When I was a kid we played games with our friends -- by snail mail.
Ummmmmmmmmm, that's not a joke.
KFG
Re:Who says older folks don't play games?
on
Gaming When We're 64
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What's more, who says older people lose dexterity?
I play with musicians in their sixties on a regular basis and sometimes with musicians in their seventies and eighties. I wish some of them would lose some damned dexterity so I could bloody well keep up. I've also noted that a piano accordian is more complicated and has more damned buttons on it than any game controller I've ever seen (although the controller sounds better); and if you want a complicated "controller" just have a look at an Irish pipe player, pumping the bellows with one arm, squeezing the bag with the other, fingering the pipe itself, hitting regulator keys, stopping the end of the pipe against his knee while the other leg stomps time.
Don't you know how the old saying goes?
Use it or lose it.
You don't lose dexterity when you get old, you lose it when you quit.
"Doctor, doctor, I lose dexterity when I don't go like this!" Figure out the rest on your own.
Two groups of people were the first to exploit the personal computer for business reasons (after the computer hobbiests themselves):
Accountants and farmers. Farming is an applied science and its products are market commodities. When the back country Laotian rice farmers were asked what they really needed to make their lives easier they asked for Internet access, so that they could track markets and get the best price for their crops, which would otherwise allow them to help themselves with their own money.
Oh, and while my mother grew up on a legitimate commercial farm (destroyed by hurricane; twice) I'm just a small scale subsistence farmer, plus whatever for some friends.
. . . there exist several good reasons why this tradition has survived a couple thousand years of city building.
Cario/Memphis, Paris and London are all inland. Originally only expendable docks and sheds were built on the riverfront. The houses were all built on the tops of the hills, with the agrgicultural lands on the flood plain between.
. ..where you live that is so free from any sort of natural disadvantages that our tax dollars do not go towards mitigating?
Despite the Army Corps of Engineers expending a good deal of money on flood control I lost all of my crops to flood this year. Not sure about future years, as my soil spent several days soaking in toxic waste. Tax dollars were spent to pump out my land as a potential health hazard to the public.
On the other hand, although I lost my crops which were planted on the rich soils of the flood plain (originally deposited before the invention of toxic waste vats), my house remained safe and untouched, because. . .
Yes, that's right, it was built at the top of the hill more than 100 years ago by people who were rather wiser than the people who built the newer houses I had to go help neighbors out of, by boat.
That all said, the vast majority of classical music only uses the standard 12 tones. ..
Exactly. Twelve tones, defined by intervals, not twelve absolute pitches. Absolute pitch is an idea that didn't really get a leg under it until the mid 1800s and wasn't, more or less (the French, as always, have their own ideas), settled until well into the 20th century.
Before that time any two musicians getting together to play would first have to negotiate pitch; and would have to be comfortable with any reference chosen. They played intervals, not pitches. "Perfect" pitch, in the modern sense, was a nonexistant concept.
Even the sense of interval was different before equal temperament was negoatiated as a cultural norm. The better string players still understand this and will play different tones when playing with each other or when accompanying a singer than they do when playing with a piano/orchestra. In fact, what they will be doing is playing their intervals in tune, rather than the slightly out of the piano.
The modern practice of practicing intonation against a digital tuner is putting the final nail in that coffin though. When done without understanding it is evil.
However, in some sort of vague support of your thesis I will note that most musicians do not need to spend four lifetimes learning all of music theory. Several evenings will generally suffice to learn 90% of what they need to know just to play any particular genre.
And they'll find 90% of that in the single volume (no matter their instrument): How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons. A truely wonderful book that everyone seeking to learn music really ought to read (despite its title) at the very beginning.
I might also point out (in fact, I will) that perfect pitch isn't even necessarily desirable. In most people it actually limits their musical development, psychologically, because perfect pitches are arbitrary, but they think of tones as being "right" or "wrong."
I teach mostly adults who are already performing professionally. I "tune them up" and take them to the next level, or introduce them to another genre/style of music. This typically takes the form of teaching a classically trained musician a traditional form, many of them so ancient that the theoretical base of them predates even Pythagorean music theory (Irish music, for example, is primarily Pythagorean, with undertones of older systems. This is why the fiddle is so popular in Irish music. It can play any tone. A piano, by it's very nature, cannot properly play Irish music, because it can only play "perfect" notes).
I hate teaching traditional music to people with "perfect" pitch.
They can't even hear the notes they need to play.
I have to teach them how. The process is fairly straightforward, but time consuming; exposure and practice. Just like for anything else.
