Andrew Grathwohl

If you still refuse to believe that Ayn Rand was speaking on a physical level - as opposed to a psychophysical level - then you simply have not read my provided evidence in the proper context. Ayn Rand refers to this same periodicity characteristic that she says defines music, when she attempts to disprove music made from "machine gears" and other "aperiodic" sounds. If she meant that music is made up of sounds that are perceived as periodic to the human brain then she would be wrong as well, because the JND for frequency interval perception among humans is around 0.5%. A concert violinist can get off tune by that much in a matter of minutes depending on his/her instrument. Your defense would amount to the falsity that music has a different definition to every person, because people are, by nature or by choice, able to utilize and recognize this perceptive strength in different amounts. Despite one's ability to recognize it, even the most prestigious of musical performances are likely to sound aperiodic to such an extent that the trained ear can identify it. The next fallacy would be that only "good" music is defined as music, because it would have to be so well-performed that the perceived output sounds periodic to the listener. The more one would know about music - and the better one's sonic perceptions - the fewer pieces of "true" music one can actually listen to. I would suggest rereading the essay yourself if you need clarification, but I think the evidence has already been provided to show that Ayn Rand speaks of periodicity in a physical context - not a psychophysical one.

Great stuff! One of his best video blogs yet, I would imagine.

Well, in her own words, Ayn Rand disqualified percussion instruments from being musical vessels. Percussion instruments are just as aperiodic as a sneeze, and even more aperiodic than machine gears, and she specifically rules those sounds out from being musical. The fact is that people have constructed beautiful works of music out of periodically-processed/rendered recordings of machine gears and other "non-musical" recordings. (The composers that immediately comes to mind are Tim Hecker, an electroacoustic composer, and Burial, a London-based electronic musician.) Music's definition should be no more than: an art form whose medium is "organized sound," as defined by composer Edgar Varese. What Ayn Rand tried to do was disregard certain sounds used in modern (at the time) musical compositions which she clearly didn't like. However, saying that is akin to saying Jackson Pollock's works were not paintings. Just because they're naturalist trash, ill-constructed, and make use of completely irrational and ugly forms, doesn't negate the fact that they're paintings nonetheless. I was answering your claim that rhythm featured periodicity, which is simply false. Those two words are not related to one another in any meaningful way, in any context. My words had nothing to do with neither Ayn Rand's works, nor their "preciseness."

Thank you for this. I should have been more attentive and supplied those quotes myself. I wrote the OP with those passages fresh in my mind, but failed to provide these passages in the post itself.

So we are allowed to be imprecise as long as it relates to aesthetics in a philosophic context?

Gotta love that reasoning.

The most recent polls still show him at about 4% among the various contenders, but against Blumenthal it's about 50-30, with 28% undecided. This primary is still anybody's game.

Rhythms are only periodic in theory. They never are precisely the same repetition in spacing of time, and when swing gets involved, all hope is lost in making a rhythm truly "periodic." It is not a pitch either. My point was that people learn how to quantify sounds in different ways, and some are far better at it than others. Was this a response to my questioning of her near hatred for non-Western music, or a continuation on the topic of music's definition? Because I am not necessarily concerned with her definition as such - we all likely knew what she meant. My problem is that Ayn Rand would have never used the word "periodic" if she actually knew what it meant in the context of sound, and would have rather used the typical definition of organized sound. My thinking is that she tried to rationalize with the music that she hated and could not understand, and thus came up with this definition (which is, in plain English, wrong) as an attempt to exclude certain types of music. There is no true reason to use the word "periodic" in this context if she knows what she's talking about.

