A fun way to look at this is that the "long head" (ramp) of the singularity began some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We're just living in teh exciting bit.
Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.
The disagreements ITT at least answer the question I came away with after scanning this post—"if these are almost all pronounced the same, why the different diacriticals?"
The partial answer being, some dialects retain differences and they are significant. My own accent is not terrible especially for an American raised when and where I was, but I internalized it early enough (just through middle school instruction, sadly) that I don't even know if I pronounce them all the same... I'd have to read some passages and inspect.
But I was hoping for a little more by way of explicit discussion of the why, which I infer is largely: diacriticals are mostly artifacts of etymology which at some point became ossified and absent a Dudens-like change in prescriptive heart, are here to stay, mostly unvoiced indicators of language evolution (like the silent k and gh in English knight).
Fellow AMD fan here—it wasn't that long ago that I finally relinquished the old ABIT motherboard that overclocked my AMD badboy to eke out extra cycles for my DAW.
- meaningful software still takes meaningful time to develop
- not all software is packaged for everyone
I've seen a lot of examples shared of software becoming narrow-cast, and/or ephemeral.
That that doesn't show up in library production or even app store submissions is not interesting.
I'm working on a large project that I could never have undertaken prior to contemporary assistance. I anticipate it will be months before I have something "shippable." But that's because it's a large project, not a one shot.
I was musing that this weekend: when do we see the first crop of serious and novel projects shipping, which could not have been done before (at least, by individual devs)... but which still took serious time.
Gwen Fisher was at the Exploratorium After Dark event ten days ago running an activity where you could sit down and implement some of her CA rules on hex paper with markers.
however much atonality and other formalisms represented an intellectual inevitability, they also are ultimately useful mostly for having mapped a good bit of the coastline defining where the experience and enjoyment of musicality is grounded in ways which are obviously embedded in both physics and our particular embodiment, and to lesser degree, culture.
Jazz did a much more nuanced mapping of that ground IMO, but to the same end result: beyond the coast there is deep water, and there we do not swim.
Nor shall we, the collective. Not so long as we live in these bodies.
Individuals can swim; individuals can endeavor or through some rare combination of circumstance find musical value and enjoyment in the water, i.e. beyond conventional melody harmony and rhythm...
...but no amount of intellectual scaffolding or historical cultural momentum can bridge it.
Humans cluster inland.
I've spend decades in the experimental sound/music community and mapped some largely unvisited coves myself, having a particular interest in what in those intellectual traditions was called musique concrete;
and been to countless "noise" shows, and lived through many generations now of enthusiastic "kids" rediscovering various aesthetics.
The lines don't budge. The cultural framing of what it means to transgress them, and the communities that form around celebration of that "transgression," are all unique in their specific concerns, and—unhappy in the same way.
Minimalism was a welcome success for pretty obvious reasons: it was a reversion and embrace of exactly those things at the heart of our embodied experience of music.
Srsly though.
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