Slightly irrelevant question: Did anyone ever unearth any further information about the greek attic-numeric catastrophe?

u/c - not irrelevant, just a mite premature ...
(actually, might have been a mega-mite - you volunteering?)
Ifrah is great on this kind of thing, he's incredibly down to earth and comes up with wonderful stuff through sheer dogged pursuit.
Anyway, agree that it has to be crucial, given that it's a case of cultural autolobotomization of numerical competence. (Imagine savage market-based cultural darwinism has ruled that sort of weird shit right out of court since, based on your fascinating discussions recently - says something interesting about the Greeks that it was still possible for them).

I did wonder whether there might be some indiana-jones style renegade classicist lurking somewhere in the world who has access to this mystery. On the whole though, no-one seems interested, whic his strange given the sort of minimicrodetails such academics spend their lives dissecting.

u/c PS. To tediously repeat an insert you might have missed:
ZERO + NINE = ONE + EIGHT = TWO + SEVEN = THREE + SIX = FOUR + FIVE.
Is this not strange?
And if it has never been demonstrated before (given the prominence of the octave within Western culture), is that not really strange?

Remember you had a big octave-numeracy thing at one point (long, long ago, so apologies if this sounds like 'do you remember that party we went to in 199x' - the very definition of annoying as previously given) - forgotten the source - Mr. Geodesic domes wasn't it? Also seem to recall having a lot of isomorphic zing with this, through twinning/folding (Vysparov's 'pitch' system also connected)

u/c - we're in a major time-slippage zone, but the absence of this theme, not only in academia but also on the web, utterly stuns me.
Tried googling elementary search patterns around digital reduction today and kept being sent straight back to hyperstition - assuming mathematics has really shut down the whole popular numeracy topic (which is why i love your recent posts, and have major gripes with Badiou)

the only site that has much on the attics (and sundry other matters) is http://www.jesus8880.com/chapters/gematria/greek-numerals.htm
Don't clearly remember the octave-numeracy although its clear that octavian period-doubling is a topic straight from the heart of the pythagorean brotherhood.

And (slipping further into distant connections) later on in history the transition to the tempered musical scale is really interesting as a numeric catastrophe: instead of a working system of harmony with anchoring in the real (ie in one particular key) and a corresponding system of different keys each with a peculiar characteristic tonality, we get a generalised, less-than-optimal approximation to pythagorean harmony that allows the scale to "start" at any point and sound 'the same', eventually making 'real' harmony intolerable or at least bizarre to our ears.

ps I'm just awating Badiou's "Le Nombre et les nombres" from amazon, hopefully this will give some hardcore insight into his fundamental in/numeracy.

Not sure whether I can add any metacommentary to the eight-twinning that wouldn't be otiose. That's the (my) trouble with the numogram really, what do you do with it apart from act impressed...?

u/c - "http://www.jesus8880.com/chapters/gematria/greek-numerals.htm" - thanks for that piece of sickness - can already see it's horribly compelling (any way we can hide this from northanger?)

musonomic geeking also highly appreciated - definitely need more of this stuff - any comments on transcultural comparisons of musical 'common sense' and the arbitrariness of the octave? (going to check out the Chinese angle before sticking my neck out, but it's totally alien)

I would have thought that the existence of octave-as-period-doubling was pretty hardwired into acoustical reality. The question why it has to be an octave rather than a nonave or whatever is different; this connects to the doubling-periods 1,2,4,8 (also=binary place values) as being more 'fundamental' than the cardinals (although this, in turn, could be simply a contingent result of math's perennial entanglement with music [but you could argue that this entanglement is a condition of possibility rather than a coincidence]).

888 HUGE over here
(HUGE = 77 irrelevant to that comment)

12 pitches in the Chinese 'octave'

PS. http://www.cechinatrans.demon.co.uk/ctm-psm.html
- has that cool musonomic geeky feel, and addresses the issue (confirming your intuitions, while diagonalizing them into some kind of refractionalization trajectory)

!

According to Needham, sound is a form of chi and the chinese thinkers were generally more interested in sonic contagion (sympathetic resonance) and the 'miraculous' immanent relationships this suggested than in mathematical analysis. And compared to greek musical thought there was far more interest in timbre or texture of sound over 'musical' relationships (presumably because different sounds were different types of breath or mood - whereas in greece such things are only understood in terms of the notes used - modes.)

However, there is a "five-fold division of sound", relating to the pentatonic scale (blues scale, major scale minus fourth and seventh). But also a heptatonic scale that was supposedly invented by the Duke of Chou (of I Ching fame?) then later, a 12-note series:

And...(Ok, are you ready for this, try to stay calm....)

