Saturday, June 26, 2004
Reading in the Dark
In Waking Life, one of the characters repeats the truism that there are two things you can't do in a dream: read, and switch the lights out. I don't know about the latter; I've never really been concerned with light sources in my dreams - however, up until a few nights ago I've had the stereotypical inability to read.
In this dream I was renting a seaside cottage, and there was a harmonium (or some kind of keyboard that I called a harmonium) with sheet music on it, which I sat down and started playing without any difficulty. I distinctly remember looking at the notes and making the correlation between them and what my hands should be doing. (The piece itself wasn't particularly earth-shattering - some garbled recollection of English Country Garden, I think.)
Reading/writing music is an entirely different animal than reading/writing text based on spoken language. While both can be said to convey ideas, they do so in fundamentally different ways. In natural language writing, a symbol or collection of symbols represents a word, and a word has a meaning. In alphabetic systems, the reader usually doesn't work out the sound of the word from the letters, except for the first time s/he encounters it. A relatively small subset of punctuation gives the reader an approximate idea of how it might be read aloud.
Musical notation - the Western kind; I'm not familiar with other forms, but expect they'd withstand the same argument - is an algoritm for a musician or group of musicians to re-create a musical performance. It describes the how - pitch, duration, articulation, volume - to a degree that would be not only annoying but useless in a novel. Very few people can pick up an orchestral score and just read it - I supsect those who can are simply running the algorithm on a virtual orchestra in their heads. The unplayed score converys no meaning. This must have something to do with why I can read music in my sleep.
Rashofolk
If anyone actually reads this blog, and is wondering what's going on with the spam-bourne rumor I ranted about yesterday: Carron has sort of confirmed it, and a board member has kind of denied it, so now I have three contradictory versions of what's going on in this tempest in a coffeehouse.
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In Waking Life, one of the characters repeats the truism that there are two things you can't do in a dream: read, and switch the lights out. I don't know about the latter; I've never really been concerned with light sources in my dreams - however, up until a few nights ago I've had the stereotypical inability to read.
In this dream I was renting a seaside cottage, and there was a harmonium (or some kind of keyboard that I called a harmonium) with sheet music on it, which I sat down and started playing without any difficulty. I distinctly remember looking at the notes and making the correlation between them and what my hands should be doing. (The piece itself wasn't particularly earth-shattering - some garbled recollection of English Country Garden, I think.)
Reading/writing music is an entirely different animal than reading/writing text based on spoken language. While both can be said to convey ideas, they do so in fundamentally different ways. In natural language writing, a symbol or collection of symbols represents a word, and a word has a meaning. In alphabetic systems, the reader usually doesn't work out the sound of the word from the letters, except for the first time s/he encounters it. A relatively small subset of punctuation gives the reader an approximate idea of how it might be read aloud.
Musical notation - the Western kind; I'm not familiar with other forms, but expect they'd withstand the same argument - is an algoritm for a musician or group of musicians to re-create a musical performance. It describes the how - pitch, duration, articulation, volume - to a degree that would be not only annoying but useless in a novel. Very few people can pick up an orchestral score and just read it - I supsect those who can are simply running the algorithm on a virtual orchestra in their heads. The unplayed score converys no meaning. This must have something to do with why I can read music in my sleep.
Rashofolk
If anyone actually reads this blog, and is wondering what's going on with the spam-bourne rumor I ranted about yesterday: Carron has sort of confirmed it, and a board member has kind of denied it, so now I have three contradictory versions of what's going on in this tempest in a coffeehouse.
0 comments
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