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The critical role of spurious symbols
Lawrence Pitchko, professional musician and master teacher often points out the role of spurious symbols in musical scores, often overlooked by performers sometimes even edited out in transcriptions. One example he gave was Bethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. When played from the score, the fact that it consists of two different “songlines” played in two tacts “2” and 3/4” is often missed if the bar is read in the linear fashion as the linear seqence of notes, ignoring special notes. Another example are “breathing” markers in the score to accommodate breathing pauses for wind intruments and vocals. The presence and following of such special markers and notes makes a difference between perception of the music performed being descibed as “alive” or “dead”.
Natural written languages
It is interesting to note that a similar importance of the special, spurious or redundant symbols in the written scripts of natural languages. Many if not all natural languages have more letters or characters than sounds giving the scribes an opportunity to encode a certain extra information or imposing subtle variants the meaning. For example old Cyrillic alphabet had 49 letters many of which were deemed redundant or meaningless (and eventually thrown out by Romanovs’ “reforms”) - but may have in fact been useful for conveying extra supra-vocal (beyond audible) information, such as an alternative meaning, accents, emotion or intention. In the languages using synthetic, simplified (or “simplistic”) alphabets such as Latin, the supra-vocal encoding was accomplished by necessity through using multiple lettering (for example “through”) as symbols. There is a perception of natural languages being more “alive” as opposed to synthetic simplified languages such as Esperanto often perceived as “dead” or stagnant.
Deterioration of written information and error correction.
Disadvantage of written information as opposed to a knowledge committed to memory and retold by living humans resides in the fact that the former is static and lives only as long as the material it is written on, and it cannot correct itself, while the latter is adaptible to evolving language or to evolving knowledge and understanding. The problem with the static non-self correctability of the written scriptural information can be mitigated to some extent by having a certain degree of redundacy built-in thus the tendency of the old written scripts to retain more letters and symbols rather than less.
Biological encoding.
This brings us to the subject of DNA (and beyond just the 3D physical molecular carrier). The degree of redundancy and non-active genetic encoding and the ability to store the DNA backup “in the cloud” is probably essential for the long term survival of the species, making the notion of the information being “live” - literal rather than figurative!
