tunes quickly and easily, so it's not always true.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Whiddler
Re: How long before it's easy?
Not so much the number of tunes, which once you get into 3 figures starts to become uncountable anyway, but the number of serious hours you put in, which those who know about these things put at around 4000.
Those 4000 hours will be used in acquiring a cast-iron fault-free technique which won't let you down, and also in learning a repertoire. It is said that practising a tune 200 times will really make it stick.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by lazyhound
Re: How long before it's easy?
1) Yes, it was definitely true for me.
2) I have no idea how many "tunes in" I was . . . I wasn't counting. But I think it would totally depend on the individual. I know some people who are like sponges picking up new tunes, even after only a few years of playing. And I know other people who have been playing for many years and still aren't there. But I think the most important thing is to listen to the tunes you want to learn. A lot. Enough to drive your significant other nuts.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by fiddlebliss
Re: How long before it's easy?
I'd rather learn a finite number of tunes well, than a lot of tunes for which I'm uncertain. That's why I stick to the famous "Dow's List."
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: How long before it's easy?
It is definitely something that happens to many people. From my own experience, and talking to others, there seems to be a pretty significant jump in how easily you learn tunes after anywhere from 60-100 tunes. For me, I felt it at about 75 tunes (and I *do* keep track, although that gets more difficult over time too...)
I found another bump at about 200 tunes, which is where I really felt like I was loosening my grip on how I internalize tunes (as shapes instead of notes...)
I think that process probably continues for the foreseeable future. In talking to <drop name here>, I asked if he could play anything as long as he had it in his head, and he said he could (on several instruments). I found that incredible at the time, but nowadays, I often play tunes in sessions that I don't know what they are, only to find out later that I had never learned the tune (formally, at least). It's always a surprise when that happens, but a welcome one...
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Reverend
Re: How long before it's easy?
This is surely a "how long is a piece of string" question. All you can really say is that learning lots of tunes, listening to lots of ITM and getting good technique makes it easier to learn new tunes. The easier bit is a progressive thing with very few sudden jumps or bumps.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Donough
Re: How long before it's easy?
I've read your profile and I was tempted to wind you up - just for a second, but as you've requested serious answers, here's one:
The question that you posed for me worked in this way - it IS the number of tunes, in a way - but the number depends on the significant patterns you have in these tunes. If I learn 7 tunes that are based on similar "finger memory tricks", it's much easier but drives me forward much less than learning well, say, 4 tunes with different patterns, which thus decrease the level of difficulty for a larger number of new tunes.
I've noticed that when I was learning guitar - after two years I could play a good number of tunes, but going forward was still pretty difficult, until I've noticed that the tunes that I played are generally the same stuff with minor changes (D mixo piping tunes). For the next year, I've deliberately learnt tunes that had something technically new for me, as well as some tunes from other traditions (Breton, Slovak and Polish), and that improved my learning skills.
I've noticed now that when I'm wheezing the flute every now and then, I tend to unconsciously pick tunes which have new patterns in them. As for now, I know about 30 tunes on the flute and it's still pretty difficult
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by EastPole
Re: How long before it's easy?
I have a problem. The faster I learn new tunes, the more often I tend to mix up similar tunes, both new and old. Only me?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by slainte
Re: How long before it's easy?
It will never be easy if you persist on trying to learn them on a guitar
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
Ha, ha, ha !
For some people, climbing the easy mountains is boring
For some people the 'impossible' option is the challenge that calls them. Heck, thinking about it, I don't want it ever to be easy. If I found it easy, I wouldn't feel much satisfaction. I like the difficulty, then I can feel I've actually accomplished something that I knew was very hard to do.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
But we all know that it ain't never gonna sound any good unless it sound easy.
This goes back to the question I asked on the other thread:
What is your priority? Do you have a love of this music? Or do you love the guitar?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
I have the same question as the above !
I am learning the whistle since September 2007, and I have 15 -20 Tunes learnt.. I have them okish, mixture between jigs and reels,
I do find I can learn tunes a lot quicker now, and I do practice them over and over believing of course it's best to have 15 ones played well, rather than 30 played badly.
" Dows List " is this available ?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by premierview
Re: How long before it's easy?
Ah, that's naughty, that's like asking if I prefer my wife or my mistress. I'm just a man. I adore both. Why do I have to choose ?
I know, your recommendation would be to learn fiddle and/or flute. But I tried flute years ago and somehow it doesn't appeal. Fiddle is another matter. As a listener, solo Irish fiddle playing is probably the music that gives me greatest pleasure. I'd give a lot to be able to do it. I have the fiddle. But trying to get anything musical out of it, well, that is kinda daunting...
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
thanks folks, i was just curious. Llig, obviously i dont give a flying fxxx about music, i just want to make some eardrums bleed - isnt it obvious?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
wolfbird:
"I don't want it ever to be easy. If I found it easy, I wouldn't feel much satisfaction. I like the difficulty, then I can feel I've actually accomplished something that I knew was very hard to do."
and
"I have the fiddle. But trying to get anything musical out of it, well, that is kinda daunting..."
there you have it.
