berr0170

technology is now necessary to operate in modern society; it has become the driving force of business enterprises, the very structure of communications and even a tool for scholastic study. i could not submit this required assignment without employing complex technologies unheard of a mere twenty years ago. i am at this moment transporting my thoughts to perceivably every computer in the world; and without wires even. Postman would argue to see the negative aspects of this “convenience�. for instance, is society getting to intimate with strangers through deployment of personal information onto the global trading post of bogging. the ability to do this wirelessly means that we can be always connected to our peers. is this technology a digital transcendental nightmare? H.D.Thoreau insisted that the solidarity of nature is the only place to truly know oneself. how long will it take wireless technology to break current limitations and allow a poet in the woods access to a wikipedia thesaurus – would poetry then really be his? the media implications of continuous wireless technology would be nothing short of constant distraction. it is already a mild schizophrenia that plagues productivity. students in classrooms bring computers to take notes and end up browsing for some trinket on eBay. it is a distraction that was not, is not, and needn’t be. Postman defines the current state of society as a technocracy while predicting a future technopoly. current technologies remains in control of the users and while it dominates our perception of modern productivity it remains partially segregated from the real – our physical lives. in a technopoly, this distinction will vanish. in this transformation the analog existence of man will become digital; computational technology will render our natural senses useless. why see only visible light when we have the technology to view the entire wave spectrum. why listen to music in a very compressed range of hertz when we have sensors to pick up extremely low and high waves? Postman warns the current generation to stop every now and then and contemplate the negative affects of technology taken for granted. one could argue that the ultimate evolution of man is toward a digital mind. thoughts composed of 1’s and 0’s. i wonder in this case how expressive art would suffer. the whole diminished leading tone having no emotional provocation. the abstraction of lines and colors on canvas having no significance; the only thing of importance being which permutation of 1’s and 0’s is most significant.

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mathematics being the language of science to describe the natural world is imbedded into the generation and transformation of sound. within architectural acoustics architects must consider intrinsic properties of the materials that they are designing with in order to control the amount of defraction or absorbtion of sound waves. it has always been interesting to me how deeply mathematics penatrates the development of music. for instance, within the famous fibonacci sequence:





successive terms (n[0,∞]) generate the outputs 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13... which in general form the foundation of western tonal theory - based on the intervals of 1,3,5,8 and with a 2 (often considered a 9) 13 can form a very interesting chord. The chord based on intervals 1-root, 3-third, 5- fifth, and 8-octave can be refered to as a tonic triad which is undisputedly the basis of western tonal music. Most pieces stretching from classical to modern popular music begin and end on the tonic triad, giving the listener a sense of completion.

it is good acoustic design that allows for the natural harmonic overtones of music to resonate within a concert hall, recording studio, or simple living room. this resonation is critical to allowing less dominant pitches to be heard clearly over the often muddy sound of the root (1) and fifth that dominate tonal music.

computer programs have been written to analyse materials and geometries in relation to waveform generation. this enables architects to “see� how the sound will interact with the designed space.

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