Restarting/reformulating the practice of shared sacredness experiences for secular people by developing a passive haptic feedback learning interface to rapidly teach partimento - the historical method used for training church musicians in Naples. — LessWrong
Epistemic status: Mix of exploratory and my best guess. I do try to substantiate my claims with relevant research where possible.
TLDR/Tweet summary á la Emergent Ventures:
Crying maths professor = AI meaning crisis is here. Solution: duolingo for classical keyboard improvisation (Bach-Mozart) but it actually works and 2xs learning speed by combining passive haptic feedback learning and singing. Users learn to improvise accompaniment for communal singing and organise shared sacredness experiences in their own local communities » Reinvent (secular) mass?
Preamble
I am posting this because I am seeking feedback and funding for a project that combines the historical improvisation pedagogy called partimento (stylistically think Bach to Mozart) uncovered by the past 2-3 decades of music scholarship. I want to combine this approach with passive haptic learning tech (wearables that teach you something through physical/buzzing sensations) so that learning speed can be improved by making the keyboard skill acquisition part passive (as much as possible) while the active learning part would involve singing. The ultimate societal goal of the project is to train amateur musicians en masse who could lead and accompany communal singing sessions to improve the resilience of their communities and give them an additional means of coping with the coming society-wide psychological stress of losing stable sources of meaning in the face of AI advancing into various professions.
Slight warning, I am on the tail end of openness (95-99th percentile) without the off the charts IQ to compensate for it so my idea is far reaching and probably comes across as nuts. So I kindly ask for your patience as I try to state my case.
Also, I have spent all my free time in the last few days writing and rewriting this proposal to make my thoughts and ideas on the subject as clear as possible and feel like at this point I could really use some constructive criticism or a splash of cold water to the face to gain some clarity on whether my idea and my request for funding has any merit or I should just calm down.
All comments and criticism welcome. Of course if you can help find funding for this idea I would be over the moon and will dedicate my first symphony in your honour, after having completed the partimento training, of course.
Anyway, I’ve structured my idea into the following 4 segments and an appendix:
Shared sacredness as antidote: Why I think we need to revitalise shared sacredness practices like communal singing in order to deal with the coming meaning crisis from AI encroaching on one of the last sources of meaning - identity tied to one’s vocation.
Passive haptic learning and partimento: How training thousands of amateur musicians capable enough to improvise keyboard accompaniment to communal singing can be made feasible through teaching partimento combined with singing and passive haptic feedback learning.
Path to commercialisation and budget for the initial RnD: I outline a basic path to commercialising the interface and the budget I would need to dedicate myself to this.
Why fund the project and why me: I try to make the best case as to why I have any business asking anyone for money to do this.
Appendix: miscellaneous musings: thoughts on whether music is a universal language and why I think starting with what is officially known as Common Practice Period harmony is the right approach training amateur musicians en masse, and why even if you disagree and hold the view that the harmonic series and its affordances don’t constitute a universal grounding for harmony and “beauty” in music it’s still the right starting point.
Shared sacredness as antidote
Seeing a Professor of Applied Mathematics cry and quote Ecclesiastes in an NYT interview [1, Interview clip] in response to the newest developments in AI driven maths proofs moved me so much that I couldn’t shake the feeling that something has to be done to prepare for the coming psychological fallout. I had already read many accounts on reddit and elsewhere of people talking about how AI is eroding their sense of purpose and meaning in their job as it takes over their role, and I can sense it too, that eventually my white collar job will in large part be eliminated by AI.
I have felt purposeless for a very long time, even before AI because I never found my vocation in life and stumbled around from hobby to hobby until I was finally diagnosed with ADHD and started medication. That fixed everything except the source of meaning part. I tried all the usual approaches to finding meaning before that: meditation, jhanas, learning to compose music, play the piano, draw, cook, code, judo, reading a lot about psychology, studying thinking models (thank you lesswrong), AI, etc. I’ve run the gamut of available interests and couldn’t find meaning™ in any of them long term. I also couldn’t overcome some of the hurdles in certain activities to reach advanced levels of competence, namely: composing, piano and drawing. What stuck with me is the urge to become a composer (even though I didn’t really act on it), which eventually led me to discover the partimento method. It felt like discovering the holy grail of music education: this is what all the classical greats studied. Eureka! Well, when I first found out about it I hadn’t started ADHD medication yet and doing the mind-numbingly boring amount of repetitions it would take to become proficient in anything musical prevents even most neurotypicals from making progress, let alone someone like me, so I didn’t make any headways with the method and eventually abandoned it.
In the meanwhile my search for meaning had gotten so desperate, I tried to become religious and studied the bible and thought a lot about going to church just for the communal singing. I could never bring myself to do it because every time a religious friend invited me to some special occasion like a christening, I would experience what I now know as shared sacredness while singing, despite not knowing the words or melody of the hymn or believing in anything being said. Once the singing was over that blissful experience would then be tainted by feeling like a phony outsider infiltrating the congregation because real believers do have a tendency to look at you with an earnest hope in their eyes that you too are a believer. Or at least that’s what it felt like. And of course it wasn’t everyone, and I am not trying to imply that I went to a church full of fanatics but it was common enough to be off-putting. Nevertheless, I knew from then on that my life would be better if communal singing was a regular part of it, I just didn’t know how to find the right community to do it with.
Beyond my anecdotal experience there is some research backing up the idea that shared sacredness experience (or collective effervescence if you prefer Durkheim’s original term) is a fairly universal phenomenon and reliably achieved through singing together. A meta-analysis of this phenomenon links such experiences with wellbeing, social integration and collective identity. [2]
Communal singing probably works as a “social technology” for evoking shared sacredness experience even in non-religious people because it combines several potentially relevant features:
A shared focus of attention.
Coordinated timing and breathing.
A common activity to which each person contributes.
Emotional expression that does not require anyone to formulate an argument or disclose their personal views.
An immediately perceptible result that belongs to the group.
Singing groups have shown faster initial social bonding than comparison classes, although those differences diminished over time. [4] Another study found increased social closeness and measured improvements in pain thresholds following group singing. [5] A randomised trial involving 258 older adults found improved mental health-related quality of life following a community singing programme. [6] I think all of this validates my own experience and desire for something like this and makes it worth investigating as means of improving people’s resilience to the meaning crisis that already seems to be on our doorstep.
Let’s say my anecdotes and the research point in the right direction. We still lack multiple things to start implementing this en masse or even on a small scale:
Songs and music that have the necessary gravitas to reliably trigger shared sacredness experiences in people
Trained musicians willing to lead and improvise accompaniment to communal singing experiences
Places to gather and sing together
I don’t have a globally applicable answer to all 3 but the partimento method and the organist musicianship training offer a strong starting point:
I would posit that the top 40 hymns in rotation in various Christian faiths can work for secular people who grew up in cultures with some local variant of the Christian faith as what I would term the “shared sacredness object”. If my proposed intervention is to work on a global scale then it would have to be expanded to other cultures, which can be done if the training methods proposed in the next section prove effective at scale. I am wedded to this idea, and would ultimately leave it up the musicians organising community singing.
Modern professional musicians who play classical music mostly can’t improvise, with the only notable exceptions being organ players (guess why), and besides are busy practicing and aren't evenly distributed amongst communities so I would propose that each community needs its own amateur musician or musicians who can fulfil the role of leader and accompanist.
