(no subject)

Last night a bunch of us went to hear a couple of Kyrgyz performers; one recited a portion of Manas, their national epic, and the other played about six different musical instruments. Some aspects of their pentatonic music system were striking. There were two notes of importance: something that appeared to function as a tonic, and the notes a perfect fifth above and a perfect fourth below (if we assume octave equivalence these are both scale degree 5 -- very similar to the hierarchy of importance in Western music!). Two of the other notes mapped right onto scale degrees 2 and 3 of a major scale. However, scale degree 4 was nearly a half-step sharp from how it'd be in a Western major scale -- making a tritone with the tonic. This is all interesting to me because people like to argue about whether there is something special about certain intervals, whether maybe there is a built-in preference for small ratios; and the ones that are most often mentioned as possibly "innate" are the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth, intervals represented by very simple ratios. In some sense this system appears to be positive evidence -- and I have to tell you I was a bit bowled over by the apparently-very-similar tonal hierarchy -- but then there is this near-tritone, which is IIRC the most complex ratio possible with the Western scale, and so it's clear that even if there is a preference for certain simple intervals, there's no assumption that all scale degrees should make such simple ratios with the tonic.

(Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, though; in pentatonic scales, which very frequently map onto subsets of the seven-note Western scale, what we think of as scale degree 4 is often omitted and replaced with what we would think of as scale degree 6. So it's clear from that that we don't start out with the expectation that "the note a perfect fourth above the tonic will be important.")

on beards

Apparently beards are trendy or something.

No survey ever conducted about women's attitudes toward beards, even those not underwritten by the Gillette Company, has indicated that more than 2 or 3 percent of women would describe a full beard as sexy. ("I hang out with those girls who are in that 2 or 3 percent," Mr. Martin, of Vice, said.)

In my opinion, the sexiness or not of a beard depends on a few things:
1. whether the person is actually capable of growing a non-pathetic beard
2. whether the person keeps it neat
3. whether it suits the person's face.

On the right guy, a beard can be totally hot. Just so you know. (Unfortunately for viewers of the article: Mr. Ralph Lauren Model? Not the right guy.)