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At 09:20 AM 7/24/2002, jim palmer wrote: >this desire for perfect specificity in language may be somewhat misguided. is it? I don't think the desire was for rigid, unchanging, perfectly specific definitions. I think the desire was for clear ideas of what words mean, and a variety of words with similar yet different meanings retaining those differences. My complaint was about people trying to make several different words become equal, broadening the definition of each until they all perfectly overlapped and could be used interchangeably. (i.e., instrument = effect = recording studio.) Eliminating the difference between various words limits the ability to clearly communicate ideas with words. My desire is to maintain the clearly different meanings, so I can have more words to use in communicating ideas. I don't think there is anything misguided in that. that's why, when I saw people using "effect" to describe instruments, and "instrument" to describe effects, I sought to clarify the definitions of the two and the differences between the two. Or at least how I understood the differences. (musical instrument = device physically and interactively manipulated in order to perform music; sound effect = device that passively and non-interactively processes sound according to some set rules.) Once we have a common understanding of the words and the ideas they represent, we can communicate other ideas from that common understanding. (And we can decide which devices in a given situation go in one category or another.) lacking that clarity brings confusion. When Mark said that people like Andre LaFosse and Bill Walker were using Looping as an "effect" at the loopfest, I didn't understand how he could possible see that. I had seen the exact same performances, and "effect" did not fit what those people were doing at all. Was Mark insulting them? Or complimenting them? By my understanding of the words, it was an insult and cheapened their performances. Perhaps by Mark's understanding of the words, it was a compliment. Without clarifying what the words mean we have confusion. >i think language in use is a discrete, linear signal and as such can be >studied >in a similar way as a digital signal. >when you perform an fourier transform to a time domain signal to >convert it to a frequency domain signal, you have to trade between >accurate frequency information or accurate time information. >is this a less accurate representation of the signal? some would say yes. >so why do it? because there are a lot of interesting things you can >do to a frequency domain signal. hmmmm, well I study signals all day long as a profession, and I'm having a real hard time understanding your comparison of that to studying language. Maybe in some really superficial way they are similar. But like anything, the complexity is in the details, and there these two things don't seem alike at all to me. kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com