Reply To: Music, maths and language
Thanks for the bump, Angelastic. I wonder if the "labeling" studies you refer to above are related to the one I've heard about involving memorisation of chess board states. The long and the short of it was that chess grandmasters have an amazing ability to remember the state of a board if that state was arrived at through the rules of play. But when the pieces were arranged, the grandmasters' advantage over laymen dwindled to insignificance.
You compilation comparison warms the cockles of my compiler. I like to imagine that I compile music to bytecode when I sight-read under performance circumstances, i.e. when the priority is to produce something plausibly good as opposed to playing exactly what is on the page. In this mental model, the notes on the page are compiled into an intermediate format by the "reading" subsystem, and the "playing" subsystem does just-in-time compilation. Maybe it makes sense to you; I know it's a difficult sell as a view of the world, but it just feels so right! This is a first step down the path ending up in descriptions of software design patterns in terms of Gestalt 