Dow's list is a good one, you can find it here, But remember the suggestion that Dow himself agrees with, which is that for aevery tune learned off his list, learn one that is not on it also.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
seriously, that 75 figure seems like a good initial goal.
Priorities...well i guess my priority is to be able to play anything i love on my instrument of choice. that, after all is why they are called "instruments"- a means to an end. But you can love your instrument too.
I studied jazz pretty seriously for 3 yrs in Prague and jazz guitarists also have this curious kind of reverse snobbery about the guitar - its like you arent allowed to LIKE the guitar too much - its all about the music, cats. you have to be more into horn players.
My ultimate view is that music is essentially just maths..all it is is numbers and intervals and frequencies-and actually this is more obvious in some styles than others-baroque music and ITM the numbers and patterns really jump out at me. On a brutal reductionist level, the whole canon of ITM tunes can be seen as a mathematical exercise in permutations and combinations. the mystery and magic for me is how some of these combinations have such strong personalities.
but what is a musical instrument, guiar, flute, whatever? its a tool for processing numbers.
i digressed a bit there..
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
If you wanna learn music by numbers, it definitely is gonna be a long long time before you find it easy.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
llig, yes, fair enough, but one mountain is learning to play tunes fingerstyle on guitar, a second mountain is learning to play fiddle.
Both mountains are very difficult, and somebody who achieves excellence in either has high status in my view.
But these things are relative, in a sense. Some young woman sails solo around the world and becomes a celebrity. But it can require similar determination and courage for a disabled old lady to get a mile to the shop and back once a week.
I'm all in favour of people attempting challenges. Most people are capable of far more than they realise. And it means you can look back on your life and be pleased that you didn't just waste the time. I did once achieve something that nobody else had ever done. Doesn't matter what it was, because the principles apply generally (except to idiot Guiness Book of Records crap, like eating the most hamburgers in three minutes). Part of being successful is estimating chances of success, and that's really hard when it's a new thing, because *everybody* will tell you it can't be done (obvious, because nobody did it) so you're on your own, and have to face your own doubts.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
u aint wrong! The Liigs of the world are eternal, because as you say,anything new has the old school fighting it. then of course as time passes the new thing becomes the old thing., and it starts again. theres always a 17yr old whizz kid in the wings!
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
I'm with you on this one Wolfbird, with one proviso - sometimes a tune will just drop into your lap as it were and another may take ages to get, though, I think, learning a tune on the fiddle is hardly life threatening unless you annoy the neighbours!
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by john knoss
Re: How long before it's easy?
1) yes
2) there's no "magic number" or threshold that once hit, the difficult suddenly becomes easy. It's a progressive thing: the more tunes you learn the more patterns are under your fingers, and thus the more quickly you can pick up the patterns of a new tune.
It's a tune-by-tune thing, because some new tunes you'll learn will be made up entirely of familiar patterns meaning that you will be able to grasp them quickly. Such tunes just "fall under the fingers".
But then some new tunes you'll learn will have quirky phrases that don't fit the usual patterns. These phrases will take a bit of work to figure out (our ear quickly identifies the familiar) and will take more time to get under the fingers (as your "muscle memory" won't help you).
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Richard D Cook
Re: How long before it's easy?
But you are wrong, hakanozel...on two counts at least, first, llig is one of the best resources that this site has, because his counter argument is solid and based on real experience; second, music isn't numbers, (unless you're a computer), music is sounds, sensation via ears.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
You just don't get it, it's about the vehicle. There are many ways you can cross the Atlantic. Fly, sail, you could even row across. And though no one has yet done it, it's thoretically possible to swim across. I wouldn't discount it. But trying to play Irish diddley tunes on the guitar is like trying to cross the atlantic in a car. Get the best and fastest car you can, an F1 car. You just ain't gonna make it.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
Oh, I do understand your point, Michael. It's already been discussed quite often.
The target, on the other side of the Atlantic, is to play authentic diddley music. So, the vehicle to get there should be suitable. That's fair enough. You say the vehicle has to be flute, fiddle, or pipes.
But we already established that some people would disagree, and that harp would also get there. Maybe it arrives at a different part of the coastline, but it's still the same country.
Guitar can reproduce harp music quite effectively.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
his counter arguments to me are usually dismissive one liners. My personal favourite of his "solid counter arguments" was "You are just ignorant, thats all". compare his responses to my initial question on this thread to that of the other respondees. As regards real, GENUINE debate, any response to him is a waste of time better spent practising.its fun sometimes, though, in a "shotting fish in a barrell" kind of way!
Everything is numbers. Sound is numbers.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
someone HAS swum the atlantic - he was french - there is a documentary about him on Discovery.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
Some people are just ignorant. Fortunately, it's a curable condition. Unfortunately, some people are wilfully ignorant. That's incurable.
"Everything is numbers". Cobblers !
