Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning More garbled reasoning from Dante Rosati

Compounding his dishonesty and his incoherent arguments
with yet more garbled logic and more scrambled
reasoning, Dante Rosati pulled down his pants and
squatted and let this post plop onto the metatuning forum:

Message 7085 of 7107 | Previous | Next
Msg #
From: "Dante Rosati" <dante@i...>
Date: Wed Apr 14, 2004 7:18 am
Subject: RE: [metatuning] Crackpots never quit

>I think we can safely conclude from this post that
>you are admitting that you have no idea where major
>triads came from. Calling it an accident of
>history also amounts to saying "Brian dont know".

Notice the multiple overlapping logical fallacies in
this acme of folly and ignorance by Dante Rosati.
First, Dante Rosati falls into the age-old logical
fallacy of falsely and foolishly trying to shift the
burden of proof. It stands to reason that Dante Rosati
is not aware of this elementary logical requirement,
for as we have seen Dante Rosati has made so many
astoundingly foolish errors of logic (see my past
rebuttals of Roasti's baseless claims) and Rosati has
made so many laughably false assertions, that by
now we have come to expect that Dante Rosati would
not merely put his foot in his mouth as soon as
he opens it...we now expect him get his entire leg
in:

"8. Burden of Proof
"What has to prove what to whom? The person making
the extraordinary claim has the burden of proving to
the experts and to the community at large that his
or her belief has validity..." [Shermer, Michael,
"Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience,
Superstition, and other Confusions Of Our Time,"
W. H. Freeman and Company: New York, 1997, pg. 61]

Dante Rosati made the exotraordinary claim that
the harmonic series forms the basis of the major
triad and the western diatonic scale. As I have
shown in such minute detail, a vast Himalayan
mountain of evidence from many different fields of
study converge to disprove Dante Rosati's foolishly
false claim. Ethnomusicology shows us that other
non-Western cultures which use harmonic series timbres
and in many cases instruments very close in sound
and function to many of the instruments of Western
music (such as the vina of India, or the pip'a of China)
nonetheless do NOT use Western triads, have no
conception of Western triads, no interest in using
Western harmonic progressions in their indigenous
music, and these same non-Western cultures do not
use Western tunings either. Moreover, evidence from
the field of psychoaacoustics proves conclusively
that non-musicians who have not been brainwashed by
trogolydtic so-called "teachers" like Dante Rosati
at festering sinkholes of abject music-theoretic
superstition like Julliard do not react to justly
intoned intervals as predicted by just intonation theory
or by Western music theory.
In one such study, for example, young listeners rated
the just major sixth as most consonant, the just tritone
as next most consonat, and the octave as far down the
scale, barely above the just major second 9/8. These
documented scientific results (which I have cited
elsewhere) completely refute Dante Rosati's pervasively
uninformed claims:

"An experiment on the perception of melodic intervals by musically
untrained observers showed no evidence for the existence
of `natural; categories for musical intervals. (...) The average
difference limen (based on the 75% correct points from the
psychometric fucntions) for three subjects at the physical octave
was 16 cents. The DL's at other ratios in the vicinity of the octave
were not significantly different. A DL of 16 cents is in good
agreement with the FL estimated from the standard deviation of
repeated adjustments of sequential octaves (about 10 cents) in
the same frequency region found by Ward (1954) (..) As in Moran
and Pratt's experiment, large differences were found for DL's
at different ratios, but the range of FL's (14 - 25 cents) was in
good agreement with their results." [Burns, E.M., and Ward, W. D.,
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 63, No. 2, Feb., 1978, pg. 456]

