source file: mills3.txt Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 01:00:15 +0200 Subject: Plato etc. From: James Kukula I'm just a fascinated bystander on this list, so I have no idea what the "official" take is on McClain. For me discovering THE MYTH OF INVARIANCE was a big thrill. I'd been playing around with keyboard configurations for just tuning, sketching out triangular patterns on a plane - then to open up McClain and see the very same patterns, associated with Plato, the Vedic Rishis, etc. Grand fun. Of course now I seem them pratically every day on this list, and lots more. Amazing! A bit off the tuning front, but still... David Fideler's JESUS CHRIST, SUN OF GOD has lots of numerology. One main focus as I recall is on rational approximants to the square root of three. The book explores the influence of Platonism on Christianity in the first few centuries after Christ. There's a delightful debate we often circle around - is "harmony" some absolute property, a basic structure of the universe? Or perhaps it's some built-in property of human beings, like having five fingers. Perhaps sea-slugs find octaves discordant? Or perhaps harmony is just some socially trained language. Even if many cultures appreciate similar forms of harmony, perhaps this is just due to millenia of inter-cultural musical exchange. Tuning relates music to math. My background is physics, I work as an engineer. Please excuse my crudity. But for the reductionist materialist crowd I hang around with during the week, mathematics is something like the foundation of truth. While music is more like an ornamental cornice. That's one of the reasons I love the whole tuning affair. The mathematical structure of music seems paradoxical from a materialistic engineering perspective. I.e. it seems to highlight a defect or limitation of that perspective. Of course these days math has gotten pretty flipped out. I think it was Kronecker back 100 years ago and more who thought the integers were God's handiwork and all the rest human invention. Fits in well with the Pythagoreans. The square root of two is just too wierd to comprehend. Jim SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu From: PErlich@Acadian-Asset.com Subject: RE: theories PostedDate: 30-07-97 01:01:02 SendTo: CN=coul1358/OU=AT/O=EZH ReplyTo: tuning@eartha.mills.edu $UpdatedBy: CN=notesrv2/OU=Server/O=EZH,CN=coul1358/OU=AT/O=EZH,CN=Manuel op de Coul/OU=AT/O=EZH RouteServers: CN=notesrv2/OU=Server/O=EZH,CN=notesrv1/OU=Server/O=EZH RouteTimes: 30-07-97 01:01:06-30-07-97 01:01:07,30-07-97 00:59:54-30-07-97 00:59:55 DeliveredDate: 30-07-97 00:59:55 Categories: $Revisions: Received: from ns.ezh.nl by notesrv2.ezh.nl (Lotus SMTP MTA v1.1 (385.6 5-6-1997)) with SMTP id C12564E3.007E704A; Wed, 30 Jul 1997 01:01:02 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA25147; Wed, 30 Jul 1997 01:01:02 +0200 Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 01:01:02 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA25146 Received: (qmail 8631 invoked from network); 29 Jul 1997 22:59:31 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 29 Jul 1997 22:59:31 -0000 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu