Zompist Bboard Again

My question is: Why are there so many names for sound varieties? A lot of common ragas use only 5 notes, the Pentatonic scale of folk music worldwide. Is it just cool to have a lot of words, or do some ragas actually need the terminology? (Personally, I have been taught to sing a few ragas, and I ha...

You don't have to care too much about what other people think. If you're open to simulating interest, I've recently turned to divination to write fiction like Philip K Dick. Here's one method I tried: I got the Alice in Wonderland oracle deck and the Magickal Botanical oracle deck. I chose these dec...

bradrn: Thank you for the explanation. You spared me from trying to explain chords. zompist: What you should take away from the Sruti article is that ragas don't agree on what the notes sound like. The words for the notes don't always refer to the same pitch even within a raga. The confusion is the ...

I think there's a good deal of obfuscation and exotification in the Wiki article on ragas. This is normal for all articles on Indian traditions. It is normal for the original source texts in Indian traditions. Sadly, my musical training was limited to singing Rabindrasangeet while playing the harmo...

For some reason the multiple modes of medieval music were lost, leaving just major and minor scales-- though even today these have differing emotional and not just arithmetical associations. Ragas have kept their ancient variety. Ragas have increased their variety with time, and as scholars tried t...

See, I always thought modes are Thaat. The Wikipedia article actually has a table listing the correspondences between Thaats and Western modes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaat But then it says a Thaat is a "parent scale" that is not used for composition.

What do you mean by the conquest of bread? What in The Know-It-All indicates such an ideology? The Know-It-All was written by a guy who went through a cringy "Marxist" phase when he was a teenager. He makes up for this by repeatedly and loudly declaring that although he wants to improve t...

I'm not sure what you mean here. My understanding is that Indian music uses pretty much the same tones and semitones as European music... occasionally however chopping them in half. The ragas are IIRC much like what European music calls modes. (But I'm assuming Bengali music is derived from traditi...

My understanding is that Ancient Greek music was very different to modern Western music in many ways. I agree with Torco: we can trace back Western music as a continuous chain deriving from mediaeval European music, but earlier than that it’s no longer traceable. We can identify specific concepts w...

Torco wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 5:17 pm our tradition comes from medieval european music

I'd say Western music originates even earlier, with Greek theories of tuning. The Bengali songs I listen to most of the time don't actually use the Western scale.

Probably because we have 200 years of political theory about both the benefits and the horrors of centralized power. We're in the middle of a power grab, where the executive is trying to achieve dictatorial control at the expense of the legislature, the courts, and the states. Yes, decentralized st...

getting fined up the wazoo has that effect on some. what surprises me (kinda) is that the reaction is to do lawsuits for Republicans since they can't do pro bono or other lawsuits for Democrats...instead of doing lawsuits (pro bono or otherwise) for non-Republicans and non-Democrats. Some firms are...

You mean this Gabor Maté ? I admittedly know little about him but nothing is mentioned about political views and the only tradition is the use of the Amazonian plant ayahuasca. Even that article has a few hints about where he stands, being a Jewish supporter of Palestine. The Myth of Normal discuss...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Mar 28, 2025 2:58 am Getting bach to Greek athletes -- one early winner was apparently a cook.

Thanks. I was expecting someone who's both an athlete and a strategos, or at least a more minor role. Greek aristocrats were expected to have roles in government, right?

Maybe they are, but at the moment the federal government is being turned into a disaster zone by corrupt and stupid oligarchs. Being in a blue state is a little bit of protection; it'd be nice if it was even more so. It could be an effective strategy if it can be implemented in the short term. In t...

Light reading: The Know-It-All, a comedy about an aging "smart boy in school" who decides to read the Encyclopedia Brittanica to reclaim his genius mantle. Super duper right-wing, but the author being a minority puts a cap on how much of an asshole he can be. What do you find right-win ab...

And this is what upsets me about everything malloc and rotting bones have been saying here, the sheer defeatism of it all, when something really can still be done. I'm hoping people will realize the sheer magnitude of the attack, get angrier, and protest more instead of relying on the Democrats or ...

By specialization, I was referring to the beginnings of professionalization. I know gladiators were full time professionals, of sorts (more like slaves at first). I don't know if all the athletes competing in the ancient Greek Olympics were full time. I know they trained a lot and put themselves on ...

But even if we get past the current disaster, the wisdom of relying on a single major funding source is now in question. There's the multipolarity argument that one country shouldn't be the toughest. But if you look at governance rather than power, the same perverse takeover problem arises at every...

Potentially amusing diversion: what will his last words will be? "It's gonna be huuuuuge"??? I hope that's what he goes with, not his rambling Joker monologues: We've been waging an all-out war on American democracy. You know what democracy is, right? It's this thing called representation...