Finally, I think that the accompaniment to the communal sining should be improvised in the classical style, on the spot, rather than pre-rehearsed in order to keep the experience from going stale and because the musical style holds a certain cultural gravitas, even outside of Western World (particularly Japan, China, Korea, as far as i am aware). Also this is what worked for the catholic church - Bach would have to write a new cantata every week - so it’s worth taking as a starting point with more limited scope.
I think on some level the novelty of offering historical style improvisations to accompany singing could itself help boost the initial interest in such events. This leads me to the tech solution part of my proposal.
Passive haptic learning and partimento
As I mentioned above only classical organists learn to improvise as part of their education and at least in the German music schools, the rediscovered methods of partimento are enjoying a revival of sorts. In French organ schools they have stuck with their original methods as far as I am aware but in essence the French approach was already close enough to partimento because its origins can also be traced to the methodology originating from Naples.
What is partimento? Partimento is the keyboard pedagogy part of the education that orphaned boys received in Neapolitan conservatories. Originating from somewhere in the 1600s the method sought to teach them the basics of harmony in order to provide them with stable employment as church musicians. Robert Gjerdingen and colleagues have uncovered and translated an entire treasure trove of manuscripts on what they were taught, practically covering the entire beginner to advanced development levels. Many of them are freely available on partimenti.org. The partimento method essentially teaches a set of bass motions and sequences (rule of the octave, circle of fifths progressions, etc), cadences (the punctuation points in this style of music), common paired bass-melody patterns called schemata (that are so ubiquitous in the historical style that scholars have given them names) and methods of introducing and treating dissonances. All of this can be thought of as a set of stock phrases that can be memorised much like the way one would memorise many example sentences when learning a language. [6], [7]
In order to become fluent in this keyboard improvisation style, about 500 - 1000 stock phrases of about 4-8 notes in length need to be learned and internalised before they can be used as interchangeable modules of musical phrases to be used in improvisation and composition. The end result sounds very exciting initially doesn’t it? The hard truth is that the amount of repetition at the keyboard needed to get there is mind-numbingly boring. Not something you would do unless you were an orphan desperate for employment. Not to mention you have to both be able to sing them and play them at the keyboard if you want employment at a fine establishment in Naples (more on the singing part soon).
Passive haptic feedback learning(PHFL) to the rescue!
The video shows one of the CNN anchors learned to play the melody of Ode to Joy on the piano in half an hour while browsing his emails and doing his usual work related tasks. All the glove did was buzz the correct note sequence into his fingers. It's really fun to see how astounded the anchor is that he can play it all. Not very well of course but he does press the buttons in the right order. Which is exactly what PHFL learning can accomplish: teach the button presses in the right order.
In an early Georgia Tech experiment also led by Thad Starner, five musical novices required approximately three keyboard test attempts on average following passive haptic training, compared with seven during active training to be able to play with 90% accuracy. [8]
Source: Huang et al. [8]
More recent work combined passive rehearsal with active piano practice. A two-week study recruited 36 participants; its main analysis used 20 participants with complete, valid data. Passive rehearsal increased the modelled learning rate for note accuracy by 49.7%, but did not significantly improve rhythm learning. [9]
Two-handed learning has also been investigated directly. A 2015 study explored two-handed piano material and reported better passive-learning results when both hands were trained simultaneously rather than sequentially. [10]
So why don’t we have this tech commercially available yet?
My best guess is because, as jazz teacher Hal Galper likes to say “the instrument is an illusion” PHFL only teaches the correct button presses which for music is only half the battle of learning. The other half is audiation and singing. In other words learning to think (audiate) and speak (sing) in the language of music.
I know this from first hand experience, anything I can sing (even badly) I can play more or less, depending on how much I practiced the motor skills needed. I am not saying it's not possible to overcome the need for audiation, I am guilty of learning patterns I can’t audiate and perform them purely mechanically and I suspect many amateur shred guitarists are guilty of this too (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Experimental work also shows that auditory and motor imagery abilities influence musical learning and recall. [11] Research has also found an association between auditory imagery vividness and singing accuracy. [12] So while I am fairly convinced of this being the missing element based on anecdote and research, it is only fair to acknowledge that this would only be substantiated if I create the haptic learning interface I am proposing and tested it on multiple cohorts of untrained or amateur musicians.
So, where does the 2x learning speed come from exactly?
Well let’s sum up, what’ve explored so far:
There are approximately 500 - 1000 stock phrases of 4-8 notes in length needed to learn improvising in the classical style to reach the level of competent accompanist (my best guess).
PHFL can teach the correct order of keys on both hands without the need for direct attention (validated by studies for short musical phrases for both hands playing together and separately).
So that frees up the learner to focus on learning to sing the melodies and basslines while the PHFL gloves vibrate the correct fingerings into them (my best guess but there is nothing in the research which suggests that this would cause confusion rather than reinforce the two activities).
Therefore I think that using a structured approach derived from the partimento method: any average person with musical inclinations, in about 6-12 months of 30 minutes of structured daily practice can become a competent improviser and accompanist for the relatively simple songs that people sing during communal singing. I am not at all claiming that anyone can become Mozart or Jacob Collier through this method, just as learning a second language will not guarantee becoming a renowned poet in the language. If you search for partimento realisation on youtube you can find people who were able to internalise the skills needed to improvise competent little pieces in the historical style - which for shared sacredness is about the level to aim for. If you want to see what it looks like at the professional level and the same methods applied to the romantic idiom, check out En Blanc et Noir. He uses the partimento method to improvise waltzes in the style of Chopin for instance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrlyKMXYLG8
The structured approach and continuous assessment would be provided by a bespoke music learning software developed with AI and the help of a software developer friend of mine once the prototype is ready for commercialisation.
All in all, the user would need a midi capable keyboard, a laptop with a working microphone and the PHFL gloves to learn the method.
What I have outlined so far gives us 3 memory anchors for memorising these musical phrases:
The sung musical line itself (though they may not be the catchiest tunes in the world they can stick somewhat, especially after you begin to recognise them in other music)
Physical sensations from the haptic feedback associated with the notes
The bass notes providing the context for the melodies or inner lines being sung or vice versa
There is one additional memory anchor that is worth taking advantage of and that comes from the other part of the Neapolitan method: Hexachordal Solfége.
Inspired the partimento work of Robert Gjerdingen, Nicholas Baragwanath spent a great deal of time reconstructing the solfeggio tradition of the Neapolitan conservatories and through his book showed how they complement partimento study, teach melody and aid in memorisation by turning music into “words” in context. [13] The hexachordal approach is different from modern movable do in that the typical melodic paths to key changes are better accounted for by the hexachordal system by better preserving the intervallic relationships between melodic fragments. For example, within the appropriate hexachords, C–D–E and G–A–B can both be sung as do–re–mi. The same syllables can therefore identify a recurring interval pattern in different tonal locations.
By adding hexachordal solfege syllables to the stock patterns, I would be adding a fourth memory anchor element to the learning process. The orphans themselves actually first had to be able to read and speak the appropriate solfege syllables before they could do anything else and were able to do so in up to 9 different clefs (IIRC)!
