o-song:

This is the graph of timbre in the paper in Scientific Reports:

The Y axis represents beta, a coefficient which represents the amount of variety. I don’t buy that distribution of timbres. Knowing about the history of music and technology, you’d expect there to be an uptick in…

Quite enjoying Proofiness by Charles Seife (haven’t read his Zero) as an accessible packaging of Stat Error 101 type information. This one is a nice example of what are likely Potemkin Numbers, numbers that result from the quantification of concepts that can’t (or, maybe more accurately, shouldn’t) be quantified. If every unique drum sound counts as a timbre, why shouldn’t every slight variation of a synth setting? Or, like, the human voice? Seems like kind of an important timbre consideration. There is absolutely no way that these numbers could be useful for anything. So why use numbers?