Comments | acalculatedname: the empiricalest of all LJIers. people weep instantly when they see i've posted

acalculatedname

the empiricalest of all LJIers. people weep instantly when they see i've posted

Jul 29, 2013 19:23

This entry is an incredibly loose intersection (mostly, bidirectional idea-bouncing in rather disparate time zones) with alexpgp, whose entry is here. Sorry, buddy. Really sorry.

edit 8/2/13: Results and discussions of the experiments here. Thanks again to all who participated.

HYPOTHESIS: While musicians and even laypeople have associated "happy" ( Read more... )

Comments 27

roina_arwen July 30 2013, 18:11:57 UTC

This was odd but fun. I like the audience interaction aspect!

acalculatedname July 31 2013, 16:42:23 UTC

Maybe the closest I've come to being fully honest about my actual sense of humor in an LJI posting. Hey, audience interaction is ALWAYS fun.

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acalculatedname July 31 2013, 16:58:44 UTC

Thanks, I tried. :)

oxymoron67 July 31 2013, 01:33:34 UTC

This was interesting.

acalculatedname July 31 2013, 16:59:23 UTC

It was definitely more interesting than the other alternative "educational" entry I wrote and then totally scrapped in favor of mild mindfuckery.

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acalculatedname July 31 2013, 16:41:37 UTC

Success! Success?

halfshellvenus July 31 2013, 05:30:08 UTC

I couldn't distinguish relative awfulness in experiment one, but the second sample in Exp. 2 was indeed sadder--because of the cringing and the horror of the excruciation involved!

I agree with you about the hypothesis, however. Apart from those with absolute pitch, I do not believe that any one particular minor key is abstractly sadder than any other. For particular instruments and particular voices, perhaps, but otherwise no.

It is far less sad for string players than, say many-flats minor or many-sharps minor. ;)

acalculatedname July 31 2013, 16:08:26 UTC

Interesting. Even as the person in charge of experimental design, I have a hard time knowing which is sadder in experiment two - my "song" or the "underlying" attempt at standup comedy by the TRULY inimitable Unkie Dunkie, endorsed by the likes of Patton Oswalt. (My one regret is that I couldn't have thrown more of Unkie's timeless, truly eye-opening "performance" into the MP3 without violating LJI-length attention spans.)

"For particular voices, perhaps..." :) :) :)

And not all "string players" are affected equally by "heavy" key sigs. Our math-rock band has an inordinate number of songs in kinda E-flat minor. Of course, I'm the only one reading (or writing) the pitched notation, so that probably helps. (I had to transcribe out one of our mostly-Ebm songs into notation/tab and it uses a lot of flat-2 and flat-5; I remember thinking I'd have a lot of questions from the guys about why so many F-flats and B-double-flats, but I think they barely even looked at the tab.)