In which Pierre Schaeffer admits that Musique Concrete is not music, and that he has never been a real musician. Ouch… I wonder if he knows there are internet music genres that have not only kept the ideas of Musique Concrete alive, but made them culturally relevant and musically valuable in a way that he and other 20th century “serious” musical thinkers never managed to. Some of the more obscure vaporwave subgenres are basically turntable pieces.
You don't have to look as far as obscure internet music genres, though. Musique Concrete set the very basis for sound design and the art of sampling! Today, artists manipulate recorded sounds in software, instead of splicing magnetic tapes, but the fundamental principles are still the same. Most people are not aware to which extend modern music has been (indirectly) shaped by experimental electronic music composers of the 1950s. Its influence can not be overstated.
BTW, there are quite a few composers that have continued the French tradition of Musique Concrete will into the 21st century, most notably Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani and Francois Bayle.
I tend to think of it as plants/trees. It starts from a single point, the main routine, and branches out its behavior over time. Branches get pruned, abandoned, merged, coopted to optimize for the nutrient gradient. I especially like the “roots” analogy i.e. it draws its strength from the parts that are hidden and difficult to assess by typical observation.
yes, but aren't we the creative gardeners/pollinators? Not to mention that software is naturally more dynamic and cross-compatible than real plants, given to all manners of chaotic mutations and grafting.
A happy, independent employee is a creative employee, and if your business is such a heavy monopoly that it’s in your interest (if not your primary market strategy) to arrest and interrupt the development of competitive alternatives, keeping your employees in cycles of misery (long commutes, oral culture heavy on tribal knowledge and who-you-know) is no longer a “tradeoff” to be balanced, it’s how you keep competition from cropping up.
Yes, 22 years ago. And while they’ve expanded some plugin features, astonishingly little has changed/improved about the base Live since then. Even minor quality-of-life features like setting a default audio interface is not even on the roadmap for 22 years.
I think part of that is probably the clientele, musicians aren’t exactly famous for asking for more from their tools. Maybe I’m a grump for not thinking that “session view vs arrangement view” (which is really a bare minimum digital mimicry of the popular music making interfaces of the 20th century: the magnetic tape and a vinyl loop) is enough as the dominant paradigm for music making in a world now driven by global, recursive, abstract navigation of/ negotiation with interconnected, automated logic processes…
But I don't wanna be sarcastic.
It’s an ideal, and like any ideal we manage to capture in a six-letter word, 99% will get it completely backwards.
For example, everyone knows and agrees with the value of the phrase “think outside the box,” but only a minority ever recognizes “the box” they should be thinking outside of, and even fewer bother to fully apply the wisdom by making a habit out of finding the box that’s currently holding them at any given moment.
I applied for summer 24, and got a less-than-thoughtful response bordering on personally insulting (“TL;DR - why don’t you go back to your day job?”). I won’t be applying anymore.
Funny thing is, I didn’t even want to hear back - I just like to fill out the application as a writing exercise, to help me get a snapshot of my own thinking around what I’m building.
I guess it’s stressful reading all those applications, but why respond if all you have to say is “I don’t believe you”? Silence will do just fine; I’m aware that people don’t believe me - it’s called a startup, right?
(Anyways, nbd, apologies for the tangential rant, love the website)
So you are complaining that you filled out an application and they didn't ghost you? And actually offered some meaningful advice even though you were rejected?
> got a less-than-thoughtful response bordering on personally insulting
> I didn’t even want to hear back - I just like to fill out the application as a writing exercise
You admittedly wasted their time with an unserious application "as a writing exercise," and you're upset because they actually took it seriously and took the time to properly respond to it with honesty instead of giving you a cookie-cutter rejection?
Just because I had little expectation of hearing back doesn’t mean my application was unserious. It was a full length application, written over multiple days, about the future direction of my business, which already has revenue.
I appreciate your perspective, but I thoroughly disagree. Silence is always the worst response: it signals that you aren't even worth the courtesy to be responded to. I'll take a borderline-personally-insulting response over silence any day of the week. That gives me the ability to analyze the responder's thinking (after I'm over the hit to my ego) and see whether I believe the responder has a point or not.
I agree. I've only heard silence applying twice. Yet all the YC messaging is "apply again!" I'm curious if they ever consider the people who have heard nothing from them for a decade, when they talk about why you should apply.