A lot of new press has been had by Peter since Obama's state of the union address: http://blogs.courant.com/capitol_watch/201...tu-shows-t.html http://blogs.courant.com/capitol_watch/201...#comment-156466

Yes, Ayn Rand read, and cited, Helmholtz. Sounds from instruments are never periodic. They may always sound the same to you, but by nature, their sonorous output will never be periodic. It can sound "the same" to you because the ear is more sensitive to certain types of sound over others, and are unable to distinguish slight frequency and timbrel changes. The trained ear can certainly make this distinction better than the layperson's, but only by so much. I'd be hard pressed to ever find a person who was able to record two identical sounds of any type from any source whatsoever and achieve the exact same waveform. But I imagine you're rather referring to the wave shape, which is not the same thing. Subtle timbrel changes happen all the time, because there is an elasticity to such musical outputs due to both performance and instrumental material restraints. In other words, the human being and the instrument are both incapable of maintaining the exact same sound quality each and every time. I wrote that bit under the assumption that people would nit-pick at the true definition of "periodic" - which I appear to have correctly predicted. I meant that even if one were to argue that a clarinet or a violin makes a periodic sound, there is no way that anybody with any knowledge on the subject could claim a drum, or some other percussive instrument, is periodic in nature. Percussive instruments are meant to be aperiodic in nature. A percussive instrument is composed of extremely aperiodic upper partials, along with its timbrel overtones not in any harmonic series, and its original striking frequency (which is also quite elastic, due to striking quality, strength, and precision). You make a very incorrect claim that people perceive frequency as opposed to pitch. I am just as able to point out a sound's frequency as I am a sound's pitch. Having been trained in recording arts, I need to be able to do this in order to best prepare for live sound situations which call for very substantial equalization processing for a clear mix. Actually, all sound CAN be deconstructed into a collection of sine waves of differing phases, frequencies, and amplitudes. But that's not what I said was the definition of "periodic" in the post, and it's aside the point - if Ayn Rand is going to claim that all music features periodic sonorous activity, then I imagine she had either evidence to prove this assertion true, the lack of knowledge to know any better, or did not think of the many ways in which her words could be misinterpreted. What about her claims on non-Western music?

Not at all. A periodic wave would never deviate from its starting frequency. As I've already brought up, no wave produced by a human being on a musical instrument fits that description. Frequency is a function of the number of occurrences of a repeating event over a unit of time. Thus, if frequency changes, then its periodicity has changed. In sound, the period of a wave can be found by dividing 1 by its frequency. It should be clear that if frequency changes, its period changes as well - making it aperiodic.

In physics, periodic never means "repeating" - there's already a word for that. Periodic implies an event that recurs at equal intervals of time. Your definition is not valid in the field of physics.

