PoseidonsNet

My cat likes the acoustic bass guitar, but not the nylon strings. She likes it best when I just play the low E string, and purrs at the sound of f#.

Pretty! Certainly an improvement on 'Happy Birthday' How about for a title 'Buttlerflies and B's' I would experiment a bit with slowing it down slightly. Just a guess. I like the middle bit too.

aah. I see. Thank you for informing me so eloquently.

It seems that some people, have quite a lot of pent up emotion! The truth hurts!

here is another point. the math behind the 12 tones is actually not as cut and dried as it is considered to be. there are two ways of calculating the length of the distance between tones, and the result is that we use an average of the two. thus if you follow the octaves (i) up and up, and (ii) down and down, the more octaves you move away from the center, the less in tune (i) is with (ii) i can't off hand remember all the details as it was some time ago when i studied the philosophy of music, (within the context of philosophy, not music) but i clearly remember how it fascinated me that music theory is just a little bit fuzzy when it comes to calculating it all PERFECTLY. however if you only move a handful of octaves, the rounding error is so small, that it is just not noticable; except to the mathematician! so perfect pitch is actually an illusion. just as perfect pi cannot be calculated. a source for this quote would be nice? my searches for the shortest wavelength find so many different answers, i'm not sure who is correct. however, the logic is the same regardless. (i recommend gargling with salt water for the cough)

One does not need to know what a noun is, or an adjective, to type a perfect sentence. He is using his imagination, whereas the trained muso is using his logical mind. Immanuel Kant called these the analytic (logical) and the synthetic (creative) in his critique of pure reason. Two differing methods : the same answer. But to be a bit pedantic, one cannot improve on perfection.

Well I also married a german girl once, so I know how he feels. Also, he could have been inspired by the idea of his father transcending to heaven. Here you mention the spirits love and death. The two greatest emotions we can have. I see the point about using music to balance your emotions. However, within a bad mood is the core of a good mood waiting to break out. You use the music as a vehicle to express this. You are still reacting to your emotions with music. That is good. The two primal emotions as you inadvertantly point out are love and death, as Yeats wrote : The last verse is most important here We also commonly say about a good piece of music, that 'it was moving' death gives birth to love and love is sad for we know it never lasts, it always dies.

Even computers do not have exactly perfect pitch. There is always a rounding error somewhere. I was recently on frostcloud where a guy claimed to have calculated the smallest wavelength possible using Planck's constant and quantum theory. (As I go look for the thread it has vannished!) If his calculations were correct, all wavelengths would have to be multiples of this very small number, which still would have a rounding error. So the human mind which hears music as it exists, technically has the potential to have perfect pitch. Its like trying to ask, 'what is PI exactly?' or 'can anyone draw a perfect circle?' Computers use pixels, for eg, so it is always an approximation of a circle. People use real resolution by contrast. I do not believe anyone is tone deaf, they just had a bad experience trying to play music as a youth and now consider themselves tone deaf. It saves them further embarrassment. In psychology we call this 'learned helplessness'. Training is vital, but the will to learn is even more important. Plato's forms is another aspect of this, where the real world is an approximation of the ideal world where pi can be calculated exactly. Perhaps when you hear music in your dreams, then this might be the closest we can get to perfect pitch. The real world is all a matter of degree of accuracy. Perfect timing is the same. Perfect relevance to the meaning in your song is the same. A perfect venue is the same. How about a perfect audience?

If you are not expressing your emotions, your music will be no better than doof-doof, even if its a piano and violin. Key and rhythm follow emotion. A song is a collection of human meanings paced by a natural stream of consciousness; expressed by key and rhythm. If you feel unhappy, play unhappy music. If you feel nothing. Do not bother playing anything. Well, thats my 2 bits of music philosophy anyway.