My thoughts on jazz theory

[charlieparker]

The truth of it is that most people are not Titian. In fact the vast majority of working artists are not Titian.

Of course Titian was a painter in an era where painting had a very clear societal function. So painting was a trade. Painters were artisans (and of course often ran studios of artisans.)

And so with music.

(And musicologists and those familiar with the craft itself can still recognise the sheer craft of the ‘nobody’ composers. The anonymous composers even.)

What we have seen over the past few hundred years of technological development is a displacement of the artisan by the machine precisely as the Luddites foresaw. The steady obsolescence of craft.

AI is simply the most recent chapter in this story.

So what is left but the search for genius? The search for genius has led us down some interesting roads. Specifically in music, what I would call the cult of progressivism, which is an interesting one.

But some people really are geniuses. And part of the nature of genius is in how impacts others.

So, for instance, present day ideological hang ups about the validity of the Canon doesn’t make Beethoven any less important, for example.

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How prescient the Luddites were! Not sure what will be left for humans to do with the rise of AI.

[Christian Miller]

How prescient the Luddites were! Not sure what will be left for humans to do with the rise of AI.

Butlerian Jihad obvs

Or maybe we could be grown up about what so called AI can and can’t offer

Tbh I’m of the ‘everything was already AI’ school of thought. Much commercial art and music is replaceable by LLM slop because it was already slop.

So already on YouTube for example, you are seeing a STRONG backlash against AI content. So there’s an incentive to demonstrate humanity, often through less editing and so on, which is becoming a new trend.

Maybe that means music will become less produced and spontaneity and lack of polish will become more celebrated.


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[wolflen]

Butlerian Jihad obvs


Maybe that means music will become less produced and spontaneity and lack of polish will become more celebrated.

In reading some of the above posts on the history of music. I wish I had a more formal education in the arts instead of business and its
convoluted approach to being in the interest of all humanity.

Scanning the dial on AM/FM radio bands you find commercial music stations and the commercials that support them
have little in common*if ANY at all* with the music that is played on them.

I can only listen to this if it is a tune that I like. Most of the time I find the local college jazz station and the classical station my refuge.

There are schools where designed courses for the study of jazz artists and their work is presented to those that have
recognized the genius of these artists. Coltrane..Monk..Keith Jarrett..Bill Evans.
Wayne Shorter is being studied for his harmonic creativity in his tunes and improvisations.
And others.

It may only be a very concentrated group of educators and students delving deep into their works.

But I remember classes being offered to study more contemporary and popular music..The Beatles and how they affected youth culture
and politics. And other popular music and media performance artists..Andy Warhol crossed these lines in his work. Laurie Anderson merged performance art
with music..and she had a commercial hit (O Superman )and it was not her intention to do such. Her work expanded and became recognized here and in Europe and awards were presented to her.

The above study groups may have effects with long lasting results. We will see and hear them as new artists display their work in various mediums.

And as you say..may it be more spontaneous with new ways to hear harmonic explorations give melodic lines new paths to venture.

[supersoul]

How prescient the Luddites were! Not sure what will be left for humans to do with the rise of AI.

What's left for humans to do is to be conscious, sentient, creative, and to actually understand things.

To me, when it comes to generating images, text and music, AI is the ultimate post-modern, collage/pastiche generator. What I mean is, it takes in disparate elements and recombines them into something "new," except that it is at random. John Cage was doing that in the 1940s.

It is not thinking of meaning, or even if it looks good. It has no sense of aesthetics. it's just intaking the gabazillions of images already floating around on the internet and recombining them. Most imagery on the internet is already slop, in that it already has smoothing filters and photoshop to smooth it all out, so AI-generated imagery has that fake quality. It's the same with AI-music.

A couple weeks ago I was a guest artist at a masters level art class. Absolutely no one was using AI. They were making things that were messy, using the tools at hand, which are smart phone cameras, opensource software, and the bog standard applications like Logic and Premiere. Some of them were really into analog-style video synthesis. AI was not consciously used at any step.

Humans expressing human thoughts will never go away. If anything, their art was intentionally rough around the edges, as if to distinguish themselves from random, meaningless slop.

[charlieparker]

What's left for humans to do is to be conscious, sentient, creative, and to actually understand things.

