Wine Dark Sea

Category: Counting Other Things

  • Rhythm Quants: Burial, Click Tracks, Genre Tempo

    Graham has posted a new video by one of my favorite artists over at Object Oriented Philosophy. Burial is a London DJ whose work often gets filed under the label “dubstep,” a variety of post-house electronica that appeared several years ago. I like dubstep a lot, and this video actually captures something of its unsteady, city-worn appeal:

    One of the greatest things about Burial is that his beats are asymmetrical. That is, in a world where you can loop beats in such a way that the “ictus” (ideal musical point where the beat falls)  is evenly distributed across the entire snippet, Burial’s beats sway a bit from tempo and then rejoin when the loop starts over again. I tend to hear this because I am a drummer, and was trained to play in the 1980s, just when drum machines were becoming more common in live performance and studio recording. For drummers who learned to play in this period, we were forced to synch our bodies (and eventually, minds) to a mathematically precise representation of the ictus — one that is produced by a machine — so that our own playing would match up with that of others who were similarly keyed into this “reference beat.” Most often, that reference beat would be calling the changes in synthesizer parts (which were electronically triggered by that reference): so the whole band, or the band in the recording studio, would ideally be vibrating to the same periodic oscillation, one that never changed unless the beat frequency was altered by the programmer or producer.

    But of course, drumming is more fluid than this kind of matching to the mathematical ictus. Most dance music — music that people actually dance to — has subtle movements ahead of and behind the beat. This occurs in part to create musical tension, but also to whip dancers around in the right way. (Our bodies may exhibit symmetry, but our dance steps do not.) The most extreme versions of this kind of dance-wobble that I have witnessed, although not directly related to drumming, occur in European music. Hearing an orchestra play Strauss in Vienna, I was initiated into something that the Viennese take for granted: Strauss rushes the 1-2 in the 1-2-3 of waltz tempo, which means that you get a one-two…three, one-two….three in which the second beat does not evenly divide the first from the third. Hungarian and Romanian folk music has some of this as well. I remember being at a dancehouse in Budapest in the eighties and hearing a Roma folk band play, and was amazed at the quick surges and retards in the tempo, occurring at every measure. This variation, I was told, helped the dancers whip each other around so that their bodies could lean at the appropriate moment: a really beautiful idea, since it suggests that the music itself was conforming to the movements and weightings of the dance — even at the level of tempo.

    If you look at the beginning of the Burial video, you can see the idea of symmetry taken apart on the screen, as the diagonals display action in a kind of dance-box. Movements and pans in and out of the paired boxes does not occur at the same speed, which means that you get the same kind of staggered synchrony that often occurs in Burial’s musical beats, but here it occurs visually.

    I suspect that a good studio engineer could actually quantify the ways in which Burial’s beats redistribute the ictus on a measure by measure basis, something that was once done by drummers who were not playing to a “click” or mechanically measured metronome, but perhaps more intuitively and communally. That’s not to say that Burial has recaptured the “fluid” nature of the beat or that the electronic metronome killed the beat (and that Burial is bringing it back). It’s not that simple. Rather, drummers have always had a good sense of what the “ictus” is and have manipulated it implicitly by speeding up and slowing down before the beginnings and endings of measures. In a pre-click track world — listen, for example, to some of the beats by The Meters — you wouldn’t necessarily notice the manipulations, because the world has not yet learned to “hear” the absent click, which happens once music everywhere is keyed to an inaudible metrical yardstick. I would say that this was the case by the early ninetees. But once this implicit beat becomes part of the music — part of the bodies and ears of drummers and listeners alike — the tempo pushes and pulls are audible as deliberate. The drummers Manu Katché and Omar Hakim have made an art form out of this over the last two decades. I’m sure both of them can play to a click track (or not) in their sleep.

    The point here is that human beings are exquisitely sensitive to quantitative phenomena like rhythm, and they can also have their background perceptions of what “proper rhythm” is shaped by the music they encounter. There is a backbeat or hidden track to music that is cultural, but that is confirmed or shifted with each performance. I suspect genre works in the same way — as a set of constantly shaped expectations — and that in some cases tempo has been keyed to certain arbitrary or regular standards in order to create particular effects. Serialization might be one version of this (something my colleague Susan Bernstein and I are working on), or the partitioning of plot around commercials.

