Mozart Meets MapReduce by Isaac Lopez.
From the post:
Big data has been around since the beginning of time, says Thomas Paulmichl, founder and CEO of Sigmaspecto, who says that what has changed is how we process the information. In a talk during Big Data Week, Paulmichl encouraged people to open up their perspective on what big data is, and how it can be applied.
During the talk, he admonished people to take a human element into big data. Paulmichl demonstrated this by examining the work of musical prodigy, Mozart – who Paulmichl noted is appreciated greatly by both music scientists, as well as the common music listener.
“When Mozart makes choices on writing a piece of work, the number of choices that he has and the kind of neural algorithms that his brain goes through to choose things is infinitesimally higher that what we call big data – it’s really small data in comparison,” he said.
Taking Mozart’s The Magic Flute as an example, Paulmichl, discussed the framework that Mozart used to make his choices by examining a music sheet outlining the number of bars, the time signature, the instrument and singer voicing.
“So from his perspective, he sits down, and starts to make what we as data scientists call quantitative choices,” explained Paulmichl. “Do I put a note here, down here, do I use a different instrument; do I use a parallel voicing for different violins – so these are all metrics that his brain has to decide.”
Exploring the mathematics of the music, Paulmichl concluded that in looking at The Magic Flute, Mozart had 4.72391E+21 creative variations (and then some) that he could have taken with the direction of it over the course of the piece. “We’re not talking about a trillion dataset; we’re talking about a sextillion or more,” he says adding that this is a very limited cut of the quantitative choice that his brain makes at every composition point.
“[A] sextillion or more…” puts the question of processing a trillion triples into perspective.
Another musical analogy?
Triples are the one finger version of Jingle Bells*:
*The gap is greater than the video represents but it is still amusing.
Does your analysis/data have one finger subtlety?