Lots of concurrency

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Oct 30 17:20:52 UTC 2001


> > The muddying factor here
> > is chunking.  Familiar chords or riffs will seem like single mental
> > chunks, not groups of individual notes.  A good musician will have
> > lots of chunks and so doesn't have to think as hard.  Note that no
> > musician has ever been good without a lot of training -- they must
> > be learning *something* during that time!
> 
> It seems it would be fair to say that music is harder to play when the
> decoding of the score generates more chunks.  Then, music would be
> harder when the chunks you know are not enough to keep the decoder's
> chunk output in check so there's no finger chunk buffer overruns, right?
> 
> Andres.



That's what I was getting at.  I could be full of it, but it sounds good
I think.  :)  If I'm not mistaken, objects in Smalltalk are actually
intended to match up with mental chunks.  Certainly during the late 80's
and early 90's it was a popular interpretation of OO.

I still think there's even more going on with music, by the way.  Bigger
chunking helps with all of them, though!

	1. Decoding the music, which is entwined with:
	   1a. predicting the music, based on general music knowledge
	   1b. remembering the particular piece

	2. Engineering the emotional landscape, for lack of a good description.
 Music is usually meant to move people, and it's not just a matter of
"doing well".

	3. Choosing which fingers to use (a multi-level plan in itself -- pick
a general strategy, then assign individual fingers.)

	4. Positioning the skeletal system (mainly wrists, elbows, and
shoulders)

	5. Oh yeah, actually pressing the keys down.  There's more than one
way.

This doesn't even touch on practice, either, which is *not* just playing
the piece over and over.

And it still seems simplified.  So much of it, even for an amateur, is
just doing what is automatic, and pulling out all the individual pieces
is tough.  It's like talking, really -- it's mostly automatic, but
there's clearly a *lot* going on.  Try to explain how to give a rousing
speech, or even just to chat with someone--there's a lot going on!

And to return to the topic, I'm not sure  that one can do high-level
problem solving with more than one of these activities at a time. 
Certainly you can *react* and probably *consider* more than one at a
time, but higher-level stuff?


-Lex




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