I think I'm misunderstanding something, but isn't it true that to write an encrypted dvd requires some sort of specialized equipment, that isn't easy to come by (in order to write the decryption key to the disc)?
If so, DeCSS COULD be handy for small-time piraters without this equipment, since they could decrypt the movie and write the decrypted version to a disc - not requiring the key, and therefore using any old dvd writer...
I assume the learned masses of/. haven't overlooked something so basic, but where am I going wrong?
(note that this doesn't invalidate most of the arguments against these lawsuits either way, since it seems there are many other things wrong with it)
I think it's good to say that intelligence (as you're attempting to measure it) won't be biased for people of a particular language.
However, language in a general sense is a big part of intelligence. To ignore it, and still say the test measures "intelligence" seems to be somewhat inaccurate. And we all know how accurate IQ tests are...
hey - I've got a 386 with 4 MB of ram sitting on my desk right now! I'm playing through ultima V again, and it just doesn't work as well on faster computers, even moslo'ed.
However, I would like to be using freedos instead of MSdos. They could definitely do a few things to make it better:
- smaller memory footprint I remember spending COUNTLESS hours trying to squeeze out a few more bytes of conventional memory for wing commander 2 on my 386. (or was it 1?) Simple efficiency could help, and allow loading a few more TSRs (smartdrive, etc...) that really help with the slow computers. Not to mention mouse drivers, sound card drivers, etc...
- Better shell If bash could be made to run instead of command.com, the world would be a better place. Even a stripped down version would be nice, as long as it had the scripting language, and filename completion, and maybe a few other things.
- Slowdown utility That's probably way beyond what you need for it, but I'm thinking something that could make your athlon system run at the speed of a 386, or a 486, for use with old games. I don't know how feasible this is - I know there are programs like moslo, and at-slow, but they aren't ideal, and don't work flawlessly. Something built into the OS might be able to do more... though it's only a guess, since I don't really know anything about that sort of thing.
Won't the Nielsen ratings apply just as much to shows watched online?
Perhaps they'd need to change the format of some of the questions, but I don't know - I've never been polled for that sort of thing, and it's been almost a year since I watched any tv at all! (and I don't miss it one bit... Slashdot's better than any soap!)
How DO tv channels know how many people are seeing their ads? It seems to me a HUGE amount of guesswork would necessarily be involved in any case.
Also, for now, you can get a much better picture quality by using a real tv, so if you're watching tv on the net, you're probably there on top of any estimate they might make.
Unfortunately, screens ARE shrunk to add ads, though usually only in the credits. This isn't quite the same, since it's the original broadcaster that's doing it, but I wonder how the people feel that sold the show to that broadcaster?
The funny thing is, that happens with cable too - I distinctly remember watching something at a friends house that regularly had ads for some detroit lawyer (the good, smart lawyer! - cracks me up everytime...) even though we were in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Canada) at the time.
But how do they know who's watching? And how does this change that? Of course, they can say "there are 6 million people that can receive this broadcast" but how many of those even have TV's, let alone watch that particular station?
Just out of curiosity, why does everyone say this is Pratchett's book? Gaiman wrote it too! In fact, I even found Gaiman's style to be the dominant one here. Though perhaps that's simply because he's the author that i prefer, of the two.
In any case, few will disagree that the two VERY different styles of writing - the silly Pratchett and the dark Gaiman - mesh incredibly well. It actually managed to be a scary comedy.
Just wanted to clarify that this ISN'T just another Discworld novel, but much more.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Terry Pratchett either - I think his stuff is funny, but doesn't hang together to make a very good novel. It always ends up sounding a bit more like stand up comedy...
However, in Good Omens, the combination of Pratchett's wanton silliness, and Gaiman's unbelievable style and storytelling combine to create an incredible book. Even if you don't much like Pratchett, I recommend you read this - I personally found it had more in common stylistically with Sandman than Discworld.