To me, when it comes to generating images, text and music, AI is the ultimate post-modern, collage/pastiche generator. What I mean is, it takes in disparate elements and recombines them into something "new," except that it is at random. John Cage was doing that in the 1940s.

It is not thinking of meaning, or even if it looks good. It has no sense of aesthetics. it's just intaking the gabazillions of images already floating around on the internet and recombining them. Most imagery on the internet is already slop, in that it already has smoothing filters and photoshop to smooth it all out, so AI-generated imagery has that fake quality. It's the same with AI-music.

A couple weeks ago I as a guest artist at a masters level art class. Absolutely no one was using AI. They were making things that were messy, using the tools at hand, which are smart phone cameras, opensource software, and the bog standard applications like Logic and Premiere. Some of them were really into analog-style video synthesis. AI was not consciously used at any step.

Humans expressing human thoughts will never go away. If anything, their art was intentionally rough around the edges, as if to distinguish themselves from random, meaningless slop.

I was thinking more broadly. My daughter is studying math and starting college soon but now I see LLM's can produce work that would take humans years of study, essentially a chapter in a PhD dissertation, in a few hours.

The liberal arts may enjoy a renaissance because as you say, I think we will always appreciate the human element in art.

[RLetson]

At this stage (and, I would argue, at any future stage), all an AI system can do is retrieve data and run algorithmic statistical analyses on it before running it through the LLM prose generator. The AI does not think--it summarizes, and not on the same bases that natural intelligence does. AI is very good at pattern recognition--which is why it seems to be so good at, say, identifying possible tumors in medical images. But for less quantitative matters, it's not operating in the same way that human intelligence does. The remarkable thing about current AI is the LLM part--it can generate coherent, convincing, grammatically correct prose. But as an examination of any political speech or courtroom closing argument will reveal, competently generated language is not necessarily factually accurate or trustworthy.

Twenty years ago I wrote a feature on an ancestral version of AI, statistics-driven programs that were intended to supercharge search engines by revealing connections that brute-force text searching would miss. They seemed to be pretty good at finding relationships within carefully designed sets of documents--say, pharmaceutical research reports. But training-set design and results monitoring and tweaking required lots of human input and intervention. Because GIGO always applies, no matter how much computational muscle you have available.

[wolflen]

I was thinking more broadly. My daughter is studying math and starting college soon but now I see LLM's can produce work that would take humans years of study, essentially a chapter in a PhD dissertation, in a few hours.

The liberal arts may enjoy a renaissance because as you say, I think we will always appreciate the human element in art.

In art..and ALL aspects of human exploration.

There will always be pioneers and avant garde guides to help us through the darkest nights and brightest days.

...and a young Frank Zappa plays a bicycle..

[Tal_175]

I think people confuse intelligence with sentient experience. The human brain is a deeply flawed organ from the standpoint of reasoning and intelligence. It isn’t built for objective truth; it’s built for survival, stability, and social belonging. There are well-studied cognitive and emotional mechanisms that protect a person’s sense of coherence, identity, and safety at the expense of seeking truth. The brain also relies on built-in heuristics that were useful for navigating jungles but are very poor tools for dealing with objective truth. For example, a belief that has been held longer can outweigh newer, stronger evidence.


People who insist that humans are special and that AI isn’t, and will never be, capable of the creativity and artistry associated with humans often find the alternative vision of life intolerable. So the very organ they use to reach that conclusion is the same one that evolved to protect them from destabilizing truths. It's good to take such conclusions with a grain of salt especially when the degree of confidence is nowhere near justified by the presented evidence given the complexity of the underlying phenomena.

[Reg]

yea... I love theory, It helped my playing last century . Really, as a teen I could shred... had great ears and could make musical thoughts or what I could hear.... work. (well kind of). I could play what I could hear and new.

I somewhat naturally could hear shapes of music... Forms etc... Great for soloing and what I thought comping etc...was.

But later as a Pro, composer and arranger... my ears became Better, maybe just educated, but I could hear and play what others were hearing. Being able to here where music is going and where it comes from.... using theory can really speed up the process of getting ones shit together.... playing jazz and in a jazz style.

Using different theories to help expand music and still keep it connected or with reference to... when playing, composing and arranging helps. If nothing else.... saves time.

