and he shows us a pic of a ukulele, hardly a conservatory instrument LOL
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
91–100 of 145 posts
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think fully employed opera singers, and professional orchestra musicians, tend to have side gigs. But it's also extremely difficult to get full employment in such jobs, and I think they're pretty intense: of the few people from my school days who succeeded in getting that, at least two of them quit/downshifted into teaching jobs after a decade or so.
My experience is different ; Somehow I befriended a bunch of professional opera and orchestra singers in my mid 20s. It is now 20 years later and they absolutely all have side gigs. We need to distinguish "professional opera singer" and "professional orchestra player" vs Pavarotti though :). Just like there are hundreds and thousands of "professional singers" and one Jennifer Lopez (though one could argue she's a per…
I think it's a lot about which country you live in. I live in Norway, and went to a music oriented high school (I'm not terribly talented myself, but only half the places were set aside for people doing well on audition, the rest of us got in on grades). A good deal of my classmates became professional musicians of various sorts, two got orchestra jobs. But Norway isn't the best country to be a full time classical musician at all - apparently there are far more positions in Russia and Eastern European countries.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>? 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.
In my experience the AI still does a lot of heavy lifting of thinking for the person.
Just like if I tell an artist can you draw a painting of a deer in the forest, but make it ominous and tense. I could have a vague idea of what that would mean for me but the professional artist will make correct decision in composition, light etc. to create that.
Just my sentence is nothing but the image can evoke feelings if done right.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs. A principal player (I don't think anyone beyond high school band calls them 'first-chair') in a major symphony orchestra in the United States makes $250k-400k a year. These are extremely competitive jobs and they are paid well. Certainly enough to live on if you wanted to. These people often teach, but not really because they need a "side-gig." If you as…
There are about twenty of these people, though. I said "approximately nobody". At a first approximation, no musician who does it for money makes a living out of it. Classical, pop, rock, whatever. Nobody in music, basically, makes real money. Fifty, maybe a hundred violinists in the entire world do earn a pure living. Perhaps another twenty five of each other instrument. A few international soloists in other instrume…
So if I go and see Hamilton or something at the theater, your claim is that the orchestra, to a man, each of them has a second job?
What sort of job would that even be? It's a traveling show so they can't even work a normal job--they're in a new town every week.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#95> Could this model work for mathematicians? It’s easy to imagine: in Euclid’s time, mathematics largely existed as an intellectual pursuit worthy of a few inclined people.
NO! Pythagoras discovered his theorems because they wanted to divide up the revenue. While there have been sections of mathematics discovered by leisure, majority of mathematics has been discovered due to an engineering need.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#96The analogy seems strained, since math is not (just) entertainment.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#97We 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…
Before Mozart came along, we had folk music, music of the masses, and they continue to exist and will exist today.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#98> 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.
This is overlooked but really important. Nobody wants to watch robots play chess against each other - we watch human chess even though bots are better. Nobody needs math that has not been verified by humans. Human understanding and communication is the important part of mathematics.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are about twenty of these people, though. I said "approximately nobody". At a first approximation, no musician who does it for money makes a living out of it. Classical, pop, rock, whatever. Nobody in music, basically, makes real money. Fifty, maybe a hundred violinists in the entire world do earn a pure living. Perhaps another twenty five of each other instrument. A few international soloists in other instrume…
So if I go and see Hamilton or something at the theater, your claim is that the orchestra, to a man, each of them has a second job? What sort of job would that even be? It's a traveling show so they can't even work a normal job--they're in a new town every week.
when the show finishes they lose their gig and go back to tending bar or whatever until they get their next one.
Re: Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
#100> Consider classical music. Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians
“Society” is a leaky abstraction here. If you reify society as a thing that is capable of “supporting” or “not supporting” something you mean essentially the government. In that case, “society” probably provides more support to classical music than pop music, through grant programs, public funding of symphonies, etc.