Yeah, maybe, who knows. Of course, you should be aware that if you search for a pattern long enough, you’ll find one.
Now, in this first verse are interesting lyrics that are referring to the chords being played, which I think are not hidden but you have to know a bit of music theory. English is not my first language so it might be a bit broken, but bear with me :)
"The forth, the fifth" refer to the degrees of the chords being played at this moment. In C major, the 1st degree is the C major chord, the 4th is F major, 5th is G major. This is a very common progression, and usually it ends up in a 5th -> 1st cadence, which would be F major, G major and C major here. But you can also, instead of the expected 1th, go to the 6th, which is a A minor chord here. This is known as a minor fall, I assume, which is exactly the lyrics at that moment. But then, the lyrics mention a "major lift", which is also what happens when it goes through the same progression, 4th, 5th, but then the 3rd (E major) with one note lifted (the G#) making the chord major, and resolving to A in a true cadence, because E major -> A minor is a 5th -> 1st for the A minor scale.
To summarize, the chord progression is faking a IV V I cadence, but falling to VI (A minor), then faking a IV V I cadence again, but lifting to a "majorified" III (E major) which become V I cadence in the A scale, allowing us to resolve on A instead of "falling" on A like the first time.
So we went from the C major scale to the A minor scale, which are also the first two chords of the song, repeated many times.
So, this whole "the 4th, the 5th, the minor fall and the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah" is nicely describing the chord progression underneath, while being poetic, and I just love it. So I had to share, sorry if it was obvious to you already. Cheers.
Since turnabout is fair play, it’s worth noting this is mostly false; if you google “minor fall music theory” you’ll only find references to Cohen.
In (conventional western) analysis, a “fall” wouldn't be something mechanical, it would always imply a contextual interpretation.
So it’s a valid reading of the text to say it means something about the chord structure, but — from a purely musical theoretical perspective — just as valid to read it as a reference to the flattening of the minor degree of the scale, or something else entirely.
I assumed wrong :)
The correct term is a deceptive cadence. According to Britannica.com "It begins with V, like an authentic cadence, except that it does not end on the tonic. Often the triad built on the sixth degree (VI, the submediant) substitutes for the tonic, with which it shares two of its three pitches."
Still, I think that by "the 4th, the 5th, the minor fall" Cohen is likely referring to this IV V VI progression with the deceptive "minor fall" cadence, and the major lift is likely referring to the subsequent IV V III(V) VI(I) progression, (degrees in the A scale are in parenthesis) where the III(V) is "majorified" (it should be a E minor in the C major scale) with this "lifted" G# note. This note is also what makes the scale shift from C major to A minor.
Anyway, I could be seeing something that Cohen didn't intend, but as someone who has had a lot of fun composing lots of songs, I'd said that's quite likely he really was collating composing terms describing the underneath progression with grand spiritual feelings, which is what this verse is about: the divine behind music and composing, and maybe more generally creativity and inspiration.
It was definitely not obvious to me! What do you make of the third chord under ‘composing’ that would not be playable in a diatonic (?) scale that was used at the time of King David, as the video claims?
I've not seen the video, but that chord is just a usual major chord, that is, a chord with 3 notes: a fundamental, a major third and a fifth.
It's a very common chord, we could say it's a "natural" chord because when a string vibrates, its first harmonics make this chord. I'm not sure why it would be a secret chord, or why you couldn't get one from a diatonic scale. Now, it's true that, assuming your instrument is "stuck" in the C major scale, you won't have a G# note, which is needed for this E major chord. Whether or not they could play such a chord progression at the time of King David doesn't feel relevant to me, in the context of the rest of the song. I would be surprised if this is what Cohen was getting at by "secret chord". I don't think "secret chord" means a chord in particular in the song. If I had to guess, I would rather think it could be a metaphor of the search for perfection in composition, and this song would be a "tribute" to perfection, but not perfection itself. Just like Tenacious D "tribute" song :)
If fundamental constants could change, this would violate energy conservation, and the second law of thermodynamics. Someone once said, if your pet theory violates the second law, there is no hope. Or am I missing something?
And in fact, energy is not conserved (and cannot even be defined) globally in General Relativity. There is a different conservation law, called the conservation of stress-energy.
The second law is not a law in the same way like the law of gravity is, it’s more a statistical statement. It simply states that more probable things will happen more often. How do we know what’s more probable? It’s what happens more often. It’s only inviolable insofar as we presume we know all the laws of nature.