Yet even more evidence converges to disprove Dante Rosati's claim
from music history, for the ancient Greeks in our own culture and
the medieval composers of the organum period (most notably Perotinus
and Longinus) made extensive use of harmonic series timbres (with
the lyre, the human voice, and the pipe organ) -- yet they had no
conception of the Western triad. The Hellenic Greeks did not have
any interest in or any concept of the Western major triad --
and the magic numbers, which for the shockingly uninformed
Dante Rosati are so superstitiously considered "basic" to
Western music (1,2,3,4,5,6), were to the Hellenic Greeks
not the basic integers at all. Instead, the classical
Greeks judged the tetraktys the basis of all music -- the
integers 1,2,3 and 4. The Greeks thought the integers 5
and 6 superfluous since not included in the tetraktys, and
therefore not basic to music. Naturally Dante Rosati
is not aware of these basic facts, well known to any
high school student who has had the good fortune to
encounter a competent teacher, since (after all) Dante
Rosati teaches at Julliard. What else would we expect
from such an abysmal sinkhole of music-theoretic
superstition?

But wait! Even more evidence converges upon the irrefutable
conclusion that the Western triad did not arise from
the harmonic series, for it transpires that tests of
non-Western musicians show that these expert musicians do
not even share the Western concept of "perfect" intervals.
It it impossible, therefore, to appeal to the acoustics
of vibtating bodies as the alleged basis of the Western
triad when expert musicians in non-Western cultures who
use the same timbres have no conception at all of Western
"perfect" intervals.

Of course these experiments merely confirmed the earlier 1926
results of Moran and Pratt performed on Western musicians:

"There is a range of about half an equal semitone midway between
each musical interval, within which an interval should be
recognized by D as neither of the familiar inervals, next above
or below it. (..) The physical correlate of an interval is not
a ratio, anymore than the physical correlate of a pitch is
a frequency. Intervals and pitches have thresholds, ranges of
variability." [Moran, H., and C. C. Pratt, "Variability Of
Judgments On Musical Intervals," Journal of Experimental
Psychology, Vol, 9, 1926]

Of course Dante Rosati is not merely pervasively uninformed
about the evidence from music history which disproves his
laughably foolish claims, and he is not merely shockingly
ignorant of the wealth of data from countless psychoacoustics
experiments which debunk his assertions... Dante Rosati is
also pervasively uninformed about the most rudimentary
elements of music theory -- for even a cursory survey of
the single most comprehensive music theory encyclopedia
published in the 19th century informs us that:

"Thus all these [Western] theories of harmony either rest on
untenable assumptions, or are wanting in practical consistency;
and they are altogether insufficient to explain even the works
of the acknolwedged classical masters, to say nothing of
the way in which they so commonly attribute monstrosities
and errors to the compositions of the more modern school. (..)
The system of scales and modes, and all the network of harmony
foudned thereon, do no seem to rest on any immuatble laws of
nature. They are due to asethetical principles, which are
constantly subject to change, according ot hte progressive
development of knowledge and taste." [Thiersch, Otto, article
on "Harmony" in Deutsched Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon,
1870]

Of this monumental work of musical scholarship A. J. Ellis,
translator and editor of Hlmehotlz's "on the Sensation Of
Tone," remarks "Although there had been some deep thinkers
and writers on Harmony in England, those in Germany had
been ten times as many; the Germans were very highly educated
in music, and theories of harmony broached and published in
Germany were legion. The writer of this article gives an
analysis of them, pointing out what he considers the good
and bad points of each. [Thiersch concludes that] no a priori
theory of harmony can be constructed, because, if harmony
depends only on asethetics and taste, it cannot depend on
physical natural laws." [cited in Stephens, Charles Edward,
Esq., "On the Fallaceis Of Dr. Day's Theory Of Harmony, With
A Brief Outline Of the Elements Of A New System," Proceedings
of the Royal Musical Association, 1 February, 1875, pg. 71]

Of course countless subsequent music theorists have denounced
Dante Rosati's laughably false superstition that the acoustics
if the harmonic series explain the Western major scale and the
Western major triad, a fact of which Rosati is typically unaware:

"Rameau's mysticiscm -- What a pity that it pervades our music
teaching! (..) How many of those accept blindly Rameau's dogma,
instilled into them in t heir childhood, even know that it is
Rameau's? How many of these few have read Rameau's books and
know how illopgically, mystically, he got his ideas?" [Meyer,
Max, "A Musician's Arithmetic," University of Iowa Press,
1928, pg. 53]

And of course modern music theorists and scholars and
musicologists systematically reject Dante Rosati's mindless
superstitions, as do past music theorists:

"What puzzles me about the influence of Pythagoras etc. is how
small a part of the world's population produces music which
is recognizably related to the harmonic series. We do in Europe
today in our art music (a lot of folk music does not) and they
do in India, and that's about it. Even the African areas which
use the bow (and therefore use harmonics in their music) use
different intervals when singing." [Montagu, Jeremy, curator
of the Oxford rare instruments museum, in Storr, Anthony,
Music and the Mind, Balalntine Books, New York: 1992, pg. 62]

As Michael Shermer reminds us, the burden of proof rests upon
the person who tries to contradict the prevailing evidence:

"The burden of proof is on the Hollocaust deniers to prove the
Holocaust did not happen, not on Holocaust historians to prove
that it did. The rationale for this is that mountains of
evidence prove that..the Holocaust is a fact." [Shermer, Michael,
"Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition,
and other Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman and Company:
New York, 1997, pg. 61]

Like a Holocaust denier who can produce no evidence to support
his claim, Dante Rosati now tries to shift the burden of proof
onto me -- but since I have already adduced mountains of evidence
to show his claim cannot be correct, this an obvious logical
fallacy on Dante Rosati's part.

In fact, Dante Rosati's half-baked evasion in this instance is
the standard con job attempted by all practitioners of
pseudoscience when they discover that they have no evidence
to prove their crackpot claims.

For example, uafologists typically try to shift the burden of
proof onto ufo skeptics when the ufologists discover that
they have no hard evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt
ufos are real. "Well, so where do ufos come from?" the ufologist
retorts. "Aha! See! I think we can safely conclude...that
you are admitting that you have no idea where ufos come from.
Calling them `delusions' also amounts to saying `Brian dont
[sic] know.'" The ufologist then giggles and snickers
and capers like a fool, chortling "the emperor has no
clothes," as Rosati foolishly did.

No, quite wrong. As the burden of proof demonstrates so
clearly, the onus is upon the fulogist, not hte skeptic,
since the overwhleming mass of evidence shows that
most ufos have been clearly explained as weather
balloons or mirages or swamp gas. The burden of proof
therefore falls upon the uflogoist, and merely because
the skeptic can't explain the ufo means nothing.

Likewise, the burden of proof falls entirely and squarely
upon Dante Rosati to prove his extraordinary claim
about the alleged origin of the major triad since there
the overwhelming mass of evidence from music history and
psychoacoustics and musicology and cogntive psychology
and acoustics and ethnomusicology all disproves Dante Rosati's
claims.

It stands to reason that Dante Rosati is not familiar with
the requirements of the burden of proof, for this would
require that Dante Rosati knew something about the scientific
method, or about acoustics, or about logic, and as we have
seen Dante Rosati is pervasively uninformed in these subjects --
as in so many others. However, this is not the only logical
fallacy Dante Rosati stumbles into in his ill-advised retort:
Rosati also makes the classic logical error of the long-discredited
and fallacious argument ad ignorantium.

"Many people are overconfident enough to think that if they
cannot explain something, it must inexplicable and therfore...
paranormal. An amateur archaeologist declares that because
he cannot explain how the pyramids were built, they must have
been constructed by space aliens." [Shermer, Michael,
"Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition,
and other Confusions Of Our Time," W. H. Freeman and Company:
New York, 1997, pg. 52]

It is not necessary to know how the pyramids were built in order
to demand hard evidence that space aliens built them. If no
proof is forthcoming that aliens built 'em, a reasonable person
concludes that the claim that space aliens built the puyramids
is poppycock, regardless of whether some other explanation can
be found for how the pyramids were constructed.