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
also, who would be the most dismissive of any non-boat way to cross the atlantic? Someone with shares in Cunard. Which brings us back to the old school vs new blood thing again.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
hakanozel, llig isn't really 'old school'. He plays fiddle tunes because they are great tunes. But in the old days, they were mostly played for folks to dance to, not primarily as session music. What he's talking about is the particular capabilities of particular instruments. I thought we sorted this when you said that Bensusan's playing was like Seamus Ennis. Do we have to revisit that ?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
everything reduces to physics. feel free to spout some pseudo "popular science " at me. you r right tho, the ability to acknowledge ones ignorance is a rare and precious thing found in 1 in a 1000 musicians, and in my professional musical life is probably the most important thing i look for in potential collaborators. The rest are Closed Systems. closed systems are fun to prod at sometimes but a waste of time when attempting any serious musical thing. Age does it the most, as people age they are less and less open to new input, especially from young upstarts. its the saddest thing in the world to me to see the petrification of talent in older musicians i meet, and i intend to fight it in myself till my dying day.
just as a curiosity,i wonder how many of Lligs contributions to this site have been in the form of questions, or requests for information.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
"everything reduces to physics"....more cobblers....check out quantum physics and you see that everything reduces to some weird mind-boggling mystery, and anyway, I thought you were speaking as a guitarist, not a physicist. When I play music I don't hear no numbers, I hear sounds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca99GLP1VtM
It's a great tune, a nice piece for guitar. But does it sound Irish ? Does it sound like Seamus Ennis ?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
yes
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
Not to my ears, hakanozel. It could be Breton or French folk dance or an English Morris tune. It could even be Irish. But when Seamus Ennis plays, there's no possibility of anything but Irish.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Premierview,
I sent Dow's List to you privately. Just remember that it is a useful place to start, and not a comprehensive list of session tunes.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: How long before it's easy?
oh btw..."checkout quantum physics" - that is quote of the day. Do you play ITM-"I dabble". ie i've got the 1st half of Drowsy Maggie down on a d whistle.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
"checkout quantum physics"
I was responding, hakanozel, to your bad misunderstanding, your assertion that music reduces to numbers, and that everything reduces to physics. By that same (faulty) logic, physics reduces to quantum physics...and then where's your music, your numbers, your physics ? The answer is, that *nobody* knows. In the practical world of experiences, music is sound.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
hakanozel, can I request a bit of information from you please? Where would you personally rate your level of ignorance with regards to Irish diddley music?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
ok fair enough..I'll check it out. I'm assuming i can pick up the basics in, oh, say, 20 minutes? Because obviously i only need to be able to name drop huge areas of knowledge to impress people, right?
quantum fiddle players, String Theory
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
Don't be petulant, hakanozel. If you're going to set up a thread and argue a case, then you're bound to get flak and you need to have better arguments than just accusing people of name dropping.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Actually, there's a good point buried in there....There are people who know all that there is to be known about diddley music. I'm not one of them. The are people who know all that there is to be known about quantum physics. I'm not one of them. So, there's a big unknown area...and, if a person is interested, they learn...that's why I'm here. To learn as much as I can about Irish music.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
my level in ITM, Llig, is i have 3 hrs of solo guitar repertoire, including probably 50 mins of Irish tunes, Carolan etc, arranged for solo guitar.
i do the whole crappy "backing guitar in sessions" thing but i hate it.
i have about 40 tunes that i flatpick on the guitar, which i try to use banjo articulation on, as it seems closest.
I can sit in a session and by the time a reel has been played 3 times ive picked up about a 3rd of it by ear.
So i'm basically a relative newbie to ITM.
HOWEVER, i am a professional guitarist (and singer) who has put in countless 1000s of hrs of practice and study in many different areas of music, so i DO have some insights to offer. I am fairly comfortable stating that as a GUITARIST, i feel i am far more capable and advanced than most guitarists ive heard in ITM. The other thing is i live and play down here in West Kerry, and a lot of "true" ITMers have a lot of respect for my abilities, as i have for theirs.
So my perspective is quite unusual-i feel that as a GUITARIST my insights on this site on guitar related issues have A LOT of weight - my insights on ITM generally far less so.
In fact, if you were to trawl thru my discussions etc, they r divided into 2 - guitar stuff where i pronounce and proclaim, and more general ITM stuff, where i almost NEVER give opinions, but am always searching for help and information. This thread is a good example- it started as a genuine request. I am comfortable in both my abilities and my ignorance.
If i could get you to acknowledge that you know WAY more about ITM than me and I know WAY more about guitar than you... well, we'd probably get on ok!
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by hakanozel
Re: How long before it's easy?
I have to make a pledge. I have to stand up for physics, and they have nothing to do in this thread. yeah, sound production relies on physics, and the scale of these physics is to big for quantum mechanics to interfere, therefore technically speaking sound can be stripped down to numbers. And yes, there are a lot of patterns in ITM to find. I guess thats due to the fact that strong patterns cater to the dancers (maybe this guess couldn't be farther off the truth, i don't know). On the other hand, you don't need to know the frequency relations between to octaves to play them in tune, and you don't have to APPLY mathematics and physics so you can find its traces. just leave them. you internalise the patterns this thread talks about because the meldy is in your hand and your fingers, not because you envisioned the function.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by TMB
Re: How long before it's easy?
