Thanyaphong Na nakorn
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2021
18:19 · 5.3M views · Jul 4, 2016
Yo-Yo Ma performs Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major at the BBC Proms in 2015. It is a full solo cello performance of the suite.
Offered as an entry point to Bach's cello suites, which HN commenters praise for evoking rich harmony from a single line.
3 comments from Hacker News
This suffers from the limitation of many generative music algorithms/tools in that you're locked into a key (in this case C major - no black notes are played at all), which makes it a cool toy and research project, but of no real use to anyone. Most of what makes good music good (or interesting music interesting if you'd prefer) comes from harmonic interplay and shift. Bach was a master of this. If you listen to the unaccompanied 'cello suites[1] then what makes the music so fascinating is that even though only one note is being played at a time, the harmonic landscape is shifting and changing (often in 'unexpected' ways) all the time. Doing this with algorithms and making it sound good is hard , and nobody's (afaik) done it well yet. 1: this video
If you like Baroque keyboard music, try something like Scarlatti. It's a bit difficult finding good interpretations (I have a CD somewhere), but here's an example [LINK] Rameau is a different kind of beast from Bach: [LINK] [LINK] I also really recommend giving Bach's cello suites a try: this video
You can write any program in any Turing-complete language, so that's obviously not my point. Rather, it's that there's a deep interdependency between the three variables of language, programmer, and problem that give rise to a system like HN+YC (which was a single program until 2014). If you changed any one of those variables you'd either have gotten something radically different or nothing at all. So my statement is a bit like saying that YC would not exist without PG; and your objection is a bit like saying: that's an exaggeration, any person who did the same steps at the same time could have arrived at the same place (and perhaps better since that person might have been a better manager as well). (Not only PG built YC, of course! But PG wrote the software and that was a critical piece.) I'm not saying that all programs have this property about programming languages—rather, that some do, and they tend to be particularly interesting and creative. For another example, one might say that Unix would not exist without C. There would be more interesting and creative systems in the world if we were more open as a community to these unexplored spaces. We exclude them in order to have the feeling that we know what we're doing, and we reinforce this by ridiculing and dismissing deviants. The social dynamics that exclude new creative possibilities are incredibly strong, which is one reason why when systems like this do end up succeeding, they tend to be the work of loners, weirdos, or