"The easiest way to appreciate the elegant simplicity of the Chinese method is to glance first at the Greek method...A musical scale based on [pythagoras'] mathematical relationships was devised, although another Greek school still favoured tuning by ear...The Chinese gamut of pitches, on the other hand, requires only the simplest mathematics and does not use the octave as starting point..or at all....The Chinese simply took a fundamental note and then multiplied by two-thirds and three-quarters alternately, thus embarking on a process which evolves an unending spiral of notes. [In O]ur oldest source for any actual lengths... the manner in which they are expressed - by use of a decimal system in conjunction with a system based on thirds - has a distinctly Babylonian flavour."

OK, notebooks out, then. Maybe should prepare a HS post on this.

definitely exceeds current processing capacities ..

Use of two incommensurate measures to create a spiral most appealing.

I bought this four-volume paperback of 'science and civilization in china' (the abridged version, that is!) out of a bargain bin in a bookshop in Cambridge, around a decade ago. I knew it'd come in handy _one day_, LOL!

So much going on in the adrenoresearch comment its difficult to know where to begin - mesopotamian connection ("distinctly Babylonian flavour") certainly doesn't contribute to a restriction of the research environment (if Reza has dug up any musical implements used by star-headed abominations we're really screwed into obscure spirals ...)

two last points for now:

The next line or the text says something to the effect that greek and chinese systems most likely have a _common_ origin in Babylonian, which makes it important to find out what it was the two models diverged from (interesting from pov of move from babylonian to greek conceptions of mathematics).

Second, of course it should be noted that the 'western' scale is a 7 _or_ 12 tone system (7 whole tones unevenly distributed in 12 semitones.) that could be understood as base-8 or -13 with octave ascension as place-value. This is notationally complicated by the fact that in the realm of music software we conventionally start at C0 (center of piano keyboard), assigning a totally separate (decimal) system to the decimal ascension/descent, and locating it to the right of the 'units', which themselves are a place-shifted version of the first seven letters ABCDEFG supplemented by fractional-modifiers up or downwards (sharp/flat).

nick, where's the ccru website?

should read:

>next line OF the text

>assigning a totally separate (decimal) system to the OCTAVE ascension/descent,

and the clocks are wrong

the uk one is right, at any rate...where are you, northanger?

seconds are off

22:[3]0
19:[0]0
03:[0]0

I'm strongly tempted to say something extremely rude to you

c.i.a.l.i.s

levitra

FA

it's official! i'm certifiable

>>> Ifrah is great on this kind of thing, he's incredibly down to earth and comes up with wonderful stuff through sheer dogged pursuit.

you mean this guy?

Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471393401/

>>> ZERO + NINE = ONE + EIGHT = TWO + SEVEN = THREE + SIX = FOUR + FIVE.
>>> Is this not strange?

not strange. no one has never noticed this before? where are the ccru pages with all the zone information and the numogram on the front page? it's kind of relevant to this discussion, neh?

>>> tried googling elementary search patterns around digital reduction today and kept being sent straight back to hyperstition

always appreciated this comment:

http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~jreameszimmerman/Hephaistion/www.html
Don't believe everything you read on the web. The internet is not (yet) a substitute for cracking a book. Verify your sources.

how is it possible that Tehran is 30 seconds slower? never noticed this before.

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/custom.html?cities=136,246,237

correction, 30 MINUTES slower

http://www.worldtimezone.com/faq.html

well, learn something new every day

if you're confusing minutes and seconds, it's probably you who has the timekeeping problem.
Yeah, tehran is in a fractional timezone, kind of cool eh.

u/c: as i recall, all half-hours (for the home page clocks) were set at the same half hour

>>> musical scale

main page:
http://www.kheraha.co.uk/k_intro.html

The Song of the Great Pyramid
http://www.kheraha.co.uk/seven.html

Scale (music)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_scale
In music, a scale is an ascending or descending series of notes or pitches, as opposed to a series of intervals, which is a musical mode. Each note in a scale is referred to as a scale degree. Though the scales from musical traditions around the world are often quite different, the pitches of the notes in any given scale are usually related by a mathematical rule. Scales are theoretical constructs which may be used to control a composition, but much music is written without any scale in mind. Scales may be described as tonal, modal, diatonic, derived or synthetic, and by the number of tones included.

Diatonic scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic

The major scale begins on the first note and proceeds by steps to the first octave. In solfege, the syllables for each scale degree are "Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do".

The natural minor scale can be thought of in two ways, the first is as the relative minor of the major scale, beginning on the sixth degree of the scale and proceeding step by step through the same tetrachords to the first octave of the sixth degree. In solfege "La-Ti-Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol."

Alternately, the natural minor can be seen as a composite of two different tetrachords of the pattern 2-1-2-2-1-2-2. In solfege "Do-Re-Mé-Fa-Sol-Lé-Té-Do."