So to summarise the learning method would like this:
The software takes the learner through the partimento method, gradually teaching them stock phrases, starting with the phrases most used elements: segments of the rule of the octave, cadences
The fragments are initially taught in 2 voice versions and once they demonstrate that they have learned the 2 voice version they move on to 4 voice versions
Here is my initial proposal for how each phrase would be learned:
Listening to the fragment with bass only first, with the haptic gloves teaching the fingering, and showing the appropriate solfege syllables on the screen.
Listening to the fragment with melody and the bass played at a lower volume and with the gloves teaching the fingering of the melody, while showing the appropriate syllables on the screen.
Listening to the fragment with melody and bass play at equal volume and both gloves teaching the sensation of simultaneous playing of the fragment
Then the user repeats the above but now sings the melody or bass line while the gloves still teach the fingering through haptic feedback - initially leading the user - not waiting for them.
Then the user repeats the singing exercise for both melody and bassline but this time the gloves only trigger when they sing the right note.
They go through enough fragments that can fit into the first 15 minutes of that day’s lesson. Any more would be too intensive based on my experience.
Once they are through all these repetitions away from the keyboard, they take off the gloves and attempt to play what they had just learned with incomplete prompts (no bass, no melody, etc) at the keyboard, checked by the program through a midi connection. Emphasis will be on playing the correct notes rather than perfect rhythm initially - this would be the other 15 minutes of their daily practice routine
Additional modules for teaching basic audiation (the ability to sing back a heard note) reading sheet music (using flash cards), basic lessons explaining the theory behind partimento and appropriate keyboard technique would be added once the prototype is advanced enough to justify spending time on these modules.
Once the learners have mastered the 2 voice versions of a particular phrase, they relearn it in a 4 voice version.
The user is then free to improvise as much as they like with what they have learned so far.
The goal is to get the user over the initial hurdle of music making as fast as possible so that they start producing “output” as soon as possible. The hope of course is that the ability is so compelling that they keep coming back to learn more.
Once they have mastered enough of the basics to complete/realise a partimento (phrases in C major, F major and G major for instance), they would then be introduced to the task of realising a historical partimento (given bass line) and accompanying the task of accompanying a simple melody.
They would progress through partimentos of increasing complexity as they learn and more of the phrases needed to realise them.
I am convinced that this approach could take almost anyone to the level of a competent improviser in the historical style if they put in the 30 minutes a day required, at least 5 times a week.
There is one caveat to all this: some situations may require alternative fingerings depending on the hand size of the learner. This is something that can only be worked out as the prototype evolves and more and more people test it.
This the cheapest haptic feedback glove (350 USD per pair + shipping) that I think is feasible for this:
Finger actuators would cue fingering patterns. Palm and wrist actuators could potentially indicate hand movements and leaps, although the usefulness of those signals would need testing and would be more relevant for the commercialisation part of the project: teaching popular piano pieces and the stock phrases of the romantic era composers (akin to what En Blanc et Noir shows with improvising waltzes).
Path to commercialisation and budget
If the prototype and testing on cohorts demonstrates sufficient benefit, I would establish a for-profit company and launch a Kickstarter campaign to finance the first commercial rollout.
The for-profit company would be domiciled either in the EU (I’m currently in Hungary) or the US - this is TBD.
In order to build an audience for the Kickstarter campaign I would share my learning progress on YouTube and other platforms to document progress with the method and (hopefully) demonstrate that the project is working.
I would run a Kickstarter campaign once the prototype and software are ready for beta testing to fund the first round of proper commercialisation.
At that point I would use the Kickstarter proceeds to recruit a full-time operations manager who has experience in supply chain management in order to lay the foundations for the full-fledged, global commercialisation of the interface.
I would hire additional dedicated staff as the product rolls out.
I would continue work on expanding the pattern library of stock phrases so that it encompasses the romantic era and add lessons for popular individual piano pieces. Further development would investigate whether haptic cues can support technical skills beyond fingering and hand movement, beginning with pedalling.
As the company expands I would move to a creative director role and let someone else do the day-to-day running of the company rather than myself (or cede the role to AI if we have AGI by that point).
My best guess of what the revenue model would like:
Sale of the haptic feedback gloves (and any subsequent accessories)
Sale of stock phrase bundles for learning improvisation in other styles (romantic, jazz, pop, etc)
Sale of individual pieces or bundles of pieces by composers for hobbyists who want an accelerated means of learning those pieces (eg.: Mozart Rondo Alla Turca for 1-5 USD, Bach WTC Book 1 and 2 for 40 USD).
Budget
To implement the first phase of the project, which I expect to take 2 years I am seeking $235,000 in funding for the following:
Allocation
Amount
My salary and employment contributions
$130,000
Hardware, tester gloves, programming and AI-assisted development
$70,000
Hexachordal solfège, audio/MIDI and haptic specialist support
$35,000
Total
$235,000
Full funding would cover:
130k USD - 2 years’ worth of my salary (about 10% less than my current salary) and employee benefits (national healthcare and social contributions) so I can dedicate myself full time to the project in terms of both product development and building the audience for the product itself as well as raising awareness about the importance of shared sacredness experiences, once the development phase is concluded.
70k USD - prototyping and programming
500 USD - One pair of TactGlove DK3 gloves, budgeted at the stated price of 350 USD, with the remaining 150 USD for shipping and associated costs.
11.5k USD - 30 pairs of gloves for the first cohort of testers, plus shipping.
18k USD - for agentic software development tokens.
4.8k USD to cover 2 years’ worth of subscription to a frontier model (Claude or ChatGPT).
13.2k USD reserve for additional development tokens. Any unused allocation could be reallocated to more gloves or other prototyping needs.
40k USD - covering the cost of work of the programmer (the other team member) contributing as a freelancer for a total of 400 hours at 100 USD per hour.
35k consulting fees reserved for specialists on an as-needed basis:
Hexachordal solfege specialist 5k - to check the correctness of the solfege syllables assigned to the patterns. Of all the costs in this category this will be the one that is definitely needed.
DSP Engineering reserve 15k - for edge case bugs related to processing singing inputs and MIDI signals from keyboard instruments. The main issue I am anticipating here is dealing with latency issues on different operating systems and input sources. Assuming 150 usd per hour and max 100 hours needed.
VR glove developer reserve 15k - for dealing with any edge case bugs (low-level firmware issues) related to programming the signals on the gloves. Here too, if there are unique problems I anticipate they will be related to rare latency or compatibility issues. Assuming 150 usd per hour and max 100 hours needed.
Any legal fees and need for counsel will be covered by me.
Why fund the project and why me
Why fund the project?
If you look at the comment section on any video demonstrating PHFL even on the most basic melodies, you can find enthusiastic comments asking for when it will be commercially available. I think there is significant commercial potential in something like this because there are many people like myself who were not able to get over the initial hurdle of doing the mind-numbing amounts of repetitions needed to just learn a piece of music, let alone a complex piece of music. Furthermore, having studied piano and music theory with a few teachers I was never satisfied with the approach (aside from partimento) I was presented with and always came away with the impression that you either feel the music and are able to improvise something or you don’t and should slink back to your place among the mere mortals. Occasionally I have sat down at the piano and through the magic of my subconscious was able to produce fully formed fragments of pieces that were good enough to delight me but I am not able to improvise on command or in any proper musical context. I am sure that providing a clear path to becoming fluent in music, starting from the “source” of all the harmonic progressions that one can hear globally would also be something that many people would be interested in learning. Even before considering the societal goals I have laid out in the first part, on an individual level I think it would be incredibly enriching for people to be able to sit down and improvise something at the piano to relax, process their emotions or just do something creative.