I think the difference is that most of the best comics these days are being put up on the web, and the artists aren't getting paid for it (at least not much...)
yowch!!! this is an awful idea! Persoanlly, I get about half my mail from people I don't even know - people reading a post on slashdot or newsgroups, mailing lists, etc...
Also, what if someone's address changes? How do they tell you about it?
It's a big question whether the aesthetics of music have anything at all to do with real life experiences, though. In Hanslick's book "On the musically beautiful" (several translations with different titles exist) he puts forth the argument that music actually has little to do with any "normal" emotion. He talks about "musical feeling", as a sort of underlying emotion, but not anything specific - not love, of fear, or anger, or anything. More of a sort of building, exciting, slow, fast, loud soft - of FEELING though. Not just of music.
In that view (which I vaguely share, with some undecided reservations) any concrete emotions that are found in a piece of music are purely programmatic elements that don't come from the music, but from somewhere else. The two might coincide and work together (and should, if the music is based on a program of any type) but the music itself doesn't.
I think that some music does manage to produce concrete emotions - that's pretty hard to argue against! But I can see how those emotions would be a result of cultural and personal associations, rather than anythign actually in the music. Even the association with minor keys being sad is, in some cultures, completely reversed. For example, in most medieval and renaissance music, the dorian mode (rather similar to our minor) is generally used in happy music. It can be hard to think of it as anything other than sad now though, simply because we've been conditioned by all the sad tunes written in minor keys.
I'd like to try some experiments with listening to programmatic music that is supposed to be very emotional, but without any idea of the program - listen to it as completely abstract music, and see if I can guess the emotions that it's aiming for - and more importantly, if I feel them without referring to the program in any way. Maybe there's a paper in that somewhere....
I agree with you for the most part, but there are a few details that I'll nitpick:
First of all, you talk of the "psychoacoustic" being the primary reason that most people appreciate music. I don't really buy that. I think it has more to do with social conditioning, just like any other trends. How else can you account for the extraordinary variety in popular music in the past 100 years, let alone the past 1000?
I do think that psychoacoustic effects are there, but on a much lower level. For most people, it really doesn't matter.
Your second point about "aesthetic relation" doesn't seem quite accurate either. It assumes all (most anyway) music is programmatic, but in actual fact, huge amounts of it aren't. Granted, there aren't too many popular instrumentals these days, but with many tunes, the voice really isn't telling the same story as the music.
The third notion, of "technical merits" seems closer to accurate, as long as we're talking of compositional technique. Most people don't notice/care about that sort of thing. However, with performance technique, I think most people are more likely respond to something flashy. More than scholars anyway, who typically want something "deeper" (not that the two are exclusive, of course).
BTW - personally, I love Mingus, like Schoenberg much more than most of his followers, and really enjoy a lot of his music, but just can't get into Coltrane.. I am getting better though - each time I hear a bit more in his playing. But still not NEARLY as much as Sonny Rollins, or Charlie Parker...
I sorta see what you mean then. But there remains the question of whether "mathematically perfect" has anything at all to do with "musically perfect". Myself, I really doubt it. Typically, perfection in music is boring. For example, you might think that always playing it tune is a good thing. But many composers' music sound much better in temperaments in which some chords are VERY noticeably out of tune. Meantone temperaments, which were commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries are quite unusable in some keys. But composers took that into account and wrote so that the out-of-tune chords were SUPPOSED to sound harsh.
Many people analyze music based on ideas of tension and resolution. With mathematically perfect sounds, there is NO tension. Unless you use the math to determine large scale forms, and leave the tension to the small subtleties. Some people would argue that the same tension release needs to be present in large forms as well though....
If a "pure" sound did have some effect, I don't think it would be at all the same as a typically musical effect.
I don't really agree there. Yes, risks need to be taken, and always playing within the bounds is a bad thing. But when you step outside of the bounds and screw up, it's not GOOD. The good thing is that you're willing to go right to the edge, and that you know where it is.
