Klarinet Archive - Posting 000844.txt from 2002/10

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] This thing on my front door
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 21:32:01 -0500

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 18:14:01 -0700, wsemple@-----.com said:

> No, the point is not a real one. There is absolutely no relationship,
> except the barest logical construct, between a lock and a key and the
> chain that leads to far more complex result.
>
> In the case of the key and lock, the result is opening a door. In the
> case of the clarinet, the result is sound, which conditioned on many
> more variables.
>
> By your analogy, no one would need to spend time doing regressive
> analyses to single out variables in a complex economic equation and
> researchers could all go home.

Quite a lot of those regressive analyses capture very little information
that is useful in dealing with a particular situation in the world. And
even in cases where they do capture something useful, the result is
never expressed in such a simplistic way as saying that this variable is
'more important' than that one. Because in a complex system, 'it all
depends'.

Isolating the relevant difficulty -- dividing up the whole phenomenon --
is of course very often the most useful way of proceeding. So if
someone's clarinet has a crack across a tonehole that they don't know
about, then what I might think of as a wonderful reed/mouthpiece setup
won't help them play; and if you have some experience of how an almost
invisible hairline crack can make an instrument completely unworkable,
then your advice and your expertise in how to go about dealing with it
is clearly very important.

But just as clearly, if a clarinet player has a defective
reed/mouthpiece setup, then the best and most airtight clarinet in the
world won't help them. There, what you know about reeds and mouthpieces
will count.

What that shows is that any *general* assessment of the relative
importance of the variables 'reed/mouthpiece' and 'clarinet' is doomed
to failure. The lock/key example is similar: the importance ratio 'lock
to key' is 100% if the lock is rusted up, and 0% if the key is the wrong
one. And how useful would it be to take a nationwide survey of people's
most common problems with their front doors?

Of course there are many interacting variables in clarinet playing --
don't I know it! -- and the situation is usually much more complicated
than the example I gave above. But that makes remarks about the
relative importance of those variables even less meaningful than in the
simple case.

What we need is not a general 'theory of importance', but a degree of
expertise in the flexible application of basic principles, both
scientific and artistic, to individual problems.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
tel/fax 01865 553339

... Psychoceramics: The study of crackpots.

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