Bach on a mobius strip | Hacker News Reader

Bach on a mobius strip

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53 pointsplanckscnst21 comments

A very neat animation of a crab canon by Bach.

If you haven't read the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach - you need to do yourself a favor and do so. It explores the ideas of recursion, logic, infinity, and so much more in one beautifully written book.

caveat: GEB might make your brain explode

If you've read the book it's worth it to also watch the free online MIT coure material on them: http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/courses/godel-escher-bach/vid... (and maybe even if you haven't)

They are very non-technical (annoying so at times), but interesting. Definitely gave me a more in depth understanding of GEB.

I thought it would be fun to watch these when I had some downtime during a flight I'm taking next week. Two problems - they stream them and they are real one files. No idea why they make it so difficult.

Solution for .rm files -> VLC [1]

Solution for streaming -> tweak the url [2]

http://mfile.akamai.com/7870/rm/mitstorage.download.akamai.c...

http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/hs/godel_escher_bach/OCW_7.01.07_...

References

[1] http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[2] http://all-streaming-media.com/streaming-media-faq/faq-downl...

I picked up this book yesterday and I'm starting to worry about what I got myself into.

You should. It's a real time investment but it pays off I assure you.

I'm 550 pages in after about 3 months of reading at an extremely casual pace. I'm wanting to speed up so I can finish before school starts in late August.

Having trouble finding examples online right now, but composers loved to do this kind of thing during and before Bach's time. I remember seeing one piece that was written in such a way that two musicians could sit opposite each other and play off of the same page, so one player is essentially playing the piece backwards but reading different notes because the page is upsidedown.

It's a famous Mozart duet for violins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpktS4rNZC8

"Bach war der erste Hacker. Das Cembalo war sein Computer. Kannst du vorwärts und rückwärts spielen"

In English: "Bach was the first Hacker. The Harpsichord was his Computer. 'Can play it forwards and backwards."

~23: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/

The last sentence reads, "Can you play it forward and backwards?"

Not quite - it's not a question, it's a variation of "you can play that forwards and backwards" which would be a literal translation of "du kannst das vorwärts und rückwärts spielen". German's free word order allows you to change the position of subject and object in that case: "das kannst du vorwärts und rückwärts spielen". The original quote is colloquial speech where the object "das" (that) is not realized - that's a common pattern. However, it would be very strange to leave the object out if the sentence were a question.

awesome movie. see 8:33 http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=0rI2anb5Da0

here's the above quote in the movie: http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=IR_EHMDhcnw at 3:42

Is there really anything to this other than the idea itself of playing a riff backward and forward at the same time? The idea is fascinating, but I don't think this piece sounds good at all, especially compared to J.S. Bach's more "conventional" pieces.

Yes it's about the idea, but the idea is hugely important to Bach. Baroque music was centered around this idea of an "economy of material": letting a single small kernel of an idea unfold into an entire piece of music. That's how Bach's brain worked; he could think of a simple theme and improvise a 5-voice fugue based on just a few notes.

This canon comes from his "Musical Offering" which are a set of pieces dedicated to Frederick the Great of Prussia (a flutist like me :-) ) all based on a single awkward theme given to him by the king, as a kind of challenge.

So I guess my point is when you look at this as one of a collection of many variations, renderings, and re-imaginings of a single short melody, with an eye to the importance that Bach placed on the aesthetic idea of an economy of material, that this becomes more than just a clever trick.

Although I agree Bach probably wrote it in less time than it took him to write it down. And I don't think he would have imagined people after his death would be playing it, let alone making CGI youtube videos and run-on sentences discussing it on internet message boards. :)

I can appreciate this as a piece of constrained writing, like a lipogram or univocalic, but apart from that context I think it lacks a pleasing musical quality which is present in much of Bach's work. That said, I would have loved to have experienced J. S. Bach's harpsichord improvisations.

Keep in mind that this was a pretty bad recording; it sounds like a (badly) synthesized acoustic guitar. Professional, live recordings of Bach's Musical Offering include the Crab Canon and sound much better.

i dont get it. what difference did displaying it on a mobius strip make? it seemed the same as when it was being played forward and backward at the same time.

The Möbius Strip just makes it an infinite loop. This won't work with music you can't play backwards.

Edit: Thinking a bit more about it, it is a bit silly. I guess you could put every musical piece on a Möbius Strip in an infinite loop. Just don't have it played backwards.

One of the instruments used to play that composition is a Klein bottle.

Saoret.One explored Markov chains and Bach

http://www.caerwyn.com/ipn/2007/04/lab-77-unexpected-markov....

as part of his Inferno Programmer's Notebook

http://code.google.com/p/inferno-lab/wiki/Index

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