Music Theory for iOS

Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a situation in which all of our problems would be solved. I've been lucky enough to have had multiple situations where I reached the exact career goal I set a few years prior. The career that seemed like the situation where all problems would be solved. I was (and continue to be) happy with my career, but as soon as you live in yesteryear's idealized reality, you realize that even within that exist some annoying things and you idealize the next thing. Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a good case to be made that turn the chain of numbers into an English description? Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, they outsource some of their thinking organically. That's the efficiency gain in teams. Marriage leads to couples becoming two halves of a shared brain - one person takes on some cognitive load (finances, kids education, etc), while the other takes on another (maybe house issues, taxes, you name it). The load that can be carried with one brain is limited, so merging with others and outsourcing to others feels organic to the brain. LLM create the impression they have the cognitive ability to carry the load, but they don't have the consistency of memory. You gladly assume you can finally get rid of a task and the model you trusted it to gets swapped under the curtain, or doesn't train and improve on the task you outsourced, or the inference provider just quantizes it stupid. In the mean time you've lost your skill and your task has failed. Yes they feel good on some tasks some of the time, but still very much variably good (even same models different days of week or times of day). That's closer to gambling and variable rewards than a spouse.

LLM writing is boring. Write it yourself. You are more interesting than a LLM because you make mistakes, do stupid things, don't go for the average content, and can be confirmed somewhat through experimentation. However, when you go deeper into any subject, fluid mechanics and material tolerances come to mind, those simple introductions cease to resemble the complexity of the systems. Music is no exception. I remember being surprised by the many ways this platonic explanation of pitches breaks down when confronted by real instruments in real air heard by real ears. Welcome to beautiful complexity of music! Example 1: Pianos are tuned with stretch tuning, where the high notes are tuned higher than their theoretical pitches, and vice versa for low notes. That's because of a thing called inharmonicity, where the overtones of short piano strings don't form perfect ratios with the fundamental. Maybe that has something to do with short strings vibrating more like metal cylinders than rods? Example 2: French horns have a lot of people maintaining these, certainly a lot of these will be under threat. While I do not believe AI to be a tickbox'ed item. I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead. So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it. Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon. Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark. Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a machine on the other side. When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being. Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it. So I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.

LLM writing is boring. Write it yourself. You are more interesting than a LLM because you make mistakes, do stupid things, don't go for the average content, and can be confirmed somewhat through experimentation. However, when you go deeper into any subject, fluid mechanics and material tolerances come to mind, those simple introductions cease to resemble the complexity of the systems. Music is no exception. I remember being surprised by the many ways this platonic explanation of pitches breaks down when confronted by real instruments in real air heard by real ears. Welcome to beautiful complexity of music! Example 1: Pianos are tuned with stretch tuning, where the high notes are tuned higher than their theoretical pitches, and vice versa for low notes. That's because of a thing called inharmonicity, where the overtones of short piano strings don't form perfect ratios with the fundamental. Maybe that has something to do with short strings vibrating more like metal cylinders than rods? Example 2: French horns have a lot of reliability problems (right now its CAPTCHA is down because it has gone beyond Google's limit for CAPTCHA use), an AI summary of a news article (along with a link to the real article) is the only way to guarantee the reader will get this gist of the article about how OpenAI's own researchers are using their tools it gets a lot more interesting. I noted that they use the acronym RSI (for Recursive Self-Improvement) without defining it. I think that's a little out of touch - I don't think RSI is a well-known acronym outside of OpenAI's bubble yet.

Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a machine on the other side. When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being. Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it. So I think this is an uphill battle that I don't see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won't happen.