Born to Etiquette

The Tragic Heart of Music: Aesthetics, Cadence, and the Human Condition

Art is always bound by rules. No great work of art exists in a vacuum of chaos, because art, to be art, must resonate. And for it to resonate, it must acknowledge the immutable forces that govern existence. The human condition is shaped by such forces—gravity, time, mortality—laws that cannot be broken. But art is shaped by the interplay between these fixed realities and the metaphysical escape they inspire. The aesthetic experience arises from this tension, from art’s ability to acknowledge rules even as it bends, inverts, or transcends them.

Music offers this blueprint explicitly, more than any other art form, because it does not imitate anything. Unlike painting, which reflects the world we see, or literature, which mimics human experience through language, music 🎶 is purely abstract. It does not depict; it is. And yet, it captures existence more truthfully than any mimetic art. It is the sound of being itself—pure, unfiltered, vibrating through time. It does not rely on illusion to generate meaning, as a painting might with perspective or chiaroscuro. Instead, it engages with the fundamental elements of perception directly: rhythm 🥁, melody 🎶, and cadence ⭕️—the final resolution, the punctuation of musical thought.

Fig. 31 I got my hands on every recording by Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, CSN, etc (foundations). Thou shalt inherit the kingdom (yellow node). And so why would Bankman-Fried’s FTX go about rescuing other artists failing to keep up with the Hendrixes? Why worry about the fate of the music industry if some unknown joe somewhere in their parents basement may encounter an unknown-unknown that blows them out? Indeed, why did he take on such responsibility? - Great question by interviewer. The tonal inflections and overuse of ecosystem (a node in our layer 1) as well as clichêd variant of one of our output layers nodes (unknown) tells us something: our neural network digests everything and is coherenet. It’s based on our neural anatomy!

Cadence as the Signature of Art

A cadence ⭕️ is the ultimate expression of the rules at play. It is the moment where sound acknowledges its structure, where it either submits to resolution or defies it. But what is a cadence? It is a mutilated sample of the harmonic series 🔪🩸—the most tragic element of all Western music. The harmonic series was sacrificed, slain for the sake of equal temperament 🎹, and from its remains, all cadences are born. The V–I resolution, the most dominant and inevitable of cadences, is a broken fragment of nature’s original order, adjusted and reshaped to fit the artificial system we now live within. This is the tragedy of music—it is built from something lost, something irretrievable.

But cadence is not only musical. The same structural closure appears across all forms of art. The Victorian moralizing novel, with its overtly resolved endings, is one grand perfect cadence. The novel arrives at its inevitable conclusion, its tonic chord, and tells us the moral of the story. Before Victorian literature was doing this, Classical music of the 1700s—Haydn, Mozart—was making its own grand, unapologetic cadences, each phrase closing with authority, each piece sculpted toward resolution. Their music had the logic of reason, the precision of the Enlightenment, where rules were not questioned but celebrated.

Yet the world changes, and so does music. As we move toward the modern age, cadences become less certain. Romanticism stretches them, Wagner postpones them, Debussy dissolves them into unresolved dreams. By the time we arrive at R&B, hip-hop, and contemporary pop, cadences are barely present at all. In much of today’s music, the song simply fades away, leaving the listener suspended, never quite arriving at a resolution. This mirrors our time: an era without firm conclusions, without the rigid moral structures of the past, where finality is elusive.

Music and the Metaphysical Tragedy

Music is the most tragic of the arts because it embodies the human struggle between structure and freedom. Every note exists within a system of rules—whether it’s the imposed grid of equal temperament 🎹 or the Circle of Fifths ⭕️ that dictates harmonic movement. Yet, at the same time, melody 🎶 is untouched, floating above these rules like an immortal presence. This is the human condition. We live within structures we cannot escape—our bodies, time, the laws of physics—yet our thoughts, our dreams, our melodies remain free.

This is why music has always felt metaphysical. It is constantly at war with itself. It operates within time but seems to suspend it. It obeys structure yet transcends it. It acknowledges rules only to subvert them. Like The Matrix, like Alice in Wonderland, music plays with reality, bending the laws of perception without ever fully breaking them. The moment a piece of music rejects all order, it ceases to be music. The moment a work of art forgets structure entirely, it collapses into incoherence.