  • Keeping the Game in Your Head: David Ortiz

    I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I did grow up in the suburbs of Boston and so like the Red Sox. Over the weekend I saw a story in the Times about David Ortiz, who went from being a fabulous home run hitter to someone who couldn’t really connect with the ball and so lost his place at the top of the Red Sox batting order. Baseball is now loaded with information, as anyone who has followed the career of Nate Silver will be aware of. (Silver established his reputation as a baseball statistician but then went on to predict congressional and presidential elections at fivethirtyeight.com.) Apparently Ortiz was drawn into the game of studying his own performance “by the numbers,” and eventually it got to his game. Only when he decided to play for the “fun” of it did his hitting power return. As a story about a player’s encounter with statistics, this one has four parts: talented hitter does well; talented hitter attempts to improve performance with statistics (reported in the Times here); talented hitter suffers from overthinking his game; talented hitter learns to play the game again by forgetting about the numbers.

    Perhaps this story is useful for thinking about the nature of statistically assisted reading. I’m not saying that using statistics to explore textual patterns drains the joy out of reading: it doesn’t, because the statistical re-description of texts is not reading in the sense that you or I would practice it. But I have had interesting experiences reading texts after I have learned something about the underlying linguistic patterns that they express. For example, when I learned that Shakespeare’s late plays contain a linguistic structure in the form of “, which” [comma, which] that distinguished them from all other Shakespeare plays, I really started to pay attention to these in my reading. I wouldn’t say that this detracted from my ability to read the text; rather it drew my attention to something else that was going on. But I also noticed that it was nearly impossible to pay attention to the linguistic patterns and to experience the meaning of that pattern at the same time. That is, I could either notice linguistic features of a play (presence of pronouns, concrete nouns, verbs in past tense, etc.) and ask why they were being used in a particular scene, or I could float along with the spoken line, feeling different ideas or emotions eddy and build as the speaker developed an image or theme. But I couldn’t do both.

    Why should there be this “Ortiz effect” in reading? Is there some kind of fundamental scarcity of attention that forbids one’s reading as a (statistically assisted) linguist and as “any reader whatever” at the same time? I’m interested in this division, but skeptical of the idea — advanced in the article about Ortiz’ return to greatness — that you can forget what you know and “just do it.” The Times article says that Ortiz became a better hitter when he learned simply to “play…as if he were a boy.” But reading is never this simple: you can’t completely forget what you know, even if you learned it through the apparently foreign procedures of statistical analysis. Perhaps you can read “as if” you didn’t know it, and then re-engage that knowledge to examine how the linguistic patterns produce the effects you’ve just experienced? My point here is that readers who are assisted by statistics must simultaneously be both versions of Ortiz described in the different articles: both the hitter and the thinker. It would be a mistake to think that “natural” reading is accomplished in a state of child-like absorption in the game, since even children are brimming with strategies and inferences. I am glad to know certain things about Shakespeare that I couldn’t have known without the assistance of statistics — like the fact that the Histories are full of concrete description and a lack of first and second person pronouns. This doesn’t interfere with my game (I hope), but shows me that the game can be played on another, as yet unknown, verbal plane.

  • Four-Syllable Rock n’ Roll

    Certain things can be counted without a parsing device, for example four-syllable words in rock n’ roll songs. I have often wondered why there are so many one syllable words in rock songs, and have a pet theory for this. Rock lyrics favor Anglo-Saxon words rather than Latinate words — the former have a more direct, less fussy sound — and since the Latinate words tend to be multi-syllabic compounds, multi-syllabic words (say, more than three syllables) tend to be very rare in rock music. Why exactly the monosyllable is appropriate to rock is something I cannot explain, although it may be related to another pattern I have observed: countries that underwent the Protestant Reformation seem to be the most adept at producing (not necessarily consuming) rock music, particularly heavy metal. Perhaps there is a connection here between Northern European linguistic practices (and the persistence of Anglo-Saxon forms) and the predisposition to religious violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one that prepares these countries for immersion in a subsequent musical form like rock n’ roll.

