How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood | Hacker News Reader

How Arnold Schoenberg changed Hollywood

newyorker.com

69 pointstintinnabula29 comments

My brain auto corrected it to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sometimes I wonder if the human brain is just another LLM.

Mine as well. I had 3/4 of a story written out to my mental scratch pad before this comment even loaded.

No, because you have the self-awareness to understand your mistake in context, rather than accepting "Arnold Schwarzenegger" because the syntax of the statement is still valid.

> Sometimes I wonder if the human brain is just another LLM

The brain is a lot about predicting situations/telling you what comes next and how to adjust your behavior to that prediction - i guess that is the common part with the LLM. The difference is that the LLM is predicting the most likely word, while the brain is matching a given situation/frame to your knowledge and past experience - it's about understanding stuff on a different level.

what i still don't get is how predicting the next word can come up with an answer that actually makes sense most of the time, that came as a big surprise to me...

I also wonder if it surprised even the AI Researchers/Developers working on OpenAI.

Maybe they were just trying to tweak things and it surprisingly turned out bigger than they had imagined.

I had an interesting conversation with google bard/gemini about this topic. Here is the link to the conversation: https://g.co/gemini/share/67da9e441ad9 Fascinating stuff...

my notes of what i am learning in the process of these discussions: https://github.com/MoserMichael/my-notes/blob/master/talking...

I would be careful about "interesting conversations" in which your interlocutor starts every single response with insincere flattery and confirmation. The link you posted reads like a chat with a sociopath sycophant that's try to get you involved in a pyramid scheme.

"You're on to something!", "You're absolutely right.", "You've got it exactly right!", "Your penis is so large and hard, yet supple!", "I'm extremely excited about anything you post to me!"

it is a bit of a confirmation bias machine. still it gives better leads for learning about a subject (better results than just searching with google)

I also fancy that you can talk with the machine about itself, to me that is still having some degree of novelty.

Maybe because I use ChatGPT-4 a lot I find ChatGPT-4 responses more credible than Gemini/Bard. I personally feel Gemini that is trying hard to not offend me and is also trying to sugarcoat the truth. It also feels kind of half baked.

++1

me too

I especially enjoyed his work in Honan the Librarian and Discriminator 2.

Until you mentioned this, I thought it was about Arnold Schwarzenegger

I got into Schoenberg after listening to an amazing electronic album from 2000, Betrieb by Ekkehard Ehlers, in which he repurposes Schoenberg's music (and Ives too). Still sounds incredible after 24 years. https://ekkehardehlers.bandcamp.com/album/betrieb

It seems that while Schoenberg was highly respected by fellow professionals, he had a somewhat more difficult time with executives.

There's an anecdote that some influential admirers got Schoenberg an audience with Louis B. Mayer, who received him, saying: „I'm a great admirer of your lovely music.“ Schoenberg answered „My music ISN'T lovely“, and stormed out of the meeting.

That is great anecdote. I have been trying to get into Schoenberg for about 30 years now and besides for Yuja Wang playing his Piano Suite I continue to fail.

The thing that interests me in your comment is why would you try for thirty years to "get into" something? Or do you mean you don't much care for his music, but no rush in jumping to conclusions...

Do you care for Berg or Webern, by any chance? (Or Stravinsky's serial music for that matter)

I'm not surprised. If I understand his 12-tone system correctly, you need to use each tone equally frequently throughout the piece. But that is the musical equivalent of white noise, or the the equivalent of saying that a novel needs to use all words equally frequently. In order to convey information the content needs to be distinctly more frequent.

Try Violin Concerto, Op. 36 by Hilary Hahn & the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

https://archive.md/iGI5A

The more I dug into it, the more movie soundtracks were all rooted in the Vienna scene, with Wagner at the base.

Max Steiner and Erich Korngold are for me better examples of this influence, since Steiner in particular pretty much invented the first modern film score with King Kong.

Very slightly relevant, since he IS a film scorer:

Danny Elfman, he of Oingo Boingo as well as film music, wrote a violin concerto and has a concert in San Jose in a few weeks:

https://www.dannyelfman.com/events-posts/san-jose-ca-violin-...

Interesting question: what's more common, classical --> pop, or the other direction?

Before you answer too quickly:

Paul McCartney

Billie Joel

Stewart Copeland

Danny Elfman

But anyway, probably classical --> pop is more common.

I'd guess a similar artist --> designer flow as one is more lucrative financially.

Follow the money as they say.

I suspect based simply on number of musicians, it's opposite. Many popular-music performers and songwriters have classical training, and take on classical themes. Classical music is single-digit shares of total music industry revenues, around 1--3%.[1]

That said, music is a form of communication, and there is and always has been a tremendous amount of cross-fertilisation and inspiration from other forms, whether you're talking traditional melodies adopted in classical composition (Dvorak's Slavonic dances, for example), Gershwin adopting jazz (Rhapsody in Blue) or western music (Copeland in Rodeo), or popular music taking up themes from classical works (Sting's "I hope the Russians Love Their Children Too" quoting Prokovief's Lieutenant Kije, the Beatles quoting Beathoven's "Ode to Joy" in "All You Need is Love", and Led Zepplin's quoting from Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" in "Kashmir").

As well as, of course, wholesale popular adaptations of classical music and vice versa, and performing and composing in different genres.

____________________________

Notes:

1. <https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/popular-classical-music-...>

Korngold Symphony 1 in F# Major, the 2nd movement really sounds like John Williams when the horns come in.

https://youtu.be/N8mI6MvsWZA?si=vf6L1AC_Y4vRZBXg&t=1080

Also, Hanson's 2nd Symphony, 3rd Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abKXHeG0u6I&t=1267s

i got the impression that atonal music is less commonly used in recent movies, past decades made more use of it, is that true? Now they still use it at moments of tension, but less frequently in other scenes.

i wonder if that is done in order to appeal/be accessible to a younger audience (that's where the movie going audience is)

I was going to bring up Jonny Greenwood's great score for There Will Be Blood and then remembered it was released nearly two decades ago. Still, a tremendous modern score that adds immeasurably to the end result.

I think quite a lot about movies has changed to appeal to a younger audience.

The Oppenheimer score

For what it's worth, his grandson, Randy (mentioned in the article), is a terrible genealogist. He amassed large quantities of unverified data, with dubious sourcing, and passes it off as legit. He also has a reputation in the genealogy community for taking other people's work with credit.

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