That sounds so unlike the YC partners I know that I have to wonder whether you correctly interpreted the response.
The fact that you got a specific message indicates that someone at YC saw potential in your application and was hoping to help you improve it. The subtext of those messages is "help us get to yes".
In my experience they would never say things like "why don't you go back to your day job" or "I don't believe you" or anything in that ballpark. That's just not the culture of how YC treats founders—quite the opposite. Besides that, insulting applicants would obviously go against YC's own interests.
I appreciate the insider perspective; my faith in YC was exactly why I was so dumbfounded. Me and my cofounder spent quite a bit of time speculating, and wrote a substantial, thoughtful response. Ignored and rejected.
I wanna make clear again that I’m not bitter about this, it was just odd. And counterproductive.
I put a lot of effort into a YC application in 2019 and got a generic form letter rejection. If I had gotten any indication anyone had actually looked at it, I might consider applying again, but as it stands, I probably won't.
> I just like to fill out the application as a writing exercise, to help me get a snapshot of my own thinking around what I’m building.
I think that's quite rude and disrespectful in itself. People do actually need to read that, and think about it, and then maybe provide feedback on it.
Of course applying conveys no obligation to follow through and you can always change your mind, but if you never intend to do so, then you shouldn't be applying.
> I didn’t even want to hear back - I just like to fill out the application as a writing exercise, to help me get a snapshot of my own thinking around what I’m building.
When someone submits an application to YC, asking to be considered, do you think it's reasonable for YC to expect that submission to be in good faith -- that the person would like to pursue next steps if YC is interested?
Do you think they sensed that your application wasn't a genuine application, and that affected their response?
> got a less-than-thoughtful response bordering on personally insulting (“TL;DR - why don’t you go back to your day job?”)
Is that a literal quote of something someone responded to you, or is it an interpretation of the gist of the response?
how about actually quoting the email instead of summarizing? if the advice was unhelpful, or rude (as you seem to be implying), why not let the rest of judge for ourselves? And maintaining a “day job” is not a mark of shame or an insult, it’s a way of maintaining low burn rate at the expense of less time to work on the startup. Whether thats the optimal scenario depends on where you are in terms of solving the problem that you’re working on, but adding yc/vc money does not magically help you find product-market fit, it just gives your more time each week to work on it. But unless what you’re doing seems to be getting you closer to that point, why not work on it and hone your process while keeping the day job?
The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the long term. It’s only when managerial types get involved the need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing that nothing of value is lost.
> The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want [...]
I'd like to offer a more moderate option--or perhaps just radical in a different direction.
Artists would like to make a living, and the "deception" comes from how that slogan is used to falsely present the powers-that-be as able, willing, and actively delivering on that goal.
Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists don’t want to make a living. My point is that, too often, the “artists need to make a living too” narrative is used by the system that exploits artists.
Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be rephrased like:
"Artists do want to make a living, however there's a nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always counterproductive, at least when it comes to the interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."
I self-publish my books. The audience is decent, I publish shortened audiobook versions for free, but frankly, I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense.
> I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense.
Having something that is paper doesn't mean that no one else can print them cheaply and flood the market. While it might not be at your expense - it certainly isn't something that is making you any money.
I don't self-publish on Amazon, though. I print my books in a local printing shop and sell them using my e-shop (Wordpress for blog, Woocommerce for e-shop).
I stopped self-publishing my books, because as soon as I offered PDFs to those who purchased my paper books the sales of printed copies tanked. Then nobody wanted to pay for PDFs and Amazon screwed my KDP sales (banned my book). The readers felt entitled to free copies and free consultation on the subject of the book. It's really depressing how entitled people feel to other people's creative output or knowledge.
It's important to note who is pushing the deception, here. Creative industry is composed of both labor (artists) and capital (publishers). I file artists under labor because their valuable economic resource is time. They make money when people pay them to make art. Unauthorized copying has harms, but the primary effect is that artists have to expect to be paid money up-front, since the only way they get profit participation on the sale of copies is if there's a strictly enforced set of laws to grant a monopoly on copying. That being said, money up-front is still a very common way for artists to get paid, so "artists need to make a living" is a half-truth.