I guess I agree with Jack... from analysis..... but That's generally how I play arrange and compose. Sure helps when arranging for BB, LOL

[lawson-stone]

While the "literature course" is a fairly recent invention, "great writers" have always studied their predecessors. We don't know for certain about Homer, but Virgil certainly went to school on Homer, and Dante went to school on Virgil and Ovid, and all of the Renaissance poets went to school on their Roman and Greek predecessors. This is the way art works. Every once in a while, somebody does something really surprising--Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Blake in his poems-with-pictures, Joyce in Finnegans Wake--but the mainstream of any artistic tradition is indeed a stream.

And, FWIW, there is a long tradition of formal study of language-based art, going back in Western tradition to Greece and Rome (rhetoric and prosody)--even when the feedstock is natural language, there's still value in studying how the artistic products work. And analysis is distinct from rule-making, though plenty of artistic traditions emphasize formal rule-sets and constraints. Poetry is full of them--see, for example, this nice essay on the history of the sonnet:

Learning the Sonnet | The Poetry Foundation

My examples are all from literature, but everything I know about Western art follows the same pattern. Invention and innovation take place within a historical context, and analysis and "theory" are posterior to practice, even when they are used to fuel new practice. On the other hand, there have always been plenty of artists who are self-taught rather than the products of formal training regimens. But the higher the technical-skill requirements, the more likely it will be that someone will reinvent some form of the academy, devise a practice regimen, produce a rulebook. Though in folk traditions, training often follows an apprenticeship model, and often within families. (See Hawaiian and Roma musical traditions.)

Scholars actually know quite a bit about how ancient authors learned their craft. Simply to be literate and be able to write in the first place, they went through an educational process called, in Greek, paideia. They started by copying sections of Homer, Galen, and other past writers and then analyzing the grammar and diction of those texts, producing notes known as scholia. They might comment on some feature of grammar, style, even identify copying errors in the manuscript they were working from. They learned a set of symbols and signs to put in their own copies signifying where they had corrected their base text (known as the Vorlage), added in sections from other copies that their own were missing, and even commenting on sections that they found offensive or unacceptable. Scholars have found a good many of these notebooks produced by the students.

Once they had mastered the whole art of handling texts, they were then expected to study intensively a canon of selected writings chosen for their excellence of style, argument, influence, etc. They were expected to learn to write and speak making creative and extensive use of quotation, allusion, outright hijacking of these "canonical" texts. A public speech or serious written document was expected to be peppered with such allusions and quotations, typically used in such a way that a listener or reader who knew the texts would find pleasure in the way the speaker appropriated the classical repertoire of rhetoric and literature.

This tradition continued up through the early Renaissance at least, and even afterward the whole tradition of assimilating a set of models, a canonical list of classic works, and then infusing ones own writing and speaking with allusions, continued. Religious writers, for example, steeped in their scriptures, not only quoted scripture to prove a point, they also alluded to it, cleverly worked its images and phrases into their own writing, and generally bled the canon anywhere they were cut.

There might be something here to learn. "Originality" is a very late appearing virtue in artistic expression. Connecting with the viewer, listener, reader by creatively incorporated a beloved and respected past into the performance has always been valued as essential in high art. Only maybe since the Romantic era has the phantom of pure originality been placed at the center of artistic performance. This shift to prizing pure originality occurs simultaneously with the shift in western thought away from the primacy of the community to an exaggerated and exclusive interest in the autonomous self.

[lawson-stone]

I think people confuse intelligence with sentient experience. The human brain is a deeply flawed organ from the standpoint of reasoning and intelligence. It isn’t built for objective truth; it’s built for survival, stability, and social belonging. There are well-studied cognitive and emotional mechanisms that protect a person’s sense of coherence, identity, and safety at the expense of seeking truth. The brain also relies on built-in heuristics that were useful for navigating jungles but are very poor tools for dealing with objective truth. For example, a belief that has been held longer can outweigh newer, stronger evidence.


People who insist that humans are special and that AI isn’t, and will never be, capable of the creativity and artistry associated with humans often find the alternative vision of life intolerable. So the very organ they use to reach that conclusion is the same one that evolved to protect them from destabilizing truths. It's good to take such conclusions with a grain of salt especially when the degree of confidence is nowhere near justified by the presented evidence given the complexity of the underlying phenomena.

