theOnliest

This is not at all new news. We've known how to transcribe Greek notation since at least the early 20th century (and probably long before that; my memory of Greek music theory is failing me this morning). This particular piece is one of Greek music's greatest hits, and has been in standard music history anthologies for at least 30 years or so, I'd imagine.

It's also not at all apparent that the Greeks used the mathematically pure ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 9:8) consistently in real music. One of the earliest debates in music theory is whether we should trust the ratios or the ear: Aristoxenus was advocating in the 4th c. BCE for a phenomenological view of intervals.

(And Ptolemy, whose intervals are supposedly used in this recording, had some truly bizarre scales in his text. He only allowed superparticular interval ratios, and so the standard Pythagorean semitone of 256:243 appears nowhere in his text.)

I'm honestly not sure (I don't have a Tumblr myself; I just read my wife's blog!) I think that probably users could block comments from people, or have some kind of moderation over their own, but I'm not sure about flagging or any system globally.

I knew about the chat, but it's not really the same thing at all. That's as if Facebook removed the ability to comment on posts, but said "Oh it's cool, we still have chat!"

It works ok, as you say, if you just want to say "Great job," but it's not the same use case.

Beats me. The announcement about them disabling it was in late October (http://support.tumblr.com/post/131951272032/pardon-our-dust-...), and on Nov. 4 they confirmed they were coming back, eventually (http://support.tumblr.com/post/132577661107/david-wizardries...). There's been no movement since then as far as I can tell.

I think they want the reblog to be the primary form of engagement, but that's silly for a lot of things, because the entire original post shows up in the reblog by default. For a running community (just one example), that's pretty lousy: you don't want to clutter up your own blog just to say "That's really fast, congratulations! Keep it up!" to a dozen other people.

They were using an in-house thing; some blogs also have Disqus comments enabled but nobody really uses them, as far as I can tell. (Even when they did, they were outside the stream of native Tumblr replies, and didn't show up in users' dashboards.)

Tumblr has recently (actually, not so recently any more) disabled commenting on their platform. My partner is part of a relatively close running community that used to use Tumblr to connect with others, give/receive encouragement about their runs, and so on. Since they disabled comments (with some half-hearted promise about bringing them back, well, sometime) hardly any of her friends post any more.

Since, as this article says, Tumblr's business model is depending on people using it, removing comments (in favor of pushing people toward reblogging) seems ill-advised.

Do we also lose the progressive tense, then? How would one express something like "The car ran me over while I was walking to the store?"

I suppose "The car ran me over while walking to the store," but that's ambiguous, since some sort of walking car could have run me over, when I happened to be sitting on a bench outside the store.

What I've always wanted, and no one seems to do, is to have the update box pop up on startup (as usual), and then have a button that says "Install on quit." Then I wouldn't have to be interrupted when I opened an app to do something, and it would be taken care of when I finished so that it's ready for the next time.

Fair enough. (I hadn't actually looked up the statutes; I just believed him based on all of the hoops he jumped through to try to do it.) There does appear to be a ban on commercial imports; even though the ivory in question was legally sourced and sold in Germany, he can't get it into the US.

(Though this was probably 15 years ago...it looks like the law might have changed and he could get his keyboard now!)

A colleague of mine ordered a Steinway grand piano from Hamburg with an ivory keyboard (legally made in Germany). He went through a long process of trying to get it into the US (including a few phone calls to the Secretary of the Interior), but there's an absolute ban on importing ivory to the US. In the end, he had to get a plastic keyboard made for the piano before it could be shipped here; the original ivory keyboard is in a closet in his mother's house in Berlin.

I had the same thought, but he appears to be tenured (has taught there 9 years, and is an associate, rather than assistant, professor): http://math.fullerton.edu/people/full-time-faculty/item/bour...

I tried with a picture of Aziz Ansari (https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/aziz_ansari.jp...) and it guessed Jim O'Heir, which I got a kick out of.

It depends on how much it's played. A Steinway in your home is likely to last a lifetime or more. The Steinway in the recital hall at our school is between 20 and 30 years old (I think), and well past its prime. It's played (hard) probably 4-6 hours a day, and eventually they just wear out. It would make a fine piano for someone's house, but it's no longer a performance-quality instrument. (Our own personal piano is a pre-WWII instrument, a 5'9" Knabe with ivory keys. It's been rebuilt once, and is a little...quirky, and could probably do with another rebuilding. It was also a very good deal for two just-out-of-grad-school musicians.)