Sure, it can be taught, but it also requires a LOT of practice.
Every learned behavior requires practice. That's what learning is.
You're at a major disadvantage if you haven't had serious analytic (read: performance, or learning to tell in-tune from out-of-tune) exposure to sound.
You are shit out of luck if you haven't been exposed to sound, because perfect pitch is memorization of manmade arbitrary divisions of sound. You have to learn them. You can't learn what you haven't been exposed to and innate perfect pitch is inherently impossible.
Once exposed, you learn. With this caveat, the wiring in the brain changes as you mature. If you haven't been exposed to musical sound before you are in your late teen/early twenties you are really shit out of luck, although with a lot of hard work you can still make some progress.
I'm afraid I read your post as a tautology based on missunderstanding both learning and music itself.
Every one of them had perfect pitch but they were never taught it.
I didn't say it had to be taught. I said it could be, because it is learned. No child has perfect pitch, they don't even know what pitch is, because pitch is culturally assigned arbitrary value, like the meaning of a alphabet letter. Perfect pitch is just memory, just like learning the alphabet is just memory.
And no one taught me to read, but trust me, I had to learn how. I wasn't born just knowing it. Similarly I play every catagory of instrument but double reeds (because I've never even held a double reed instrument. I'll have to do something about that). I also taught myself to read music. I was only taught one instrument, just enough to get me started. I just learned the rest. I was a prodigy. Performing for audiences when I was six.
Neither I nor these autistic kids are superhuman. We are, by definition, working fully within human capacity. And I can teach this capacity. In fact, I teach autistic kids.
You are doing exactly as the authors of the article say, taking anecdotal evidence of precociousness and extrapolating that into a falacy; and if you can simply tell one note from another (and I've had students who couldn't do that; at first) and hit one piano key; and then another, I can teach you how to play piano; and play it well. As the book How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons notes, you cannot help but learn to play piano. It "just happens." Any action you repeat, you learn. Period.
Denying that genetics and nature have something to do with it all is simply being in denial yourself.
I haven't done any such thing. I even noted a genetic difference that limits "ability."
In any event, the point I'm trying to make is that I believe that all of our brains are wired somewhat differently and sometimes that wiring enables certain abilities or enhances them.
And one of the reasons I haven't done any such thing is because I'm in no position to deny it. I can dance, but I cannot dance called dances, because I lack the normal ability to differentiate right from left. I have no "talent" for called dances.
But that is because there is actually something wrong with me. My wiring is not just different, it is, in some manner, broken. I'm not talking about broken people. I'm talking about "normal" people.
Normal people are all wired different, but they're all wired different the same. Like snowflakes. They're all different, but they cannot help but all have the same underlying structure, otherwise they wouldn't be snowflakes. In fact, they're not wired different, but the same as dogs. The similarities dwarf the differences.
And any normal dog can be taught to play a keyboard.
And remember, whatever you do, do not use what you have just learned here to remap your collegue's keyboard when goes out for lunch. It would cause him a certain amount of consternation, especially if he isn't the sort that would know about these things.
Maximum effect is actually obtained by only changing a few keys, not just messing everything up.
But remember, if anyone should ask where you got the idea, I specifically said "do not."
. ..does it really deserve such extreme aggressive measures to punish the guilty?
Maybe, maybe not, but then they aren't punishing the guilty. They're punishing the guilty's parents without any real probable cause for believing the bars are actually on the property.
The parents claim that they're buried in the White Mountains somewhere not only sounds reasonable, but probable.
Oh, hey! I've got relatives in North Conway I can stay with. Hands off Washington, Jefferson and Monroe people. I claim them. They're mine! Mine! All mine! I'm a greedy little miser.
Take away all income and possessions until the debt is paid.
Someone didn't read the article. His income was from spamming and the only siezable possessions are a used cop car (whereabouts unknown) and . . .
. ..gold and platinum bars, because. . .
He now either has the choice of living in povery. ..
He has already made that choice. For some reason he just likes the idea of living in poverty with gold and platinum buried somewhere. Makes him feel comfy or something just knowing it's there while he's eating cold Kraft macaroni and cheese in the back seat of his used cop car, down by the Connecticut River.
Can a failure of will be a success of imagination, a complete lack of willingness to do the same boring repetitious task, over and over and ad nauseam.
I attached no morality to what I said. Choices are individual.
