anderson@uwvax.ARPA (05/29/84)
<> I would agree with Dan Laliberte that people who have high energy and talent levels tend to be good at several things, and that this may account for the fact that in professional areas like math, comp sci, law, etc. there seem to be more musicians than in the population as a whole. I have also noticed that among math/CS musicians, there are two camps: those who view music as being complementary to math/CS, and those who view it as being strongly interconnected. Here Dan is of the former group and I am of the latter. In college I really got into musical analysis (counterpoint, harmonic, structural, Schenker voice- leading stuff, etc.) as well musical acoustics. This has influenced my piano playing quite a bit, and it has also merged with my CS interests. I am working on (among other things) programming languages for expressing musical interpretations and composition algorithms. On the minus side, I feel that I have payed a price for my extreme intellectualization of music: try as I might, I can't get anywhere with either improvisation or composition, even though I have strong desires to do so. It doesn't affect listening to music, though... that's still a non-intellectual experience. David Anderson (uwvax!anderson)
janney@unm-cvax.UUCP (05/29/84)
I talked today with an acquaintance of mine who is primarily a composer
but who also plays with computers, and he mentioned that he cannot work
on a musical composition and a computer program at the same time. He
very definitely feels that the same part of the brain is used in both
tasks.
There may be a difference between composing/analysing music and performing
it. Certainly the physical coordination involved in performing is not
used in composing.
Jim Janney
{{convex,ucbvax,gatech}!unmvax, {purdue,lbl-csam,cmcl2}!lanl-a}!unm-cvax!janney