People do make mistakes. I think that they can be overlooked though, as long as the parts that are RIGHT are powerful enough to carry it along, and make the mistakes irrelevant. But I find it hard to believe that it's the mistakes that make music good. I think if you play an unbelivably great performance, with one wrong note, fixing that note would make it even better - as long as it's not at the expense of the rest.
A great performance feels like riding a bicycle along a tightrope - you know you SHOULD be falling flat, but you keep going and push through. If you stop to think about it... well, there'd better be a net there.:)
*SOMEBODY* doesn't listen to much classical music! Seriously, classical music would, IMHO, be even harder to simulate than jazz or rock, etc, because the variation, and interpretation is there to no smaller extent - it's just focused on (generally) more subtle things. Anyone who plays classical music has been criticized for playing to mechanically, true. But that's because they were doing a bad job at it at the time.
Personally, from what music teaching I've done, I think this would be a bad idea. Already, people do too much mimicking in the early years, and not enough exploring, figuring out and UNDERSTANDING. I think students (and professionals!) would be better off using the same tools you did to get a square, bland, "perfect" performance if they needed something like that. Then they wouldn't be stuck repeated the exact same interpretation as everyone else. I'm constantly encouraging people to NOT listen to recordings of pieces that they want to learn soon, because then they'll be stuck doing the same thing as the other performer in most cases. You end up with karaoke, where the performers have to do everything the same as on the CD in order to not get lost.
Why jazz and not classical? Or rock? Or anything else? Why does jazz have to be the only music? Of course, jazz is the only music these days that's consistently improvised, but that's certainly not true historically. In fact, a typical jazz "improvisation" has much more pre-existing material than many typical "classical" methods like those described in millions of French tutors on unmeasured preludes (c. 1700) and CPE Bach's "Essay on the Art of playing Keybaord instruments" (I hope I got the title right). In fact, it seems to me, that a common renaissance practise was for instrumentalists to jam with nothing more than a repeating bass line - no chords, no rhythms, nothing at all planned ahead of time. Anyway, just my little bit of ranting about the current state of improvisation. (and yes, I am working on mine, though I find it difficult to invent harmonies on the fly.. More work is needed!)
While I'm on the subject, is there really a difference between improv and composition? Of course, a simultaneous performance is involved in the improv, but the only other difference that I can think of is that the time frame is different - and if a computer can compose, it can improvise. All it needs is more processing power to be able to do it real-time.
Personally, I think that a "perfect" (i.e. as good as a person) performance by a computer would require the vast majority of the same programming as it would need to compose. Really what we're talking about is UNDERSTANDING music, and then showing that understanding. It's the same problems that face any other area of AI. The problem is that humans do the really exciting part so completely intuitively that they can't tell another person how to do it, much less a machine.
There are a lot of ifs in there, but most of this entire discussion is awfully speculative, so I hope you'll forgive me.
I'm not sure of that... It depends what you mean by "understanding". For me, understanding a piece of music involves understanding what makes it MUSIC. For that reason, I "understand" Webern's music, because I've taken 20th century theory courses, and know what 12-tone techniques he was fond of, etc... But I see nothing musical in it at all. Am I missing the point? Maybe! I don't like Schubert, Brahms, or Coltrane much either, and from the huge number of people that swear by these musicians, I know there's SOMETHING there. I just haven't really found it yet. About Webern, I haven't heard as much from people who I know (from experience, etc..) are looking for the same kind of musical experience as me, so I'm not convinced that I'll find anything no matter how long I look. Likewise with the Backstreet Boys. But if I don't like some music, I can't honestly say that I understand it.
Of course, I know that I'm using very personal definitions for many words here, but that's unavoidable.
Then it already is a sad day! Machines do a LOT of the jobs that used to be taken by real musicians. I've already written a few posts about this, but here are a few examples:
drum machines, synths, etc.. - sometimes they are played/programmed in musical ways, and used as a truly new instrument. But often they're there simply because they're cheaper than a real performer.
recordings - yes, a musician is needed at the start. But only once - once the pice is recorded, no one is actually playing it when you hear it. And it shows - for one, the music gets boring pretty fast. For another, the music isn't keyed to it's environment. Also, you can't tell a CD to play something relaxing, or something intense, or anything else, unless you have a CD recorded in that exact way. A musician can take a single piece and play it an infinite number of ways.