Sound is my life. It is my study, my career, and my hobby. Though I am (relatively) new to exploring and studying Objectivism, and its associated sciences, sound is an area of self-proclaimed expertise for me. I recently finished reading Ayn Rand's brilliant The Romantic Manifesto but I have a few quibbles that I would like addressed. Ayn Rand defines music as an art, which "employs the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, and evokes man’s sense-of-life emotions." She claimed that works employing techniques such as musique concrete, and other forms which employ non-traditional instrumentation, were not periodic, and therefore were not actually fit to be "music" as she defines it. My problem with this is that an average human being would be quite hard pressed to find an example of periodic sonorous activity. If a clarinetist, or a violinist, were able to produce a truly periodic result from playing their instrument, it would be a miraculous physical achievement, and much study would need to go into both the performer's mind and the instrument's construction. The fact is that sounds fluctuate in frequency, amplitude, and timbrel quality, due to a number of both personal and environmental factors. The only way the average human being could ever be exposed to a sound that was even close to periodic would be to employ a digital sound oscillator, which featured a VERY high sampling rate and bit depth, and then played through VERY high-fidelity playback equipment, in an acoustically-sound room. That being said, it is of particular interest that the only composers to probably ever achieve this are the very composers that Ms. Rand likely was addressing in her writings on music - Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varese, and others who utilized analog audio equipment as part of their concert-hall performances, are likely the only individuals to ever make music according to Ayn Rand's own standards. The other problem with her definition of music is that it, by definition, labels all non-periodic traditional western instruments, like percussive instruments, as "noise" - not music. Instruments which are struck are of a particular sonic interest because they do not produce overtones which are harmonically-consistent with its fundamental striking frequency. These sounds, by definition, are aperiodic, which makes me wonder what Ayn Rand thought of music which featured percussion instrumentation. It should also be noted that any "noisy" sound could be made into a periodic waveform by means of either analog or digital manipulation. You will find almost all composers of the musique concrete persuasion are doing this. Ayn Rand also made the claim that Western music was the best music ever made because its musical scales are the most capable in extending the possibilities of consonant spacings. She drew a connection between the cultures of societies and their respective musics. However, the North-Indian musical tradition, which has employed the use of raga for centuries (far before the first Romantic classical composers of the 19th century, and even before Bach), in fact has more consonant possibilities than Western scales, and also features heavy emphasis on improvisation. This doesn't gel with Ayn Rand's claims, as we all know what the Hindu cultural history consists of. She claimed that the Western individual has no ability to understand the musics of the "Oriental" persuasion, similar to how language barriers exist among different cultures. But we know from the countless numbers of people who enjoy both classical and raga music equally, and who, like myself, find just as much validity, pleasure, and - most importantly - musical possibilities - in them both, that the number of notes in a scale is not indicative of musical complexity. Musicologists have shown that where one type of possibility is limited in a particular musical form, another is greatly expanded. Rhythmic lines and counterpoints exist on a much greater conceptual scale in several cultural musics, including the Japanese, the Indian, and the Pakistani forms. And even those have varying degrees of sonic and harmonic complexity - ranging from five-note scales, all the way up to scales which feature different interval spacings in different octaves. The Qawaali tradition in Pakistan, for example, is a beautiful indicator of Romantic (big R, not little r) music, performed by savage peoples. Look into the recently-deceased Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who carried on a centuries-old family tradition in the Qawaali tradition. The rhythmic potential is vast, the performances are heart-felt, and the form and style is far from mathematically-dull (her claim was that music which did not feature mathematical-complexity would bore the listener, and only appeal to those whose philosophical premises were incorrect). This is information that was available to anybody at the time when Ayn Rand wrote these things. Psychoacousticians, physicists, and musicologists alike, have been pursuing these topics, and it only takes an individual of great musical and sonic experience to understand the validity to my claims. I want to side with Ayn Rand on these issues, but doing so would completely obliterate my reasonably strong knowledge of the physics of sound, the human perceptions of sound, and the musics of various cultures and time periods. Doing so would be nothing more than taking another person's words on faith, when I know well enough that they are not valid. What I wonder, after having said all of this, is if Ayn Rand addressed any of these issues at a later date than The Romantic Manifesto, or if there are any objections to my claims. Anybody?

Interactivity is not contrary to the definition of art. Video games offer a calculated, deterministic reaction to each action performed in-game. If the reactions were purely stochastic, then the resultant game would not only suck - it would not be art. Interactive media, i.e. video games and certain web-based projects, are most certainly art, as long as each action performed by the player delivers a reaction that is rational and consistent, i.e. through algorithmic processes and generative adaptation. Does Ayn Rand's Night of January 16th cease to be art as soon as the open-ended finale begins? Allowing the viewer to make decisions that impact the outcome of the performance is a decision formulated by the viewer's unique experiences, yet no good game is passive in nature (leaving all the control in the hands of the player). The rules, boundaries, and the logic utilized for deterministic calculations, are all part of the construction of the video game world, and are similar to the artistic objects used in literature, films, and television shows to arrive to a reasonable conclusion.

