2004-06-28
Fwd: Do Music and Language Obey the Same Rules?
Interesting item from slashdot:
>----- Forwarded message from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org -----
>
>From: brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org
>Date: 28 Jun 2004 07:26:01 -0000
>To: slashdotnews@hyperreal.org
>Subject: Do Music and Language Obey the Same Rules?
>User-Agent: SlashdotNewsScooper/0.0.3
>
>Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/28/0046201
>Posted by: michael, on 2004-06-28 06:01:00
>Topic: music, 77 comments
>
> from the i-before-e-except-after-middle-c dept.
> [1]Emre Sevinc writes "Ever felt as though a piece of music is
> speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together
> in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to
> an Argentinian physicist. [2]This article in Nature states that Damián
> H. Zanette's [3]analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal
> compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones,
> which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to
> make sense of atonal works. In both written text and speech, the
> frequency with which different words are used follows a striking
> pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist [4]George Kingsley
> Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to
> the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly
> proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared. [5]Herbert
> Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship.
> He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context
> within which words that have been used already are more likely to
> appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that
> the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word
> 'sausage'. Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in
> Bariloche, Argentina, used this idea to test whether different types
> of music create a semantic context in a similar fashion."
>
>References
>
> 1. mailto:emres@bilgi.edu.tr
> 2. http://www.nature.com/nsu/040614/040614-11.html
> 3. http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0406015
> 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
> 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon
>
>----- End forwarded message -----
>----- Forwarded message from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org -----
>
>From: brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org
>Date: 28 Jun 2004 07:26:01 -0000
>To: slashdotnews@hyperreal.org
>Subject: Do Music and Language Obey the Same Rules?
>User-Agent: SlashdotNewsScooper/0.0.3
>
>Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/28/0046201
>Posted by: michael, on 2004-06-28 06:01:00
>Topic: music, 77 comments
>
> from the i-before-e-except-after-middle-c dept.
> [1]Emre Sevinc writes "Ever felt as though a piece of music is
> speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together
> in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to
> an Argentinian physicist. [2]This article in Nature states that Damián
> H. Zanette's [3]analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal
> compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones,
> which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to
> make sense of atonal works. In both written text and speech, the
> frequency with which different words are used follows a striking
> pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist [4]George Kingsley
> Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to
> the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly
> proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared. [5]Herbert
> Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship.
> He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context
> within which words that have been used already are more likely to
> appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that
> the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word
> 'sausage'. Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in
> Bariloche, Argentina, used this idea to test whether different types
> of music create a semantic context in a similar fashion."
>
>References
>
> 1. mailto:emres@bilgi.edu.tr
> 2. http://www.nature.com/nsu/040614/040614-11.html
> 3. http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0406015
> 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
> 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon
>
>----- End forwarded message -----
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