Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the basis of assumptions and conclusions first advanced in 1968 concerning tuning instructions that were originally written down ca. 1800 BCE, Assyriologists have agreed that Mesopotamian tuning was diatonic. Nonetheless, Sam Mirelman (2013) has recently suggested that this consensus view is “uncomfortably familiar and Eurocentric.” As a follow-up to Mirelman’s misgiving, the present report begins by identifying flaws in the reasoning concerning Mesopotamian tuning that was disseminated more than half a century ago and have remained uncontested. The starting point of the present study is information directly recorded in Mesopotamian documents, as opposed to concepts dating from Greek Antiquity and beyond. This information includes the spatial ordering of strings and the relative fundamental frequencies of two pairs of strings on the sammû , a harp or lyre that is explicitly identified in cuneiform tablets, as well as the tuning instructions’ recursive and symmetrical patterning of prescriptions concerning the alterations of this instrument’s strings. At each step, this patterning involves loosening or tightening a string that is three or four strings away from the string that had just been tightened or loosened. Added to these observations are acoustical features of the harmonics produced by plucked strings, and the auditory roughness and smoothness produced by pairs of plucked strings that psychoacoustical studies have established as universally audible. On these bases, one can conclude that Mesopotamian tuning can be interpreted as diatonic in structure without assuming such notions as octave identity, scale degrees, and consonance, all concepts for which there is no known testimony until much later in the history of music theory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".