I have been an employee of my university's technology consulting department, where I go to scheduled computer labs on campus and help students with odd jobs like printing, file conversion, etc. Though my knowledge of the subject matter involved is significantly above pretty much every other employee here (we have over 100 people working my very same job), I have had several problems with the higher staff regarding certain rules/regulations that are part of my job. I won't get into the particular technicalities that were involved with my breaching of these so-called "regulations" but my own analysis has drawn me to the conclusion that the rules are convoluted and unnecessary. The computer labs are consistently cold because they are temperature-controlled, yet I am not allowed to wear a jacket over my work t-shirt in the labs, which typically go under 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The management claims I'm breaking dress code, but the specific rule in the rule book is: Shirts may be worn underneath the t-shirt, but jackets/coats cannot be worn over the t-shirts in the labs (jackets/coats may be worn when traveling to an appointment or destination lab that requires you to go outside). I've never worn a jacket or coat over my work shirt, though I almost always wear open flannel shirts which still allow the shirt to be seen, just so that my arms are covered. Either their written rules do not reflect their intended meaning, or the management is trying to find ways to criticize my performance. So anyway, considering the amount of work I've actually put into my job, and the considerable knowledge and experience I provide, I don't find my presence getting appreciated by my employers. I'd like to quit, but I live in a college town, and work is very hard to find due to the competition I face amongst nearly 50,000 other students. It's a university job, so scheduling is very flexible - a good thing for a person who has classes going well past midnight and has to be ready to take odd-job calls at any time for my academic department. But at the same time, I'm growing ever-more frustrated at this job, and considering the measly $8.00 an hour they pay me for a job I was paid well over $20 an hour for back home, I feel used and unappreciated. I do not need this job to live, but I do need it for a considerable amount of extended comfort. By no means would my life be in danger if I ended up quitting this job - particularly if I can find other work - but I am in the very likely position that I will not be able to find other work in even the most mundane of positions if I quit. My question boils down to this: should I do it? Would quitting be a self-destructive move, particularly in my situation - and this economy?

If he bought into the protectionist myths, then he would suggest that the illegals leave and never come back. He recognizes, as he indicated during the interview, that it needs to "become a lot easier to legally immigrate" into this country, because if immigrants want to work, then we should welcome them. Schiff only dislikes immigrants, illegal or otherwise, who mooch off the welfare state.

Peter just KILLED at a recent radio interview: http://www.talkofconnecticut.com/includes/...iff_lovallo.mp3

That "Democratic activist" is a despicable fat loser - a conspiracy fringe loon. I've seen him before - the Courant has been slanted against Schiff in a very obvious way since the beginning, and their focusing on Ed Anderson's comments only heightens this fact.

Though she did say that there wasn't a musical criteria fit for objective criticism, she did still make it clear that she did not favor the "oriental" musics that she claimed had a trance-like effect on the listener. She spoke out against repetition and against non-Western musical scales. However, she also claimed that music employed periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, which means that pretty much nobody on this planet has heard "music" as defined by her. According to her, the only music out there is produced by digital sound oscillators with extremely high sampling rates & bit depth - because that's about as close to periodic as you're going to get. My point is that I don't think Ayn Rand knew a lot about music or the physics of sound when she was claiming these things. Another great Objectivism-friendly hip-hop artist is Aesop Rock. Check him out if you're into the more uplifting and rational side of urban music.

But I too acknowledge that America is the freest nation ever, which certainly, it deserves praise for. If that's the only thing that made our views distinct from one another, then we could both potentially arrive to the same conclusion. Rarther, I think it is only the individual that forgoes understanding an issue within the US due to its earlier accomplishments that should be considered as differing from Ayn Rand's view of our country. That is the behavior I witness from some here - they consider any admittance of fault in the American system as "apologizing for our evils" or something along those lines. This should not be the case. There are plenty of reasons to celebrate America, but there are also reasons to fault her. And her brilliance is what makes her faults all the more disappointing. Again, I will repeat my views on this matter: The USA is the greatest country in the world - the greatest country that the world has ever seen in all of history. But she still has her evils, and not acknowledging them is quite a counter-productive method to utilize when attempting to fix these problems. Ayn Rand herself said that there is to be no double standard when examining a country's breaching of individual rights - while you suggest I need to look at this in "context", Ayn Rand suggests that we need to view the matter as either: Are my individual rights protected, or not protected? She breaks down the right that government needs to protect - the right to life - and its implementation - the right to property. Since all other individual rights are derived from the right to life, that would mean that any violation of any right whatsoever would be, ultimately, a violation of the right to life. Just because the severity of the violation is minor compared to other countries (and I really mean that - minor) does not excuse the fact that it is a violation of individual rights. And, again, Ayn Rand was rather explicit in saying that there is to be no double standard when judging a government's protection of individual rights.

