All about music

I recently started learning to play the guitar. Ok, now that you've taken a minute to stop laughing as to the possible reasons for my doing so, (ok insert more delay here) let me point out the reason for my fascination with this instrument. I've been told it's easier to learn the piano, by a good friend who does, but my fascination with the guitar goes back to the first time I heard "With or without you" by U2. Lyrics and good singing aside, this song amazed me because of the instrumental section towards the end, dominated by the guitar. Even this clip of how The Edge achieves his effects (courtesy, the same friend), hasn't quite deterred me yet. What my short learning experience with the guitar has taught me though, is that it is a hard instrument to master. Maybe I'm an inexperienced player, or my fingers are too fat, but finding the right placement without damping the other strings is still something that fails me.


Ok, after the long intro, let me get to the main point of my post. A while ago, I read up about how people appreciate music for a course on art & philosophy. I found an interesting study on how even though we focus on the notes we hear, the ones we don't often induce an emotional response. Which means that the inaudible frequencies affect our brain activity (see paper here), and from what I remember, it does affect our emotional response to the music. This is one reason I don't quite like mp3's, the way they achieve a small file size is by cutting off these very frequencies. Might be an interesting pitch for studios to make for CDs and DVDs and not focus on mp3s exclusively. Also while working on the same project, I got this idea of resonance with music. But since I've covered that in another post, I won't go into it.


Recently I read this new study on the link between music and rehab for people who have had strokes. They made this observation on how music activates different regions of the brain, and people who have lost the ability to use the left side of the brain, can still communicate using singing. It's an interesting point on how music seems to have this intricate contact with our brains, our minds. We all have had our moments where we've listened to certain music tracks to calm us down, pump us up, or even get over bad moments. Rhythm and musical notes seem to have this connection with our minds, and it seemingly goes beyond training. Babies are known to respond to music, more so to rhythm, and feel like dancing when they hear it (see here). This would suggest that whatever relationship we have with music, goes beyond training and might just be ingrained in our genes. No one quite understands why we have this attraction to rhythm, but I've personally found it easier to learn and do repetitive tasks when associated with a rhythm. It would seem our brains are tuned to certain rhythms which govern us, subconciously. It might even be interesting to see whether we can grasp something about our minds from this fact, though it's quite clearly a long shot. Maybe our preferences for different kinds of music, apart from reflecting on who we are, also says something about how our brains are wired. But till we know more, enjoy that rhythm.

A World of Snow

I stepped out and lo and behold,
There it was,
A world dressed in white,
Untouched and unblemished,
By the sand of time,
Is it the end of an epoch,
Or the beginning of something new,
But those questions can wait,
As I'm reborn in this world anew

-- Me

Quotes

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on...
When in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back?
There are some things that time cannot mend... some hurts go too deep... that have taken hold.

--Frodo (The Lord of the Rings)

Irony

Most of an iceberg, is never seen,
We're always more concerned with where we'll be,
Than where we've been
Blind to all around
Yet so focused on that distant dream

Always ready to run, hear, and look
Yet never able to stay, listen, and see
Confined in cold lonely spaces
Yet unwilling to step out and seek warmth,
Amongst the hearts that beat so keen

The anatomy of a question

When I was younger, much younger in fact, in school, we were taught about writing a notice. In case you don't know, writing a notice involves answering 5 key questions, Who/What, When, Where, How, and Why. The interesting part, I realised later, was that you could actually decompose pretty much anything that ever was asked, into one of these basic questions, or at worst, a combination of them. That, in itself, isn't very special, you'll probably say. To the mathematically minded, this will probably seem somewhat more interesting, cause you're defining a basis of a space, orthogonal or not, you decide. The real kicker comes when you actually try to see this in action.

The first, the obvious, is probably art. Understanding art, in fact anything at all, requires that you ask the right question. It is like the principle of resonance, you really can't see any substantial affects unless the frequency's right, i.e. the right questions are asked. But then again, the point of a lot of art is simply to make you ask the question. Why is that interesting, useful even? When we usually ask a question, we ask it in a context. When you try to ask the same question in a different context, or even simply try to see the same answer in a different context, you'll see very different results. That's why people who advocate abolishing the death penalty, would probably hesitate, if say, Hitler was involved, assuming of course, that he were alive.

In saying so, the act of asking the question, the "right" question seems to be the most important thing of all. Ask someone doing a Ph.D. , they'll vehemently agree. The "right" part is the hard thing, it seems you need to use some magic to do so. Let me offer an interesting parallel. In theoretical computer science, there are 2 classes of problems, P and NP. The class of problems P are such that can be solved in time proportional to some polynomial function of the size of the input problem, for example, sorting a list of numbers. The other class, NP, intuitively means ones that cannot, more specifically, they stand for the class of problems whose solution can be verified in polynomial time. To actually find a solution would take exponential time. If this seems gibberish to you, understand this much, that problems belonging to the group P, are easily solveable, while the ones in NP, are not, they can be verified easily. Now, one of the areas of research in computer science is to see whether these 2 sets are the same set or not, i.e. is it that problems of NP actually cannot be solved in polynomial time, or we've just been that dumb for so long that we didn't see the answer.

