Klarinet Archive - Posting 001552.txt from 2000/10

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: [kl] Factors of two
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 17:54:10 -0500

Before I began to play clarinet, my hobby was photography. (I'm
not alone in this, someone else posted recently about his or her
Hasselblads being stolen.) Music has pretty much pushed photography
out of my life, but today I was converting cents to cycles/second and I
realized that I was doing the same arithmetic as a photographer does
when converting f-numbers to seconds in order to choose the proper
exposure for a scene. Each f-number (f-stop) is a doubling of
brightness, not a simple addition.
This made me realize that more than one aspect of the human nervous
system is organized by multiplication (logarithmic scales) rather than
by addition.
My instinct is to search for commonalities, and so this is another
example. Of course, in my search for the GUT (Grand Unified Theory) of
music, I began to think about language. But I was unable to factor
multiplication into language. (apologies for the scruffy pun)

...anyway, it struck me as an interesting thought, and I'm posting
it just in case someone else has something to say about it.

Cheers,
Bill

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