when i read this article, the shape of music, i immediately related to it in the sense that i perceive music in shapes and colors. i don’t actually “see” things. it’s like using a lens to perceive music — i just choose to interpret sound by warping it into visual abstractions.
for example — i’ve always understood the concept of similar chords. a combination of three types notes on the keyboard sound similar no matter the pitch. they can be grouped close together, or spaced far apart. the overall sound is different, but the flavor is still the same. it’s like how you can tell if something is a major chord vs a minor chord even if you don’t have perfect pitch. apparently, the article was talking about mapping these generic configurations into ‘configuration space’, where each particular chord was a point in a generic space that accommodated all the different configurations of that chord.
the article goes into higher-dimensional geometry, which i’d like to say i understand, but i don’t. the concept of it is intuitively familiar to me when referring to music, because music to me is four-dimensional (if you take 3-d + time, or if you think about the light shows inside my head). i mean, i can see how music can be four-dimensional, but i still suck at math.
it’d be fun to learn about this. without the grades.