Also, the second law is only applicable to closed systems. The universe may not be a closed system in the way we normally think of it.
The second law may be in a way we must evolve to conceive it, or may be in a way that we may never conceive it, or we are acting in ideas that are as distant as friction creating fire. We crawled, the we walked, then we ran, rode, motored, flew, rocketed, got stuck in orbit...
My college physics professor once said, "if in order to make progress we must leave reality, by all means let's leave reality." He also pointed to three red volumes on his shelf, and said those may interest you, and they did. (Richard Feynman)
Thermodynamics by definition only studies equilibrium processes. Applying thermodynamics laws too broadly is a common misconception, even among those who study physics at university, because not many people get far enough to study physical kinetics (like Landau vol 10).
Violating energy conservation (the first law of thermodynamics) does not inherently violate the second law of thermodynamics. It's not hard to imagine a situation where the energy of a closed system changes but not enough to decrease the total entropy of the system, for example if the energy of the closed system decreased.
My best guess at this moment is that all the fields can or may influence each other, resulting in relative changes.
Some things may seem incredibly constant, but have to be measured in such a ridiculous small or big (time) frame, that it's barely not measurable at all.
In less than a year, you will be able to go from east coast to west during your sleep. That was said in 2016 IIRC. 8 years later we’re still waiting for it, and it’s not anywhere close.
You are an enabler of this fraud. Great for you that you love it.
> In less than a year, you will be able to go from east coast to west during your sleep. That was said in 2016 IIRC. 8 years later we’re still waiting for it, and it’s not anywhere close.
FWIW, I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now. Even ignoring needing to get out of the car to plug in, it can't park itself at a charger. It can barely navigate parking lots in general as evidenced by the terrible results of Smart Summon (which I did not try during my FSD trial because fuck that).
> You are an enabler of this fraud. Great for you that you love it.
I'm an enabler only in the sense that I bought a Tesla. I did not buy FSD.
And if it's worth anything to you, while I do love my Model 3, I would not buy a Tesla today for reasons far beyond lies about FSD capability timelines.
Fair, but I still don’t understand why someone would buy from a car from a company, while knowing they lie about the car capabilities and safety to their customers and shareholders.
It reminds me of some talk I had the chance to come across, I can’t remember which one. Sleep could be a training phase. Discerning whether inputs come from the real world or from the trained neural network itself would be the reward function. When it’s no longer possible to discerne reality from "fiction", the training is complete. And this could be somehow linked to the ability of training while simultaneously operating the network. I wish I remembered where I heard about it.
In your cube example you are using the word "vector" to refer to faces of the cube. Did you mean matrix?
My understanding is that the cube is a rank 3 tensor, the faces (or rather slices) of the cube are rank 2 tensors (aka matrices), and the edges (slices) of the matrices are rank 1 tensors (aka vectors).
I was very happy to see a new video from him. It has been ages. I highly recommend the one debunking the magic trick with the card, the glass and the monkey. As you said, it’s much more than a debunk, he even went to the place where it was filmed.
Now, in this first verse are interesting lyrics that are referring to the chords being played, which I think are not hidden but you have to know a bit of music theory. English is not my first language so it might be a bit broken, but bear with me :)
"The forth, the fifth" refer to the degrees of the chords being played at this moment. In C major, the 1st degree is the C major chord, the 4th is F major, 5th is G major. This is a very common progression, and usually it ends up in a 5th -> 1st cadence, which would be F major, G major and C major here. But you can also, instead of the expected 1th, go to the 6th, which is a A minor chord here. This is known as a minor fall, I assume, which is exactly the lyrics at that moment. But then, the lyrics mention a "major lift", which is also what happens when it goes through the same progression, 4th, 5th, but then the 3rd (E major) with one note lifted (the G#) making the chord major, and resolving to A in a true cadence, because E major -> A minor is a 5th -> 1st for the A minor scale.
To summarize, the chord progression is faking a IV V I cadence, but falling to VI (A minor), then faking a IV V I cadence again, but lifting to a "majorified" III (E major) which become V I cadence in the A scale, allowing us to resolve on A instead of "falling" on A like the first time. So we went from the C major scale to the A minor scale, which are also the first two chords of the song, repeated many times.
So, this whole "the 4th, the 5th, the minor fall and the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah" is nicely describing the chord progression underneath, while being poetic, and I just love it. So I had to share, sorry if it was obvious to you already. Cheers.