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So mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen came up with this term ‘lies to children’ - useful but ultimately inaccurate factoids we teach in grade school level education. This is not necessarily a bad thing - the real truth often muddies the waters because it’s too complicated and the simplification serves in the short term, but sometimes these simplified ideas outlive their usefulness. Anyway here’s some physics examples
- the planets go around the sun
- atoms are like little solar systems with electrons orbiting the nucleus
- the period of a pendulum is given by this simple equation
Here are some examples from jazz/music edu. Mark Levine’s ‘myths’ chapter in the jazz theory book is in the same spirit. Some may be more factoids or misconceptions than edu ‘lies’, but interested to hear your examples/thoughts.
- don’t double the root
- harmonic minor isn’t used much in jazz
- the fourth is an avoid note on dominant
- the thirteenth is an avoid note on minor seventh
- bebop is about the upper extensions/pre war jazz players didn’t use extensions
- improvisers always make everything up from scratch
I’ll leave it at that for now….
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10-22-2022 06:38 AM
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I suppose the music examples you give will be useful and acceptable also (if not more so) for "adult children" too?
This kind of lies and kids ... it can work out all kinds of ways. It appears I was shocked and unwilling to accept that Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas, a priori the "original" Santaclaus) didn't really exist and that the presents he left us instead came from my parents. I think my sister had figured that out by herself well before she was told. I had much less problems with "more reasonable" lies (i.e. inaccuracies or incomplete representations).
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Originally Posted by RJVB
In our case, the Sun ‘wobbles’ slightly mostly due to Jupiters influence. This may seem pedantic and the sort wanky thing you might say to be clever because in the specific case of ‘how a solar system is laid out’ it’s like splitting hairs, but in the general case of ‘how gravity works’ it’s simply not true.
in Newtonian physics there is a tacit assumption that some reference frames are more valid than others, and there must be some absolute universal reference frame. Early on we assume the Sun is the centre, then as our understanding of the universe developed in the c18 and c19 presumably ‘god’. This was a bit of intellectual credence in fact for a theist cosmology.
Einstein sorted this out. So from the perspective of general relativity, you can reconstruct the physics from any reference frame. It may be more convenient to solve the equations from the perspective of the Sun (or the barycentre) but from the standpoint of GR all reference frames (including non-inertial ones) are equally valid and choosing one or the other is a matter of convenience. It’s there in the words ‘general relativity.’
I suppose the music examples you give will be useful and acceptable also (if not more so) for "adult children" too?Last edited by Christian Miller; 10-22-2022 at 07:59 AM.
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So the planets circle the sun for convenience.
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Originally Posted by Litterick
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I've also started to notice these jazz myths.
The center of gravity happens to be in the sun because it has the majority of the mass of the solar system like anyone would expect. But the whole system has more complexity to it like you said. Been looking at Mars and Venus at night.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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Originally Posted by Litterick
Physics has always done this. The difference is now we know that all reference frames are transferable into each other without needing an absolute reference frame.
for Einstein it made no less sense to ask ‘when does the station stop at the train?’
From a mathematical point of view, the problem of planetary orbits in both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics is simpler when considered from a heliocentric perspective than the geocentric one as the maths will be way simpler, and the planets will follow simpler paths* rather than the complicated wiggles we see from earth. However, both are equally valid reference frames from the perspective of Einsteinian relativity. you place your coordinates system and reference frame where convenient for the problem, but no reference frame has a greater claim to being absolute than any other, something that wasn’t the case for the theories of c19 physics (cf Michelson-Morley, speed of light and the luminiferous ether.)
I think relativity is quite hard to get conceptually. But there’s some weird shit as well involved in all of this. Mach’s principle for instance is a good one, the extreme case of the sort of thing I’ve been talking about.
*there’s also the thing that early heliocentric (Copernican) cosmology didn’t quite get it right. The clincher was when Kepler worked out planetary orbits were elliptical thus getting rid of those pesky epicycles that plagued both Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmologies with their circular orbits. History vindicates Galileo but it wasn’t quite a scientific slam dunk at the time. Stellar parallax (or rather the lack of at that time measurable parallax) was another problem for Copernican cosmology that was only solved much later (the stars are flipping far away); it wasn’t at this stage any simpler than the heliocentric model and in some ways Galileo’s critics were not entirely ignoring the evidence. The scientific slam dunk really took Kepler.
so yeah, the school history I was taught about this is yet another example of ‘lies to children.’Last edited by Christian Miller; 10-22-2022 at 11:29 AM.