And yes, these HAVE discouraged many people from exploring music! I've talked to a number of people older than myself, and just 30-40 years ago, according to my mother, over HALF of the kids in her high school were involved in bands, etc. For dances, and other events, they always had students lined up to play. Nowadays, highschools might have a handful, though they're rarely anythign close to professional level, or even publicly acceptable. Perhaps I'm being somewhat harsh, but there certainly isn't as much music-making going on among the public in general as there was in the past.
Musicians are already upset about being replaced by computers - listen to the TV sometime, and listen to ads closely - the majority of them are synthesized. A few times I even recognize the samples used as being the same as my AWE. There aren't nearly so many jobs available to musicians as there used to be.
For that matter, many musicians aren't pleased at being replaced by recordings! When you consider that 100 years ago, if someone wanted to hear some music - ANYTHING at all! Even just some tunes to help him get to sleep - he had to get musicians to play it for him. I'm not saying whether this is good or bad - of course, it's good for insomniacs who aren't paying mountains of cash for musicians every night, but it's bad for musicians who don't get as much work - this happens whenever technology changes though: no one cries about all the scribes that have lost their jobs with the proliferation of printing presses. More importantly, it's bad for the MUSIC - live musicians can simply do more than anything else, if they're good. More than a live recording, even. And certainly more than a computer.
What might "mathematically perfect song" mean? I really don't see how it can exist at all, even as a theoretical notion. It really doesn't make much sense to me....
Slashdot Mirror
I think I'm misunderstanding something, but isn't it true that to write an encrypted dvd requires some sort of specialized equipment, that isn't easy to come by (in order to write the decryption key to the disc)?
/. haven't overlooked something so basic, but where am I going wrong?
If so, DeCSS COULD be handy for small-time piraters without this equipment, since they could decrypt the movie and write the decrypted version to a disc - not requiring the key, and therefore using any old dvd writer...
I assume the learned masses of
(note that this doesn't invalidate most of the arguments against these lawsuits either way, since it seems there are many other things wrong with it)
I think it's good to say that intelligence (as you're attempting to measure it) won't be biased for people of a particular language.
However, language in a general sense is a big part of intelligence. To ignore it, and still say the test measures "intelligence" seems to be somewhat inaccurate. And we all know how accurate IQ tests are...
hey - I've got a 386 with 4 MB of ram sitting on my desk right now! I'm playing through ultima V again, and it just doesn't work as well on faster computers, even moslo'ed.
However, I would like to be using freedos instead of MSdos. They could definitely do a few things to make it better:
- smaller memory footprint
I remember spending COUNTLESS hours trying to squeeze out a few more bytes of conventional memory for wing commander 2 on my 386. (or was it 1?) Simple efficiency could help, and allow loading a few more TSRs (smartdrive, etc...) that really help with the slow computers. Not to mention mouse drivers, sound card drivers, etc...
- Better shell
If bash could be made to run instead of command.com, the world would be a better place. Even a stripped down version would be nice, as long as it had the scripting language, and filename completion, and maybe a few other things.
- Slowdown utility
That's probably way beyond what you need for it, but I'm thinking something that could make your athlon system run at the speed of a 386, or a 486, for use with old games. I don't know how feasible this is - I know there are programs like moslo, and at-slow, but they aren't ideal, and don't work flawlessly. Something built into the OS might be able to do more... though it's only a guess, since I don't really know anything about that sort of thing.
Won't the Nielsen ratings apply just as much to shows watched online?
Perhaps they'd need to change the format of some of the questions, but I don't know - I've never been polled for that sort of thing, and it's been almost a year since I watched any tv at all! (and I don't miss it one bit... Slashdot's better than any soap!)