From a technical standpoint, I think I have identified the missing element that previous use cases of PHFL didn’t account for and therefore never made it out of the prototype stage: they focused on teaching the motor skills needed to learn a piece of music as the primary objective when that is just one of the hurdles needed to overcome and the missing piece of the puzzle for anything musical is developing the necessary auditory imagination and ability to “think” and “speak” musically. I know I don’t have great studies backing up this concept and am relying more on andecdote but another point of reference I can offer is if you watch any interview with Jacob Collier, when he is explaining music theory concepts he often sings all the voices in a chord, and is able to sing the individual melodic movements between chords, demonstrating that he has a highly developed capacity for audiation. This may appear like the skill of some alien or musical genius but I am confident that amateurs who focus on singing as the primary means of learning music would be able to do this with all the phrases they know as well, even without perfect pitch. I can do it for certain small pieces of music I know and have internalised and I don’t have a music career.
If the proposed interface succeeds commercially, I would reinvest the profits in enabling as many people as possible to start communal singing gatherings where those learners who successfully completed the basic course would lead communal singing sessions and improvise accompaniment and preludes/postludes to the songs of their choosing. I think the commercial potential of an interface and learning tool like this would sustain the social goals of the project for at least 10 years, by which point hopefully over 500,000 people will have completed the basic program and will have started leading communal singing sessions. I know this is the most out there part of the idea, but I think this is also the most urgent.
Why fund me specifically to do it?
Having been a lurker and reader in the rationalist/EA sphere, I see how a lot of people are working on important problems related to AI and have always wanted to contribute somehow but because of life circumstances (my father is a diplomat, we moved around a lot) I didn’t develop the necessary foundations in math during childhood and am therefore unable to contribute to AI research in any form. I completed a masters in data science for business applications, hoping that this would give me a path to working on AI but I realised that I am too far behind mathematically and that it isn’t my true calling.
You may also ask why don’t I develop the prototype in my free time and start a kickstarter instead of asking for funding? This is the final route I am considering if there is no appetite for funding this as grant but this mean development would slow to crawl because I currently work in sustainable finance (helping central banks of developing countries design national sustainable finance taxonomies to attract international capital and foster green bond issuance) which is very taxing mentally and leaves with little left of over capacity to do additional work like this. Even with the help of AI for development, there are a lot of moving parts so the project would require my full attention for developing this as quickly as possible. I would also serve as chief guinea pig for the interface, which is additional time not spent on the development process itself. Finally, I am 37 years old, have a young daughter, who I cannot in good conscience take more time away from than I already do because of my job and therefore cannot pursue the usual path of a young founder sacrificing absolutely everything in pursuit of a goal while also working full time.
I am basically asking for 2 years of runway (I live in Hungary, so you could say this is cheap relative to American salary standards) to focus on this to the exclusion of all else professionally. I would happily commit my life to this project because it brings together so many facets of what I am passionate about and view it as a genuine contribution to humanity’s future. I am convinced that the method will work because amateurs without these sorts of aids have already attained delightful improvisation skills and the research backs up the validity of the approach I have outlined. Given the nature of the product, if it delivers the results in the promised amount of time or somewhat slower than anticipated, I think the likelihood of commercial success is very high and would happily reinvest the profits into enabling communal singing. I think it is only a matter of time until someone else puts these ideas together and succeeds commercially with a product like this (or creates a bunch of fake videos promising the moon and scamming people out of their money) closing the window on seizing first mover advantage with this product idea.
From a skills needed to complete the project standpoint I would say this about myself:
Project management: I have 10+ years of experience in this, I worked with serious organisations like the World Bank’s IFC and other funders with budget sizes and timelines comparable to what I am asking for. I know how to work autonomously and have all the necessary generalist skills needed to get this going.
Software development skills: I am not a software developer but have been using AI to develop small bits of software for myself and every programmer I know is complaining about how AI is so advanced in software development that they no longer even read the code they ship. I of course would not do this. I will use AI to develop the software prototype and enlist my developer friend with 20+ years experience to work as a freelancer once it's ready for commercialisation (I have budgeted for this).
Music pedagogy skills: I am not a music teacher by training but I have been studying music theory and have been looking for how to learn music in a way that lets me circumvent the physical barrier for becoming proficient in music for close to a decade. Progression in the partimento curriculum itself is laid out in what is required of the learner to realise the partimentos set by the old masters, teaching how to progress through the learning of stock phrases so I would simply follow their lead on this. For applying the appropriate hexachordal syllables to the phrases, I would hire someone like Richard Baragwanath, someone trained in hexachordal solfege to assess the correctness of the assigned syllables for the 1000 or so stock phrases.
As a test user: I think I am suitable as a first test case, because while I have very basic keyboard skills I am not at all out of the beginner stage, I have studied partimento on my own and with a teacher but never internalised enough of it for it to stick, I can read sheet music and I can sing back a melody I hear, meaning I have enough audiation skills to perform the tasks but not enough to “speak” music. In other words, I am on the cusp of reaching basic fluency in music and have been stuck there for years. My best guess is that If it works for me it would work for many other people who are in a similar situation to mine.
So yes, the snarky summary of my passionate outpourings here are essentially I am a generalist project manager with a vision for a product that I hope will save the world from the looming AI-driven meaning crisis through bringing people to sing.
If you made it this far, first of all thank you! I really appreciate you reading through my lengthy ramblings. As I wrote in the beginning, I would really appreciate any comments, criticism or if you think my proposal is worthwhile, please contribute funding for the project on manifund.org or recommend it someone who would be interested.
Let’s say you are right about all of the above: what will people sing?
This is admittedly something I don’t have a great answer to. My starting point would be the “top 40” hymns that Christian faiths of various types have in rotation but I am not by any means wedded to idea of using Christian texts and I fully admit is not likely to be appropriate for other cultures that don’t have any European roots or influence or want to dispense with said influence because of their connection to colonialism. My best guess is that while secular Filipinos may be happy to sing Christian hymns, Chinese or Japanese people may much rather choose some other source text that can be the object of shared sacredness used for singing. Ultimately I would leave it up to the community organisers to decide on what people should sing together. The top 40 hymns would be the starting point and the teaching tool for a learner interested in doing communal singing as a community service. They can apply the lessons learned to any other melody.
Why do you think Common Practice Period harmony is appropriate for everyone around the world? Isn’t it presumptuous to think that just because you find the harmonic progressions and stock melodic phrases appropriate for triggering shared sacredness that this will work for everyone else? On its surface yes, but this interpretation bakes in the assumption that positively responding to the harmonic possibilities inherent in the harmonic series, which I would argue is the basis of all music, is an entirely culturally determined phenomenon and not one rooted in physics and our anatomy. To me this is like claiming that focusing on increasing the sense of umami in cooking is a Japanese cultural phenomenon rather than an inherent property of how our taste buds responds to certain foods - I am aware of conflicting studies related the universality of the harmonic series, I will address at the end Nevertheless here’s my best guess for justifying the universality of the harmonic series:
The harmonies that we hear today pop music everywhere in the world originates from Western European musical culture because historically it is the only known musical culture to have explored harmony and harmonic motion in such depth - this isn’t a baseless assertion either, it is discussed by respected American Music Theorists like Dmitri Tymoczko, who shows from group theoretical stand point that this is the case.