Personally, I consider a jungle full of things than can kill and eat me a good definition of "objective truth." Objective truth is that which can kill you if you ignore its attributes.
I think you are intending something more like abstract truths?

[joe2758]

Scholars actually know quite a bit about how ancient authors learned their craft. Simply to be literate and be able to write in the first place, they went through an educational process called, in Greek, paideia. They started by copying sections of Homer, Galen, and other past writers and then analyzing the grammar and diction of those texts, producing notes known as scholia. They might comment on some feature of grammar, style, even identify copying errors in the manuscript they were working from. They learned a set of symbols and signs to put in their own copies signifying where they had corrected their base text (known as the Vorlage), added in sections from other copies that their own were missing, and even commenting on sections that they found offensive or unacceptable. Scholars have found a good many of these notebooks produced by the students.

Once they had mastered the whole art of handling texts, they were then expected to study intensively a canon of selected writings chosen for their excellence of style, argument, influence, etc. They were expected to learn to write and speak making creative and extensive use of quotation, allusion, outright hijacking of these "canonical" texts. A public speech or serious written document was expected to be peppered with such allusions and quotations, typically used in such a way that a listener or reader who knew the texts would find pleasure in the way the speaker appropriated the classical repertoire of rhetoric and literature.

This tradition continued up through the early Renaissance at least, and even afterward the whole tradition of assimilating a set of models, a canonical list of classic works, and then infusing ones own writing and speaking with allusions, continued. Religious writers, for example, steeped in their scriptures, not only quoted scripture to prove a point, they also alluded to it, cleverly worked its images and phrases into their own writing, and generally bled the canon anywhere they were cut.

There might be something here to learn. "Originality" is a very late appearing virtue in artistic expression. Connecting with the viewer, listener, reader by creatively incorporated a beloved and respected past into the performance has always been valued as essential in high art. Only maybe since the Romantic era has the phantom of pure originality been placed at the center of artistic performance. This shift to prizing pure originality occurs simultaneously with the shift in western thought away from the primacy of the community to an exaggerated and exclusive interest in the autonomous self.

psh what do you know...kidding! very interesting

[lawson-stone]

This thread is showing that among us on this forum are quite a few folks who are very thoughtful, deeply reflective and articulate people.

[John A.]

This tradition continued up through the early Renaissance at least, and even afterward the whole tradition of assimilating a set of models, a canonical list of classic works, and then infusing ones own writing and speaking with allusions, continued. Religious writers, for example, steeped in their scriptures, not only quoted scripture to prove a point, they also alluded to it, cleverly worked its images and phrases into their own writing, and generally bled the canon anywhere they were cut.

I want to a college with a "great books" core curriculum, and it was basically this (+ distribution and major requirements). I'm pretty old, but to the best of my recollection I graduated somewhat later than the Renaissance (albeit into a new dark age).

[Jonah]

.There might be something here to learn. "Originality" is a very late appearing virtue in artistic expression. Connecting with the viewer, listener, reader by creatively incorporated a beloved and respected past into the performance has always been valued as essential in high art. Only maybe since the Romantic era has the phantom of pure originality been placed at the center of artistic performance. This shift to prizing pure originality occurs simultaneously with the shift in western thought away from the primacy of the community to an exaggerated and exclusive interest in the autonomous self.

Although I do not disagree, I cannot also accept it because artistic perception and mentality for me strongly with personality ( I do not mean Romantic conception of artist).
The artist is original because his personality is present through his art.
And personality is original by default... I know about anonymous art of cathedral builders but it does not mean I do not feel them in their art as persons, they were persons.
Recently I visited Loan and I am convinced that it is mainly a result of one person's project, it is too integral and conceptually harmonious though it us of course obvious that there were many people involved in this, but also many people were involved in Versailles but it is the ingression of personality of the 'king the artist', Louis XIV, and Berliner Philharmonic orchestra in 30s-40s consisted of many great musians but it was the will and artistic vision of Furtwangler.

Another point is that historic vision contradicts to the artistic vision for me, of course artists accumulate culture, inherit predecessors and influence posteriors. But essential each of them is alone and is the beginning and the end. When we encounter a great piece of art at the moment of a true direct perception we have unconventional experience where nothing else exists of course we cannot stay in this perception mode we need to return to conventuali reality and them we analyze and describe and involve also historic paradigm ( and it us actually helpful).