Some music schools have contracts with Steinway where they get all-new instruments every year, which are sold back to Steinway at the end of the year who sells them as used instruments. I'd imagine (but have no evidence) that music schools in general are one of the largest consumers of pianos. At our undergrad institution of ~200 majors, we have probably 30-40 pianos in the building. My graduate school probably had upwards of 200, and employed 3 full-time piano technicians to maintain them.

Sure. I'm always on the lookout for new things, because I'm unsatisfied with most solutions out there. The best way to learn/practice ear training is to find someone who's decent at piano and play through some progressions you'd find in a theory book.

(Diversion on theory textbooks...) Though I didn't pick it, at my school we use Steve Laitz's The Complete Musician (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Musician-Integrated-Approach-...) and its associated workbooks. I wouldn't recommend it for self-study, because there are a lot of little errors in it a student likely wouldn't notice, and it's prone to confusing people. What might be better for learning on your own is Gary Karpinski's Manual for Ear Training and Sight Singing (http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Ear-Training-Sight-Singing/dp/0...) and the CD that goes along with it. Finding ear-training books is kind of difficult, since most are designed to be used in a class with a teacher. I have more opinions on textbooks but I'll save that rant for now.

Online, this site is pretty good for basic intervals and chords (as I said above), and http://www.musictheory.net/ also has some pretty basic exercises. It avoids a lot of the problems I mentioned above by simply not having those exercises for ear training. I think it's pretty good for people who don't know anything and want to learn, but I usually don't recommend it to my students because it tends to fuzz some specifics as it gets more advanced. I often recommend this software called Practica Musica (http://www.ars-nova.com/practica6.html), which we have installed in the lab at school.

(Background: I teach at a liberal-arts undergraduate institution, and the theory curriculum focuses on common-practice tonal music in the Western tradition. There are probably other more specific sources for particular genres, but knowing the basics of common-practice tonality is a good foundation for most other Western musics.)

I added that R binding a couple of months ago, and it is magical. I hated having to git log, copy the sha, and then 'git rebase -i [paste]' every time. I've mostly switched over to magit, but this is one thing I still use tig for.

The Alliance really isn't gonna like that...

Sure. (I wasn't as clear as I might have been...it's early yet.)

I was preempting a response that I often hear when this debate comes up, which is that "the market" will fix the problem of underemployed PhDs. This often turns into an argument that research that has "practical value" (as judged by the general public) is somehow more important than that which does not. On Hacker News I sense that it's common to read "PhD" as "STEM PhD," and the response is "it's fine, they can just find positions in the industry."

This logic tends to fall short when applied to the humanities in general, and external (non-university) funding for humanities research is shockingly less than those in STEM fields. The National Endowment for the Humanities has an annual budget of $167 million, and the National Science Foundation, compared to $7 billion for the NSF (numbers from Wikipedia). Humanities research often tends to get mocked in debates on public funding: "Why are we, the taxpayers, paying this person to go look through archives in Germany looking for fragments of music by Robert Schumann?"

The humanities do not, in general, have "practical application," at least if practical application means monetary value (as it often does). As 1stop notes in a sibling, humanities research is often research for the sake of culture, or for the sake of research itself. I got into my field because I love it, but also because I think there is inherent value in knowledge. The number of people who will read my dissertation could likely all enjoy a meal together, but for those few people it matters deeply.

So there is some long-term benefit to society for humanities research (other people, likely also scholars, can benefit from it later), but it's not a benefit that's easily quantified. In today's society, this is a problem without a clear solution, and it's an attitude I see a lot on HN (with constant talk of valuation and whatnot).

I appreciate your point, but this kind of attitude often (intended or not) leaves humanities PhDs out in the cold. Sure, for a PhD in computer science you might convince the public that your work is worthwhile (there may be some practical application). My PhD is in the field of music theory...a field which has practically zero real-world applications. It's still important as an academic field, but the long-term benefit to society of a music theory dissertation is simply that we understand a particular aspect of music better.

I've done that, but I was more wondering if there was some place (a blog series or something) that people here would actually recommend. The top hits are all just lists with single terms like "B-to-C" and the like. They're fine if I need to know a single term, but don't really explain much else.