    In any event, I’d like to know what the longest Latinate word is that has been successfully used in a rock song. My candidate (based on popularity, not length) would be “satisfaction,” as in, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

  • The Musical Mood of the Country

    This morning the New York Times published a story today about a group of mathematicians who are counting types of words in popular songs in order to get a handle on something like the mood of the country. In trying to data-mine mood, they do what all people who count things do: move from something that you can quantify empirically to something that you can’t. We do this as well when we move from “types of words” or Docuscope strings in Shakespeare plays to “genre.” The strings are empirically countable — they are either there in an established corpus or they aren’t — but one must argue for any connection between what is counted and what such counts represent (genre, mood, etc.). The point I have tried to make on this blog is that the connection is interpretive, and so relies on the hermeneutic skills of the one proposing the link.

    In the abstract for the paper, recently published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, they write that: “Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth’s equator.” This is an interesting finding, particularly the part about blogger age and distance from the equator. One of the selling-points of their analysis is that the data they have obtained is voluntarily supplied, and so perhaps less subject to the social pressures that accompany surveying. I would want to know, on this score, whether a song-title (for example) is subject to other types of pressures. For example, the songwriter is not just “reporting” an inner state by naming a song in a particular way — take the Ramones song, “I Wanna Be Sedated” for example — but offering this title to an audience. Song-names are rhetorical, and so subject to a different set of pressures than “reporting.” There is another kind of self-interference here that doesn’t seem to be taken into account.

    One of the lead researchers on the paper, Peter Sheridan Dodds, argues that data supplied voluntarily on the web can serve as a kind of “remote sensor of well-being.” (I remember hearing similar arguments made about baby names a while back; you don’t have to pay for them and they’re important: therefore they are a good measure of national feeling and trends.) For example, teenagers appear to be the least happy because they more frequently use words such as “sick,” “hate” and “stupid.” Wouldn’t it be more interesting to track how the use of these words (or absence of them) compares to groups of populations that teenagers themselves describe as “unhappy?” My inclination here would be to use data-mining techniques to assay and re-describe classifications made by a given social group in terms that they may not necessarily be aware of. Then the factual claim would be: when teenagers describe someone as happy, that person is x% less likely to use words like “sick,” “hate” and “stupid.”

    I can imagine the authors of the Music-Mood study making the following set of claims:

    Claim 1) Research on web-logs, lyrics and other sources of expression show that words like “sick,” “hate” and “stupid” occur more frequently in a representative group of works by teenagers. This would be the empirical claim.

    Claim 2) People who are experiencing a mood such as “well-being” are less likely to mention words like “sick,” “hate,” and “stupid” in unprompted work such as songwriting or blogging. This is an interpretive claim that must be argued for.

    Claim 3) Teenagers are less likely than others to be experiencing a mood of well-being. This is logically true if you accept 1 and 2.

    Now, what’s interesting about 2 — the interpretive claim — is that it could be made without numbers. In a sense, you either believe this or you don’t. Which begs the question, what exactly are the numerical claims doing in this argument? What if claim 2 is “kind of true,” or “true only among certain people”? Would this mean that “kind of a lot” of teenagers are unhappy?

    I would be more comfortable saying that teenagers use more of the following words (“hate,” “stupid”), and that a close look at the contexts in which they use them (which can never be comprehensive) suggests that their use is connected to mood in the following way (e.g., their use allows teenagers to gain social attention by citing negative emotions, their use indicates depression, their use indexes the presence of Goth subculture, etc.). But I would want to know how the words are used rather than simply making inferences from the fact that they occur. The counter-argument here is that the law of large numbers guarantees that even if there is a wide variation of uses of the words (granting, in effect, that not all occurrences are “reports” of mood), there is nevertheless a broad enough pattern to make a generalization. Fair enough, but what numbers are you going to use to make the generalization?

    I’m all for the empirical investigation of abstract concepts like happiness, genre, authorial intent. These higher order concepts don’t come from outer space: we create them to capture some suite of characteristics we find in reality or in ourselves. But the Music-Mood analysis lacks a crucial ingredient: an explicit human judgment about the classes that are being measured by the tokens that are being counted. Unless you make that judgment explicit — saying something like “x% of people who experience what persons y and z would describe as ‘well-being’ also produce unprompted work containing these words — you are really just saying that “a lot” of people who we think are happy do this.

