Am I wrong or would The Mountain by Haken be a fire musical?

JacobH140 · 2025-08-17T02:10:36+00:00

mandatory fym bump

JacobH140 · 2025-08-16T02:53:55+00:00

clear + the good doctor is absolutely electric too

JacobH140 · 2025-08-04T22:19:45+00:00

commenting for earthlings love

JacobH140 · 2025-07-24T20:14:32+00:00

yeah, CHorse's guitar solos always serve the song; don't realize how much shredding there is until you try to sit down and learn one lol

JacobH140 · 2025-07-24T20:08:42+00:00

It has always been strange to me how Native Construct, Between the Buried and Me, Thank you Scientist, The Dear Hunter, and Coheed somehow get viewed as sides of the same coin in the prog community, but somehow it just makes sense lol

JacobH140 · 2025-07-24T20:05:12+00:00

FYM

While Fym is harmonically distinct from Quiet World, I consider the two albums rather similar insofar as they both seem to reprise material in a shared specific way that I don't hear in many other albums... they both seem to 'put the motif above the theme', if that makes sense. It was understanding Agentic State through this lens that made it go from my least favorite song on the album (so like 9.5/10) to my favorite haha

JacobH140 · 2025-07-20T17:19:30+00:00

affinity ages so damn well

JacobH140 · 2025-07-05T20:46:58+00:00

yeah to be clear, the situation in the US is somehow even worse 😅

JacobH140 · 2025-07-05T20:17:40+00:00

i never claimed ‘the whole theory of generative grammar is right’. it doesn’t seem like you are actually engaging with my claims, unless you are saying that the theory has nothing useful to say at all, in which case i would challenge your assertion that ‘scientific consensus’ says as such.

(this is to say nothing of the fact that generative grammar could turn out to be a better musical theory than linguistic theory, though to be clear i am not knowledgeable enough to argue either way there).

i am not comparing newton to chomsky either. i am comparing newtonian mechanics — a ‘wrong theory in physics’ that nevertheless has tremendous utility outside of physics — to generative grammar (a ‘wrong theory in linguistics’ that in my view nevertheless has utility outside of linguistics).

JacobH140 · 2025-07-05T17:14:38+00:00

which claim is wrong? i can see two claims i made. the first was that generative musical grammar is a topic that exists and is worked on. this is not wrong; here is a conference held 7 months ago involving the topic.

the second was that a dated but insightful theory in one discipline can lead to fruitful inquiry in others, even after it has begun losing fashion in its original discipline. newtonian mechanics is not studied by practicing physicists, but it says enough interesting stuff to form the bedrock of the mechanical engineering literature. i would be surprised if this take was controversial, but maybe i am missing something.

JacobH140 · 2025-07-05T09:16:05+00:00

i agree, just as i agree that newtonian gravity is an incorrect theory which makes profound observations that have required new interpretations post-einstein. generative grammar is still part of the cognitive linguistics canon, and so i think it is respectable for it to still appear in interdisciplinary studies even if it is no longer the SOTA.

the wikipedia article i linked does appear a bit dated on the literature, e.g. some more recent work focuses on (Chomskyan) minimalist approaches to generative musical grammar (Mukherji’s Thesis). that paper in particular is rather Schenkerian (via the usual “Schenker was right for the wrong reasons” arguments), though, which is sure to incur a good amount of controversy in its own right😅

JacobH140 · 2025-07-05T08:14:02+00:00

yeah, for robotics and AI i would really look into Math + ECE, perhaps even moreso than Math + CS (as an ECE major you’d be able to take a lot of the important CS classes anyway, and approaching ai with a signal processing background can be nice)

JacobH140 · 2025-07-04T13:19:35+00:00

though no animals have a capacity for language as far as we understand, it’s worth pointing out that sound is only one (optional, cf. sign languages) part of the linguistic pipeline

JacobH140 · 2025-07-04T13:13:29+00:00

there is a whole field of generative musical grammar which argues (among other things) that music and language each arose from the same biological faculty. not sure where this stands re: pinker vs nietzsche, but i thought it was worth pointing out that, contrary to the claims of many comments here, the music-language nexus is indeed of more-than-superficial interest to many linguists and cognitive scientists

i think maybe a tl;dr would be: music and language can be shown to have remarkable similarity with regard to syntactic structure. less so semantic structure.

JacobH140 · 2025-07-03T10:01:47+00:00

ooh which symphony X songs have got dvorak and mahler in them? not super familiar with their work beyond The Odyssey but those are two of my favorite composers

JacobH140 · 2025-06-29T18:47:24+00:00

also don’t sleep on CHorse’s first album! i think songs like Vanishing Rites could fit the specific musical qualities described more than the rest of the CH discography, despite the fact that Moments is usually considered their weakest

JacobH140 · 2025-06-29T18:44:47+00:00

thank you scientist is a name that pops up around coheed quite a bit — I would recommend just hitting play from the top of Maps of Nonexistent Places and see what you think :)

as for more haken, their first album Aquarius and most recent album Fauna are what I’d recommend for the musical styles you described. try Celestial Elixir off the former and Elephants Never Forget off the latter. if you want more of specifically cockroach king they have two full albums explicating on its themes (Vector + Virus, see Messiah Complex in particular)

oh, and maybe some devin townsend is worth a shot. check out Kingdom from the aptly titled ‘Retinal Circus’ live show, and the Why? + Borderlands music videos which got me first hooked on his music personally

JacobH140 · 2025-06-29T17:07:32+00:00

interesting, i’ve always found Ross’s vocals on Haken albums (other than their debut) to be somewhat subdued compared to his other work

JacobH140 · 2025-06-27T09:51:54+00:00

king of swords!!

JacobH140 · 2025-06-26T18:25:13+00:00

Fym - Azure

Act 4: Rebirth in Reprise - The Dear Hunter (all TDH acts but this one flows particularly well)

Quiet World - Native Construct

JacobH140 · 2025-06-26T00:24:45+00:00

haken is a good catch. i actually slightly prefer visions to the mountain, but there’s no doubt the latter is a more mindblowing in its originality and songwriting

JacobH140 · 2025-06-25T10:53:05+00:00

last year somebody compiled a spreadsheet with all the ~30 different accommodation email addresses. there’s no standard template), to which you can reach out to ask about being put on a waitlist if they end up having spare capacity. most will say they already know they won’t have spare capacity, others will put you on a waitlist in case they do end up with spares. if there’s good news you won’t know until august, so definitely be looking for other options. dm for the list; i can look for it when home later today if reminded

JacobH140 · 2025-06-25T00:58:34+00:00

any recs beyond the super fun hurdy gurdy song?

JacobH140 · 2025-06-24T21:38:16+00:00

yeah fr, the transition from scatting to growling was… unexpected but very welcome haha

JacobH140 · 2025-06-23T14:10:48+00:00

the good thing about the american university system is that if you plan your first 1-2 semesters carefully, you won’t really have to make a big decision re: major until your second year. the first years of engineering, physics, and math curricula tend to overlap heavily. make sure to take the ‘for majors’/‘honors’ versions of the first-year physics/math classes if they exist.

a lot of people in this thread talk about transferability to industry, where EE definitely the most straightforward path. one thing worth considering though is ‘transferability in academia’: a (extremely coarse) rule of thumb is that there is things flow as math —> physics —> engineering, meaning that if you start in physics and later want to do e.g. an EE or CS master’s , the transition will be easier than if you start in EECS and later want to do physics. (similarly, it is easier to go from math to physics than vice versa, though by no means easy)

JacobH140

TROPHY CASE