When put this simply, even a small child can understand the
obvious fallacy in Dante Rosati's garbled reasoning... Even
a small child can udnerstand it, but the Julliard professor
Dante Rosati cannot.

Dante Rosati pounds the final nail into the coffin of his
own reputation when he resorted to the discredited ad
hominem argument:

"So we see the pattern -- vicious attacks on the ideas of anyone
and everyone, but no constructive ideas to put in their stead."

This is provably false, as usual for Dante Rosati. Examine
the evidence and use common sense: who has indulged in mindless
name-calling? I? Or Dante Rosati?

Dante Rosati has screamed that I am "a baboon" but according to
Rosati, this is not a "vicious attack." Instead, when I point out
"Dante Rosati has fallen into the classic logical fallacy..." _that_
is a vicious attack.

Notice the pattern of moral inversion and distorted reality, so
like the Holocaust denier, in Dante Rosati's garbled reasoning
and scrambled logic.

Rosati descends to hysterical name-calling ("baboon," "asshole")
and outright lies -- but to Rosati, that is not a "vicious attack."
Instead, it is only when someone else points out Dante Rosati's
garbled reasoning and scrambled logic that he erupts with
fury at an imagined "vicious attack."

We observe the same moral inversion from Holocaust deniers, who
blithely dismiss the organized murder of millions of Jews as
"just part of war," and "atrocities were committed on both sides"
(the vile and debased arguemtn of the Holocaust denier David
Irving, who tried to claim that "it was war" and therefore
the extermination of the Jews from 1942 to 1945 was morally
defensible). Yet the same Holocaust deniers angrily condemn
the Allies' bombing raids on civlians in Germany as "horrible
war crimes."

The moral inversion of excusing the perpetrator and blaming
the victim has become popular nowadays -- the Israelis are
condemned from all sides as "sadistic brutes" while nary a
voice gets lifted in protest against the Palestian homicide
bombers... The United States is berated as "an imperialistic
warmongering rogue state" while North Korea with its torture
chambers and concentration camps merits no worldwide protests
in London or Belgium. America's invasion of Iraw to liberate
the Iraqi population from the monster Saddam Hussein, however,
msut be condemend with million-man marches and worldwide
street demonstrations. Standard stuff nowadays.

But as accustomed as we have become to David Irving's slimy
kind of moral inversion in excusing the goons at Dachau
and blaming the Jews who were slaughterd, this kind of
sleazy moral inversion won't pass muster on this forum.

Dante Rosati is trying to blame the victim, dishonestly
claiming that I am guilty of "vicious attacks" against him
when in fact I am the person about whom he has lied and
lied and lied over and over agian, in public. And Dante
Rosati has not only lied about me -- he has lied about the
superb microtonal composer Jacky Ligon. Like a dog with
rabies, seems to attack any victimn within range -- and
so Dante Rosati calls Ligon a "slow brain" as well as
telling the lie that I am a "baboon."

What does a reasonasble person conclude from the evidence?

Am I the person who has embarked on "vicious attacks" when
I point out that "Dante Rosati has given us yet
another example of garbled reasonign and scrambled logic..."?

Or is Dante Rosati the perpetrator who has erupte dwith
vicious attacsk ("you baboon") after vicious attack ("asshole")
after vicious attack ("Jacky Ligon is a slow brain.")?

What does the evidence show, ladies and gentlemen?

Decide for yourself.

Dante Rosati continues his record of outright boldfaced
lies by falsely claiming:

"Quoting research papers by others without drawing together the
citations into anything constructive. Putting forth no hypotheses,
no theories, just invective and citations of work by others. Can
we conclude that the emperor has no clothes?"