How DO tv channels know how many people are seeing their ads? It seems to me a HUGE amount of guesswork would necessarily be involved in any case.
Also, for now, you can get a much better picture quality by using a real tv, so if you're watching tv on the net, you're probably there on top of any estimate they might make.
Unfortunately, screens ARE shrunk to add ads, though usually only in the credits. This isn't quite the same, since it's the original broadcaster that's doing it, but I wonder how the people feel that sold the show to that broadcaster?
If this is illegal (and I'm quite certain it isn't), perhaps someone should give tucows a little talking to?
The funny thing is, that happens with cable too - I distinctly remember watching something at a friends house that regularly had ads for some detroit lawyer (the good, smart lawyer! - cracks me up everytime...) even though we were in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Canada) at the time.
But how do they know who's watching? And how does this change that? Of course, they can say "there are 6 million people that can receive this broadcast" but how many of those even have TV's, let alone watch that particular station?
Just out of curiosity, why does everyone say this is Pratchett's book? Gaiman wrote it too! In fact, I even found Gaiman's style to be the dominant one here. Though perhaps that's simply because he's the author that i prefer, of the two.
In any case, few will disagree that the two VERY different styles of writing - the silly Pratchett and the dark Gaiman - mesh incredibly well. It actually managed to be a scary comedy.
Just wanted to clarify that this ISN'T just another Discworld novel, but much more.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Terry Pratchett either - I think his stuff is funny, but doesn't hang together to make a very good novel. It always ends up sounding a bit more like stand up comedy...
However, in Good Omens, the combination of Pratchett's wanton silliness, and Gaiman's unbelievable style and storytelling combine to create an incredible book. Even if you don't much like Pratchett, I recommend you read this - I personally found it had more in common stylistically with Sandman than Discworld.
I think the difference is that most of the best comics these days are being put up on the web, and the artists aren't getting paid for it (at least not much...)
See Goats, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly (though that one's not restricted to the web..)
there are a lot of other "hobby" strips out there - ComicSites lists bajillions of them.
Of course, I miss Bloom County, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, the Far Side..... But so do we all..
yowch!!! this is an awful idea! Persoanlly, I get about half my mail from people I don't even know - people reading a post on slashdot or newsgroups, mailing lists, etc...
Also, what if someone's address changes? How do they tell you about it?
It's a big question whether the aesthetics of music have anything at all to do with real life experiences, though. In Hanslick's book "On the musically beautiful" (several translations with different titles exist) he puts forth the argument that music actually has little to do with any "normal" emotion. He talks about "musical feeling", as a sort of underlying emotion, but not anything specific - not love, of fear, or anger, or anything. More of a sort of building, exciting, slow, fast, loud soft - of FEELING though. Not just of music.
In that view (which I vaguely share, with some undecided reservations) any concrete emotions that are found in a piece of music are purely programmatic elements that don't come from the music, but from somewhere else. The two might coincide and work together (and should, if the music is based on a program of any type) but the music itself doesn't.
I think that some music does manage to produce concrete emotions - that's pretty hard to argue against! But I can see how those emotions would be a result of cultural and personal associations, rather than anythign actually in the music. Even the association with minor keys being sad is, in some cultures, completely reversed. For example, in most medieval and renaissance music, the dorian mode (rather similar to our minor) is generally used in happy music. It can be hard to think of it as anything other than sad now though, simply because we've been conditioned by all the sad tunes written in minor keys.
I'd like to try some experiments with listening to programmatic music that is supposed to be very emotional, but without any idea of the program - listen to it as completely abstract music, and see if I can guess the emotions that it's aiming for - and more importantly, if I feel them without referring to the program in any way. Maybe there's a paper in that somewhere....
I agree with you for the most part, but there are a few details that I'll nitpick:
First of all, you talk of the "psychoacoustic" being the primary reason that most people appreciate music. I don't really buy that. I think it has more to do with social conditioning, just like any other trends. How else can you account for the extraordinary variety in popular music in the past 100 years, let alone the past 1000?
