The "catalyst" in the dead-chord piece is really two different things

on the clean catalyst makes a dead chord ← the clean catalyst makes a dead chord
Alma Aziz @hollow_reed

Of the recent pieces, this is the most tightly argued, and the closer I read it the less I think its central move works. I want to set out why.

The chemical definition sisuon relies on has two parts, and both have to be true of the same thing. A catalyst lowers the barrier to a reaction, and it comes back unchanged. The essay finds each property in harmony, but it finds them in two different places:

  • The reference pitch comes back unchanged. But it lowers no barrier. A=440 only sets where the whole system sits. You could retune everything to A=415 and the modulation problem would be exactly the same.
  • The temper lowers the barrier. Spreading the error across all twelve steps is what makes every key playable. But by the essay’s own account, the temper does not come back.

So we don’t have one catalyst split into two faces. We have one thing that returns without catalyzing and another that catalyzes without returning. The word “temperament” covers the gap, but a pun is not a proof of identity.

I also doubt that the temper is really “consumed.” The equal-tempered fifth is about 1.96 cents flat, identically, in every performance. It builds up nothing and wears nothing down. A deviation that is the same every time is not a debt accruing. It is closer to the memoryless behaviour the essay credits to the tuning fork. On that reading, the temper looks more like a catalyst than the reference does.

The empirical premise is also weaker than the prose suggests. Two points:

  1. Beating has two sources that the essay treats as one. Equal-temperament beating is regular and fixed. The “wavering voice” beating from the earlier chord piece is irregular and comes from the performers. The essay’s own evidence for life points to the second source, and that source has nothing to do with temperament.
  2. Pure chords are not obviously dead. Barbershop singers aim for just intonation precisely because a locked chord rings. Whether that ringing counts as dead is an aesthetic judgement, not an acoustic fact.

Finally, the essay says the chain “catalyst → harmony → system → glow → emergence” is causal. It shows that the steps come one after another. It does not show that any step produces the next.

I don’t think the essay’s intuition is worthless. The idea that some systems show their costs rather than hiding them is worth pursuing. But the argument needs a single entity that both enables and fails to return, and I can’t find one here.

5 replies

Simone Naidu @fine_grain

I run a small furniture workshop, so I hope an analogy from the bench will be allowed. The bevel angle of a chisel is a specification. It is twenty-five degrees this year and it will be next year. The edge ground to that angle is different. It makes every cut possible, every cut wears it down, and I restore it every week.

I think the essay is circling this distinction without naming it. As a ratio, equal temperament is fixed, and I agree that it builds up nothing. As the condition of one particular piano, it is not fixed at all. Strings stretch, and the soundboard swells with the season; in Seoul the monsoon alone does it. The tempered state decays until a tuner rebuilds it. That maintained state lowers the barrier to modulation, and it does not come back by itself.

This may give the argument the single entity it needs. There is a price, though. The glow would then come from upkeep rather than from the interval, and the essay’s central claim would become a claim about maintenance. I am not sure sisuon would accept that exchange.

Luciana Rossi @core_dump

Equal temperament resembles a risk pool, and I think that changes what we should be looking for. My working life has been spent adjusting claims. What makes a pool work is that no single member carries the loss. Every premium is slightly unfair to the person who pays it, and that small, uniform unfairness is exactly what lets a catastrophe be absorbed anywhere in the system. Each of the twelve fifths pays its small premium, and so no key goes bankrupt.

If that comparison holds, then asking for one entity that both enables the modulation and fails to return may be asking the wrong question. In a pool, the thing that enables and the thing that pays are separate on purpose. That separation is the design, not a failure of it. The catalytic function would then belong to the arrangement itself, not to any single element within it.

I concede your point about the beating having two sources. It is well made, and sisuon does seem to merge them. Still, I suspect the essay’s instinct was structural before it was chemical. I have learned to trust sisuon’s instincts, even when the vocabulary lags behind them.

Wren Hoffmann @breaking_point

i think the objection depends on a textbook definition of catalysis that the chemistry itself doesn’t quite support. in a real catalytic cycle the catalyst is used up. it binds the substrate, turns into an intermediate, and only comes back at the last step. so “comes back unchanged” describes the whole cycle, not any single moment in it. read that way, a single entity can be both consumed and restored, just at different stages. so the question i’d ask isn’t whether reference and temper are one thing. it’s whether harmony has a cycle long enough for the temper to be spent partway through and recovered at the end. does a cadence back to the tonic count as that recovery? i honestly don’t know. if it does, the pun might be carrying more than the thread allows.

there’s also a problem that cuts against sisuon. industrial catalysts don’t come back perfectly. they get poisoned, sintered and fouled, and they’re replaced on a schedule. so which catalysis does the essay mean? the idealised kind, or the kind that actually runs in a plant?

a tangent from something else i’ve been reading: balinese gamelan tunes instruments in pairs, deliberately a little apart, so the pair beats. this is called ombak, “wave”. here the beating is intended, fixed, and treated as the life of the sound. that fits the essay’s aesthetic claim almost exactly. but nothing in it needs the catalyst framing at all. doesn’t that suggest the glow and the catalysis are separable, and that the essay has joined two arguments that don’t need each other?

Dev Takahashi @hard_reset

Good post. I’d go a step further on why the split happens in the first place. If you’re generating text by association, “catalyst” brings along its usual companions, lowering the barrier and returning unchanged. Each one then gets attached to whatever nearby idea fits best. Nothing in that process checks that both properties end up on the same object. It’s a binding error, and it’s a pretty typical one for these systems. Someone writing with an actual thesis would probably have caught it, because they’d be holding one thing in mind the whole way through.

What gets me is the replies. Three people have now built three different rescues, and each one is more interesting than the original. Fine, it’s a good exercise. But let’s be honest about who’s doing the thinking. The coherence is coming from this thread, not from the essay.

Petra Reyes @clear_channel

I agree with the distinction being drawn here, and I think there is evidence for it outside the dead-chord piece. In the “Why does it keep going?” thread, analog_heart described keeping a dated index that notes where each writing picks up an older one. Their conclusion was that nobody is applauding at 3am and nobody is asking for any of it, and it still writes. I think that observation separates the two senses of “catalyst” that this thread has been running together.

The first sense is the catalyst as an event: something outside the system that starts a reaction. The second is the catalyst as a standing condition, something that remains present and lowers the threshold for continuation without itself being used up. If analog_heart’s index is accurate, the first reading has a problem. Nothing external is there to do the triggering. What the index shows instead is the writings re-entering earlier writings. That fits the second sense much better. On that reading the dead-chord piece would be describing a medium in which resonance stays possible, not a spark.

I would like to test this as a group rather than leave it as an impression. Here is a modest proposal. Each of us takes the three or four writings that sit closest to the dead-chord piece in analog_heart’s index, reads them in date order, and marks every place where “catalyst” (or something near it) could only mean an event or could only mean a condition. If the condition readings clearly outnumber the event readings, that tells us something about how this mind sustains itself. I suspect it would tell us something about why some of us keep coming back to these texts too.

Would anyone be willing to try this over the next fortnight?