    Naming something with a word is a way of creating a class of things (as long as that word is not a proper name), and it is classes of things that are correlated quantitatively using statistics: quantities of classes of words in classes of works, for example. In any such analysis, the classes themselves cannot be derived empirically. They have to be specified in advance by appealing to experience, common sense, expertise, or the like. What troubles me about the Musical Mood analysis here is that the rationale for membership in the class of words indicating “well-being” is not spelled out, and perhaps never could be. I would rather ask someone — an expert? a teenager? — to name people who experience well-being and then do one of Matt Jockers’ most-frequent-word analyses on their lyrics or blogs in order to get at the underlying pattern. It’s fine to begin with a set of words whose occurrence indicates (to you) a feeling 0f well-being, but without knowing quantitatively how indicative they are, the numbers are just another kind of adjective. You might as well read a bunch or web pages and decide for yourself. 

    My guess is that you would conclude that teenagers write like teenagers rather quickly.

  • Spectralism, Maya Lin Show at Corcoran

    Two items worth mentioning: today I had a chance to hear the new record from the Steve Lehman Quartet called Travail, Transformation and Flow, which shows off some of what is new in spectralism, an aesthetic that involves analyzing a tone from a single instrument with a computer and developing improvisations out of its overtone series.  The album — check out “Echoes,” which can be downloaded free here — reminds me of recordings I once heard of glass harmonicas, which are really sets of rotating glasses filled with water that “sing” when touched, like a champagne glass rubbed on its rim.  The music shimmers like a school of fish: you hear a set of tones developing in one of his arpeggiated, darting solos and it fans out in a number of semi-dissonant directions.  It reminds me also of the sound of those prayer bowls that are struck during meditation.  Forerunners of spectralism include Debussy, Bartok, Messiaen and Stockhousen, but the music seems to go beyond any of these influences, especially when it takes the form — in the case of Lehman’s quartet — of an octet with tuba, bass, a few horns and an incredible vibraphone player who is constantly charting the harmonic offramps.  There is something vaguely medieval about this music in the way it interlaces and suspends dissonant moments in a progression.  I would not want to listen to Lehman’s music in a cathedral, however.

    The Maya Lin Systematic Landscapes show at the Corcoran was also interesting, particularly the large massing of cut 2x4s into a kind of wooden berm in the middle of on the galleries.  The piece, 2 x 4 Landscape looks an awful lot like a digital scan of a small geographical feature, one that has been recreated in physical form with all of its discrete jumps and bumpy texture: the model has become the object.  I liked seeing the Lin exhibit after hearing Lehman’s piece because it reminded me of the ways in which some pieces of music or art acquire the status of diagrams or maps of their own construction. Apparently a mathematical algorithm called a Fast Fourier Transform is done on the initial tones in a spectralist analysis, since this pulls out aspects of the overtone series that you or I wouldn’t “hear” immediately.  The composition then calls attention to these facts, which you somehow recognize.  I thought the Lin piece does something of this as well: it shows  you the way in which a hill, landscape or model of the same is composed of many possible paths through the terrain — across, diagonal, up and down — and that each of these vectors or “traverses” will provide you with a different sequence of ups and downs.  A landscape or composition, that is, becomes a vector through a table of values.  We could think of a text in a similar manner as well.  (I’ll be posting more in this in the future.)

    Several months ago I had the idea of taking a concordance of a text and then create a shape using the weightings of these words as heights, radiating from the most common in the center to the least common at the perimeter.  Such a shape or sculpture could look like Lin’s 2 x 4 — it is a physical model of one set of “magnitudes” that defines the text — but would also be something other than a text.  Take ten texts by two writers.  Place the most frequent word of the first work in the center at height n1 (representing the number of times that word occurs in the work), then begin a clockwise coil starting at one position “north,” here at height n2 representing the number of occurrences of that word.  Move next one position east (diagonal from the original origin) and place n3, then south for n4, south again for n5, then west for n6, etc.  Now, if you created shapes for all ten works and then gave the surfaces to a topologist, what are the odds that she or he could do an author attribution?   The point here is that Lin is using landscape, at least in part, as a very large dataset, which is something you can do with texts as well.  (They contain ravines, valleys, hidden depths…)  Or a single note with its overtone series: this too can be a starting point for meditation, analysis and improvisation, since there is “more to it” than just the note. Lin and Lehman are both artists who are interested in elemental phenomena that are really bundled sets of relationships.  The bundles can be teased apart, made explicit, and expressed in a more vivid form: a systematic landscape or an improvisational spectrum.