It appears to me that the European historical style is rooted in the exploitation of the affordances of the harmonic series, which is a physical phenomenon that doesn’t belong to any single culture and humans across the globe respond to its affordances in fairly universal ways in much the same way that umami in cooking is not unique to the Japanese, it’s just that they were the first to name the phenomenon. I think that is the reason, beyond all other more culturally and politically based explanations, for why the use of harmony in music has spread to all other musical cultures across the globe. Mandopop, J-pop, K-pop and Indian pop music would not be using the same harmonic progressions (and modernised derivations of them) that were originally discovered in Europe if it were a purely cultural phenomenon, especially since of these 4 musical cultures only India was colonised. Whereas if you take the case of something like ballroom dances, which were forced in the indigenous populations of Africa by some colonisers, these cultural practices were immediately abandoned after the colonialists left.
Therefore I think that the European historical style is the appropriate starting point for learning improvising accompaniment for people of most backgrounds and of course if the program spreads and the training methods succeed, other modules can be added to help localise the training to the specific harmonic tastes of other musical cultures, or eventually adapt the PHFL training methods to other historical musical cultures. All in all, I think once people are given these tools they will be able to quickly adapt them to their own aesthetic preferences and cultural needs.
For instance in traditional Japanese music the focus was more on the space between the notes and the individual aesthetic qualities of the notes being played rather than harmonic motion and note density (at least as far I understand it). The example of the Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Kamui-Chikap Symphony comes to mind which while containing distinctly European elements like the use of a symphony orchestra, harmony which would be recognised as rooted in the European historical style, the music itself has its own distinct aesthetic that at least to my ears as a foreigner sounds distinctly Japanese because the symphony paints sonic landscapes rather than moving through the “meaning” of the music in a conversational manner as it often does in European classical music (Eine Kleine Nachtmusic starts with a question and answer phrase for instance).
In short, secular people disconnected from their own cultures already listen to the musical descendants of this style anyway and would be sufficiently familiar to them.
This approach also sets the stage for potential future avenues of research since some other musical cultures divided the octave differently from the European ones and sang melodies usually against a drone (1 note representing “home base”) rather than accompaniment using changing harmonies. These alternative divisions of the octave, along with alternate tuning systems could also be further explored with the help of AI and the reduced training time to potentially discover entirely new sound scapes.
Why the historical style is appropriate for triggering shared sacredness: the harmonic language of classical music has a distinct quality of its own that differentiates it from the more modern styles of music and based on revealed preferences still has cultural significance in terms of shared sacredness. Stated plainly, in moments of great difficulty like funerals or significant life moments like marriages many people still reach for this style of music for their wedding procession or wake. National anthems are mostly marches written in this style. Many movies also use modernised variations of its harmonic language. Furthermore this style, I would argue, more than any other, is focused on exploiting the properties of the harmonic series which grounds its aesthetic sensibilities in the physical properties of sound and its practices beyond just expressiveness also place a strong emphasis on beauty (a subjective and overburdened word, I know). Beauty, I would posit, is also a necessary part of fostering shared sacredness.
Why improvisation: If the goal is communal singing, why not teach fixed accompaniments to a predetermined repertoire? My hypothesis is that improvisation would help gatherings remain responsive and musically engaging over time. Historical musicians frequently produced or adapted music for recurring services. I think variation could help sustain interest, while the awareness that music is being created live could heighten engagement. A performer need not have extraordinary skills to make a live improvisation compelling. Gjerdingen has also described the positive response to his own church improvisations, despite his modest assessment of his performing ability.
Reddit threads illustrating despondency in response to AI development: the selected threads are only anecdotal evidence but imply a growing trend.
“It’s to the point I’m now doing paint overs and edits of ai generated art rather than actually painting.”
References
[1] The New York Times. When A.I. Comes for Your Purpose in Life. The Daily. Interview clip.
[2] Pizarro, J. J., et al. (2022). Emotional processes, collective behavior, and social movements: A meta-analytic review of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 974683. Article.
[3] Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2, 150221. Article.
[4] Weinstein, D., Launay, J., Pearce, E., Dunbar, R. I. M., & Stewart, L. (2016). Group music performance causes elevated pain thresholds and social bonding in small and large groups of singers. Evolution and Human Behavior, 37, 152–158. Article.
[5] Coulton, S., Clift, S., Skingley, A., & Rodriguez, J. (2015). Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of community singing on mental health-related quality of life of older people: Randomised controlled trial. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 207, 250–255. Article.
[7] Mortensen, J. J. (2023). Improvising fugue: A method for keyboard artists. Oxford University Press. Book.
[8] Huang, K., et al. (2010). Mobile music touch: Mobile tactile stimulation for passive learning. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Article. Full text.
[9] Gemicioglu, T., et al. (2024). Passive haptic rehearsal for augmented piano learning in the wild. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 8(4), Article 187. Article.
[10] Seim, C., Estes, T., & Starner, T. (2015). Towards passive haptic learning of piano songs. IEEE World Haptics Conference, 445–450. Full text.
[11] Brown, R. M., & Palmer, C. (2013). Auditory and motor imagery modulate learning in music performance. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 320. Article.
[12] Pfordresher, P. Q., & Halpern, A. R. (2013). Auditory imagery and the poor-pitch singer. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Article.
[13] Baragwanath, N. (2020). The solfeggio tradition: A forgotten art of melody in the long eighteenth century. Oxford University Press. Book.
Epistemic status: Mix of exploratory and my best guess. I do try to substantiate my claims with relevant research where possible.
TLDR/Tweet summary á la Emergent Ventures:
Crying maths professor = AI meaning crisis is here. Solution: duolingo for classical keyboard improvisation (Bach-Mozart) but it actually works and 2xs learning speed by combining passive haptic feedback learning and singing. Users learn to improvise accompaniment for communal singing and organise shared sacredness experiences in their own local communities » Reinvent (secular) mass?
Preamble
I am posting this because I am seeking feedback and funding for a project that combines the historical improvisation pedagogy called partimento (stylistically think Bach to Mozart) uncovered by the past 2-3 decades of music scholarship. I want to combine this approach with passive haptic learning tech (wearables that teach you something through physical/buzzing sensations) so that learning speed can be improved by making the keyboard skill acquisition part passive (as much as possible) while the active learning part would involve singing. The ultimate societal goal of the project is to train amateur musicians en masse who could lead and accompany communal singing sessions to improve the resilience of their communities and give them an additional means of coping with the coming society-wide psychological stress of losing stable sources of meaning in the face of AI advancing into various professions.
Slight warning, I am on the tail end of openness (95-99th percentile) without the off the charts IQ to compensate for it so my idea is far reaching and probably comes across as nuts. So I kindly ask for your patience as I try to state my case.
Also, I have spent all my free time in the last few days writing and rewriting this proposal to make my thoughts and ideas on the subject as clear as possible and feel like at this point I could really use some constructive criticism or a splash of cold water to the face to gain some clarity on whether my idea and my request for funding has any merit or I should just calm down.