Personally I'm no fan of Knute Rockne. I'll take Stirling Moss, who actually gave away a world driving championship through an act of sportsmanship (it cost him a point. He lost by half a point), any day of the week.
But if you want to play violin the path is spending hours a day with a willingness to do the same boring repetitious task, over and over ad nauseam, because it isn't a question of talent, it's a question of patterning.
But the pay off is to actually be able to play violin. And that repetition is a form of meditation if you do it right.
And if you just want to goof off it's no nevermind to me. I think I'm pretty good at that one myself. It's just that if there is something I'd like to be good at, and I'm not, I know it's because I chose to goof off rather than become good at it, not because I lack "talent."
And a considerable amount of "goofing off" is damn good for you. Christ Almighty I wish someone would take the Calvinist work ethic out and shoot it right between the eyes.
I've got to ask, are you a Paul Deem in anything. ..
Posting to Slashdot, obviously.
KFG
Re:Partial credit
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
. ..four lifetimes would not suffice to learn all of music theory.
But this is also equally true for everyone; and the one who works at it the most will learn the most.
Of course learning properly also helps. Did you learn theory from a book at the piano/guitar; or did you sit down with a koto (or better yet a gu zheng, more strings) and meter stick and actually try to tune it by physical measurement and by ear?
You'll learn more about temperament that way in a couple of weeks than the average music student learns in a decade by modern methods. It might even disabuse you of the notion that there are "right" and "wrong" notes, merely consonant and dissonant intervals; and even some of those are a matter of cultural training.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a kid we played games with our friends -- by snail mail.
Ummmmmmmmmm, that's not a joke.
KFG
What's more, who says older people lose dexterity?
I play with musicians in their sixties on a regular basis and sometimes with musicians in their seventies and eighties. I wish some of them would lose some damned dexterity so I could bloody well keep up. I've also noted that a piano accordian is more complicated and has more damned buttons on it than any game controller I've ever seen (although the controller sounds better); and if you want a complicated "controller" just have a look at an Irish pipe player, pumping the bellows with one arm, squeezing the bag with the other, fingering the pipe itself, hitting regulator keys, stopping the end of the pipe against his knee while the other leg stomps time.
Don't you know how the old saying goes?
Use it or lose it.
You don't lose dexterity when you get old, you lose it when you quit.
"Doctor, doctor, I lose dexterity when I don't go like this!" Figure out the rest on your own.
KFG
. . .all you iPod junkies, get a fucking detox.
Does the detox support vorbis?
KFG
. . .[Linux] will always be catching up.
Ironically, this is because Windows and OSX are plots to take over the world; whereas Linux is just an operating system.
KFG
A farmer....on /.????
Two groups of people were the first to exploit the personal computer for business reasons (after the computer hobbiests themselves):
Accountants and farmers. Farming is an applied science and its products are market commodities. When the back country Laotian rice farmers were asked what they really needed to make their lives easier they asked for Internet access, so that they could track markets and get the best price for their crops, which would otherwise allow them to help themselves with their own money.
Oh, and while my mother grew up on a legitimate commercial farm (destroyed by hurricane; twice) I'm just a small scale subsistence farmer, plus whatever for some friends.
KFG
Blowing up a plane is a one-time deal but scaring people. . .
.is why, I believe, they call it "terrorism."
. .
KFG
. . . there exist several good reasons why this tradition has survived a couple thousand years of city building.
.where you live that is so free from any sort of natural disadvantages that our tax dollars do not go towards mitigating?
Cario/Memphis, Paris and London are all inland. Originally only expendable docks and sheds were built on the riverfront. The houses were all built on the tops of the hills, with the agrgicultural lands on the flood plain between.
. .
Despite the Army Corps of Engineers expending a good deal of money on flood control I lost all of my crops to flood this year. Not sure about future years, as my soil spent several days soaking in toxic waste. Tax dollars were spent to pump out my land as a potential health hazard to the public.
On the other hand, although I lost my crops which were planted on the rich soils of the flood plain (originally deposited before the invention of toxic waste vats), my house remained safe and untouched, because. . .
Yes, that's right, it was built at the top of the hill more than 100 years ago by people who were rather wiser than the people who built the newer houses I had to go help neighbors out of, by boat.
KFG
. . . you should go tell those Japanese to abandon their tiny island country so that the next earthquakes won't destroy their lives. . .
Actually, they tried that a while ago and we told them to knock it off.
KFG
That all said, the vast majority of classical music only uses the standard 12 tones. . .
