BTDT (Cont.)

 

There have been various measures of time and distance in world history as a form of navigation. We can divide it up in various ways, but once one system is established it is difficult to set new standards.

We can experiment with new systems, that we might think would be revolutionary, but if you look back far enough someone has already tried it, then was canceled out once a Standard was established. The spherical nature of the Earth was first realized by the Greeks in 500 BC. By the Renaissance, there were all kinds of new Standards, such as establishing the mile as being eight furlongs (a term adapted from farming), which we now know as "blocks".

Equal Temperament is probably the best compromise as a Universal, as well as duple and triple meters. The decimal system could produce some consonant intervals but would be esoteric. I have experimented quite a bit with alternate tunings, and while they can have interesting uses and characteristics, I always return to the traditional systems. I use the alternate systems as a way to exploit the perfect and/or resonant intervals and chords in a given key, such as using open-D type tunings (DADGAD, DADF#AD, DADF#AC#) to produce novelty when the traditional gets boring.

From the book The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, which I found to be quite interesting for its metaphors for finding our way creatively and in life.

PS 6/2024:

"From the late 1970s onward, custom-built Chinese interfaces steadily disappeared from marketplaces and laboratories alike, displaced by wave upon wave of Western-built personal computers crashing on the shores of the PRC. With those computers came the resurgence of QWERTY for Chinese input, along the same lines as the systems used by Sinophone computer users today—ones mediated by a software layer to transform the Latin alphabet into Chinese characters. This switch to typing mediated by an input method editor, or IME, did not lead to the downfall of Chinese civilization, as the historian Arnold Toynbee may have predicted. However, it did fundamentally change the way Chinese speakers interact with the digital world and their own language." https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinese-keyboard