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Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

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Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#71
post #19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The idea that classical composers (before about Liszt) were the "pop music" of their day is uninformed. Consider 1) the size of the venues that Mozart or Haydn's secular music was performed in, and 2) the fact that the bulk of the population was peasantry who wouldn't be admitted to such venues in a time of strict class distinctions. Outside church settings, classical music of the Baroque, Classical and early Romanti…

Merzbow is not pop music, or arguably even music at all.

>I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill'. I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative. — Masami Akita

Pulse Demon is the only Merzbow album with any cultural importance, and that's mostly because the eye-catching cover art let it replace Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music as the default "check out how extreme this is" meme album. Only a tiny minority of music listeners will enjoy listening to it, and there is no establishment pushing it as the future of music.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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.

I think often in families, if a generation is successful with money (for example as engineer or enterpreneur), then next generation often become artists or politicians etc.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#74
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…

>the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome. The outcome is also bad though, once you scale past static images. That's why consumers, who otherwise are apathetic at scale, are extremely negative against generative AI. at least where they (perceive to) notice it.

AI seems to be the new CGI. If it's invisible nobody cares and you only notice when it's awful.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#75
I honestly don't get what the author is trying to say.

> But pure mathematics is already in a conservatory, better known as the academy.

Yes, exactly. So "is mathematics about to enter the conservatory" is a quite weird question.

> who deserves funding, tenure, and fame

It's always been decided by a very small clique of academic elites and a few big companies who have too much R&D budget to spend. It's not something that can be decided by 'the pop' democratically. If you ask an average person how much we should spend on linguists and philosophers per year, the answer will be ~$0. I don't see how AI changes that.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#77

> To be clear, I haven’t fully verified the proof; I worked through it with Claude Fable and it passes the sniff test, but fully digesting it will take a bit more energy than I have right now. As predicted, we no longer need mathematicians for math; the math is being both generated and read by models. We're in for some exciting times, when the pace of mathematical advance can run faster than the constraints of human…

We definitely need mathematicians to understand it and verify to us that the math is correct. And it takes a mathematician to even talk to the AI in a way that will be useful. There is no way I could personally get Claude Fable or Opean AI GPT 6 to generate a proof of Fermat's Theorem in LEAN. It actually take mathematical skills. And real depth to understand the work.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#78
post #71
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that classical composers (before about Liszt) were the "pop music" of their day is uninformed. Consider 1) the size of the venues that Mozart or Haydn's secular music was performed in, and 2) the fact that the bulk of the population was peasantry who wouldn't be admitted to such venues in a time of strict class distinctions. Outside church settings, classical music of the Baroque, Classical and early Romanti…

Merzbow is not pop music, or arguably even music at all. >I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill'. I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative. — Masami Akita Pulse Demon is the only Merzbow album with any cultural importance, and that's mostly because the eye-catching cover art let it replace Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music…

Merzbow gets booked for popular-music festivals regularly, and plenty of other artists have credited him. The Japanese noise scene even inspired a Detroit noise scene through the 1990s and early millennium.

I don't care for the genre myself, but having been to events and seen pleasurable crowd reactions and met people who traveled some distance for it, I can't deny it has at least some real following. Who cares if it isn't discussed as the future of music? There are punk, metal, and hardcore subgenres that draw the same narrow audiences and don't aim to shake the world, but claiming that disqualifies them as part of the popular-music world would be silly.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#79

> To be clear, I haven’t fully verified the proof; I worked through it with Claude Fable and it passes the sniff test, but fully digesting it will take a bit more energy than I have right now. As predicted, we no longer need mathematicians for math; the math is being both generated and read by models. We're in for some exciting times, when the pace of mathematical advance can run faster than the constraints of human…

We definitely need mathematicians to understand it and verify to us that the math is correct. And it takes a mathematician to even talk to the AI in a way that will be useful. There is no way I could personally get Claude Fable or Opean AI GPT 6 to generate a proof of Fermat's Theorem in LEAN. It actually take mathematical skills. And real depth to understand the work.

When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:

> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.

It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. The prompter is the creator of bun.js, a kind of janky JavaScript execution environment.

Math isn't a thing people need to care about any more. AI will soon take care of it. There may be some hobbyists, but progress will not depend on them. AI will come up with new math as needed when it builds for us.

Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

#80
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…

On a side note: It's not called a "conservatory" because we are conserving the art in it. The name seems to originate from a place where orphaned children were taken care off (i.e. conserved) and part of that was through musical education.
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