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Swimmer963 comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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True, but I mention them as a baseline against which to compare Modern Academic Composers, who have the advantage of dedicated learning and studying the history and theory of music. If they are genuinely learning the structure of reality in their studies (rather than, e.g., how to best pull off an "inside joke" among their fellow acoyltes), they ought to be capable of a lot more than just impressing classmates.
Thus, I claim that a fair standard to expect MACs to meet is that they could produce music of similar success to that of top classical composers, if given the audience -- but all they can produce is, in fact, stuff that only their classmates care about.
I would agree that their music is at least in the ballpark with Mozart -- no one has to be indoctrinated in years of schooling to like the Beatles (or Mozart) and yet they were able to gain the appreciation of huge sectors of society (also like Mozart).
But I think the appropriate question to ask is, why can't MACs do what the Beatles did? If they truly have assimilated the insights behind what made Mozart and the Beatles pleasing to the human mind, why can't they produce it just the same? I believe it's because they judge themselves only against the ivory tower, not reality -- and could not compete with "real world" music if they tried.
Could be related to the kind of person who studies music academically, as opposed to understanding it intuitively (as I think Mozart did, based on the very catchy little songs he wrote pre-puberty). Writing something "catchy" is a non-trivial ability, is quite important to whether music is enjoyable (which is the criteria I think music should be judged on), and is hard to learn...and maybe can be learned, but not by studying theory, only by iteratively writing music and observing its emotional effect.
I may be an example of someone whose music comes from book learning more than intuition, but I do have strong emotional reactions to music, so I can modify the things I write until they produce that reaction, without necessarily knowing the music-theory name for the techniques I use.
Well, modern music education (quite rightly) does require students to compose and play music and thus give them this kind of practice.
But the difference in understanding you're describing is exactly the kind of barrier reduction seeks to take down. A few hundred years ago, the mechanics who eked out the biggest performance for steam engines were the ones who had an "intuitive" understanding of what "just works right" and what doesn't.
Science sought to put this art on a more rigorous, learnable grounding, where you no longer need someone with "machine empathy", but can identify the governing rules behind nature and exploit them to get maximum performance -- and explain why a certain method gives better performance.
Reductionist and scientific progress occurs when we can take the black-box understanding that the earlier masters had and demystify it. Music theory should be doing the same thing: generate theories that take away much of the need for intuition in composition. And to its credit, it has done so: it identifies which chord progressions and which keys produce which kinds of emotional effects, which key changes generally "sound right", and which don't -- things like that.
But given the level of judgment MACs purport to be capable of passing on modern music -- and the musical "inferential distance" they claim lies between them and the masses -- they ought to have assimilated the kind of insight the previous masters had, such that it is trivial to write music of similar quality.
The problem, then, is that the true musical innovation just isn't coming from the ivory tower -- the very folks who should be the very be the very best at pleasing the mind of the unindoctrinated through music.
Hence my criticism.
I read this comment out loud to my father, and his comment is "it sounds convincing, but in my experience the best art and music have never come from academics".
Isn't that exactly what I've been arguing here?