All comments and criticism welcome. Of course if you can help find funding for this idea I would be over the moon and will dedicate my first symphony in your honour, after having completed the partimento training, of course.
Anyway, I’ve structured my idea into the following 4 segments and an appendix:
Shared sacredness as antidote
Seeing a Professor of Applied Mathematics cry and quote Ecclesiastes in an NYT interview [1, Interview clip] in response to the newest developments in AI driven maths proofs moved me so much that I couldn’t shake the feeling that something has to be done to prepare for the coming psychological fallout. I had already read many accounts on reddit and elsewhere of people talking about how AI is eroding their sense of purpose and meaning in their job as it takes over their role, and I can sense it too, that eventually my white collar job will in large part be eliminated by AI.
I have felt purposeless for a very long time, even before AI because I never found my vocation in life and stumbled around from hobby to hobby until I was finally diagnosed with ADHD and started medication. That fixed everything except the source of meaning part. I tried all the usual approaches to finding meaning before that: meditation, jhanas, learning to compose music, play the piano, draw, cook, code, judo, reading a lot about psychology, studying thinking models (thank you lesswrong), AI, etc. I’ve run the gamut of available interests and couldn’t find meaning™ in any of them long term. I also couldn’t overcome some of the hurdles in certain activities to reach advanced levels of competence, namely: composing, piano and drawing. What stuck with me is the urge to become a composer (even though I didn’t really act on it), which eventually led me to discover the partimento method. It felt like discovering the holy grail of music education: this is what all the classical greats studied. Eureka! Well, when I first found out about it I hadn’t started ADHD medication yet and doing the mind-numbingly boring amount of repetitions it would take to become proficient in anything musical prevents even most neurotypicals from making progress, let alone someone like me, so I didn’t make any headways with the method and eventually abandoned it.
In the meanwhile my search for meaning had gotten so desperate, I tried to become religious and studied the bible and thought a lot about going to church just for the communal singing. I could never bring myself to do it because every time a religious friend invited me to some special occasion like a christening, I would experience what I now know as shared sacredness while singing, despite not knowing the words or melody of the hymn or believing in anything being said. Once the singing was over that blissful experience would then be tainted by feeling like a phony outsider infiltrating the congregation because real believers do have a tendency to look at you with an earnest hope in their eyes that you too are a believer. Or at least that’s what it felt like. And of course it wasn’t everyone, and I am not trying to imply that I went to a church full of fanatics but it was common enough to be off-putting. Nevertheless, I knew from then on that my life would be better if communal singing was a regular part of it, I just didn’t know how to find the right community to do it with.
Beyond my anecdotal experience there is some research backing up the idea that shared sacredness experience (or collective effervescence if you prefer Durkheim’s original term) is a fairly universal phenomenon and reliably achieved through singing together. A meta-analysis of this phenomenon links such experiences with wellbeing, social integration and collective identity. [2]
Communal singing probably works as a “social technology” for evoking shared sacredness experience even in non-religious people because it combines several potentially relevant features:
Singing groups have shown faster initial social bonding than comparison classes, although those differences diminished over time. [4] Another study found increased social closeness and measured improvements in pain thresholds following group singing. [5] A randomised trial involving 258 older adults found improved mental health-related quality of life following a community singing programme. [6] I think all of this validates my own experience and desire for something like this and makes it worth investigating as means of improving people’s resilience to the meaning crisis that already seems to be on our doorstep.
Let’s say my anecdotes and the research point in the right direction. We still lack multiple things to start implementing this en masse or even on a small scale:
I don’t have a globally applicable answer to all 3 but the partimento method and the organist musicianship training offer a strong starting point:
I think on some level the novelty of offering historical style improvisations to accompany singing could itself help boost the initial interest in such events. This leads me to the tech solution part of my proposal.
Passive haptic learning and partimento
As I mentioned above only classical organists learn to improvise as part of their education and at least in the German music schools, the rediscovered methods of partimento are enjoying a revival of sorts. In French organ schools they have stuck with their original methods as far as I am aware but in essence the French approach was already close enough to partimento because its origins can also be traced to the methodology originating from Naples.
What is partimento? Partimento is the keyboard pedagogy part of the education that orphaned boys received in Neapolitan conservatories. Originating from somewhere in the 1600s the method sought to teach them the basics of harmony in order to provide them with stable employment as church musicians. Robert Gjerdingen and colleagues have uncovered and translated an entire treasure trove of manuscripts on what they were taught, practically covering the entire beginner to advanced development levels. Many of them are freely available on partimenti.org. The partimento method essentially teaches a set of bass motions and sequences (rule of the octave, circle of fifths progressions, etc), cadences (the punctuation points in this style of music), common paired bass-melody patterns called schemata (that are so ubiquitous in the historical style that scholars have given them names) and methods of introducing and treating dissonances. All of this can be thought of as a set of stock phrases that can be memorised much like the way one would memorise many example sentences when learning a language. [6], [7]
In order to become fluent in this keyboard improvisation style, about 500 - 1000 stock phrases of about 4-8 notes in length need to be learned and internalised before they can be used as interchangeable modules of musical phrases to be used in improvisation and composition. The end result sounds very exciting initially doesn’t it? The hard truth is that the amount of repetition at the keyboard needed to get there is mind-numbingly boring. Not something you would do unless you were an orphan desperate for employment. Not to mention you have to both be able to sing them and play them at the keyboard if you want employment at a fine establishment in Naples (more on the singing part soon).
Passive haptic feedback learning(PHFL) to the rescue!
Here is a clip from Thad Starner on how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEdr6iY6F-w
The video shows one of the CNN anchors learned to play the melody of Ode to Joy on the piano in half an hour while browsing his emails and doing his usual work related tasks. All the glove did was buzz the correct note sequence into his fingers. It's really fun to see how astounded the anchor is that he can play it all. Not very well of course but he does press the buttons in the right order. Which is exactly what PHFL learning can accomplish: teach the button presses in the right order.
In an early Georgia Tech experiment also led by Thad Starner, five musical novices required approximately three keyboard test attempts on average following passive haptic training, compared with seven during active training to be able to play with 90% accuracy. [8]
Source: Huang et al. [8]
More recent work combined passive rehearsal with active piano practice. A two-week study recruited 36 participants; its main analysis used 20 participants with complete, valid data. Passive rehearsal increased the modelled learning rate for note accuracy by 49.7%, but did not significantly improve rhythm learning. [9]
Two-handed learning has also been investigated directly. A 2015 study explored two-handed piano material and reported better passive-learning results when both hands were trained simultaneously rather than sequentially. [10]
So why don’t we have this tech commercially available yet?
My best guess is because, as jazz teacher Hal Galper likes to say “the instrument is an illusion” PHFL only teaches the correct button presses which for music is only half the battle of learning. The other half is audiation and singing. In other words learning to think (audiate) and speak (sing) in the language of music.
I know this from first hand experience, anything I can sing (even badly) I can play more or less, depending on how much I practiced the motor skills needed. I am not saying it's not possible to overcome the need for audiation, I am guilty of learning patterns I can’t audiate and perform them purely mechanically and I suspect many amateur shred guitarists are guilty of this too (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Experimental work also shows that auditory and motor imagery abilities influence musical learning and recall. [11] Research has also found an association between auditory imagery vividness and singing accuracy. [12] So while I am fairly convinced of this being the missing element based on anecdote and research, it is only fair to acknowledge that this would only be substantiated if I create the haptic learning interface I am proposing and tested it on multiple cohorts of untrained or amateur musicians.
