Tufte, Monk, Musical Chartjunk?
Shawn poses the question via email:
i wonder if tufte would view a score of music on sheet paper as chartjunk?
Me:
Musical notation has always been the bane of my musical existence. It’s so arbitrary with the whole and half steps, sharps and flats- why not just make it twelve notes? a b c d e f g h i j k l and m?
I don’t know if he’d call it chartjunk though. I think he uses that phrase for stuff like:
- 3d-looking bars on charts that only show 2 variables (fake 3d, it doesn’t display any new information)
- stylized background shading or clip art that doesn’t directly represent data values
[Tufte would probalby wince at my use of bullet points :)]
Shawn:
if you change it to twelve notes then you subtract your ability to run discern the cirlce of fifths which inturn negates your ability to run duplicate relative keys with simultaneous modal structures. I think 12note systems were like gregorian, Romanesque, Archaiec Greek, etc…its cool sounding but limiting. imaginge the newpornographers as sung by some Abbots.
(emphasis mine)
Shawn continues:
if you learnt musical notation through the archaeic english version they call notes other things– they use some sort of metric system.
i understand what you’re saying in terms of tufte’s application to meta-data graphical analysis but fundamentally im taking the leap and projecting chartjunk to music, drawing on that scene from “Straight No Chaser” where they’re like five seasoned jazz musicians trying to understand some sheet music monk wrote. None of them could discern what he’s (Monk) doing in terms of music theory, yet they can’t find any “rules” being broken. like he wrote this piece specifically to illuminate the paradoxes inherent to musical notation/charting- rendering muscial notation/charting in much the same likeness that tufte posits chartjunk Is.
i highly reccomend this movie. it sorta goes along the lines of my fascination with modes of musical attack and application. Though Monk was a nutt-job, he posesses interesting avenues for musical exploration and applicative attack that i never would have encountered otherwise. and its just a movie, poifect!
On the way home from work I stopped by I Love Video to rent Striaght, No Chaser. I think the song to which Shawn referrs is called Mysterioso. I don’t know about chartunk but holy shit I have to agree with one reviewer on Amazon that Thelonious Monk’s album, “Underground” has the best cover art of all time:
That’s so awesome that it’s going on my awesome list.
1) with 5 #’s/b’s and eight whole tones(including both the tonic and 8th scale degree) that would actually make a 13 note scale (mmmm…chromatic).
2)i retract my statement about the circle of fifths and the like, cause a) it’d probably just be called the circle of 7.561ths or whatever the mathematical equivalent is.
3) Chromatic music is far more complex and bizzare than crap i can comprehend anyways. (e.g. tone clusters, atonal crud, and Coltrane come to mind).
chartjunkie
21 Jun 06 at 10:50 am
Don’t you agree that that’s the best album cover in the history of like, ever?
banksean
21 Jun 06 at 11:05 am
its cool…but it makes me wanna clean my house.
chartjunkie
21 Jun 06 at 12:12 pm
I feel compelled to mention that Monk was my gateway artist to jazz (which is like saying that heroin is a gateway drug, but whatever). On the day he died, they had a brief obit on the news, and played a few bars of his music. I had never heard anything like it in my life, but knew that I had to hear more.
“Underground” has a great cover, but it’s also a great album.
adamrice
23 Jun 06 at 7:37 pm