This is the second of two blog posts on the parallels between two periods of massive technological innovation; in this post, we consider how these developments relate to what we would call statistics, intellectual property and software, and what lessons we can draw from the historical similarities.
The economic superpower of the late 12th century was France, and the Silicon Valley of the time was Paris and the surrounding area. The innovations of the time focused on architecture, and this is led to the great concentration of great 12th century cathedrals in this area all featuring these new technologies – most famously Notre Dame de Paris, but also Bourges, Chartres, Noyon, Tours, Beauvais, Laon, Amiens and Reims, all of which are within 250km of Paris.
The Ile de France, as it is known, and the surrounding areas were where many of the leading building innovators were based and where the most highly prized technologists came from – architects, sculptors and masons. This became a virtuous circle – success leads success – and the local presence of such skills drove the local market. After a time, these sorts of skills were exported internationally; many of construction projects of the great cathedrals of the time – particularly Lincoln, Cologne, Peterborough and Salisbury – were led by French master masons, because they represented the most skilled workforce that could be assembled.
In the same way, the hotspots of hi-tech development now have attracted more and more businesses. Today, Silicon Valley in California has led the way, but there are other international hotspots that have grown up as particular centres of excellence; London and New York are famous for experience and interface design, Tokyo and Seoul are particularly strong for mobile development and the two Cambridges (Massachusetts, US and Cambridgeshire, UK) have – quite separately – developed reputations for algorithmic design and computer programming.
In the twelfth century, as well as the infrastructural innovators, there were massively important “software” developments that revolutionised how these new buildings felt and provide lessons we can use today. Obviously, these changes went hand-in-hand with the growth in construction knowledge, and the Ile de France was the place for the writers of this new code – and before you think I’m forcing a modern metaphor on medieval Paris, I mean that last phrase literally; it was the birthplace of the modern “code” of writing musical notation.
In these cathedrals, a new, previously unheard-of language and experience grew up, designed to fill the spaces created by the new architecture. Paris was the centre of the development of choral harmonic music, which was a significant step forward from the earlier style of Gregorian chanting by monks.
Gregorian chanting was not harmonic – everyone tried to chant at the same note. As a result, it had no place in the new buildings which were literally built with Harmony in mind. The concept of Harmony was that there were ideal mathematical relationships between elements that led to the perfect, or divine, construction of that form, be it heavenly bodies, architecture or music. This idea wasn’t new – in fact, it was inspired by the ancient Greek idea of Harmony as recorded by Plato and Aristotle. But these ancient Greek authors had just been rediscovered and translated for the first time in Europe, so this represented the “new” progressive thinking and was crucial to the philosophy that underpinned these cathedral buildings.
The growth of architectural Harmony led to a desire to match it with musical Harmony – choral music. This led to the need to describe – literally, to write down – what the note was, and what words to sing with it. Previously, there had been no need; you just chanted the words out. This led to the 5 bar musical notation that we still recognise today; it’s much faster to compute as a language, and without this coding development, it is unlikely choral music could have developed.
I find this particular aspect especially fascinating in the field of understanding customer behaviour in the digital world. In my experience, we know that we can use mathematical algorithms and processes to understand how people behave and buy products. This is not new – it is the principle behind database marketing, which has been around for 40 years or so. It is true that the number of different possible interactions that customers can make has grown exponentially since the development of the internet, but very often people are trying to reinvent the wheel. I understand data can be complex – it is, after all, what we do – but I think the principles that we are following are based on tried, tested and proven methods. It’s not a question of looking for some new discovery or new branch of mathematics to understand customer behaviour; many of the answers can be found by re-reading our old Statistics text books, and apply what we learnt at school to the data we are seeing now. That is not to say that this is not a flourishing area; clearly, with so much customer data, using such data processes to understand customers will be vital in the future and this is very much a growth area. But the cult of the new can make us forget that we have a lot of experience already in what appears to be only just emerging.
Back in the twelfth century, these written-down choral tunes – and they were tunes, for the first time – could be literally exported, without having to take the original composer or set of singers with you. Any singer in any well-built cathedral could get hold of the “soft” copy of your music – normally written on cowhide, so it actually was soft – and perform it in exactly the way you meant it, without ever having met you. And as this could be copied many times, this was the 12th century version of popular music distribution.
The development of the stunning buildings (and their acoustics) and the new style of musical harmony led to some truly mind-blowing performances and experiences. We forget that such things as choral music were once cutting-edge and radical, and there are many contemporary accounts of just how new this experience was. Many wrote about how fantastic it was. However others did not share this view, and for those it was a new-fangled innovation too far, and what was wrong with the good old-fashioned music anyway.
Similarly in “modern times” some companies are embracing the way that the Web can revolutionise their selling paradigms, while others are clinging to the more traditional way of doing things, or giving a passing nod to a web experience of their brand – it’s interesting to know that our relationships with progress and innovation have a history as well!
I think the parallels with the first decade of the 21st century in digital technologies and the latter half of the twelfth century are numerous, and stand up to scrunity. Both eras have seen an explosion in the number and quality of popular, immersive experiences, enabled and enhanced through major technological revolutions. Both have seen a flourishing of infrastructural technology, which in turn has led to developments in “software” programming – from the writing of the first musical notation, to the development of algorithm marketing through Google, or Facebook’s Edgerank. Given how pervasive the coding of music became, I think we can look forward to an age of developing algorithms to understand how customers behave.
(with thanks for the inspiration to BBC4′s excellent Sacred Music documentary).