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Baked. The psalms were not only meant as poetry, they were also to be played on a special harp whose strings correspond to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The mapping is forgotten, however. |
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For instance, Psalm 4 starts with "For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. A Psalm by David." |
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right, that was the example I gave too. But the task is to find Bethoven's 5th in a cook book. |
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Literally Beethoven's fifth? Or just something with some resemblance to music? |
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One can theoretically make an encoding to derive anything from anything else. I could extract Mein Kampf from Harry Potter for instance. |
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//find Bethoven's 5th in a cook book// I don't think that's where he left it. |
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//the task is to find Bethoven's 5th in a cook book.//
Hmm... Seems more interesting to find the hidden recipes contained in Beethoven's 5th! |
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// they were also to be played on a special harp whose strings correspond to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet. |
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Even today, we're naming strings with letters - but that doesn't mean that the lyrics of songs encode their tunes. What made you think that that's what was happening with the Psalm songs? |
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(-) Sorry, the idea is fun on the surface, but to my untrained ears, music you generate from math or DNA or written text or ..., far from revealing hidden anything, just sounds bad. |
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An historical relevancy [link]. Any mathematical lexicographers out there care to determine how many English (or German) words can be formed from letters A-H? |
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$ grep -i '^[a-h]*$' /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
269 |
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Of those, the words I'd easily recognize as such if I met them on the street (leaving off -ed forms of verbs):
a Abba Abe accede ace ache ad Ada adage add age ah ahead
babe Bach bad badge bag Bagdad baggage bagged be beach beached beachhead bead bed bedded bee beech beef beefhead behead
cab cabbage cabbagehead cache cadge cage cede chaff Che chef
dab dad Dada daff dead deadhead deaf Deb debadge decade deed deface
each Ed Edda edge egad egg egghead eh
gab Gabe gaff gaffe gag gee ghee
ha had hag head headache hedge he |
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There is a German children's song about the evils of drinking too much coffee that spells out C-A-F-F-E-E as the corresponding notes are sung. But that and B-A-C-H are single words, and they already sound a bit forced. |
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Well, I don't put any stock in it, [jutta], it's just something I read about. I should have put some weasel words in, I guess, but I thought this subject too silly to bother. Anyway, I've listened to the disharmonious chaos they called "music" in the 12th century, if those were the standards at that time, it stands to reason that the Hebrews might have found the music generated thusly acceptable. Many believe the "Chief Musician" references in the Psalms refer to a lost musical worship tradition, this is one of the theories held by some of them. There's a group who has attempted to recreate the music, they call it "Music From God" which I think is silly as if there is, in fact, music there, David made it, not God per se. Their decoding method (basically they tried random mappings until they found one that "sounded good") is also very questionable. |
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'A dad had a bad headache' would make a tune somewhat apropos of the message... |
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