Jumping Off Point!

This is the first post for The Musophyst. Hello and welcome. I’ve coined the term Musophyst as an aggregation of my primary interests – Music, philosophy, science, and technology. Each of these areas of interest encompass a wide range of topics. Regarding music, I will delve into issues of music composition, performance, recording, and appreciation. Much comes under the rubric of philosophy, but my specific interests lie in cognitive philosophy and universal Darwinism. The science aspect will include many topics from physics to neuroscience to cosmology. And finally I will include posts about the technology that pervades our lives, as well as my detailed take on hardware and software design and architecture issues as a professional in that arena for more than three decades.

Photo credit: "lapolab" / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Darwin Misunderstood

Darwin’s theory of evolution may well be the most important scientific breakthrough of all time. It describes how a simple iterative process applied over long periods can lead to results of staggering complexity. The ramifications of this are only now, over a century and a half after Darwin’s seminal work, beginning to be fully appreciated. The far-reaching implications of the theory are now categorized under the rubric of Universal Darwinism, a topic I will return to many times in these pages.

For the moment, I want to concentrate on what I believe are common, even pervasive, misunderstandings about how biological evolution works. Continue reading →

Thought Forms

What is it to be a philosopher? Some would say that a philosopher is an academic whose career consists of writing inscrutable papers designed to be read only by others who possess an advanced degree in the field. At the other extreme, some would say that everyone is a philosopher by virtue of the fact that adherence to some philosophy or other, whether it may be, e.g. a philosophy of child rearing, or a religious philosophy, or even an exercise philosophy, is something most people would attest to.

I don’t believe that either extreme is correct (though I will admit I think there are certainly some professional philosophers that fit the first description). Instead, I believe that to be a philosopher is to actively engage in an ongoing process. Simply to espouse some set of philosophical principles does not sufficiently meet the criterion. The necessary process is one of continually refining one’s way of thinking and one’s approach to problems. It is a process of ongoing improvement of one’s rational relationship to ideas. (Not necessarily all ideas – one can certainly be a philosopher of something in particular, or of multiple somethings). The defining characteristic being the ongoing effort to challenge one’s self to think as clearly as possible about the subject matter in a way that avoids self-deception and which allows for the creation of new (to the individual) or novel frameworks and approaches to understanding the area of inquiry. Continue reading →

A Musical Theory

I meet many people who play a musical instrument who unabashedly admit that they are unable to create a new song of their own, improvise a solo over existing music, or to learn songs by listening to a recording. This may be true even though they can display a level of technical achievement on their instrument that clearly shows that they have spent a great many hours practicing and refining their skills. I think this is a shame, and shows a great deficiency common in musical instrument lessons. This post is the first in a series designed to help address this lack and hopefully make these skills more accessible to readers of this site who play an instrument. Continue reading →

Stepping Stones

[This post is the second in a series on Introductory Music Theory. The series begins with the post A Musical Theory. The next in the series is Stepping Into Numbers.]

I assume you are familiar with the musical sequence “Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do”, that we are commonly taught to sing as children. Musicians refer to this familiar Do-Re-Mi sequence as the Major Scale. An interesting and important fact about Do-Re-Mi is that it doesn’t matter what pitch is chosen as the Do that one starts with, it is possible to proceed from any note and sing Do-Re-Mi such that it will sound “right”. Likewise you can start from any note on your instrument and play a series of notes that sounds like Do-Re-Mi. What we understand from this is that there is not a specific set of notes that make a Major Scale. So what makes it sound “right”? The answer is simply that it is the “distance” between the notes you play that makes the sequence sound like Do-Re-Mi. Continue reading →

Stepping Into Numbers

[This post is the third in a series on Introductory Music Theory. The series begins with A Musical Theory. The previous post in this series is Stepping Stones. The next post in this series is Intervals.]

Music is itself a form of communication, but communicating about the music that we play and create is a vital part of being a musician. I am referring not only to communication with other musicians, but also to the internal dialogs we have with ourselves when thinking about the music that we play. A necessary part of being able to communicate effectively is to have fluency with an appropriate vocabulary. The musical vocabulary is comprised not only of words but also of numbers. Numbers are used in various ways in different musical contexts, and this at first can seem quite confusing. In this post I will introduce some of the ways we use numbers to communicate about music. Continue reading →

Intervals

[This post is the third in a series on Introductory Music Theory. The series begins with A Musical Theory. The previous post in this series is Stepping Into Numbers.]

The interval of an octave is a pretty amazing thing. When we sing the Do-Re-Mi scale it seems perfectly reasonable that the eighth note is called “Do” again because, as one could say, “it sounds just like the first Do only higher”. (By the way, if an octave doesn’t sound this way to you, it’s may be time to consider poetry or painting as your artistic endeavor instead of music.) Of course you can sing Do-Re-Mi past the second Do, ever higher to the third Do, and as you do so each successive note is exactly an octave above the earlier one of the same name. So Mi to Mi (3 to 10) is called an octave just like Do to Do (1 to 8). As I mentioned in the last post, all of the interval names – 2nd, 3rd 4th, 5th, etc, refer to a specific number of half-steps no matter what the starting point is. The interval of a 2nd gets its name from the distance between 1 and 2 on the Major scale (1 step). Since the interval from 6 to 7 is also 1 step, we can also call it a 2nd. Continue reading →