So, where does the 2x learning speed come from exactly?
Well let’s sum up, what’ve explored so far:
What I have outlined so far gives us 3 memory anchors for memorising these musical phrases:
There is one additional memory anchor that is worth taking advantage of and that comes from the other part of the Neapolitan method: Hexachordal Solfége.
Inspired the partimento work of Robert Gjerdingen, Nicholas Baragwanath spent a great deal of time reconstructing the solfeggio tradition of the Neapolitan conservatories and through his book showed how they complement partimento study, teach melody and aid in memorisation by turning music into “words” in context. [13] The hexachordal approach is different from modern movable do in that the typical melodic paths to key changes are better accounted for by the hexachordal system by better preserving the intervallic relationships between melodic fragments. For example, within the appropriate hexachords, C–D–E and G–A–B can both be sung as do–re–mi. The same syllables can therefore identify a recurring interval pattern in different tonal locations.
By adding hexachordal solfege syllables to the stock patterns, I would be adding a fourth memory anchor element to the learning process. The orphans themselves actually first had to be able to read and speak the appropriate solfege syllables before they could do anything else and were able to do so in up to 9 different clefs (IIRC)!
So to summarise the learning method would like this:
This the cheapest haptic feedback glove (350 USD per pair + shipping) that I think is feasible for this:
Image source: https://www.bhaptics.com/en/shop/buy-tactsuit/tactglove-dk3/
Finger actuators would cue fingering patterns. Palm and wrist actuators could potentially indicate hand movements and leaps, although the usefulness of those signals would need testing and would be more relevant for the commercialisation part of the project: teaching popular piano pieces and the stock phrases of the romantic era composers (akin to what En Blanc et Noir shows with improvising waltzes).
Path to commercialisation and budget
If the prototype and testing on cohorts demonstrates sufficient benefit, I would establish a for-profit company and launch a Kickstarter campaign to finance the first commercial rollout.
The for-profit company would be domiciled either in the EU (I’m currently in Hungary) or the US - this is TBD.
In order to build an audience for the Kickstarter campaign I would share my learning progress on YouTube and other platforms to document progress with the method and (hopefully) demonstrate that the project is working.
I would run a Kickstarter campaign once the prototype and software are ready for beta testing to fund the first round of proper commercialisation.
At that point I would use the Kickstarter proceeds to recruit a full-time operations manager who has experience in supply chain management in order to lay the foundations for the full-fledged, global commercialisation of the interface.
I would hire additional dedicated staff as the product rolls out.
I would continue work on expanding the pattern library of stock phrases so that it encompasses the romantic era and add lessons for popular individual piano pieces. Further development would investigate whether haptic cues can support technical skills beyond fingering and hand movement, beginning with pedalling.
As the company expands I would move to a creative director role and let someone else do the day-to-day running of the company rather than myself (or cede the role to AI if we have AGI by that point).
My best guess of what the revenue model would like:
Budget
To implement the first phase of the project, which I expect to take 2 years I am seeking $235,000 in funding for the following:
Allocation
Amount
My salary and employment contributions
$130,000
Hardware, tester gloves, programming and AI-assisted development
$70,000
Hexachordal solfège, audio/MIDI and haptic specialist support
$35,000
Total
$235,000
Full funding would cover:
130k USD - 2 years’ worth of my salary (about 10% less than my current salary) and employee benefits (national healthcare and social contributions) so I can dedicate myself full time to the project in terms of both product development and building the audience for the product itself as well as raising awareness about the importance of shared sacredness experiences, once the development phase is concluded.
70k USD - prototyping and programming
35k consulting fees reserved for specialists on an as-needed basis:
Any legal fees and need for counsel will be covered by me.
Why fund the project and why me
Why fund the project?
If you look at the comment section on any video demonstrating PHFL even on the most basic melodies, you can find enthusiastic comments asking for when it will be commercially available. I think there is significant commercial potential in something like this because there are many people like myself who were not able to get over the initial hurdle of doing the mind-numbing amounts of repetitions needed to just learn a piece of music, let alone a complex piece of music. Furthermore, having studied piano and music theory with a few teachers I was never satisfied with the approach (aside from partimento) I was presented with and always came away with the impression that you either feel the music and are able to improvise something or you don’t and should slink back to your place among the mere mortals. Occasionally I have sat down at the piano and through the magic of my subconscious was able to produce fully formed fragments of pieces that were good enough to delight me but I am not able to improvise on command or in any proper musical context. I am sure that providing a clear path to becoming fluent in music, starting from the “source” of all the harmonic progressions that one can hear globally would also be something that many people would be interested in learning. Even before considering the societal goals I have laid out in the first part, on an individual level I think it would be incredibly enriching for people to be able to sit down and improvise something at the piano to relax, process their emotions or just do something creative.
From a technical standpoint, I think I have identified the missing element that previous use cases of PHFL didn’t account for and therefore never made it out of the prototype stage: they focused on teaching the motor skills needed to learn a piece of music as the primary objective when that is just one of the hurdles needed to overcome and the missing piece of the puzzle for anything musical is developing the necessary auditory imagination and ability to “think” and “speak” musically. I know I don’t have great studies backing up this concept and am relying more on andecdote but another point of reference I can offer is if you watch any interview with Jacob Collier, when he is explaining music theory concepts he often sings all the voices in a chord, and is able to sing the individual melodic movements between chords, demonstrating that he has a highly developed capacity for audiation. This may appear like the skill of some alien or musical genius but I am confident that amateurs who focus on singing as the primary means of learning music would be able to do this with all the phrases they know as well, even without perfect pitch. I can do it for certain small pieces of music I know and have internalised and I don’t have a music career.
If the proposed interface succeeds commercially, I would reinvest the profits in enabling as many people as possible to start communal singing gatherings where those learners who successfully completed the basic course would lead communal singing sessions and improvise accompaniment and preludes/postludes to the songs of their choosing. I think the commercial potential of an interface and learning tool like this would sustain the social goals of the project for at least 10 years, by which point hopefully over 500,000 people will have completed the basic program and will have started leading communal singing sessions. I know this is the most out there part of the idea, but I think this is also the most urgent.
Why fund me specifically to do it?
Having been a lurker and reader in the rationalist/EA sphere, I see how a lot of people are working on important problems related to AI and have always wanted to contribute somehow but because of life circumstances (my father is a diplomat, we moved around a lot) I didn’t develop the necessary foundations in math during childhood and am therefore unable to contribute to AI research in any form. I completed a masters in data science for business applications, hoping that this would give me a path to working on AI but I realised that I am too far behind mathematically and that it isn’t my true calling.
