Tyranny of the barline or something else

Headline: TED Video Irritating

Alt headline: Media Company Declares Own Take On 15th Century Graphic Concept Groundbreaking 

Alt alt headline: tEd Dopes Find Music Unintuitive

 

Getting back to my usual form: complaining about a dumb, currently circulating tED video from 2014. It could be seen as nitpicky, but hell, rhythm is our trade, the fine points of it are supposed to matter. And it's fun. 

Per normal, the video producers have compressed the timing of the speech into a rapid fire alien chatter, spewing a lot of colorful facts all over us, so we don't have time to notice that what they're saying is possibly scientifically a lot of crap. 

This is the major thrust of it, and I don't like any part of it: 

“The continuity of a wheel can be a more intuitive way to visualize rhythm than a linear score which requires moving back and forth along the page.”

Massive irritation:

1. What is it with these guys and “intuitive”? Is the English language, for example, intuitive? Or any language? Languages take years to acquire— reading them, speaking them, understanding them. Even if you believe music should be a people's art, doable by everyone, people's art, like language, still requires immersion. People don't pick it up like playing Tetris or driving a Honda.

2. I've never heard reading music described as “back and forth.” Usually we read from left to right, one line at a time, down the page. Like reading most languages— which billions of humans, starting around age 5, do every single day, processing fantastic quantities of information quickly and efficiently. 

3. They say visualizing rhythm like it's a thing. They try to slide these things past you.  

Musicians deal with rhythm primarily as an aural phenomenon, and also as a physical phenomenon, and as an information phenomenon. We learn rhythm by hearing it, playing it, counting or singing it. We may conceive it as a mathematical form. And we read it— which is visual, but not visualizing. Is the word reading a visualization of the act of reading? No. 

Yes, an animated wheel graphic is a way to visually represent simple repeating rhythms, and to an extent, illustrate how subdivisions work. Clock faces and sun dials are very old technology, it's fine. We can have visual aids. But normally we don't promote our visual metaphors as being possibly superior to the information system they are in aid of understanding. 

Interlude: I believe if a person is going to re-invent music, he should know its basic terms. For example:
 

“In standard notation, rhythm is written on a musical bar line”

...illustrated with a line of music written on a staff, of course— the horizontal thingy with five lines where music is written.. The bar line is the actual vertical line demarking bars or measures. It's like a mechanic calling the catalytic converter the muffler. You want to find a new mechanic.   

Even the guy who can't spell treble knows
the difference between staff and bar line.

[... ... ...]


So I just fail to see how some colored dots on ungraded concentric circles is more intuitive or precise than standard notation. Anything off the 12, 3, 6, or 9 o'clock position, you have to guess what the subdivision is supposed to be. Maybe we're just supposed to space out on the spinning dial hand and just hit something when it hits a dot. 

Or maybe it's it's not supposed to be a notation system for humans playing instruments, and he's developing a beat programming interface, and is doing a little advance publicity with an “educational” video. 

The closing bit about “tyranny of the barline”... based on the above maybe he means tyranny of the staff? If we're talking about the actual bar line— not the staff— it's only tyrannical if we don't teach people how to use it, understanding that it does have limitations. To me a closed looping circle is tyrannical. 

I actually think we're dealing with someone for whom music = something done on a laptop. If somebody lives their whole musical life in a 16 chamber grid, yes, that will seem “tyrannical”: 

Looking at a blank page of manuscript, knowing that you can put the barlines anywhere you want, or nowhere, where's the tyranny? Does he know that measures are only used for organization, and that measures can be any size you like, and you can change that any time you like? 

No built in forced repeat signs, even.

 
It's like saying tyranny of the paragraph. Tyranny of the comma. It's completely stupid. 

Their big discovery: rhythms become other rhythms if you invert them (as a musician would say), or “rotate wheels” (as they say in the video).

It's not a big discovery, it did not require wheel magic to learn it. They made a graphical representation of an ordinary concept, without teaching the concept. Check that— they explain it in terms of their animated graphic— rotate the wheel. Of course, there is no way for you to “rotate the wheel” yourself, you have no tool for doing that. You would need whatever proprietary app this person is/was apparently developing. Normally it can be done by anyone in the world with a pencil and paper and a little bit of knowledge. No computer device or animation software required whatsoever.

Postscript: I was digging around in vain for any evidence of a musical career of the guy who made the video, and came across some comments by a musicology professor.