But here we also come to the subtle problem of what the personality is and what culture is ..

In the Ashes and Diamond the poem by Cyprian Norwid is quoted ( extremely original poets especially for his time), this sharp, clever sarcastic poem describes the travel of the author to hell
I found an English ( tohough non- rhymed translation).
I think this quote shows the problem if personality clearly.
And integrity too, is personality really as integral as we often wish it to be ? Am I the same person I was a year ago? Am I the same person who was irritated and shouted at a kid and felt remorse but now I remember the event but I don remember and do not understand those feelings I had? And after all what if I just do not remember any more? Am I obliged to be consistent to stay myself?

I think only art gives experience that connects all these things together.
To be honest I think artistic experience is probably the only mode where I feel I exist ( the only other mode is probably Love but it is rare and less controllable).




Cyprian Norwid

Then it is time of trial and of measure
How much? you have taken of self mastery...
Your value stands quite naked and revealed
And then you see - who you are - without inquiry.

And how much you've been named this or that in Time -
Or perhaps been known through your forbears' name
You see - and how much? you've taken on yourself
From custom? style? tone? - or mimicry?

Split off of you, burning like a torch,
Smoldering rags are flying away
And you don't know if you're becoming free
Or whatever's yours is being destroyed!

Will remain only ashes, storm and chaos,
To be swept straight into the abyss,
Or will remain there a shining diamond,
The light of the dawn of everlasting triumph?

[pauln]

...and influence posteriors.

Oh yes, some music just makes people want to dance.

[Christian Miller]

Scholars actually know quite a bit about how ancient authors learned their craft. Simply to be literate and be able to write in the first place, they went through an educational process called, in Greek, paideia. They started by copying sections of Homer, Galen, and other past writers and then analyzing the grammar and diction of those texts, producing notes known as scholia. They might comment on some feature of grammar, style, even identify copying errors in the manuscript they were working from. They learned a set of symbols and signs to put in their own copies signifying where they had corrected their base text (known as the Vorlage), added in sections from other copies that their own were missing, and even commenting on sections that they found offensive or unacceptable. Scholars have found a good many of these notebooks produced by the students.

Once they had mastered the whole art of handling texts, they were then expected to study intensively a canon of selected writings chosen for their excellence of style, argument, influence, etc. They were expected to learn to write and speak making creative and extensive use of quotation, allusion, outright hijacking of these "canonical" texts. A public speech or serious written document was expected to be peppered with such allusions and quotations, typically used in such a way that a listener or reader who knew the texts would find pleasure in the way the speaker appropriated the classical repertoire of rhetoric and literature.

This tradition continued up through the early Renaissance at least, and even afterward the whole tradition of assimilating a set of models, a canonical list of classic works, and then infusing ones own writing and speaking with allusions, continued. Religious writers, for example, steeped in their scriptures, not only quoted scripture to prove a point, they also alluded to it, cleverly worked its images and phrases into their own writing, and generally bled the canon anywhere they were cut.

There might be something here to learn. "Originality" is a very late appearing virtue in artistic expression. Connecting with the viewer, listener, reader by creatively incorporated a beloved and respected past into the performance has always been valued as essential in high art. Only maybe since the Romantic era has the phantom of pure originality been placed at the center of artistic performance. This shift to prizing pure originality occurs simultaneously with the shift in western thought away from the primacy of the community to an exaggerated and exclusive interest in the autonomous self.

Interesting... there are certainly some parallels as one might expect with music. Certainly it seems the musicians of the Early Modern Era had a similar attitude to 'originality' in so much as the concept existed - music was a trade. Craft was all important. A lot of this was probably down to the social function of music, much like furniture making, gardening, painting portraits and religious commissions and so on and so forth. One original composer I can think of right away is Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) - his music is full of arresting chromatic harmonies and dissonance even by the standards of the late 16th century madrigal style (which could be pretty wild). Obviously his situation was quite different to that of the professional composer being an aristocrat who literally got away with murder. So he could write what he liked. He certainly cuts a very Byronic, Romantic figure to our modern eyes.

But we don't really see that among non-aristocrats until around 1800. Mozart is often held to be the first freelance composer, and sure enough his work breaks out of the conventions of the courtly Galant style. But he only managed 10 years of it before his health and finances collapsed.