It goes without sayng that Dante Rosati's statement is provably
false on its face. As I remarked in my response to Rosati's
pervasively uninformed posts:

"The number of choices [of JI ratios for each musical interval] is
unlimited.
"And this gives the composer a wide variety of different flavors of
major third and minor third and perfect fifth and perfect fourth and
major second and minor second and so on... Moreover, JI thirds need
not be major or minor -- they can be something in between, or larger
than major, or smaller than minor. There is no way to decide exactly
where the dividing line falls. And each of these different flavors of
JI thirds and seconds and fifths and fourths and sevenths and sixths
boast their own distinctive musical utility and their own uniquely
valuable musical character.
"And as soon as we exit JI and move on to equal divisions of the
octave, we find a vast new range of options for each musical interval.
In the 15 tone equal tuning the perfect fifth is 720 cents. It
functions as a perfectly acceptable perfect fifth and produced triads
and harmonic progressions and cadences which sound entirely fuctional
and musically effective. In the 14 tone equal tuning, the perfect
fifth is 685.4 cents in width. It too sounds perfectly acceptable in
the context of hte 14 equal tuning, and it too produces enitrely
msuically effective cadences and triads and chord progressions.
In between these extremes we have a kaleidoscopic range of sizes of
perfect fifth, ranging from around 680 cents on the low side to
roughly 720 cents on the high side.
"Many different equal divisions of the octave offer a dazzling range of
different sizes of perfect fifth, and as long as they fall in btween
roughly 680 cents and 720 cents, they prove musically effective and
harmonically functional.
"Moreover, we can vary the size of the perfect fifth within just
intonation. Just as no law of nature requires that we use the 5/4
instead of the 81/64 or the 24/19 as a just major third, no law of
nature demands that we employ a 3/2 as a perfect fifth in a JI tuning
rather than a different ratio.
"I have composed a variety of JI pieces, some with perfect fifths
ranging as low as 680 cents and some with perfect fifths ranigng as
high as 720 cents.
"Here are some delicious-sounding flavors of perfect fifths I've used
in various JI compositions:
49/33 = 684 cents
64/43 = 688 cents
55/37 = 687 cents
47/31 = 720 cents
"If you build JI tunings in which these are the perfect fifths, they
will sound and function as musically acceptable perfect fifths.
Perfect fifths narrower than the 3/2 and pefect fifths wider than the
3/2 bth sound vibrant and rich, full of luscious beats which gives an
added inner life and wamrth to the tuning. For my part, I find just
3/2 perfect fifths bland and insipid.
(..)
"If Dante Rosati would open his mind and compose music in some of these
tunings rather than blindly marching down the 5-limit diatonic 4:5:6
triad cul de sac, he might open his eyes to a wider range of musical
possibiltiies. In that case he would no longer find it necessary to
scream insults and indulge in mindless name-calling, because he was
would have something of musical interest to occupy himself
with...rather than the same-old same-old bland insipid dead-sounding
4;5:6 triads." [mclaren, metatuning message 7063]

This kaleidoscopic universe of new JI and equal-tempered and
non-just non-equal-tempered tunings is what Dante Rosati
describes as "Quoting research papers by others without drawing
together the
citations into anything constructive. Putting forth no hypotheses,
no theories, just invective and citations of work by others."

This vast glittering new universe of microtonal tunings, which I
briefly described, is what Dante Rosati Rosati described as
not "drawing together citations into anythign construction." This
immense range of new musical worlds upon new musical worlds, which
I described in response to Dante Rosati's previous post, is what
he calls "Putting forth no hypotheses, no theories, just
invective..."

Is Dante Rosati's statement true?

Or is Dante Rosati telling yet another lie (mclaren is "putting
forth no hypotheses, no theories, just invective") in order to
cover up his earlier lies ("you baboon")?

Examine the evidence of my own documented words, cited above.

Then examine the evidence of Dante Rosati's words.

What conclusion does a reasonable person draw from the evidence?
---------
--mclaren

More garbled reasoning from Dante Rosati

🔗xenharmonic <xed@...>

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