Solfege
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfege
In music and sight singing solfege is a way of assigning syllables to degrees or steps of the diatonic scale. In order, they are: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, and Do (for the octave). In the East, the origin of Solfege was in the Upanishads, which discuss a solfege system of seven notes. Much later in the West it was a pedagogical technique created by Guido of Arezzo; These names are still used for the notes in Latin countries while in Germanic countries the names of letters of the alphabet are used.

northanger - get some grip! pouring out the contents of your head doesnt mean a live connection with the hyperstitonists! you are like a child blurting out first thing in your mind. interesting site though, even if i don't understand anything you guys are talking about. except that chinese music you talk about is not the chinese music of today. dead culture. look now, things are different.

northanger - "Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers" - Yes (theoretically understated, superb book)
Ccru site - damn! ... this could take a while ...

Sung: of course you're right that ancient musical models must have been overcoded by pop music - but what does it mean for a culture to be 'dead'? Could it not be the case that certain general ways of thinking about sound and music still exist and influence today's music, or does technology completely erase them? Have these forms totally disappeared, or do they combine with pop to create a specifically chinese pop? I have heard very little but for instance Ai Jing(?) seems to combine elements of traditional chinese music along with stereotype guitar-rock (I'm sure there are more interesting examples....)

I'm just in the process of writing a piece about this in relation to D&G's "pop philosophy": This is an important subject because it's a metonym for a lot of fraught debates re. globalisation : is "pop" as a model to be regarded as a homogenising, erasing model of sameness, or simply as a mongrelising, contagious principle of distribution? Is "pop" to be thought of as simply relating to the production of lowest-common-denominator popularity, or is it a specific sociopolitical modality?

If I'm not wrong, the whole 'popular numeracy' topic indexes a general tendency to understand mechanisms of popularity conducted through sensory innovation as more liberatory than top-down imposed structures of understanding (sorry, that's a bit vague...). Given that numerology is generally written off as a similar kind of soothing illusory pastime to pop music, an opium for the masses, we should have something to say about an abstract "pop" model as such (as in Reza's comment about the apparently-benign but actually politically-corruptive influence of occultism).

more precisely, should say:

we should have something to say about this positive abstract "pop" model as a _de jure_ distinct assemblage despite its _de facto_ occurrence only in mixed milieus (ie the fact that the pop charts are always full of crap, or that starbucks coffee tastes lkie shit, shouldn't be a cue for dismissal and retreat to ideological purism).

u/c - 'is "pop" as a model to be regarded as a homogenising, erasing model of sameness, or simply as a mongrelising, contagious principle of distribution?'

Good question u/c. Though this question is launched above the specific Chinese milieu. Already by talking of "pop", without regard to local specificity you are exploring something assumed shared throughout all human cultures in which technology and globalised capital have a siginificant impact. I see it as a mongrelising of locality with homogeneity, a flattening, smearing of homogeneity across what was porous local space, in which previously music and culture (including dance, worship, tea ceremonies, other rituals) staked out some relatively isolated independence.

>>> ZERO + NINE = ONE + EIGHT = TWO + SEVEN = THREE + SIX = FOUR + FIVE.
>>> Is this not strange?

I don't get it. Are you surprised that moving an object from one pile to another does not change the total number of objects?

Please ignore my previous comment. This is what happens when you read the comments but not the actual post.

"This is what happens when you read the comments but not the actual post" - well i guess that's original (you're hanging onto your nic by your fingernails right now).

Tachi - you still having technical problems?

northanger - where are you?

tachi, like your characterisation of pop - think it is key that it doesn't "come from" anywhere but is virtually present and activated in various ways. I'm still thinking about this....would like to find a way to prolong this line of enquiry. [many thanks for your comments at the other place, too]

"where are you?" - BOO!

Hi Nick, seem to be over the technical hitch, though just not able to dedicate enough dedicated time to engage with stuff arising in the blogspace.

u/c - cheers, agree pop doesnt really 'come from' anywhere. Would like a second run-up to your previous interesting questions, though not sure where is best to address these except here:

u/c: "is "pop" as a model to be regarded as a homogenising, erasing model of sameness, or simply as a mongrelising, contagious principle of distribution?"

This question lacks a noun relating to the key verbs 'homogenise' and 'mongrelise' - sorry to appear linguistically uptight, but think it is important - since I do not think (and guess nor do you) that there is some stuff already there to be acted upon.

Don't mean we should look for a noun that is 'doing' the homogenising and/or mongrelising, but think that it is interesting to ask whether *pop* can be seen as the *production* of a simultaneous homogenizing and mongrelizing aspect of culture (eg. music) precisely through a facilitation of the local by a bastard alliance with the global. The 'parochially local' gives way to the 'globally local'.

> Mongrelization - production through synthesis of the local and global (and/or local and local?)
> Globalization - production of/within a global model of distribution ...

u/c: "Is "pop" to be thought of as simply relating to the production of lowest-common-denominator popularity, or is it a specific sociopolitical modality?""

Again interesting q. Think I can see where you are driving at. Effacement, homogenization, simplification in a sense, vs. Effusion, dispersion, distribution?

Why not: Pop = effacement of the parochially local forms of culture through the production of the locally global.

Ahh. Help!

Just letting you know - your site is fantastic! , to forecast table you should be very big