Eric Contractor Wants To Know: What's Your Sign?
I received an email from singer songwriter Eric Contractor (you remember, the Roy Orbinson soundalike!) and before I have my say, here is what Eric had to say about a fascinating idea he had:
"I have an idea which you may find to be a "little" out there- but nonetheless, I am throwing it out there to you. Recently, a friend of mine, a mathematician, and I have been interested in seeing if there is a connection between our astrological signs/horoscopes and our musical preferences. Our idea is to eventually make develop app software that will combine a daily horoscope with a daily musical suggestion- and the whole thing would be social and based on recommendations, etc.
To start though, we have made a questionnaire, asking people their sun sign, and then a couple questions about musical preferences. The idea is to see if we can draw some statistical patterns based off the responses, and to just get a conversation going about how music and astrology might be related in everyday life. (For example, if there is a horoscope for Libra that suggests turbulence in a relationship, a relevant song would be chosen to deal with the issue). Right now we are looking for participants, and if am curious to know if this anything that would be of interest to your readers."
OK, the survey is at the end of the post.
Here is my take.
1. An astrology is fairly simple stuff. Break down the human species into twelve character types (charming, bull headed, spiritual, etc) and you are boud to get one our of every 12 right, that's the law of averages.
2. But any reader of Carl Jung would not be quite so fast to dismiss the entire concept out of hand. When Jung studied telepathy who worked on the law of averages: If you guess 12 out of 12 symbols, 12 out of 12 times, you're telepathic, if you guess em one out of 12 times, you're an astrologer.
So astrology becomes a game of averages. The question is, are there enough emough anomalies to prove trends where there should be none. Jung decided to try a very simple test. He had married coupls mails in their date of births and then he collated them by astroohical signs and searched for unexplanable patterns. And found none.
But that was 70 years ago. What he needed he couldn't get. He needed millions of responses and he needed a computer to sort them out. For instance if he could have gotten a goverment marriage licensing bureau to share their data and had a computer to sift through it.
Which leads me to Eric Contractors concept. There are two problems here, a) how do you get enough data and b) how do you get rid of the noise. By noise I mean, the more questions you ask the more variables occur. If Scorpios in Nashville like country, is it because they are Scorpios or because they are in Nashville?
There are two answers:
1. Ignore the problem. Get a very good astrological chart and put music to mood. Forget the science.
Or
2. Start with a very very simple question and ask everybody you know, email, facebook, twiiter, ask and ask and collate and collate:
Ask what is your date of birth and whether you respndant listens to music a lot, average or a little. And then start digging.