Now that we've taken that detour, let me point out where I'm going. We always ask questions that have no "right" answer, or atleast one whose answer's "right"ness you cannot check until you try it out. That, to me, is pretty much what I'd consider NP material. However, you answer a lot of easy questions everyday, which you don't think twice about, more P material. I know a lot of you would scream blasphemy and point out holes in the argument at this point, but keep your pants on, take a leap of faith here. So, our dilemna is, are there 2 kinds of questions, or are we simply just dumb enough that it seems so to us. After all, different questions seem to pose different levels of difficulty to different people. But, when told the answer, we can all "easily" see that the answer's right, or wrong. Well, sometimes, we can't even do that, cause that itself is asking a new question. So does that prove whether P=NP or the negation? difficult to say. If human nature has shown us anything, it's that the same questions pose different scales of difficulty at differing times in our lives, so in a way, all questions are hard, which would seem to suggest that thinking P=NP isn't that bad after all. But then think of questions like "Where am I" at a more cosmic level, you'll have to stop at universe, but where is the universe?. Or even seemingly more mundane questions like "Who am I", or "Did I do the right thing". The thing is, hard questions exponentially explode to pose a number of other hard questions, which is exactly why they're hard. But the thing is, the answer to whether such hard questions can be answered (pun unintended), could be suggested by computer scientists!, if and when they prove the P=NP problem. Until then, we can do something most other computer scientists do, use approximations. The key lies in realising that the right answer may not be worth the effort, so there's no point in killing yourself over it. All you should probably care about, is that the answer is good enough to a certain level of tolerance, and then not care so much about the repercussions. After all, you did your "best", and you have a somewhat hacky argument to prove that you couldn't have done a better job given your restrictions. After all, the best algorithms for perfection are non-terminating. My favorite is a dialogue that Richard Gere said in a very cheesy movie called First Knight: to win a duel, you have study your opponent, wait for the critical moment, and not care about your life.

Of course if you try to use this post as an argument as to why you couldn't complete an answer in your paper, in front of your instructor, then ask yourself, is god/luck with you (and the exploding series of questions that follow :P ).

Ramblings

Rainy Day
In that moment time stood still,
Her beauty washed over me,
She was in front of me, within me, and all around me,
Born anew, glistening in the moonlight

-- Me

Religion, stupidity and the news

I try to, but it's hard to avoid talking about religion. A few weeks back, gay sex was finally allowed in India, and the debates happening on TV, were real fun to watch. I actually felt a bit of pity for the people defending the religious viewpoints, because they were so easy to prove wrong. A big problem with relgion is that they're atleast 500 years old or more, which makes their teachings hard to associate with today's world. The weird part is, the more they get out of sync with today, the more fiercely some people fight to keept them in place. If you think I'm referring to Islam, you're sadly mistaken. I've seen zealotry displayed by Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike, and other relgions too, so no side really has a high moral ground here.

The interesting part about seeing such debates and arguments is the examples and similarities given in the debates. I've seen people compare gay sex to sex with animals, among other things. I remember only this example because of this funny pic I saw on this page, about sodomy. The weird desire of people to control others' lives astounds me even today, I mean, let people do whatever they want, it's not like they're going to stop because you tell them to, it's simply going to push these activities under the radar. The other weird fact is how sometimes these are not even arguments or debates, they're simply shouting matches. This, weirdly, is most apparent in USA. Switch on a news channel, and all you will see is opinion shows. Every channel seems to have taken a side, and they will bash up the other side, and glorify theirs, no matter the issue, no matter the incident. Common sense things get pushed back, and I'm almost left to wonder, where is the so called difference with the Indian government that everyone keeps talking about. All democracies seem to be crippled by people pulling strings from behind the scenes, by using corruption, and god knows what other means (pun unintended :) ). At least, in India, I can switch on a news channel, and see news, a report of what is happening, unblemished in most cases, by personal opinion. Also, if something is clearly wrong, all channels will uniformly portray this. Weirdly enough, the best news I get in the USA, is from news comedies on Comedy Central, they atleast uniformly bash everyone, or from print agencies.

Coming back, the odd fact that I realised is that, people are more or less the same everywhere. You'll always have your share of the ignorant, who are manipulated by those in power, and those who are immune to it to a certain extent, or atleast feel they are. Why you do not see this always, is marketing, the media likes to highlight the ignorant of other countries, and the sensible (and ignorant) of your own. All religions can be equally stupid at times as well. It's interesting, and mostly futile to argue that a prophet or a god, who had an opinion a few hundred or thousand years ago, might not have changed now. Such an argument can never stick, especially since it's an opinion someone says the gods have, and unless religious leaders acknowledge that, or atleast concede this much that they are simply interpreters and not gods themselves, they cannot win over all of the population. Somehow, I feel that this divide will remain, and if people are still educated free from religion and purely by science, they will always protest against it. But, everyone is never educated, it hasn't happened in 2000 years, and there's no reason to believe it's going to happen anytime soon. The sad part is, there are some really nice parts to religion too, and they tend to get lost in all of the brouhaha over the controversial ones. I'm not particularly religious, mostly superstitious, but still like some aspects of religion, particularly the inspirational stories that encourage you to do good. I do hope all the nonsense ends someday, but I'm not holding my breath.