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Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

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Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#61

Post by Someone »

dofm wrote: post #35
encomiast wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point. Music is one of those careers, like professional athlete, that make parents cringe when optimistic children announce an intention to pursue it. Your numbers are off (the base pay of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last time I checked was around $200k) and there ~30 violinists in that orchestra alone. But it's not an order of magnitude. But just because the numbers are small doesn't mean societ…

But society in general does not really support professional athletes in any directed “conservatory” sense, beyond the weird obsession with college sports in the USA. Corporate sponsorship pays the bigger amounts: that is a side job with its own commitments. Prize money: by definition not available to most. Directed pay is a tiny fraction of it (stipend level), even at the highest levels. Athletes have other jobs. Aga…

> But society in general does not really support professional athletes in any directed “conservatory” sense, beyond the weird obsession with college sports in the USA.

At least some countries have programs where (candidate) Olympians get professional support and a stipend.

See for example https://www.uksport.gov.uk/our-work/investing-in-sport/how-u..., https://www.dosb.de/en/themen/athletes/services-for-athletes

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#62

Post by contubernio »

dofm wrote: post #35
encomiast wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point. Music is one of those careers, like professional athlete, that make parents cringe when optimistic children announce an intention to pursue it. Your numbers are off (the base pay of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last time I checked was around $200k) and there ~30 violinists in that orchestra alone. But it's not an order of magnitude. But just because the numbers are small doesn't mean societ…

But society in general does not really support professional athletes in any directed “conservatory” sense, beyond the weird obsession with college sports in the USA. Corporate sponsorship pays the bigger amounts: that is a side job with its own commitments. Prize money: by definition not available to most. Directed pay is a tiny fraction of it (stipend level), even at the highest levels. Athletes have other jobs. Aga…

A country like Spain has a formal system of grants and awards for athletes designated as "elite" and supports them roughly at the same pay as it supports junior university professors.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#63

Post by IronyMan1 »

dofm wrote: post #5

> Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians. It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teac…

i know some musicians, and it's how you describe it. They have multiple gigs all the time. Even 20-30 years ago. Most of the time one main job, one that pays the bills and is stable, like teaching, and more on the side. A conservatory is just a high-end agency for distributing classical live music.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#64

Post by prmph »

mitxela wrote: post #40
lokar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome I want from art is to feel some emotion in common with the artist. Machines don’t have emotion.

People who write prompts can have emotion. If someone is feeling really sad and they say to a computer "draw me a sad thing" and it draws something really sad and they break down crying, and then they show it to you and you also break down crying, that meets your goals, but it probably isn't what you meant.

The sad thing was produced by the machine, as its idea of something sad. It is not s result of this particular episode of sadness.

Put another way, “draw me something sad” is too vague; a million people can issue the same prompt, and what comes out does not correlate to any specifics of their own experience of sadness.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#65

Post by falcor84 »

hypersoar wrote: post #60
madrox wrote: post #11

We are largely having a reckoning with whether a discipline is the process or the outcome. Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around? Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the…

>? Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome. That is not my objection to AI art at all. The value of art for me is that somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me. That's totally absent from AI-generated material. I'm not categorically opposed to AI, but my interest in automatically generated content tailored to indulge my pe…

> somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me

I don't see why that would exclude GenAI - you have an idea, you write a prompt, you get something that's sort of but not quite what you were going for, so you iterate a bit until it's good enough to communicate what you wanted.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#66

Post by seba_dos1 »

eru wrote: post #27
lokar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he agrees it is popular, but in comparison to contemporary styles of music it’s tiny (in skilled performers, listeners, funding and revenue). Right? Even in Europe.

Europe is actually worse, or at least Germany, because the government pays for opera, so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.

> so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.

That's great. A lot is lost when art has to cater to audiences.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#67

Post by kashunstva »

anon291 wrote: post #9
dofm wrote: post #5

> Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians. It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teac…

Modern 'classical' music is a myth. In their day, classical composers were essentially pop performers. Women used to throw their undergarments at mozart... Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas. And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and ato…

> Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.

What an incredibly cynical take. I’ve done several chamber music collaborations with a violist who also plays pop music gigs on keyboards.

There are arrogant pricks in classical music. And in software engineering and every other discipline. Personality is orthogonal to field of interest.

Anyway you complain that classical musicians look down on pop music while you yourself do the same about modern composers.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#68

Post by kdavis »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #58
kdavis wrote: post #55

Maybe in the future mathematicians could be the ones proposing different axiomatic foundations (e.g. ZF vs ZF + C vs ZF + C + CH vs ...) and then using computers to examine the consequences of these differing foundations?

I'm sure AI could contribute to this, but this is already a well-developed field of mathematics, and most of the consequences of additional axioms have been worked out. (The most productive hypothesis has been what's called "projective determinacy", if you're curious.) Mathematicians have also gone in the opposite direction, and tried to work out what are the weakest foundations where different results hold. This is…

What name does this "well-developed field of mathematics" go by? (I just want to get a taste of what the field is like.)

I also thought that there are an infinite set of possible extra axioms, e.g. axiomize any statement that's true but not provably so via Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem, though maybe the vast majority of such axioms are "uninteresting".

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#69

Post by lordnacho »

analog31 wrote: post #54
dofm wrote: post #5

> Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians. It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teac…

>>> Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job. Yes, they really did. Getting to that level requires training at an intensity that closes off the option of training for an alternative career.

I think he's alluding to having family money.

So, even though you try hard to become a pianist, if you don't become famous, you're ok.

A friend of mine did this, he lives in a massive house and just enjoys his music, teaches occasionally.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#70

Post by Turneyboy »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #66
eru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is actually worse, or at least Germany, because the government pays for opera, so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.

> so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much. That's great. A lot is lost when art has to cater to audiences.

Except it runs into an excess problem. As an example, Berlin - just one city - has 7 professional orchestras. They are supported by the government financially to the tune of 200 million EUR per year. There is a very real opportunity cost here and quite a bit of a wealth transfer to old people at the same time (since the audiences for classical music tend to be on the older side).

You could pump a large part of those resources into supporting other kinds of music and arguably the outcome would be more interesting.

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