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Given all of that verbiage, it’s easy to see why the ‘lie’ or perhaps more fairly the ‘reasonable educational simplification ’ is used.
But the converse is that a basic educational (school) background doesn’t mean that you actually understand a subject that you are not a specialist in.Last edited by Christian Miller; 10-22-2022 at 11:27 AM.
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^^This is the thing most people seem to have a problem understanding, in every area.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Your jazz examples, on the other hand, are not all such simplifications. I have therefore rearranged them. In my opinion, the first three examples are really such simplifications. They can really help a less experienced improviser, who usually does not yet have the necessary musical ear, to avoid dissonances that he cannot master yet.
The second group are simply false assertions, probably out of ignorance, which I would simply call BS if someone said them to my face.
- don’t double the root
- the fourth is an avoid note on dominant
- the thirteenth is an avoid note on minor seventh
- harmonic minor isn’t used much in jazz
- bebop is about the upper extensions/pre war jazz players didn’t use extensions
- improvisers always make everything up from scratch
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Suddenly I'm humbled.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Originally Posted by DonEsteban
I get where the first three are coming from somewhere but I think there’s much better ways they could be framed
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BTW. As a six-year-old, I could already read quite well, and as luck would have it, my family lived next door to the public library. So I spent countless rainy days there in the children's non-fiction section and read my way through everything I could get.
In my attempt to understand the world, I finally came to the conclusion that everything living was made of cells, everything non-living of atoms.
I also decided that gasoline and diesel engines couldn't actually work because I couldn't imagine the pistons and valves moving at such breakneck speeds.
The Bohr atomic model, on the other hand, I found very plausible. Quantum physics did not take place in children's books at that time (yet?).
Unfortunately, I had no adult who was willing to discuss my findings with me. Which almost cost me my life one or two times for example when I wanted to try "measurements" on a power outlet with my bare hands. As you can see, I survived... :-)
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Improvisors play what they already practiced nothing really new too much if at all most days. That is not a lie just an observation.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Well, as a jazz beginner, for example, I had a strange habit of regularly ending a phrase in major on the "four," which always sounded awful. It helped me a lot when an instructor at a jazz workshop simply forbade me to use the four on major7 and dominant chords.
Later, it all fell into place when I started to hear better. So I'm not sure I agree with you.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
You can look at them through a telescope and see the disks. But then as toylike as they appear in the eyepiece, you are of course looking at planets that are thousands of km (or miles) across. Comparable to the size of the world. i mean we might go that far on a plane, but do we have any real idea of what distance that is?
compare that to the distance of the planets which are in the order of hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Which is unfathomable really. In practice travelling there would mean months in a tin can in microgravity being zapped by solar radiation which is also pretty hard to fathom psychologically and physiologically.
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That's what I like to think about. No I can't gauge the distance like if I were throwing a baseball, but I can still sense the magnitude.
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Originally Posted by DonEsteban
it is very interesting that you knew it sounded bad but it helped to hear a teacher say it was wrong.
Anyway, if you spend a bit of time learning the chord tones of course, then using the 4th or any other dissonant note becomes straightforward. Extend or substitute the chord and you become familiar with the extensions.
But - that’s a separate issue. The fourth on the dominant chord is nothing like as dissonant as it is on the major seventh. Try it. Likewise for a 13 on a m7.
And then you look at the melody for a tune like Recorda Me and it’s got 13th all over m7s.
The reason why they make this distinction is because of the way they teach the ii V. They are right to identify the importance of those two notes - the the C on a Dm7 chord and the B on the G7 driving the progression. The idea is the the ‘B on Dm7 gives away the dominant’, which is true. The B does make Dm sound like a G dominant chord in that specific context.
but to talk about these being avoid notes is not the most helpful way of doing this imo. First of all it makes you imprisoned by the exact written changes and gives you something else to think about while you could instead be developing the ability to hear and express harmony in your line. Second, telling people to avoid doing things is bad education psychology. This is the number one thing they tell you not to do when teaching children and I don’t think teaching adults is really that different.
instead, it’s imho better to say ‘these are the sensitive notes of the ii V, the C gives the floating sound of the Dm7 chord, while the B gives the active sound of the dominant. Practice using them to give direction to your ii V lines’ or something. Exactly the same info, just differently presented.Last edited by Christian Miller; 10-22-2022 at 02:33 PM.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
You hit the nail on the head, that was exactly the problem. I was pretty quick at learning these scales, and already I was thinking how well I could improvise now - or better, should be able to, because I couldn't, it just didn't sound good.
For example, I could play the altered scale after a short time, but until I finally learned to make music with it, years passed.
So I agree with you 100%!
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