Paying per-copy and agreeing not to copy for some fixed period is more consumer friendly than, say, everyone pooling their money into a giant one-and-done Kickstarter and just trusting that the end result will be good. If your work can be published serially, then something like Patreon might work, but that's impractical for a lot of larger projects. The consumer unfriendliness manifests in the form of risk: who is out the money if something turns out to suck, or worse, doesn't even get made. The traditional "sell copies with a monopoly" model means that if I don't like a work, I just don't buy it. We have reviews to inform people if a thing is good or not, but you can't review a finished work based off the Kickstart campaign. This results in a market dominated by scams of varying degrees, customers who are hesitant to put money into campaigns that might not produce, and artists that can only really make the business model work if they have a lot of social capital and reputation to stake.
I mentioned fancy capitalist words like "risk" and "market", so let's talk about the capitalist side of the business: the publishers. Or "managerial types", as it were. They do not make their money from selling the service of creating art, they make money from selling art that has already been made, which is capital. When Napster was telling people to stop paying for music and just steal it, the publishers shat their pants. An embarrassingly large part of the music business at the time was reissuing old acts on CD[0][1], and even new acts had to sell albums, which is why 90s listeners had to deal with a flood of albums with one good song and 10 terrible ones.
It's specifically the capitalist side of the business that got screwed over the hardest by Napster. What screwed over artists was Spotify, which made music profitable again for the capitalists by turning it into a subscription. A music Boomer[2] accurately summed this up as a faucet pouring water straight into a drain. This is the best way to devalue artists, because it doesn't matter what songs the artists make - just that the publishers control the flow of the songs.
The Spotify mentality has percolated into basically every other form of media over the last decade. It's why you will own nothing and be 'happy', and why every publisher CEO has a boner for generative AI, even as their artists are screaming their heads off about being scraped. Publishers have nominally been stolen from as well, but they don't care, because the theft is in their benefit[3]. It's the exact opposite of the Napster situation. What matters is not what will benefit the artists, nor what the law says. What matters is what will make them richer.
[0] This is also why the SPARS code was a thing for a few years - to distinguish between new recordings made for CD and reissues riding the hype of digital music.
[1] Metallica also found themselves caught on the back foot, mainly because they found out Napster users were trading pre-release soundtracks they'd made. Their reaction made them look like suits for a while, because Metallica had gotten popular through unlicensed copying, though I don't think this read was entirely fair.
If a miraculous new technology that helps individuals grok any conceivable topic has “no economic impact,” you should probably question how you measure of economic impact - perhaps even your very definition of the economy, the nature of human labor and collaboration. Fundamental changes at the base of the hierarchy will always escape the attention of high level managerial class, because the one thing they’re never taught to do is to consider the possibility that their inherited power structure may become irrelevant.
My (snarky) point is that I do not think LLMs have dramatically enabled the average person to grok (to gain a deep and intuitive understanding of) new topics, because I haven't observed the corresponding sea-change in (mostly online) people that I would expect to go with that.
To offer a competing hypothesis: LLMs are merely augmenting or replacing other routes that people may take to acquire facile knowledge. In addition, the fundamental way those tools operate limits them to imparting facile knowledge.
Arguably, but imho the difference between search engines and GPTs is akin to punch card coding vs modern IDE - theoretically the same activity, vastly different in practice.
For generating output, sure, but when it comes to "helping individuals grok any conceivable topic" like the original comment said, you're still bottlenecked by how fast you can read and understand text, so it won't make as much difference there.
Plus, from my experience, the more obscure topics, which are not easy to google, also tend to suffer the most from hallucinations when using LLMs. The topics which ChatGPT can explain perfectly usually have well-written explanations at the top of search results too.
I haven't read the book, but I think "concrete zoos," for humans, is more metaphorical than literal. Humans find comfort in much wider ranges of environment. If it were available, I'm sure many would find spaceships to be comforting environments.
IMO, the problem is that we're at this stage of social development, where capitalism, and the antiquated culture of jobs, management and deadline, is actively incentivized to limit human potential and creativity. Why? Because that's where competition comes from.
i'm not a flaming activist or anything (yet), and i appreciate the benefit of their work, but they really told us we can't pirate anything they make, and then proceeded to pirate everything we made.
i'm not a luddite, or a "hippie". i'm going to keep paying for my GPT-N+1. I just want it in writing that if they can pirate everything, so can you and I. It's only fair.
As far as I'm aware, the people telling us not to pirate content are the people currently suing OpenAI for (allegedly) using pirated content to train their models.
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