I do think that psychoacoustic effects are there, but on a much lower level. For most people, it really doesn't matter.
Your second point about "aesthetic relation" doesn't seem quite accurate either. It assumes all (most anyway) music is programmatic, but in actual fact, huge amounts of it aren't. Granted, there aren't too many popular instrumentals these days, but with many tunes, the voice really isn't telling the same story as the music.
The third notion, of "technical merits" seems closer to accurate, as long as we're talking of compositional technique. Most people don't notice/care about that sort of thing. However, with performance technique, I think most people are more likely respond to something flashy. More than scholars anyway, who typically want something "deeper" (not that the two are exclusive, of course).
BTW - personally, I love Mingus, like Schoenberg much more than most of his followers, and really enjoy a lot of his music, but just can't get into Coltrane.. I am getting better though - each time I hear a bit more in his playing. But still not NEARLY as much as Sonny Rollins, or Charlie Parker...
I sorta see what you mean then. But there remains the question of whether "mathematically perfect" has anything at all to do with "musically perfect". Myself, I really doubt it. Typically, perfection in music is boring. For example, you might think that always playing it tune is a good thing. But many composers' music sound much better in temperaments in which some chords are VERY noticeably out of tune. Meantone temperaments, which were commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries are quite unusable in some keys. But composers took that into account and wrote so that the out-of-tune chords were SUPPOSED to sound harsh.
Many people analyze music based on ideas of tension and resolution. With mathematically perfect sounds, there is NO tension. Unless you use the math to determine large scale forms, and leave the tension to the small subtleties. Some people would argue that the same tension release needs to be present in large forms as well though....
If a "pure" sound did have some effect, I don't think it would be at all the same as a typically musical effect.
I don't really agree there. Yes, risks need to be taken, and always playing within the bounds is a bad thing. But when you step outside of the bounds and screw up, it's not GOOD. The good thing is that you're willing to go right to the edge, and that you know where it is.
:)
People do make mistakes. I think that they can be overlooked though, as long as the parts that are RIGHT are powerful enough to carry it along, and make the mistakes irrelevant. But I find it hard to believe that it's the mistakes that make music good. I think if you play an unbelivably great performance, with one wrong note, fixing that note would make it even better - as long as it's not at the expense of the rest.
A great performance feels like riding a bicycle along a tightrope - you know you SHOULD be falling flat, but you keep going and push through. If you stop to think about it... well, there'd better be a net there.
"An uncreative classically-trained, on-the-beat musician..."
*SOMEBODY* doesn't listen to much classical music! Seriously, classical music would, IMHO, be even harder to simulate than jazz or rock, etc, because the variation, and interpretation is there to no smaller extent - it's just focused on (generally) more subtle things. Anyone who plays classical music has been criticized for playing to mechanically, true. But that's because they were doing a bad job at it at the time.
"In five years, the penis will be obsolete!"
-Opening sentence to Steel Beach, by John Varley
Personally, from what music teaching I've done, I think this would be a bad idea. Already, people do too much mimicking in the early years, and not enough exploring, figuring out and UNDERSTANDING.
I think students (and professionals!) would be better off using the same tools you did to get a square, bland, "perfect" performance if they needed something like that. Then they wouldn't be stuck repeated the exact same interpretation as everyone else. I'm constantly encouraging people to NOT listen to recordings of pieces that they want to learn soon, because then they'll be stuck doing the same thing as the other performer in most cases. You end up with karaoke, where the performers have to do everything the same as on the CD in order to not get lost.
Why jazz and not classical? Or rock? Or anything else? Why does jazz have to be the only music? Of course, jazz is the only music these days that's consistently improvised, but that's certainly not true historically. In fact, a typical jazz "improvisation" has much more pre-existing material than many typical "classical" methods like those described in millions of French tutors on unmeasured preludes (c. 1700) and CPE Bach's "Essay on the Art of playing Keybaord instruments" (I hope I got the title right). In fact, it seems to me, that a common renaissance practise was for instrumentalists to jam with nothing more than a repeating bass line - no chords, no rhythms, nothing at all planned ahead of time. Anyway, just my little bit of ranting about the current state of improvisation. (and yes, I am working on mine, though I find it difficult to invent harmonies on the fly.. More work is needed!)
