(I found this post from my old blog years ago, and I liked it enough that I thought I’d bring it over here. The old blog was getting spammed too much, so I had to take it down).

Check out this youtube vid:

Non-traditional art, sure. But to me, it just goes to show that essentially any two art forms are computationally equivalent. You can always find an algorithm to encode one inside another. They are all equally complex.

When I was younger, my father used to say that dirty jokes were inherently inferior to non-dirty jokes, and that it was easy to come up with dirty jokes.. and that they were not as complex. I would say that this was not true. There is a really easy algorithm to convert any arbitrary non-dirty joke into a dirty joke. Just add the word ‘poop’ to the end (or whatever comes to mind). Then the new joke is dirty and just as complex as the previous joke. How do I know it is just as complex? Because all the information from the original non-dirty joke is in the dirty joke. If you have the dirty joke and my algorithm, you can even uniquely recover the non-dirty joke.. so it must be as complex.

I think the same can be essentially found between any two art forms. Probably you can even turn staples and bulletin boards into an art form just as complex as any other. As a drummer, I’m always a little bit sensitive to hearing that ‘it is easy to play drums’.. Well, maybe it is easy to play badly, but that does not mean it is easy to play well. You can work on it to the extent that it is just as complex as playing any other instrument. It’s not as if they reach a point where they stop getting better.

For example, let’s take a piano piece.. the piano has rhythm, dynamics and melody. Certainly, the drums has rhythm and dynamics. Melody? Maybe.. but let’s ignore that for now. There are only 88 keys on a piano. It is really easy to encode that information in the drum part. We will map every 16th note or the piano piece to a 1/2 note of the drum piece. Play the first 16th note with the proper rhythm and dynamics of the piano piece, then the next 7 16th notes with a rhythm uniquely determines by the melody of that note (note 2^7 = 128 »88). There! We’ve encoded the original piano piece into a drum piece. It is just as complex as the piano piece! Again, all the information from the piano piece is in there. I can uniquely recover the piano piece from the drum piece. This may not be the ‘most pleasant sounding’ encoding, but you get the idea.

(Aside: for any mathies out there, this type of argument may remind you of the proof that natural and rational numbers have the same cardinality… even though the rationals have another ‘dimension’ to them, it does not mean they are more “complex”. Or a Turing Machine with a 1-dimensional scratch tape is computationally equivalent to one with a k-dimensional tape..)

Because of this, I try not to say that one art form is inferior to others. It might be that the famous people who do this art form suck, or that I haven’t taken the time to appreciate an art form, but that does not say anything about the art form inherently.