Well it's probably true that I am more familiar with diddley music than you, though not as familiar as I could be ... who is? As far as guitars go, I don't play the guitar though I have dabbled in other fretted string instruments, though not for decades. However, I have detailed knowledge of the mechanics of playing the thing I appreciate it's subtleties and strengths while understanding its limitations. And I have no problem in giving you the benefit of doubt that you are adept at overcoming these limitations.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
Okay, TMB, I'm always a sucker for off-topic diversions. At what scale does quantum mechanics cease being a consideration ?
hakanozel hijacked his own thread by saying 'everything is numbers'. Numbers are just a way of counting stuff. I'm sitting here on a chair on a mountain. Not a number to be seen anywhere. I'm picking guitar. No numbers. I can hear birds singing, I don't hear any numbers singing.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
It's daft science fiction isn't it. Like the end of The Matrix when keanu reeves sees the world melting into the matrix code. Does it help to type into a computer screen and visualise all that binary confuguration instead of the letters and words they make up? Does it help to try to understand down to the quantum level what no body understands of what's really going on in the micro chips?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
So, Michael, with a reference back to the previous 'articulation' thread, that guy on youtube above could make Bensusan's 'Merrily kissed the quaker', sound Irish, if he could play the appropriate articulations/ornaments ? But that's not possible to achieve because the Irish slow roll can't work on guitar ? Or maybe you agree with hakanozel that it already sounds like Seamus Ennis ?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Jesus, I wanted to keep it OUT of the thread
The biggest object that has shown quantum attributes in experiment is a single molecule, and a small one for that matter. Now compare this to the size of your instruments
you either play the smallest guitar in the world or you can ignore quantum effects. (would be a great excuse for bum notes tho, "sorry, it wasn't me, it was quantum effects messing with my strings")
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by TMB
Re: How long before it's easy?
Well, TMB, you dipped your toe into the pool full of piranha fishes....
I'm open to correction, because I'm not a physicist, TMB, but I spent some time reading up on quantum stuff recently, and I read in one paper that the upper end of the scale was something like 90 nanometers. That's big for nuclear physicists, but small for the rest of us. But the I also read in another source that the upper limit is amoeba size. That's a lot bigger than a standard human cell. I could well be wrong, but to the extent that I've grasped it, there's no reason that quantum effects would not be relevant on the everyday human scale, other than, we are made of billions of atoms, so, as it only takes one to collapse the probability wave, we appear to have a continuous solid reality. But the more I delved to try and get a clearer view, the more I came up against the 'nobody knows' barrier. There are at least six different interpretations on offer, and they are all very peculiar...
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Yes, it's all about the appropriate articulations, including the subtle stresses and torques in the rhythm, not just the rolls etc.
Though our minds have an ability to recognise stuff when very little of what actually makes up what we are recognising is actually perceived. So yes, it's quite possible to make a guitar recognisably sounding Irish. Just so long as you have enough of the articulations and you are very careful not to clutter it up with ones that aren't in the tradition. Better to leave gaps. In fact, a lot of the traditional sounding articulations are gaps anyway.
So no, the guy in the clip above has a very very long way to go before it even remotely sounds Irish. For a start, most people who play that tune think it's a jig.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: How long before it's easy?
if thats the case, i'll jump in, and pull you in with me
-i was referring to this. but even at amoeba size, the probability of the amoeba reaching such a state (while by definition of the science can't be excluded anyway) is in my amateur knowledge so small that it won't happen to enough cells of your body at the same time to let you feel a difference. but hey, i am a geek, i always love to learn more - but don't mix it up with music, i don't want to hear about physics when i'm playing a tune
the most obvious reason your body is not suffering the effects as a whole probably would be stuff like, you don't look the same when you turn around, you warp, you are dead and alive at the same time, ...
right now i am at a similar state of knowledge, i also read about it (but hopefully this will change when i start studying in october, when you come to vienna, mail me and we'll fight this out over a pint), so pretty much the fact that there are no anomalities in your daily life prove that it doesn't really affect your life. i read about the interference experiment, and allegedly a fulleren (C14) was the biggest mollecule yet to show wave interference, something that would really bother me if my flute was doing it
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by TMB
Re: How long before it's easy?
Good. Thanks, Michael. That's very helpful to me, and it's nice to be in agreement on that area. I'm trying to learn 'Eel in the sink'. It'll take me a long while yet before I begin to be happy with how it sounds, but if/when I think it's moderately well played, I'll ask you and others to tell me everything that's wrong with it, ok ?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Thanks for the offer of a pint in Vienna, TMB. Unfortunately, my quantum ability to be in two places at the same time is not as good as I'd like, otherwise I'd be there now
Yes, I also read about the big C14 molecule. I forgot that one. But we might be collapsing probability wave in our brains, as Penrose suggests, so each instant, we may be 'making' reality out of many (infinite ?) possibilities ?
I really must go and do other things, see ya later
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
I was going to ask this question today. Frustrating lesson yesterday.