As I understand it rhetoric was absolutely central to the conception of Baroque musical performance. It's telling that one of the soloists in the original performance of the Messiah was not in fact known as a singer, but as an actor.

From reading Mortensen, Gjerdingen and so on, the impression I get with music in the 'classical' era (i.e. late 18th century) at least is that there wasn't really that much attention paid to the music of the past and music existed in the sunrise of a perpetual present that reminds me of today's popular music - in fact, I would go as far to say that modern pop music has more reverence for a historical canon thanks to Bruno Mars and his fellow neoclassicists. I would say this seems from my limited knowledge to somewhat true up until about 1800.

The prevailing sense I get of this era from reading about it is that there wasn't really a musical canon. The canon in so much as it existed seems to have mostly been in church liturgy - plainsong for Catholics, and chorales for the Lutherans. And while plainsong is genuinely old, it is still younger than the Classics. Greek writings on music were tremendously influential on Western music theory (and in the Islamic world) but this doesn't map to a preservation of a genuinely ancient Greek musical literature for various family obvious reasons (although the classical Greeks did have a form of musical notation.)

But, perhaps this may be overstated to some extent. There was obviously an interest in older music from the musicians themselves.

While European rich person music (i.e. the stuff that got written down) was very much subject to the whims and enthusiasm of a very international court circuit mostly interested in Italian musicians, obviously it wasn't completely devoid of historical context. Older music was very much performed in the church - most famously the Allegri Miserere which was over a century old when Mozart famously heard it. And the music was updated to reflect the tastes of the present day, and often rendered in a more up-to-date style - including plainsong performance. (The austere plainsong performance style we hear today in the Catholic and High Anglican church is apparently a creation of the 19th century.)

And you do have some 18th century writers, the best known of which is probably Fux, seeking to teach a "classical" Renaissance style of counterpoint. However, as Peter Schubert points out Fux is representing a recontextualisation of the Palestrina style within the understanding of 18th century music - he is not representing the actual composition practice of Palestrina and his contemporaries which was actually quite different. It does seem that the sort of scholarship that Schubert and his colleagues are undertaking today would have been quite alien to the sensibilities of the era.

OTOH Mozart's of ignorance of Bach until Baron Gottfried van Swieten introduced him to his work, seems to more a reflection of Bach's lack of fame as a composer in the 18th century generally - even during his lifetime to some extent. Mozart also re-orchestrated the Messiah at van Swieten's request. I don't think the wildly successful Handel was obscure in Mozart's time, but I'd be happy to be corrected.

The idea of the Western Musical Canon (and musical antiquarianism, for instance in Brahms) only gained traction in the 19th century, and coincides with two important cultural currents.

One is the rise of Germany as a major cultural and industrial power and the huge influence of German music and crucially, German thought on theory, musicology and music history. Today, the European music history taught in schools is largely that written by the Germans.

The other is the move of performance practice away from the performer/composer/improviser and towards the specialised executant around 1850. The increasingly important figure of the conductor as the composer's interpreter and a curator of this canon comes from the same era.

[RLetson]

Also going on in Germany in the early Romantic period: interest in folklore, philology, and scriptural analysis (the "higher criticism"). All of these movements are in part backward-looking, interested in history. For example, the Grimm brothers were involved in overlapping fields: folklore, philology, and lexicography, tied together by their German-nationalist sentiments.

I find it interesting that this urge to retrieve the past sits right next to the Romantic artist-as-hero/rebel attitude. Nor were the Germans the only ones to tie identity to history (and the arts of the past)--it was all over Europe right up to its pathological climax in National Socialism. (And we're getting a dose of it now in the US. But that's politics, so I'll leave it there.)

[Litterick]

"Originality" is a very late appearing virtue in artistic expression. Connecting with the viewer, listener, reader by creatively incorporated a beloved and respected past into the performance has always been valued as essential in high art.

When John McLaughlin played Cherokee with the Tonight Show Band, he demonstrated that he was part of the tradition. Viewers who were momentarily discomforted when Johnny Carson told them the next guest had played with Miles Davis and Chick Corea would have been reassured to hear him play a song that had been covered by Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Stan Getz and Lionel Hampton.

[Bach5G]

There’s a certain amount you need to know (IMHO). Maybe up to identifying key centres and knowing a couple (not all) interesting scales.