Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Yet another change to The Tuba Sound


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Posted by Rick Denney on July 17, 2001 at 10:54:25:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Yet another change to The Tuba Sound posted by Carl on July 17, 2001 at 02:21:40:

Don't assume I'm being aggressive just because I disagree with you. That assumption precludes all debate.

If I have a dream, and I'm sufficiently convinced of its merit and committed to its success, then I will spend my money, with perhaps that of those who share that dream, to bring it to realization. That is what the Wright brothers did. We know about them because they succeeded. We don't know the names of all those who did not succeed, though we have all seen the films of the flying machines that failed utterly. We don't know how much of their personal fortunes were lost, or that of their friends, on such enterprises, let alone those who died or were injured testing an idea that failed to consider all important factors.

If I'm the president of a corporation, and that corporation has stockholders and board members to whom I am responsible, I am not free to take such risks. And if I'm a scientist, I am trained to look for all the factors that may affect the results and try to understand them before building the final product that is the sum of all those effects. If the majority of those effects remain unexplained, then I will assert that it is not yet time. And I will also estimate what I think the difficulty will be, and I'll make the prediction that this industry will not support what it takes to achieve that result.

So, were I Anton Meinl, I would do what I said before. I'll use what little understanding we do have to 1.) improve the dialogue with professional musicians on whose experience we base improvements, and 2.) correct what faults we can in our current designs, incrementally, with careful observation of the result to make sure that we do not go backwards when all the important factors are subjectively considered. I'd bet that's why Herr Meinl has the software or something like it, but hasn't used it to make a new instrument based solely on computer models. (And it ain't easy, by the way, to mix analytical computer models with heuristic trial and error. It is quite likely that the heuristics you apply will de-optimize the tuba for the thing you are modeling while not even achieving what you had before.)

We sticks in the mud are often accused of throwing cold water on new ideas, but that is because we have seen so many new ideas fail, and we've studied why they failed. Most often, they fail because the fellow who had the idea becomes a zealot for that characteristic to the exclusion of all others, in his quest for the respect (and reward) his new idea very likely deserves.

Rick "who has build successful products and failures, too" Denney


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