I never said that America is a dictatorship, nor did I say that Rand thought that. What context is there to drop when analyzing the morality of a government's actions? I have contrasted the taking of property by the US and by the former USSR countless times. Indeed, they are quite different, and in the instance of the USSR, quite horrendous. But there exists a similarity between them: they're both wrong! I do not see "any amount of taking of property" by government to be proof of a dictatorship; I see it as the taking of property. That is NEVER OK! I don't care if it's by eminent domain or by threat of killing your eldest child; the force has been brought upon an innocent individual, and the action was immoral. An immoral action can be very elastic in severity, but just because the USSR did worse things does not let America off the hook. Think about the difference between the monsters who formed the USSR, and the men who formed the USA. We could expect the treachery that came out of the USSR based upon its followers, but could we really be so forgiving of a country founded on such a brilliant premise? You're imagining a hyperbole here, David. I refuse to regard America's censorship as I regard Zimbabwe's. The difference between the two is obvious. But, like the point you made regarding the taking of property, the extremity of the action does NOT excuse the actions of lesser offenders. I will not disregard simple logic by forgiving, or understating, the immorality of the USA's forceful governmental actions. The extremely fit individual can abandon exercise, and eat at McDonnalds thrice a day every day, for only so long before he ends up just as fat as all the other losers that eat there. America is currently the skinniest in the room, but she still hangs out with a bunch of underemployed, fat morons, and they're having a rather bad influence on her. Then why are you here? You responded with personal insult and hardly any evidence, other than your near-retarded request of enormous double standard. If you aren't here to prove things to me - in whatever form you see most fit - then what are you trying to prove? You've been using this argumentative tactic against a few people recently, and it's just an absurd thing to say. Assuming you act in your own self-interest, what is it exactly you get from being here and speaking to people the way you do (typically offering nothing but empty and meaningless slander as your contribution)? Since you perceive yourself as being far above pretty much everyone you get into contact with on these forums, is it some sort of internal game of mockery of others? Is it bettering your life to answer peoples' questions that you know oh-so-much about? What about your verbiage - is that a result of the analytical mind you believe you possess, thinking of ways to best improve your writing style? Whatever your reasoning is - assuming (most likely, incorrectly) that you even have a reasoning for this - it is not nearly valid enough to justify hanging around here and filling the boards with filth as you do. You post far too often to be here for self-fulfillment, Jake, and frankly, I've never seen you post differently from every single post you've directed towards me. (Not to mention that you did claim you were "done" responding to my posts - but, well, here we are). You've said among the wittiest and most intelligent things I've read on this board, but I've had to surf through an ocean of shit to find any of those posts.