Exactly. Twelve tones, defined by intervals, not twelve absolute pitches. Absolute pitch is an idea that didn't really get a leg under it until the mid 1800s and wasn't, more or less (the French, as always, have their own ideas), settled until well into the 20th century.
Before that time any two musicians getting together to play would first have to negotiate pitch; and would have to be comfortable with any reference chosen. They played intervals, not pitches. "Perfect" pitch, in the modern sense, was a nonexistant concept.
Even the sense of interval was different before equal temperament was negoatiated as a cultural norm. The better string players still understand this and will play different tones when playing with each other or when accompanying a singer than they do when playing with a piano/orchestra. In fact, what they will be doing is playing their intervals in tune, rather than the slightly out of the piano.
The modern practice of practicing intonation against a digital tuner is putting the final nail in that coffin though. When done without understanding it is evil.
However, in some sort of vague support of your thesis I will note that most musicians do not need to spend four lifetimes learning all of music theory. Several evenings will generally suffice to learn 90% of what they need to know just to play any particular genre.
And they'll find 90% of that in the single volume (no matter their instrument): How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons. A truely wonderful book that everyone seeking to learn music really ought to read (despite its title) at the very beginning.
KFG
The guy seems to think that the stagnation of the UI is an entirely bad thing.
That's because he lacks a sense of the history of human/tool interfaces. Perhaps he should take a course.
KFG
I might also point out (in fact, I will) that perfect pitch isn't even necessarily desirable. In most people it actually limits their musical development, psychologically, because perfect pitches are arbitrary, but they think of tones as being "right" or "wrong."
I teach mostly adults who are already performing professionally. I "tune them up" and take them to the next level, or introduce them to another genre/style of music. This typically takes the form of teaching a classically trained musician a traditional form, many of them so ancient that the theoretical base of them predates even Pythagorean music theory (Irish music, for example, is primarily Pythagorean, with undertones of older systems. This is why the fiddle is so popular in Irish music. It can play any tone. A piano, by it's very nature, cannot properly play Irish music, because it can only play "perfect" notes).
I hate teaching traditional music to people with "perfect" pitch.
They can't even hear the notes they need to play.
I have to teach them how. The process is fairly straightforward, but time consuming; exposure and practice. Just like for anything else.
KFG
Sure, it can be taught, but it also requires a LOT of practice.
Every learned behavior requires practice. That's what learning is.
You're at a major disadvantage if you haven't had serious analytic (read: performance, or learning to tell in-tune from out-of-tune) exposure to sound.
You are shit out of luck if you haven't been exposed to sound, because perfect pitch is memorization of manmade arbitrary divisions of sound. You have to learn them. You can't learn what you haven't been exposed to and innate perfect pitch is inherently impossible.
Once exposed, you learn. With this caveat, the wiring in the brain changes as you mature. If you haven't been exposed to musical sound before you are in your late teen/early twenties you are really shit out of luck, although with a lot of hard work you can still make some progress.
I'm afraid I read your post as a tautology based on missunderstanding both learning and music itself.
KFG
In argument against me, I obviously have no talent for closing tags.
KFG
Every one of them had perfect pitch but they were never taught it.
I didn't say it had to be taught. I said it could be, because it is learned. No child has perfect pitch, they don't even know what pitch is, because pitch is culturally assigned arbitrary value, like the meaning of a alphabet letter. Perfect pitch is just memory, just like learning the alphabet is just memory.
And no one taught me to read, but trust me, I had to learn how. I wasn't born just knowing it. Similarly I play every catagory of instrument but double reeds (because I've never even held a double reed instrument. I'll have to do something about that). I also taught myself to read music. I was only taught one instrument, just enough to get me started. I just learned the rest. I was a prodigy. Performing for audiences when I was six.
Neither I nor these autistic kids are superhuman. We are, by definition, working fully within human capacity. And I can teach this capacity. In fact, I teach autistic kids.
You are doing exactly as the authors of the article say, taking anecdotal evidence of precociousness and extrapolating that into a falacy; and if you can simply tell one note from another (and I've had students who couldn't do that; at first) and hit one piano key; and then another, I can teach you how to play piano; and play it well. As the book How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons notes, you cannot help but learn to play piano. It "just happens." Any action you repeat, you learn. Period.
Denying that genetics and nature have something to do with it all is simply being in denial yourself.
I haven't done any such thing. I even noted a genetic difference that limits "ability."
In any event, the point I'm trying to make is that I believe that all of our brains are wired somewhat differently and sometimes that wiring enables certain abilities or enhances them.
