28 karma · joined October 24, 2021
That the article's abstract and researchers are willing to claim the opposite despite their own evidence : this smells like butt-hurt denial.
The writing technique of the baroque era revolved around line conductions that dodged harsh-sounding intervals in the temperament of the time.
Nowadays, we tune using equal temperament. Equal temperament doesn't have harsh-sounding intervals (except flat 9th on a major chord), which makes classical writing technique obsolete.
The ui design and the business model always reflected that prerogative: poor discoverability, poor user-favorites, poor classification, absolutely no blobs, credits or liner notes. An artist uploading is just another entry in the database - the service sells access to the DB, it doesn't sell music. By extension, the user is also more and more a "yet another entry" in the whole process of "consuming" the data.
It's just dehumanizing, yet consumers would rather this than having to deal with the friction of purchasing records (which are outrageously expensive, which also points to the record industry's responsibility in this...) or pirating under they eye of copyright trolls. Long story short: they'll fail, sooner or later.
About NYT withholding documents: well, that's just another nail in the coffin of the paper's credibility, along with yet another betrayal of the trust they got from WL...
Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to graduate. If professors start playing tough-graders and put a student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a future to the kid. I definitely had some heated discussions with older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance). Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.