1. What are "serious hours of practise" I think Lazyhound referred to? When I get really tight and focused, I don't remember things as well and usually make a bloody mess of my lesson performance.
2. I tend to rush when I am playing (doesn't matter what instrument. As Church Organist, I have a reputation of being able to play a 50 second "Hundredth"). Metronomes and such never have helped. They work great in practice. Forgotten during when it comes time to perform.
3. Short of the obvious normal beta blocker, drugs and alcohol suggestions, does anyone have any techniques they use to calm down?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by zippydw
Re: How long before it's easy?
The question does not mention the "playing" of tunes, only the "learning". A non-player can still learn tunes and could face different problems to someone trying to play all the tunes they have learned.
I have certainly learned more tunes than I have ever played, can learn a tune without ever playing it, and can play a tune out of my head that I have heard before, but never played before.
Isn't it quicker to learn a tune without bothering about playing it? Less to worry about?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by geoffwright
Re: How long before it's easy?
? When I get really tight and focused.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by jig
Re: How long before it's easy?
what
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by jig
Re: How long before it's easy?
do you mean?...
tight?
sorry about the stagered post.... pushed the wrong button [as normal
]
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by jig
Re: How long before it's easy?
Zippy, its all about self control....... controling your fingers etc to play the right notes in the right place.....controling our inclination to 'rush'. controling our muscles and attitude to stay relaxed, aware , loose and cool while the music might be blasting at full pelt......
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by jig
Re: How long before it's easy?
It may never be easy.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by McCracken
Re: How long before it's easy?
Sorry for this slight swerve from the overall thread, but: which remedy for an enlarged prostate feels the most Oirish?
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by NEW Pure Drop® Ear Canal Oil
Re: How long before it's easy?
McFlomax
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by pbassnote
Re: How long before it's easy?
Weighing in on the physics and numbers part of this debate, trying to quantify this music with numbers is useless. Saying that it's all "numbers, intervals, and frequencies" is looking at it the wrong way.
You use those things (numbers, intervals, and frequencies) as an overlay to explain why it sounds like it does, but the music exists outside of that artificial overlay, and trying to put a repeatable structure over it will drive you mad, because the music is way too fluid to be reduced to a kind of formula.
This is a similar debate to the sheet music one. The sheet music is another artificial overlay that can't really describe the full essence of the music. Just as sheet music can be a useful tool, the "numbers" might be useful too. But if you're approaching the music entirely from that direction, you'll never get it.
Learn your tunes by listening to Irish players playing them. Push yourself to do it that way. If you spend your time worrying about the numerical difference in intervals between the 1-2 and 2-3 notes in a jig pattern, you'll never *feel* that interval, and it's going by too fast for your brain to process it as a number or ratio anyway - you *have* to feel it to play it. (And that's not an interval ratio that stays constant, BTW. The tune will drive that interval to change, which is part of what makes this music so beautiful IMO)
If you push yourself, you'll find several jumps and plateaus in both your playing ability, and your ability to learn tunes. (And pretty soon, you'll not feel any need to quantify what you feel)
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by Reverend
Re: How long before it's easy?
Thank you, pbass, and I speak for many.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by NEW Pure Drop® Ear Canal Oil
Re: How long before it's easy?
Having studied jazz guitar for several years myself, I understand where hakanozel is coming from. On a superficial leval he is correct. Understanding the maths of a particular style of music makes it easy to figure out the basics of a style. It is easy to listen to a variety of music and work out what modes etc are used. But to actually play the music with any depth or integrity? That is way beyond maths and requires far greater depth in the study. To state that it all comes down to the maths is to only skim the surface of any style of music.
And as wonderful a guitarist as Bensussan is, that didn't sound Irish to me at all.
# Posted on May 5th 2008 by blah
Re: How long before it's easy?
I am working to transition from an accompanist who plays a few tunes here and there, to a tune player who accompanies a tune here and there. I am finding that, as I approach a hundred or so tunes in my head, that learning new tunes is getting easier. And tunes that I have accompanied, but never learned, are suddenly appearing under my fingers, needing only to be polished up. I am not the greatest musician, but I find that I am better than I ever thought I could be, and have the potential to get even better. So hang in there, keep plugging away, and enjoy the ride!
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by AlBrown
Re: How long before it's easy?
zippydw-
I got this from another site I frequent (trumpetherald.com) ;
Eat three bananas two hours before you play, to avoid the nerves. This must be in conjunction with avoiding caffeine and alcohol; being rested; and of course, thoroughly prepared.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: How long before it's easy?
hakanozel has a good point about music and math/numbers. We've all heard "inspirational" recordings. When it comes right down to it, a CD recording is nothing but zeros and ones.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by pbassnote
Re: How long before it's easy?