You may also ask why don’t I develop the prototype in my free time and start a kickstarter instead of asking for funding? This is the final route I am considering if there is no appetite for funding this as grant but this mean development would slow to crawl because I currently work in sustainable finance (helping central banks of developing countries design national sustainable finance taxonomies to attract international capital and foster green bond issuance) which is very taxing mentally and leaves with little left of over capacity to do additional work like this. Even with the help of AI for development, there are a lot of moving parts so the project would require my full attention for developing this as quickly as possible. I would also serve as chief guinea pig for the interface, which is additional time not spent on the development process itself. Finally, I am 37 years old, have a young daughter, who I cannot in good conscience take more time away from than I already do because of my job and therefore cannot pursue the usual path of a young founder sacrificing absolutely everything in pursuit of a goal while also working full time.
I am basically asking for 2 years of runway (I live in Hungary, so you could say this is cheap relative to American salary standards) to focus on this to the exclusion of all else professionally. I would happily commit my life to this project because it brings together so many facets of what I am passionate about and view it as a genuine contribution to humanity’s future. I am convinced that the method will work because amateurs without these sorts of aids have already attained delightful improvisation skills and the research backs up the validity of the approach I have outlined. Given the nature of the product, if it delivers the results in the promised amount of time or somewhat slower than anticipated, I think the likelihood of commercial success is very high and would happily reinvest the profits into enabling communal singing. I think it is only a matter of time until someone else puts these ideas together and succeeds commercially with a product like this (or creates a bunch of fake videos promising the moon and scamming people out of their money) closing the window on seizing first mover advantage with this product idea.
From a skills needed to complete the project standpoint I would say this about myself:
So yes, the snarky summary of my passionate outpourings here are essentially I am a generalist project manager with a vision for a product that I hope will save the world from the looming AI-driven meaning crisis through bringing people to sing.
If you made it this far, first of all thank you! I really appreciate you reading through my lengthy ramblings. As I wrote in the beginning, I would really appreciate any comments, criticism or if you think my proposal is worthwhile, please contribute funding for the project on manifund.org or recommend it someone who would be interested.
https://manifund.org/projects/restoring-shared-sacredness-experience-by-developing-a-haptic-feedback-interface
Appendix: Miscellaneous musings
Let’s say you are right about all of the above: what will people sing?
This is admittedly something I don’t have a great answer to. My starting point would be the “top 40” hymns that Christian faiths of various types have in rotation but I am not by any means wedded to idea of using Christian texts and I fully admit is not likely to be appropriate for other cultures that don’t have any European roots or influence or want to dispense with said influence because of their connection to colonialism. My best guess is that while secular Filipinos may be happy to sing Christian hymns, Chinese or Japanese people may much rather choose some other source text that can be the object of shared sacredness used for singing. Ultimately I would leave it up to the community organisers to decide on what people should sing together. The top 40 hymns would be the starting point and the teaching tool for a learner interested in doing communal singing as a community service. They can apply the lessons learned to any other melody.
Why do you think Common Practice Period harmony is appropriate for everyone around the world? Isn’t it presumptuous to think that just because you find the harmonic progressions and stock melodic phrases appropriate for triggering shared sacredness that this will work for everyone else?
On its surface yes, but this interpretation bakes in the assumption that positively responding to the harmonic possibilities inherent in the harmonic series, which I would argue is the basis of all music, is an entirely culturally determined phenomenon and not one rooted in physics and our anatomy. To me this is like claiming that focusing on increasing the sense of umami in cooking is a Japanese cultural phenomenon rather than an inherent property of how our taste buds responds to certain foods - I am aware of conflicting studies related the universality of the harmonic series, I will address at the end
Nevertheless here’s my best guess for justifying the universality of the harmonic series:
Why the historical style is appropriate for triggering shared sacredness: the harmonic language of classical music has a distinct quality of its own that differentiates it from the more modern styles of music and based on revealed preferences still has cultural significance in terms of shared sacredness. Stated plainly, in moments of great difficulty like funerals or significant life moments like marriages many people still reach for this style of music for their wedding procession or wake. National anthems are mostly marches written in this style. Many movies also use modernised variations of its harmonic language. Furthermore this style, I would argue, more than any other, is focused on exploiting the properties of the harmonic series which grounds its aesthetic sensibilities in the physical properties of sound and its practices beyond just expressiveness also place a strong emphasis on beauty (a subjective and overburdened word, I know). Beauty, I would posit, is also a necessary part of fostering shared sacredness.
Why improvisation: If the goal is communal singing, why not teach fixed accompaniments to a predetermined repertoire? My hypothesis is that improvisation would help gatherings remain responsive and musically engaging over time. Historical musicians frequently produced or adapted music for recurring services. I think variation could help sustain interest, while the awareness that music is being created live could heighten engagement. A performer need not have extraordinary skills to make a live improvisation compelling. Gjerdingen has also described the positive response to his own church improvisations, despite his modest assessment of his performing ability.
Reddit threads illustrating despondency in response to AI development: the selected threads are only anecdotal evidence but imply a growing trend.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1uzfvrq/how_to_find_joy_in_modern_software_development/
This employed developer describes losing enjoyment in AI-led work and subsequently recovering it by taking a more active role in implementation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programmer/comments/1uxgpxx/5_years_dev_feeling_dreadful_due_to_ai_usage/
Programmer feeling disconnected from their work
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1rfzorr/lost_all_motivation_to_create_naturally_being/
Visual artist losing sense of purpose due to image generation algorithms (the earliest victims of AI development)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Artists/comments/1s2lf7c/ive_been_drawing_for_15_years_last_year_i_almost/
“Not a creative block. Something worse - a crisis of purpose.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1jsbkh3/ai_art_is_now_prolific_in_the_professional_world/
“It’s to the point I’m now doing paint overs and edits of ai generated art rather than actually painting.”
References
[1] The New York Times. When A.I. Comes for Your Purpose in Life. The Daily. Interview clip.
[2] Pizarro, J. J., et al. (2022). Emotional processes, collective behavior, and social movements: A meta-analytic review of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 974683. Article.
[3] Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 2, 150221. Article.
[4] Weinstein, D., Launay, J., Pearce, E., Dunbar, R. I. M., & Stewart, L. (2016). Group music performance causes elevated pain thresholds and social bonding in small and large groups of singers. Evolution and Human Behavior, 37, 152–158. Article.
[5] Coulton, S., Clift, S., Skingley, A., & Rodriguez, J. (2015). Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of community singing on mental health-related quality of life of older people: Randomised controlled trial. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 207, 250–255. Article.
[6] Gjerdingen, R. O. (Ed.). Monuments of Partimenti and Solfeggi. Collection and editorial statement. See also Fenaroli’s Book III.
[7] Mortensen, J. J. (2023). Improvising fugue: A method for keyboard artists. Oxford University Press. Book.
[8] Huang, K., et al. (2010). Mobile music touch: Mobile tactile stimulation for passive learning. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Article. Full text.
[9] Gemicioglu, T., et al. (2024). Passive haptic rehearsal for augmented piano learning in the wild. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 8(4), Article 187. Article.
[10] Seim, C., Estes, T., & Starner, T. (2015). Towards passive haptic learning of piano songs. IEEE World Haptics Conference, 445–450. Full text.
[11] Brown, R. M., & Palmer, C. (2013). Auditory and motor imagery modulate learning in music performance. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 320. Article.
[12] Pfordresher, P. Q., & Halpern, A. R. (2013). Auditory imagery and the poor-pitch singer. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Article.
[13] Baragwanath, N. (2020). The solfeggio tradition: A forgotten art of melody in the long eighteenth century. Oxford University Press. Book.