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Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question


From: Rusi
Subject: Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2015 06:35:28 -0700 (PDT)
User-agent: G2/1.0

On Friday, March 27, 2015 at 6:35:42 PM UTC+5:30, tomas wrote:
> Try to convince a musician to write always C-sharp instead of sometimes
> D-flat, although they "are" the same note (since Bach, at least) (or are
> they? On a violin? On a piano?).

On the same page of Beethoven piano sonata 32 in C, you find a Ab and a G#.
According to the outlook above they are the 'same note' -- as I believed until
I got a piano with alternate tunings, ie in addition to the usual equal 
temperament there are now possible just-major and just-minor.

Put the piano into just-major and the G# sounds good and the Ab not.
Into just-minor and its the other way round.

Now if you look at this (humongous!) list of possible notes
http://www.kylegann.com/Octave.html
you can see that
G# ie augmented fifth is 772 cents ie 25/16
Ab ie minor sixth is 813 cents ie 8/5

IOW the augmented fifth and the minor sixth are separated by almost
HALF a SEMITONE. [The tempered G#=Ab is 800 a poor approximaion to both]

What's my point?

Civilization is digitization
Digitization is information-loss

This is true for music -- allowing for only 12 points in the ∞ spectrum between
frequency f and 2f makes music possible but also out of tune.

The same is true of language -- words are an indirection, pictograms are (more) 
direct.

And ASCII... Hoo Boy! That's one hell of information loss!
Thank God for unicode!
-------
PS. And I should write not G# and Ab but G♯ A♭


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