Well, gosh, pbassnote. So what *you* hear when you put a CD into the player is zeros and ones ? What do they sound like ? It must be horrid, you poor thing. When I play my CDs I hear wonderful music.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
That is what i wanted to say all along. you can find numbers, if you look for them. But rather than searching vor digits, enjoy the music, the numbers might be there but thinking about them only distracts you from the underlying beauty. (besides wolfbird, i wouldn't want to talk to someone who has already put himself in a superposition
, but wait another couple of hundreds of years and you can use the mechanics to warp over...talking of warp, imagine you wouldn't have to bother about going to a session, at any time jump there, whether in the USA, in japan or in ireland, does that sound desirable or not? i cant decide)
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by TMB
Re: How long before it's easy?
It's when you see someone walking towards you and suddenly recognize that it's you, that's when it can get a little bit spooky, TMB.
You know, an amoeba size object is just at the threshold of what is visible to the naked eye, not so small. Maybe quantum effects are relevant to everyday scale of chairs and tables ?
Seriously, I don't think there's going to be anyone around in a couple of hundred years
http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=97317
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
wolfbird, your sarcasm is loudly apparent, despite the fact that it's really just a bunch of zeros and ones. Actually, I have heard them and seen them as well as I've designed, built, and tested network circuitry. Nothing horrid about it. It is what it is. I am not commenting upon any emotional or spiritual (for lack of a better term) aspect of the music, as I'm here for the same reasons as you - I love the diddley. Music affects most of us on many levels, conscience and subconscience, logical and illogical, perceptive and artistic, organized and chaotic, etc. Music is also temporal, finite, and subject to the same laws of physics as any other natural phenomenon.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by pbassnote
Re: How long before it's easy?
pbassnote, I like to live in the real world. In the real world, music is sound. I thought some of the threads here where people insist that dots on a piece of paper are music, where totally daft, but to insist that music is zeroes and ones is even dafter.
Anyway, there are no zeroes and ones on a CD. It's just sculpted plastic. All that physics is, is a sophisticated mental model, devised to try and describe and measure aspects of reality with a view to explaining phenomena. Compared with the reality it attempts to model, it's merely a trivial human conceit.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Fair enough, wolf.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by pbassnote
Re: How long before it's easy?
Btw, pbassnote, a conscience is the part of the mind that tells you what's good and bad, the thing that causes guilt if you've been a wrong doer. Conscious and subconscious are something very different.
I don't know if you've conceded the point just to avoid an argument, or because you understand the point. Look, to say that 'music is numbers' is like saying that a great theatrical production of Shakespeare's Macbeth is merely Morse code, just because the text could be converted into dots and dashes and sent down a telegraph wire.
If I seem sarcastic or aggressive about this, it's because it really does make me annoyed. Just because my body is made of molecules doesn't mean that's *all* I am. Just because you can count the stars doesn't explain why they exist. The way of thinking which says 'everything is numbers' diminishes what we are, it reduces us, it's demeaning.
It's mistaking the map for the territory, mistaking the pointing finger for the Moon. As Magritte painted, " This is not a pipe!"
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Interesting points, wolfbird. You've continued on where my "artificial overlay" idea left off.
Numbers do not *exist* in the same way that music exists. Numbers themselves are a purely human fabrication to help us explain and control our surroundings, and they're handy for doing that. But the universe existed before numbers were invented.
Music is a purely human fabrication, as well, but it is something that exists in a physical way - sound waves generated by some physical source. But if you think about it as organized sound waves of different frequencies, put together in a recognizable pattern, you're missing the beauty that is there.
When you refer to music on CDs as ones and zeros, you're correct, although, that's not how you experience them. We create machinery that turns them back into very real sound waves that are experienced in a very different way than the ones and zeros.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Reverend
Re: How long before it's easy?
Not quite certain if I'm agreeing with you or not, Reverend, but it's stuff I like to think about anyway...
One part is very straightforward. Music is sound, and by study over centuries it's been established that it's vibrations through air. And the vibrations can be trapped, recorded, transformed and transmitted, recorded and reproduced, etc, etc. I'm really grateful for CDs and computers because the music quality and variety is so much higher fidelity than ever before. And I understand pretty well how it all works. No problem there.
The earlier point, I'm not quite so clear about. I said to Sean Lead Liath the other day, that 'no humans, no numbers' is obvious. But he maintains that numbers exist regardless of humans. I think that's called the Platonic Idealism position, isn't it ? The philosophizing gets heavy in that region, after a couple of millennia of smart people digging it over and over. I think I still hold to the view that numbers do exist, and can only exist, as electro chemical traces in people's brains, part of our modelling equipment. But I'm a bit wobbly on that topic.
But the point which does get me seriously agitated is this: Because we have these fancy brains, which can model reality, we fool ourselves into living inside those models, instead of the glorious raw reality itself. I think it's got a lot to do with cities and pressurized life styles. If I had to spend hours everyday standing up in a crammed tube train, with all the noise and stress, I'd want to live in an internal fantasy rather than real world.
The way I see it, there's many, many ways of modelling reality. It's like mapping a city. You can map the drains, or the roads, or the bus routes, or the pedestrian flows. They're all 'true' in a sense, and have utility, but none of them *are* the actual city.
