Some interesting reading in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance this evening. Here’s a little excerpt, which philosophically relates to my earlier discussions about faceted classification. Pirsig first defines classical vs. romantic views of the world:

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees in its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. ‘Art’ when it is opposed to ‘Science’ is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition, and esthetic conscience…”

and so on. the classic dichotomy. Then here’s where it gets interesting:

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness and call that handful of sand the world … Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it … We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

“The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles—sizes in different piles—grain shapes in different piles—subtypes of grain shapes in different piles—grades of opacity in different piles—and so on, and on, and on. You’d think the process of subdivison and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.

“Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.

“What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to niether of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding would not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken…”

One twist on this that came to mind for me was what I’d call romantic classifications, such as allmusic, where you can start with an artist and say “I want something more playful” or “more dark” or “less sophisticated” or “similarly harsh but more arranged”. If you step back further and look at genres of media, some have only vague emotional ties (“rock and roll” might be somewhat harsh and rebellious, but not necessarily… “classical” might be relaxing and proper, but not necessarily) and others are completey emotionally detached (“documentary” has only to do with the approach to filmmaking, it doesn’t have to be educational or shocking or anything else). So it’s not surprising that allmusic chose to reclassify their database.

Speaking of media classification, have you seen this article about the group trying to find an algorithm for pop music? I like the other potential uses for the database that Polyphonic HMI is building… for example, computer-generated mix tapes. Not only could the computer find recommended music based on your current collection, it could also build a mix tape that has a nice balance of loud/soft, slow/fast tempo, etc…!