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Looper's Delight
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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. i don't understand this distinction. > 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. i agree with this, but i don't think people were saying an effect is the same as an instrument... > > 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.) this was the point of my aquinas quote. > > 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. > it seems to me that the responsibility for clearing up confusion is to ask the speaker. after all it's the speakers intent that you are trying to understand. you should be able to do this without concern about offending them or appearing foolish. (these are the most common outcomes, though. i blame society) i think a lot of problems could be eliminated if people would refuse to be offended by words. > > >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 > > reading this back i see that it is not very well worded. (appropriate, yes?) this is an imperfect analogy, but aren't all analogies imperfect? clearly the human brain processes spoken language as a signal. but my point was that trying to totally define a word by itself excluding the context (speaker, syntax, time of day, blah blah) and without feedback, is like trying to get frequency information from a single sample.