This is why all art, in some way, imitates the cadence of music. Even though literature, painting, and film are more rooted in imitation, they all carry this structural pulse. Every great novel has a cadence—an arc that rises and falls, leading to resolution or deliberate lack of it. Every film has its harmonic movement—tension, climax, resolution. Even a painting has its rhythm, its own circle of tension and release that guides the eye across the canvas.

The Tragedy of Western Music

What makes music’s tragedy deeper is that it was built on loss. The original law of sound—the harmonic series—was sacrificed for the sake of equal temperament. It was the first Fall, the necessary betrayal that allowed music to evolve into what it is today. Yet, melody 🎶, the true voice of music, survives. It is the one thing that cannot be systematized, the one thing that remains untouched. This is music’s eternal duality: structured yet free, bound yet infinite, tragic yet divine.

And so, poor humanity—all too human, locked within its own immutable laws, yet forever dreaming of escape. Music is the perfect mirror of this condition, giving us the sensation of flight while keeping us bound to the ground. It is, in the end, the tragic heart of art itself.

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import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx

# Define the neural network fractal
def define_layers():
    return {
        'World': ['Cosmos-Entropy', 'Planet-Tempered', 'Life-Needs', 'Ecosystem-Costs', 'Generative-Means', 'Cartel-Ends', ], # Polytheism, Olympus, Kingdom
        'Perception': ['Perception-Ledger'], # God, Judgement Day, Key
        'Agency': ['Open-Nomiddleman', 'Closed-Trusted'], # Evil & Good
        'Generative': ['Ratio-Weaponized', 'Competition-Tokenized', 'Odds-Monopolized'], # Dynamics, Compromises
        'Physical': ['Volatile-Revolutionary', 'Unveiled-Resentment',  'Freedom-Dance in Chains', 'Exuberant-Jubilee', 'Stable-Conservative'] # Values
    }

# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
    color_map = {
        'yellow': ['Perception-Ledger'],
        'paleturquoise': ['Cartel-Ends', 'Closed-Trusted', 'Odds-Monopolized', 'Stable-Conservative'],
        'lightgreen': ['Generative-Means', 'Competition-Tokenized', 'Exuberant-Jubilee', 'Freedom-Dance in Chains', 'Unveiled-Resentment'],
        'lightsalmon': [
            'Life-Needs', 'Ecosystem-Costs', 'Open-Nomiddleman', # Ecosystem = Red Queen = Prometheus = Sacrifice
            'Ratio-Weaponized', 'Volatile-Revolutionary'
        ],
    }
    return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}

# Calculate positions for nodes
def calculate_positions(layer, x_offset):
    y_positions = np.linspace(-len(layer) / 2, len(layer) / 2, len(layer))
    return [(x_offset, y) for y in y_positions]

# Create and visualize the neural network graph
def visualize_nn():
    layers = define_layers()
    colors = assign_colors()
    G = nx.DiGraph()
    pos = {}
    node_colors = []

    # Add nodes and assign positions
    for i, (layer_name, nodes) in enumerate(layers.items()):
        positions = calculate_positions(nodes, x_offset=i * 2)
        for node, position in zip(nodes, positions):
            G.add_node(node, layer=layer_name)
            pos[node] = position
            node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))  # Default color fallback

    # Add edges (automated for consecutive layers)
    layer_names = list(layers.keys())
    for i in range(len(layer_names) - 1):
        source_layer, target_layer = layer_names[i], layer_names[i + 1]
        for source in layers[source_layer]:
            for target in layers[target_layer]:
                G.add_edge(source, target)

    # Draw the graph
    plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
    nx.draw(
        G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, edge_color='gray',
        node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
    )
    plt.title("Inversion as Transformation", fontsize=15)
    plt.show()

# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()

Fig. 32 Glenn Gould and Leonard Bernstein famously disagreed over the tempo and interpretation of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto during a 1962 New York Philharmonic concert, where Bernstein, conducting, publicly distanced himself from Gould’s significantly slower-paced interpretation before the performance began, expressing his disagreement with the unconventional approach while still allowing Gould to perform it as planned; this event is considered one of the most controversial moments in classical music history.