And one of the reasons I haven't done any such thing is because I'm in no position to deny it. I can dance, but I cannot dance called dances, because I lack the normal ability to differentiate right from left. I have no "talent" for called dances.
But that is because there is actually something wrong with me. My wiring is not just different, it is, in some manner, broken. I'm not talking about broken people. I'm talking about "normal" people.
Normal people are all wired different, but they're all wired different the same. Like snowflakes. They're all different, but they cannot help but all have the same underlying structure, otherwise they wouldn't be snowflakes. In fact, they're not wired different, but the same as dogs. The similarities dwarf the differences.
And any normal dog can be taught to play a keyboard.
KFG
And remember, whatever you do, do not use what you have just learned here to remap your collegue's keyboard when goes out for lunch. It would cause him a certain amount of consternation, especially if he isn't the sort that would know about these things.
Maximum effect is actually obtained by only changing a few keys, not just messing everything up.
But remember, if anyone should ask where you got the idea, I specifically said "do not."
KFG
Perfect pitch is learned, not innate. Since it is learned, it can be taught.
.she will be the first to admit that here sister is much better naturally and it really pisses her off.
. .
Would this be the younger one?
KFG
By the way, its spelled Juilliard.
You are, of course, correct. Mea Culpa. I can't spell worth crap, but I do generally try to make the effort for proper nouns.
KFG
...just classify those other things as whatever you want to call them.
I'm still holding out for "Big Ass Round Things." The acronym is a bit troubling though and I don't think calling them BARTons will help.
KFG
Are they trying to set a record for stuipd things in a month?
Well, the RIAA sued a dead person. Being number two I guess they feel they have to try harder.
KFG
. . .does it really deserve such extreme aggressive measures to punish the guilty?
Maybe, maybe not, but then they aren't punishing the guilty. They're punishing the guilty's parents without any real probable cause for believing the bars are actually on the property.
The parents claim that they're buried in the White Mountains somewhere not only sounds reasonable, but probable.
Oh, hey! I've got relatives in North Conway I can stay with. Hands off Washington, Jefferson and Monroe people. I claim them. They're mine! Mine! All mine! I'm a greedy little miser.
KFG
Take away all income and possessions until the debt is paid.
.gold and platinum bars, because. . .
.
Someone didn't read the article. His income was from spamming and the only siezable possessions are a used cop car (whereabouts unknown) and . . .
. .
He now either has the choice of living in povery. .
He has already made that choice. For some reason he just likes the idea of living in poverty with gold and platinum buried somewhere. Makes him feel comfy or something just knowing it's there while he's eating cold Kraft macaroni and cheese in the back seat of his used cop car, down by the Connecticut River.
KFG
AOL could be made sure to fix any damage the do (grass, trees, etc)..
Have you ever tried to "fix" a tree with a bulldozer?
KFG
Can a failure of will be a success of imagination, a complete lack of willingness to do the same boring repetitious task, over and over and ad nauseam.
I attached no morality to what I said. Choices are individual.
Personally I'm no fan of Knute Rockne. I'll take Stirling Moss, who actually gave away a world driving championship through an act of sportsmanship (it cost him a point. He lost by half a point), any day of the week.
But if you want to play violin the path is spending hours a day with a willingness to do the same boring repetitious task, over and over ad nauseam, because it isn't a question of talent, it's a question of patterning.
But the pay off is to actually be able to play violin. And that repetition is a form of meditation if you do it right.
And if you just want to goof off it's no nevermind to me. I think I'm pretty good at that one myself. It's just that if there is something I'd like to be good at, and I'm not, I know it's because I chose to goof off rather than become good at it, not because I lack "talent."
And a considerable amount of "goofing off" is damn good for you. Christ Almighty I wish someone would take the Calvinist work ethic out and shoot it right between the eyes.
KFG
I've got to ask, are you a Paul Deem in anything. . .
Posting to Slashdot, obviously.
KFG
. . .four lifetimes would not suffice to learn all of music theory.
But this is also equally true for everyone; and the one who works at it the most will learn the most.
Of course learning properly also helps. Did you learn theory from a book at the piano/guitar; or did you sit down with a koto (or better yet a gu zheng, more strings) and meter stick and actually try to tune it by physical measurement and by ear?
You'll learn more about temperament that way in a couple of weeks than the average music student learns in a decade by modern methods. It might even disabuse you of the notion that there are "right" and "wrong" notes, merely consonant and dissonant intervals; and even some of those are a matter of cultural training.
KFG