(Philosophically, it's called perspectivism, I believe)
Same goes for the world, and our selves. We can view our selves using a medical map, or a spiritual map, or a moral map, or a social status map, or a career cv, or whatever. But all those are just different angles of view. Just like you could draw a house as an architectural plan, an isometric projection, or an artist's sketch, or an aerial photo. They're all valid ways of assembling data, according to the job in hand. But the actual house is the actual house, and what it means to you if you've lived in it for a lifetime is way beyond any sort of mapping.
So, what I'm arguing for, is to recognise human dignity, and the miracle of existence on this planet, and avoiding the trap of thinking that says we are 'just' biological machines, or that the world is 'just' a lump of rock in Space...does that make any sense ?
Some folks seem to think this is a dumb mystical nonsense, but I reject that. I like science. I like physics. I check out the physics, which everybody likes so much because it 'explains' what, e.g. music, is....and, well, golly gee, the smartest physicists say it's ALL totally baffling...superpositions, and entanglement, and time travelling backward and forward, and all the rest....there aint no solid foundation, it's an illusion..
So. That's where I'm at !
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
wolfbird, I'd love to hang out with you one day, but I fear we'd get very little music done and spend the time babbling about these philosophical matters.
Better make it two days, one for music one for philosphy.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: How long before it's easy?
You better make it snappy, SWFL, coz I only got the rest of my life and it's pretty much fully booked up...might just be able to spare an afternoon, squeeze you in somehow, yes, howbout, August 17th ? That suit ? August 2015, that'd be...any use ?
just kidding
Thanks for the compliment. Isn't this music a kind of practical applied philosophy ? I believe it is..
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
You know, SWFL, I'm like Buckminster Fuller, I can talk almost non-stop, about everything under the sun, for about four or five days. Then I'm done. That's on topics that's worth talking about. IMO, the most important stuff can't even be said in words. Playing music is a great antidote for too much talking and thinking.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
I think we agree, wolfbird, at least for the most part. But you have a way of putting it more eloquently
I might be able to be convinced that numbers exist without humans, in the sense that the universe (as we understand it) is finite, which makes it inherently numerical. But Math and Physics would not exist as an extension of that reasoning. The world can be explained by physics in a lot of ways, but that's because we developed physics to explain the world.
I agree with you, the physics are there to map the world, not *be* the world. In the same way that musical notation can map the music, but not *be* the music.
And I, too, I like science. I like trying to understand how things work. And I don't mind breaking down the music into formulas and numbers to try to understand it better. But if someone were to approach the music from that direction, instead of from listening to it, and internalizing how it *feels* (to our highly-advanced pattern matching brains), I don't know that they'd ever really get it. We can make computers play music, but even with sampled sounds, and fancy stress programming (like Barfly has) for swing, it still doesn't sound like a human.
And SWFL, count me in on the two day music/philosophy get-together!
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Reverend
Re: How long before it's easy?
I guess it's a concept thing? The fact of one and two exists always? The human concept of calling it one and two is the artifice? Hmm...
...and I nominate my locale if Philoso-Session 08-09 is happening in the Winter, but either of your locales if in the Summer.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: How long before it's easy?
>>I can talk almost non-stop, about everything under the sun, for about four or five days.
OK, Wolf, what do you know about Kombucha?
And DON'T Google it!
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: How long before it's easy?
In answer to the original question, I'm increasingly finding it harder to remember tunes...although once I get started on a tune I can usually get going on it. Must have more Kombucha.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: How long before it's easy?
Kombucha, KML ? I'm gonna vote for him, I like his ideas...
Naah, isn't it that fermented drink, something like vinegar ? Just a guess, seeing as it's pub quiz time
And I didnee google 
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Alien slime fungus you mean? yummy
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by jig
Re: How long before it's easy?
Reverend and SWFL, about the numbers....it's easy for me to visualize how they began, when some guy wanted to know if he'd still got all his sheep, so he matched them, one to one, on his fingers, and every time he used up the fingers, scratched a mark on a stone. That sort of thing. Obviously a very useful discovery.
But when it starts getting weird, is when the philosophers and mathematicians get to work on the subject. If we just invented numbers for our own convenience, how come they suddenly slip out of control and take on a life of their own, with all sorts of strange unexpected properties and patterns ? They are deeply, deeply mysterious...
I mean, it's impossible to calculate an infinite series of numbers, because they go on forever (whatever that means ?) But hang on, you can have an infinite series, and then another infinite series to which you add one. The you've got two infinite series, but they're not the same. One is larger (by one) than the other. Crazy stuff. Does my brain in. Worse than drugs.
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
An infinite series is only infinite in length, not size... It's pretty easy for one to be bigger than the other... Because the digits get infinitely less significant.
What's more mind boggling to me is the report I heard on Paul Harvey the other day about scientists noting some evidence of the soul down at the quantum level, which is inherently timeless... Must do some more research, Mr. Harvey didn't go into much depth
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Reverend
Re: How long before it's easy?
Naah, Reverend...look, you've got two absolutely identical infinite series, doesn't matter about how significant the digits are. You can't say anything about them, except they go on forever. But if you add one digit to one serie, you can, logically, say that it *must* be larger, or longer, than the other. No ? I know it's utterly useless (to me, anyway) but I don't understand, if we invented numbers, why the effing heck do we find crazy things like Pi ?
