Woah woah, slow down there. Pythagoras applied his aesthetic desire for pure ratios to an idealized model for musical intervals. Funny enough, this ended up being the reason that the west discovered that such an approach does not scale (figuratively and literally). We literally call this delta between the ideal tuning and the limits of a fixed-pitch tuning a “Pythagorean comma”. This comma became the basis for a lot of tuning systems (meantone, etc) developed by the west. It’s only in the last hundred years that, in my opinion, forces of industrialization and mass production erased all such effort and replaced it with the boring compromise that is 12 tone equal temperament.
Other, far older, musical cultures took things in a different direction and ended up building systems on pure ratios that just become more complex in their relationships (Indian shruti, Turkish makam, etc).
This does not mean that Pythagorean ratios are irrelevant. They remain a great tool for analysis of universal human experience of music. The authors of this paper are literally doing just that.
Birds generate pure ratios in their songs. Smacking a metal anvil (as Pythagoras discovered) naturally generates pure ratios. They’re everywhere. If anything we need MORE of this understanding in Western music, which is missing out on some really tasty (low integer) intervals like 7/4, 8/5, 10/9, 7/5, many of which have naturally emerged in the West via genres like Blues.
I went into a pretty deep dive into dozenal systems a few years ago. I really like the dozenal unit systems that people have came up with and even designed my own. I don't exactly remember what I had but I think I tried keeping all of the metric base units and then multiples of 12 from there.
Some of the dozenal measurement systems try to replace the second or meter, for example, which I don't think would be necessary. And some also try to redefine the clock, but honestly 2 sections of 10d hours is more than dozenal enough. And I like the blended base-60/base-12.
What's really interesting is trying to extend the calendar to base-12. Depending on whether you want to keep the 7-day week or switch to 6-day week or abolish the week altogether[1], you can come up with several different interesting concepts.
[1] Even though it had 7-day weeks, intercalary days outside of the week is what shot down the closest we've got to calendar reform since Gregory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar
The Nix Language, while goofy at times, is built for config-as-code and is hiding a decent little functional language in what looks like just attribute assignments.
Likewise, CUE Lang is built for config (esp merging docs with shared refs) and is highly under-appreciated. You can express powerful computations if you puzzle over the logical inferencing for a bit.
A couple of months ago I switched from Neovim with a carefully crafted config file to Helix with zero config. I haven't looked back.
As far a performance, well, Helix + Alacritty is the fastest thing I know of. Snappy AF. You're still at the mercy of whatever language server might be grinding away, but at least it doesn't block the UI in any way. Every other component (tree-sitter, ropey) is performance optimized by Rust nerds who love that sort of thing.
Kraus Hamdani Aerospace | Senior Software Engineer | Full-Time | Portland, OR / West Coast USA / REMOTE | U.S. Citizens Only
Build software for sky-computers in perpetual flight!
We are primarily a Rust and TypeScript shop, but as a growing software team in an early-stage company we need experienced, generalist, and polyglot engineers who love to take on new technologies.
- Architect fast backend services for a massive geospatial data lake
- Design robust distributed systems for an unreliable network
- Optimize onboard compute and embedded systems for power and efficiency
- Apply Machine Learning and Machine Vision models for real-time object detection
- Build beautiful and interactive web GUIs for aircraft fleets
- Use and abuse WebGL for 3D graphics visualizations
We are well funded and can offer competitive salaries and great benefits. Culture fit: experienced engineers with lives and families and a "get it done" attitude.
Kraus Hamdani Aerospace | Senior Software Engineer | Full-Time | Portland, OR / West Coast USA / REMOTE
Build software for sky-computers in perpetual flight!
We are primarily a Rust and TypeScript shop, but as a growing software team in an early-stage company we need experienced, generalist, and polyglot engineers who love to take on new technologies.
- Architect fast backend services for a massive geospatial data lake
- Design robust distributed systems for an unreliable network
- Optimize onboard compute and embedded systems for power and efficiency
- Apply Machine Learning and Machine Vision models for real-time object detection
- Build beautiful and interactive web GUIs for aircraft fleets
- Use and abuse WebGL for 3D graphics visualizations
We are well funded and can offer competitive salaries and great benefits. Culture fit: experienced engineers with lives and families and a "get it done" attitude.
EDIT: message me (a real human guy) on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/bugeats or email chadwick[dot]dahlquist[at]krausaerospace[dot]com
This gives me hope. I've been thinking lately that one of the ways that we get through this intense disequilibrium is through a youth counterculture that treats social media as something deeply uncool that only their out of touch parents use. Youth rebellion is humanity's cultural immune system.
I'm also used to functional programming. The only thing I can not stand about Dart is that types are coupled to classes. If you want to use stateless functions and typed data shapes, you're out of luck. Compare this to TypeScript that truly allows both paradigms and has a very expressive type system.
Doesn’t `typedef` let you specify arbitrary type aliases for pretty much anything in Dart? Or are you talking about something else? For my own curiosity, can you provide an example of Typescript vs Dart in this case?
Other, far older, musical cultures took things in a different direction and ended up building systems on pure ratios that just become more complex in their relationships (Indian shruti, Turkish makam, etc).
This does not mean that Pythagorean ratios are irrelevant. They remain a great tool for analysis of universal human experience of music. The authors of this paper are literally doing just that.
Birds generate pure ratios in their songs. Smacking a metal anvil (as Pythagoras discovered) naturally generates pure ratios. They’re everywhere. If anything we need MORE of this understanding in Western music, which is missing out on some really tasty (low integer) intervals like 7/4, 8/5, 10/9, 7/5, many of which have naturally emerged in the West via genres like Blues.