count from zero damn you!

[blue hell]

[Kassen]

[jkn]

If I'm following the conversation correctly - rewind to zero takes us back into the song before this one, but only slightly.

Or in Lawrence Welk speak... zero is the 'ah' in "ah-one-and-ah-two..." although it's only the first 'ah' - the second 'ah' is clearly different due to the preceding 'and'.

[DrJustice]

[SynthLord]

[Kassen]

[SynthLord]

I write an R&B song at 85 bpm; it's exactly 4 minutes long, so if I were to express this in terms of beats, I'd say it's 340 beats long. You came behind me and do a jungle remix at 170 bpm. Elapsed time is the same, but using the terminology yours is 680 beats long. Same duration, but yours is statistically twice as dense as mine.

If you're playing the music, this might matter (especially at 170bpm!), but if you're listening it does no good to know how many counts a song has. You'd just like to know if you're in for a 3 minute pop song, or a Tale from a Topographic Ocean.

Besides, as a listener, you perceive music differently than the performer. The performer can never think about what has just happened, only about what is to come. Same for a conductor, who must always stay ahead of the orchestra. If he listens to the music rather than directs it, the whole performance will be a train wreck.

Now imagine the conductor counting/directing on the back end of the beat using the "zeero is the first count" theory ... complete catastrophe.

[Kassen]

[SynthLord]

I understand the concept, but disagree. Having both played music off a score and sequenced, I find it very intuitive to know that in a 4/4 song, the third measure starts on the 9th count. But I'm not thinking "count 9", anyway - I'm thinking "downbeat of measure 3".

Again, you don't count music the same way you count birthdays. Birthdays signify how old you are - it's appropriate that you're not 1 until a year after your birth. Note how we count years "backwards". The new millenium began on January 1st, 2001. The specific rationale behind the Gregorian calender is different than in music, but the principle is similar: we number a year from it's beginning, not from the end. The same goes with music. There was a first year, "1 A.D." not "0 A.D."; and the first beat of a measure is count 1.

To put it another way, a beat starts an event, it does not tell you what just ended. How would you know you were counting a piece of music where the time signature changed often, if you didn't know until it was over?

Sequencers have to follow this logic, mainly because MIDI information must be easily displayed in the form of a score. Now, as far as other forms of programming, it's perfectly legit to have 0 as a value (or rather, lack of a value). Since MIDI CCs are expressions of base 2, and have 128 values, it makes since that the lowest value is 0, and the highest is 127. These figures represent a quantity, and can only be counted in terms of what is there.

When speaking of temporal quantities, counting at the end is proper. But counting the future - which is what the musician must do - requires a reversal of this process, because what does not exist yet has no specific quantity.

(Wow, my brain hurts ... I need to go back and study Aristotelian unit-measurement. The answer I'm having a hard time articulating is there, but it's an epistomological one, and I'm a bit rusty in that field.)

[Kassen]

Ok, but if we can agree that counting from zero makes sense if we are dealing with manipualtions on time and that counting from one makes sense if we are playing some instrument at the moment and that both can figure to various degrees in the compositional process, wouldn't it make sense to at least have settings for this so we can change ont he fly?

I don't think it makes sense to apply the terminology for the one to the other. You don't try to express you laptop's cpu peed in notes and cents either, after all, even if you could.

[brinxmat]

[Kassen]

Practice material;


The other cover (I think for europe?) is much nicer but I couldn't find a good image.

[Oskar]

[blue hell]

[DrJustice]

[jkn]

Null tends to confuse folks... in the world I work in null is the absence of value - which is different than a blank space... which is different from zero.

Then again - my twisted thinking has gotten a bit too used to nested arrays within nested arrays within fields. And when you toss a few nulls into a few nested arrays - life gets fuzzy.

Then again... we're ditching that system so I have to get used to relational thinking again. Then again - I'm not sure what I'll really be doing a year from now... ah - the joys of working in IT.

[DrJustice]

[Antimon]

Regarding zero offsets: If we are counting solid objects (such as apples or notes on a score sheet) it makes sense to start with one (1). If we are using iterations in loops or counting beats (like the short pulses that a sequencer module on a Nord Modular generates, which is more like a marker of the infinitesimal space between notes) it makes sense to start with zero (0), I think. It's great to be able to divide by 8 (or 4 or 2) and get the current measure/bar etc.

Regarding null: C or C++ aren't examples of well-designed computer languages. Their zero/null handling shows what kind of macro-assembler freaks they are. Check out Java instead. It looks similar on the surface, but it is totally different. It has "null" as a separate entity.

/Stefan

[DrJustice]

[bachus]

[dmosc]

the reason we don't count from zero is purely for syllabic reasons. What do one, two, three, four, five, and six have in common that zero doesn't? 1 syllable

[Kassen]

[Kassen]

[Kassen]

[Antimon]