First, I rip from the CDROM to a wav file.

cdparanoia 1 prokofiev1.wav

cdparanoia lets me specify the input device, but I don’t need to, since the default—/dev/cdrom—is what I want. The line above just says to rip the first track to a wav file named prokofiev1.wav.

lame -h prokofiev1.wav prokofiev1.mp3

Encode the wav file to a mp3 file, in high quality (128 kb).

lltag --cddb prokofiev1.mp3

lltag helps me look up the CDDB data about the track and then add it to the mp3. I’m first prompted to make a CDDB query:

Enter CDDB query [q] (no default, h for help) ?

I’ve tried entering the hexadecimal strings I get from cd-discid, but I’ve never gotten it to return any results. Instead, I enter “prokofiev violinsonaten” verbatim from the CD’s title. I get one matching result, which I select, and then I choose the appropriate track and save the CDDB data.

id3ed -i prokofiev1.mp3 and id3v2 -l prokofiev1.mp3 let me verify that the data has been saved.

Now I’m all set to import the mp3 to Banshee and then to my iPod.

I decided to track down this supposed Plato quotation and found the following in A History of Western Music:

Furthermore, the foundations of music once established must not be changed, for lawlessness in art and education inevitably leads to licence in manners and anarchy in society. For Plato the saying “Let me make the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws” would have expressed a political maxim; more than that, it would have been a pun, as the word nomos, with the general meaning of “custom” or “law,” was used also to designate the melodic patterns of a certain type of lyric song.

Grout, Donald J. A History of Western Music, 1973. p. 8

Notice the ambiguous “would have”: “For Plato the saying . . . would have expressed a political maxim.” It is possible that Grout could have used “would have” in the sense of “did,” but none of the footnotes near the quotation (there is none for the quotation itself) points to such a passage. In fact, the relevant passages in the footnotes—from Plato’s Laws—actually seem to support the converse: Plato wants law to control the music. But somewhere along the line an ambitious musical-political theorist made it through page eight of A History and decided to resolve the ambiguity in his own favor.

This weekend a friend played me the album Simple Gifts by baritone Bryn Terfel, and I discovered Jenkins has written a nice Ave Verum Corpus, a selection from which you can hear here as track 11. It’s not Mozart or all that profound, but it’s well worth the 99¢ I paid to download it from iTunes.

Some classical music is enjoyable.
Some concertos are not enjoyable.
Therefore, some concertos are not classical music.

This is an invalid syllogism, so it can’t be “sound,” because a “sound” syllogism is one that is valid and has true premises. But that didn’t stop numerous students who went on to evaluate the truth of the premises.

Here’s what surprised me: quite a few concluded that this was an unsound syllogism, because the first premise is false. In other words, they believe that no classical music is enjoyable, and they said so directly in their explanations.

They’ve never enjoyed a piece of classical music? That’s like saying you’ve never been in love or never laughed. It reminded me of a passage from a book that influenced me when I was a freshman in college, written about college students twenty years ago: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.

The power of music in the soul—described to Jessica marvelously by Lorenzo in the Merchant of Venice—has been recovered after a long period of desuetude. And it is rock music alone that has effected this restoration. Classical music is dead among the young. This assertion will, I know, be hotly disputed by many who, unwilling to admit tidal changes, can point to the proliferation on campuses of classes in classical music appreciation and practice, as well as performance groups of all kinds. Their presence is undeniable, but they involve not more than 5 to 10 percent of the students. Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they like it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America. Many, or even most, of the young people of that generation also swung with Benny Goodman, but with an element of self-consciousness—to be hip, to prove they weren’t snobs, to show solidarity with the democratic ideal of a pop culture out of which would grow a new high culture. So there remained a class distinction between high and low, although private taste was beginning to create doubts about whether one really like the high very much. But all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music. This is a constant surprise to me. And one of the strange aspects of my relations with good students I come to know well is that I frequently introduce them to Mozart. This is a pleasure for me, inasmuch as it is always pleasant to give people gifts that please them. It is interesting to see whether and in what ways their studies are complemented by such music. But this is something utterly new to me as a teacher; formerly my students usually knew much more classical music than I did.

The Closing of the American Mind page 69

They describe it as pretty neat as well as being scientifically interesting, and useful. After listening to some compositions and creating a few random ones myself, I must agree that it is. And anyone who has listen [sic] to the radio the last few years could certainly use some unique music.

Scientifically interesting, maybe. But after playing around with it, the best “compositions” I heard could hardly rival Muzak. Curiously, the site’s FAQ has a comment about “meaning”:

Can WolframTones compositions have meaning?

That’s a complicated philosophical question. There’s some discussion of meaning in the computational universe in A New Kind of Science. It’s probably fair to say that objects in the computational universe–and WolframTones compositions–develop meaning as they get connected to other things. In some ways WolframTones compositions are like objects in nature: their features emerge from specified underlying rules. So if the form of a sunset, a tree, or a mollusc shell is meaningful, then so can a WolframTones composition be.

Right. And that’s why rule-generated music is unlikely to mean much to its listeners–you’ve eliminated half of the human component in the communication process. It’s more like the sound of a babbling brook than a symphony.

While it’s true that human musicians incorporate rules into their compositions, they do so reflexively, so that various parts of the piece respond to other parts of the piece. The composer responds to and adjusts the music according to how it achieves certain criteria (such as beauty), criteria that are difficult to make into algorithms. When the computer is aware of how its composition makes it feel and changes the piece accordingly, then we’ll be getting somewhere.