While I'm on the subject, is there really a difference between improv and composition? Of course, a simultaneous performance is involved in the improv, but the only other difference that I can think of is that the time frame is different - and if a computer can compose, it can improvise. All it needs is more processing power to be able to do it real-time.
Personally, I think that a "perfect" (i.e. as good as a person) performance by a computer would require the vast majority of the same programming as it would need to compose. Really what we're talking about is UNDERSTANDING music, and then showing that understanding. It's the same problems that face any other area of AI. The problem is that humans do the really exciting part so completely intuitively that they can't tell another person how to do it, much less a machine.
There are a lot of ifs in there, but most of this entire discussion is awfully speculative, so I hope you'll forgive me.
I'm not sure of that... It depends what you mean by "understanding". For me, understanding a piece of music involves understanding what makes it MUSIC. For that reason, I "understand" Webern's music, because I've taken 20th century theory courses, and know what 12-tone techniques he was fond of, etc... But I see nothing musical in it at all. Am I missing the point? Maybe! I don't like Schubert, Brahms, or Coltrane much either, and from the huge number of people that swear by these musicians, I know there's SOMETHING there. I just haven't really found it yet. About Webern, I haven't heard as much from people who I know (from experience, etc..) are looking for the same kind of musical experience as me, so I'm not convinced that I'll find anything no matter how long I look. Likewise with the Backstreet Boys. But if I don't like some music, I can't honestly say that I understand it.
Of course, I know that I'm using very personal definitions for many words here, but that's unavoidable.
Then it already is a sad day! Machines do a LOT of the jobs that used to be taken by real musicians. I've already written a few posts about this, but here are a few examples:
drum machines, synths, etc.. - sometimes they are played/programmed in musical ways, and used as a truly new instrument. But often they're there simply because they're cheaper than a real performer.
recordings - yes, a musician is needed at the start. But only once - once the pice is recorded, no one is actually playing it when you hear it. And it shows - for one, the music gets boring pretty fast. For another, the music isn't keyed to it's environment. Also, you can't tell a CD to play something relaxing, or something intense, or anything else, unless you have a CD recorded in that exact way. A musician can take a single piece and play it an infinite number of ways.
And yes, these HAVE discouraged many people from exploring music! I've talked to a number of people older than myself, and just 30-40 years ago, according to my mother, over HALF of the kids in her high school were involved in bands, etc. For dances, and other events, they always had students lined up to play. Nowadays, highschools might have a handful, though they're rarely anythign close to professional level, or even publicly acceptable. Perhaps I'm being somewhat harsh, but there certainly isn't as much music-making going on among the public in general as there was in the past.
Musicians are already upset about being replaced by computers - listen to the TV sometime, and listen to ads closely - the majority of them are synthesized. A few times I even recognize the samples used as being the same as my AWE. There aren't nearly so many jobs available to musicians as there used to be.
For that matter, many musicians aren't pleased at being replaced by recordings! When you consider that 100 years ago, if someone wanted to hear some music - ANYTHING at all! Even just some tunes to help him get to sleep - he had to get musicians to play it for him. I'm not saying whether this is good or bad - of course, it's good for insomniacs who aren't paying mountains of cash for musicians every night, but it's bad for musicians who don't get as much work - this happens whenever technology changes though: no one cries about all the scribes that have lost their jobs with the proliferation of printing presses. More importantly, it's bad for the MUSIC - live musicians can simply do more than anything else, if they're good. More than a live recording, even. And certainly more than a computer.
What might "mathematically perfect song" mean? I really don't see how it can exist at all, even as a theoretical notion. It really doesn't make much sense to me....