KML knows all about this stuff. I feel he's duty bound to offer us half an hour of his precious time to a full explanation, I'm sure he's get Godel well sussed...
Paul Harvey ? I'll google...
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Pi can be expressed as an infinite series... But Pi + 1 is still approximately 4.14159, it's easy to note that it is bigger than something that is approximately 3.14159. If you have an infinite series that is expanding exponentially, then it is really the same as infinity, and infinity plus one is infinity...
(Strangely enough, I am wearing a Pi shirt today, that has the Pi symbol written out as digits of Pi...)
Paul Harvey is an old radio news man from Chicago. He has a quirky style of delivering the day's headlines. Not sure what the soul thing was about actually... Googling too...
# Posted on May 6th 2008 by Reverend
Re: How long before it's easy?
http://www.humantruth.info/quantum_soul.html
http://www.shiftinaction.com/discover/luminaries/fred_alan_wolf
http://pw1.netcom.com/~wolfpapers/myarticles/Q&A%20for%20Deepak.pdf
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Perhaps all the interpretations proposed so far are incorrect, but they are all downright bizarre...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_Quantum_Mechanics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
http://www.sfms.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&TEMPLATE=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&SECTION=Article_Archives&CONTENTID=1679
http://www.innerchangemag.com/200802/IC-FebMar08-magazine%2014.pdf
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
This guy sums up what I was attempting to say above, far better than I did :
"An important experiment carried out as recently as summer 1982 by the French physicist, Aspect, has unequivocally demonstrated the fact that physicists cannot get round the Uncertainty Principle and simultaneously determine the quantum states of particles, and confirmed that physicists cannot divorce the consciousness of the observer from the events observed. This experiment (in disproving the separabilty of quantum measurements) has confirmed what Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg were only able to philosophically debate over - that with quantum theory we have to leave behind our naive picture of reality as an intricate clockwork. We are challenged by quantum theory to build new ways in which to picture reality, a physics, moreover, in which consciousness plays a central role, in which the observer is inextricably interwoven in the fabric of reality."
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/quantum.html
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
There are several types of infinity in mathematics. The simplest to get to grips with is the infinity of the integers (the numbers you use to count with). The is called, not surprisingly, "countably infinite". But another one is the infinity of _all_ numbers, including fractions, and other more exotic numbers like the square root of 2 and pi, which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinity of the integers - i.e. we have an infinity which is uncountably infinite and can be simplistically thought of as "bigger" than the countable infinity of integers. And there are other types of mathematical infinities that are even "bigger". Go any further into this topic and you've got to get very serious with set theory (and I don't mean acoustically optimum pub seating arrangements or how you select three tunes that sound good played one after the other).
This is the light relief: some mathematicians have devised different kinds of "zero" that can (again simplistically) be thought of as the reciprocals of the different types of infinity.
Playing the fiddle, flute, guitar or whatever may, and should, get asymptotically easier with time, but this stuff gets exponentially more difficult the more you go into it.
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by lazyhound
Re: How long before it's easy?
Different kinds of zero, lazyhound ? I feel urged to investigate...
I like Leibniz' poetic approach to the character of zero, " a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit - almost an amphibian between being and non-being."
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
I think this guy is mistaken...philosophical conjecture began long before the concepts of zero and infinity...
http://www.chycho.com/?q=Zero_Infinity
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
Wolfbird, I heard about the concept of different zeros during a group tutorial at uni many years ago. The tutor mentioned it in passing when he was talking about Cantor's continuum hypothesis, but I never followed it up (no internet in those days!).
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by lazyhound
Re: How long before it's easy?
Thanks, lazyhound. I guess it figures. If there can be different infinities, there can be different zeros
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: How long before it's easy?
The answer is 42.
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by AlBrown
Re: How long before it's easy?
I think that the breakthrough in terms of learning tunes comes when you start to play them regularly in session with others. Everyone has their individual way of playing the same tune and if you really know the tune in your head then you can carry on with it while others play their version. With the noise and musical distraction going on, you don't have as much of a chance to hear what you're playing so it can be a great test of your muscle memory ;)
To get to that stage unfortunately took me about 2 years, topped by a final 3 months of solid 6-8 hours a day practice with a few sessions a week thrown in for good measure. After that I could pick up the bones of a tune and play it without any practice 'cause my fingers just knew where the tune was without me really having to think about it.
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by biccy
Re: How long before it's easy?
Good point, biccy. I agree that starting to get out in sessions is something that can generate a great jump in ability. Which is why I encourage people to do just that even before they feel they're "ready", because you're never going to *be* ready until you get out and do it.
(I'm not suggesting that you get out to sessions if you only play 3 tunes poorly, but once you have at least a small stable of tunes, playing them with other people is key! For me, just the sheer embarrassment of how bad I was when I was first going to sessions was motivation to work at it too...)
# Posted on May 7th 2008 by Reverend