For example: this article (http://www.techrepublic.com/article/glossary-startup-and-ven...), gives the definition for "preferred stock" (a random selection) as "stock that carries a fixed dividend that is to be paid out before dividends carried by common stock." As someone not in the startup business (and not knowing much about finance in general), this is not really helpful. I'm not sure what it means for a dividend to be fixed, nor is there a definition of "common stock" anywhere.

I realize this isn't really the right thread to ask, but these things come up all the time so it seems like there might be a respectable reference somewhere online.

Related: is there some reliable "startup jargon for dummies" page somewhere? I'm often confused with all the talk of rounds, vesting, dilution, and whatnot. I know there are books, but I'm not planning to get into the startup scene; buying a book doesn't seem worth it to be slightly less confused on a website I waste lots of time on.

The saddest thing about the Epitaph is that the last line of it is now ruined, because in the late 19th century its owner ground it down so it would sit flat to hold her flowerpots.

If anyone is interested in ancient Greek music/music theory, the best source is undoubtedly Thomas Mathiesen's Apollo's Lyre (http://www.amazon.com/Apollos-Lyre-Theory-Antiquity-Middle/d...). I had the distinct privilege of taking his ancient music course in his last semester of teaching. The man has literally looked (in person) at every fragment of Greek music or music theory, and translated many of them himself. The book is magnificent, and you will be very unlikely to find any source more well-researched and written.

Edit: If anyone has any questions about Greek music/music theory, I'm happy to try and answer them. It's one of my favorite topics, and while I'm no expert, I probably know a little more than the average Hacker News reader.

This idea isn't entirely new (is anything?); for an earlier version, check out Klavarskribo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo. It didn't really take hold, because it's much more inefficient than normal notation.

As someone who has stolen a lot of Vimscript from his dotfiles, I know that he prefers Mercurial to git (see https://github.com/sjl/dotfiles), and so he's more active on Bitbucket than Github.

Right. It probably also has to do with the fact that it's optimized for speed. The thumb is flexible, but not particularly fast. Many of the thumb keys on the bassoon are for notes that aren't played often, or alternate fingerings that are more in tune than the standard ones, and can be swapped out for other fingerings when speed is required.

That's true. Part of the problem is that for the smaller woodwinds, the right thumb is responsible for holding the weight of the instrument. When a clarinetist is playing an open G, no keys are depressed, and so the instrument is supported only by the mouth and the right thumb.

The reason the left thumb has so few (saxophone and flute each have one, clarinet has two, oboes have one or two, bassoon is an anomaly) is because it usually operates the register key, which has to be held down much of the time while the other fingers do most of the work (not unlike a shift key for typing capitals). Having the left thumb do this is much easier than, say, the pinky, since you lose a lot of dexterity in your ring finger if the pinky has to stay depressed.

Some less common instruments do have more thumb keys; high-end bass clarinets have an extended low register and the two additional notes are operated by the right thumb. Bass clarinet typically uses a peg or a neckstrap, so the thumb is freed up a little bit to do some work.

(For a moment I forgot the main topic of the thread was computer keyboards and thought you had very strange piano technique!)

Kind of off-topic, but ironically the saxophone is probably the most optimal of the woodwind instruments. It was designed much later than the others, and so Sax was able to take the best parts of the others and avoid all the annoying bits. The saxophone, for example, overblows an octave rather than a twelfth like the clarinet, so you can use the same fingerings in both registers. There's also only one key to be pressed by the thumb, unlike the 13 (!) for the bassoon (9 for the left thumb, 4 for the right). This engineering is one of the reasons all of the saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor, bari, etc.) have a similar sound, whereas (say), all the members of the clarinet family sound pretty different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone#History

Plus Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, and Ahmad Jamal! (Can't believe I left them off the first time.)

Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock (a little younger), Chick Corea (noted Scientologist), just to name a few off the top of my head. All of them are still playing fairly regularly, too.

And one of those was to his own earlier work!

See also the MEI project at http://music-encoding.org. Not quite the same thing, but still noteworthy. It's an attempt to provide a parallel to TEI (http://www.tei-c.org) for music notation. MEI is still under development, and they're supposedly working on some way to output notation (maybe through Lilypond; it's been a few months since I've kept up with the project).