Isn't that "what things look like"? Like what you see when you see a tree isn't actually a tree but the interpretation of light waves hitting your eye. It's a rendering of the light in a particular way and we somewhat casually call this "what a tree looks like". Often when we talk about the projection of a thing into some visual form we us this kinda casual language. I think to your point, any one of those methods of rendering the information into visual form has equal claim to "what the notes look like"

Yes, that's true, but in the case of macroscopic physical objects like trees there is a "natural" rendering designed by evolution that is reasonably called what the thing "actually" looks like. In the case of sounds, there is no such a natural rendering. Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound.

    > Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's 
    > no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound.

Turning light into images necessarily invokes a design, too: an eye. And depending on whether this eye is that of a human, a fish, or a fly, a different image will be experienced. So here, too, there is no basis for calling any particular image, that you experience from the light that an object reflects, the actual appearance of that object.

It's just one instance of an appearance of an object in your field of experience at one particular point in time. Not even you will ever experience that object in exactly the same way again.

Furthermore, we have no way of knowing if there, some place on earth or elsewhere, exists a life form that experiences sound exactly as these two-dimensional images. If there has been an evolutionary advantage to doing so, I see nothing preventing a sensory organ from picking up these vibrations and creating this experience out of it.

> there is no basis for calling any particular image, that you experience from the light that an object reflects, the actual appearance of that object

Sure, but "the actual appearance of an object" is generally understood to mean, "the actual appearance of an object relative to a typical human visual system", at least when the phrase is uttered by one human to another.

So the problem in this view is the primacy of one particular projection asserted by the word "actually"? Fair enough.

Yes, exactly. If the headline had been, "A neat way to turn sounds into pretty pictures" I would have had no problem with it.

But the current headline is "What Musical Notes Can Look Like", emphasis on the "Can". Your suggestion is basically just a condescending way to rephrase that.

The headline has been changed. When I posted my original comment, the headline was the original headline: "This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like"

It's important to recognize pretenses of objectivity.

I don't like the idea of musical notes being a different rendering of sound. Everyone plays a piece differently. Classical music is a great example of that.

I like the analogy of notes on a page being akin to source code and the different players akin to different compilers. Every "standard compliant" player (one that knows all the constructs) produces the same result (the song/program), they just do it differently from each other (different playing styles/different assembly). Newbies just aren't as "standard compliant" because they ignore certain constructs they don't understand.

In the brain, both images and sounds are just activation patterns. So there is a sense in which the premise of the article holds. There's even that experiment on mice where researchers switched the end of the optical nerve from its normal location to that of hearing. They developed sight with the hearing part of the brain. It's the same algorithm for both.

> both images and sounds are just activation patterns.

Yes, that's true.

> So there is a sense in which the premise of the article holds.

No, that does not follow. Sounds and images have fundamentally different structure. Images occupy two spatial dimensions. Sounds occupy one non-spatial dimension (pressure) and the time dimension. Sounds are inherently time-dependent. A sound with no time-dependent components is not a sound. All this derives from fundamental physics, and the different ways in which light waves and pressure waves propagate and carry useful (to biological systems) information about the world.