And yet you continue to simply make claims without providing evidence. If my views on things are really so different from these basic Objectivist writings, then surely it would be easy to prove me wrong, rather than merely continue to insult me - right? America, by nature, is capable of much more than it has achieved today. Its exhibitions of altruism are just as illegitimate as any other nation that exhibits them, as my quotations from Rand's own writing signifies. Why do I love this country? Because it exhibits those qualities of altruism less than any other on the planet. But that should not be a factor of America's greatness - that's a factor of America's failure. Unlike almost all other countries on the planet, America, by virtue of its founding documents, and its founding philosophies, has the potential to be the shining beacon of capitalism, but, sadly, the end of the 19th century was also the end of America actually exercising that potential. It's time we stopped excusing America for its flaws, though. The longer we sanction this type of behavior on the part of the government - the very government that is said to exist by the citizens' permission - the more intrusive the government will be on our lives. It doesn't stop me from achieving what I want to achieve, but it sure as hell as made it more difficult. Am I not allowed to criticize my country for this, when around here, America gets almost exclusive praise? Ayn Rand had an additional factor for loving this country, which involved her previous life in Soviet Russia. I cannot know what living in such a hellhole is like, but my knowledge of her and her writings tells me that she would be the first to criticize any immoral action on the part of both individuals in American society and its government. When Antarctica allows for the establishment of a government that protects individual rights, I'll see if I can love it more than the US.

Making your money by catering to the vices of other irrational individuals is not exactly what Ayn Rand meant by "productive achievement." It seems as if you're looking at how much money one makes as being the metric that should be used to define an individual's morality, but instead, it's much more about the path taken to those riches. If somebody makes a fortune by selling addictive drugs to drug addicts, or prostitutes to men who are too pathetic to get a partner based on their positive qualities, they certainly have not achieved as much as any of the people who pioneered any of the industries on the list that Jake Ellison provided.

You know, Jake - no Objectivist would ever say "take my word for it" like you just did. I have read the essay, and I quoted the appropriate sections from it. Telling me to take your word for it is asking me to engage in whimsical behavior. I would at least expect more consistency out of you than you've just exhibited. America is not mentioned once in your quoted paragraphs. If anybody is grabbing out of context, it is you. Words have meanings that are not modulated by context, Jake. You can't tell me that I'm pulling quotes out of context, when they easily defend my argument - while you think it's OK to grab quotes out of context, and then not only require me to reread the entire essay in full to understand your quote's context, but also tell me that she implies something that she clearly doesn't within the quoted paragraphs! You're wrong, and it's rather obvious - all you're doing is trying to stall. The clearest definition of dictatorship I've ever seen from Ayn Rand is this quote, from TVOS: "There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw." I mentioned this in the previous post. I find it disturbing that we already regularly engage in the latter two characteristics, and engage in a sort of semi-one-party rule on the national level. I know what Ayn Rand thought about America. But you know what - her writings largely dealt with her criticisms of the United States, whether it be in terms of economics, education, foreign policy, social policy, etc. I have yet to find out why exactly my views on America are so distinct from Ayn Rand. Are we both not capable of loving a country despite its immense flaws?

The first paragraph of your quote describes a country much greater than America. It describes a country whose government's political power is "severely delimited" and whose minorities and dissenters are not at stake. Does that sound like the America you live in, Jake? The second paragraph states that this country has a right to its sovereignty. If a country is required to have a government whose political power is delimited and whose minorities are not at stake, then America no longer is deserving of having its sovereignty recognized. Ayn Rand said it in clear English in the very quote you've presented. Rand wrote: "If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society—you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right." If you cannot think of an aspect of living in America where you must obtain the permission of society (such as government) to do something, then the America you know is probably no more than an internal hallucination. Rand often wrote that if individual rights are violated by a government, then it does not constitute a free nation. Since all rights are ultimately derived from the right to life, and ultimately implemented by exercising property rights, it only takes one example of aggressive force from government against an individual to demonstrate that that government is not protecting individual rights. And a government that doesn't protect individual rights is not a free government - a government that is not free is not moral. I do not find America to be evil - when I spoke of evil in the previous post, it was with regard to her foreign policy. I find my country to be the oasis among the desert. However, the oasis is running dry. It is undeniable that America is not the country that Ayn Rand describes as being a free nation. Denying this is a denial of reality. Hell, the US already satisfies three of the four qualities that, according to Rand, undeniably consist of a tyrannic state. It really shocks me how many so-called Objectivists refuse to judge America by the same criteria which they rightfully assign to all other nations on the planet.