readymade

Seeing as though deep structure is by definition unobservable in its direct form, it would be kind of strange to tackle that before building up a lexicon. A more interesting question, IMO, is whether they even have a deep structure.

Nice! Looking forward to seeing where this leads :)

I mean, what would the priors look like for this dude?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZBmELy1Dc

Without a more cross-cultural study this falls more into the domain of cultural bias (still interesting) than what the title suggests. I'd love to see what the results look like incorporating data from cultures whose musical traditions are rhythmically complex and better documented. Godfried Toussaint's work on Euclidean Rhythms (http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf) makes for a pretty convincing survey of "evenly spaced" beat distribution, albeit sometimes over uneven lengths. This doesn't even get into things like the polyrhythm and syncopation in much African music or the complex rhythmic cycles found in Indian percussion.

I have mild Tourette's, which has thankfully gotten milder in adulthood. It was the most pronounced in grade school. Minor facial tics, the occasional head jerk, and some subvocalized echolalia that took me years to be able to notice myself doing. I'm kind of shocked it's still so misunderstood by society at large.

The sneeze analogy is a good one. Or an itch that you're trying not to scratch.

You'd be surprised how many people play live with 1/8" jacks. It's also a useful backup when someone spills beer on your RME Fireface.

Objective-C also uses ARC by default, and that's been the case for several years now. In any event, avoiding retain cycles is relatively straightforward and most iOS devs I know would agree that the low memory overhead and lack of GC pauses are worth the occasional extra effort of weak references.

I do think, as one of the commenters on the original thread suggests, that some of the blame lies with the often latent relationship audio software companies have with Apple's release cycle. Ideally QA begins while the OS update is still in beta. This varies quite a bit from company to company, but it's not something to sweep under the rug. The news of audio drop out issues (poison to live performers) persisting through multiple major versions is horrifying though.

Some of us happen to think that no GC is a good thing, in Obj-C's case. Swift eschews it as well.

I studied theoretical linguistics through the graduate level and it wasn't until rather late in my schooling that I even began to hear of competing frameworks such as HPSG or LFG, and much of it in passing. There was no mention of them in the coursework, and the tendency of faculty to sell modern linguistics as a hard science gave the impression that we were learning a standard approach that had a provable empirical edge and broad scientific consensus. Otherwise, why would it be called "Extended Standard Theory"?

While I know that part of the pedagogy was giving students a grounding in dominant strains of formalism (in North American circles anyway), at times I felt a bit cheated out of a broader perspective.

Of course in practice many of the competing frameworks are weakly equivalent in terms of their descriptive power and the differences come down more to things like biological plausibility, computational complexity, how strongly you interpret the claims of UG, whether you have any interest in building tractable computational implementations, and so on. Or how you feel about the proliferation of empty functional categories, which was what bothered me the most from an empirical point of view.

As the foundational figure in modern Linguistics Chomsky has had an outsized role in shaping the field, some of it good and some bad. IMHO the usefulness of mainstream generative grammar has waned since the 70s or so in terms of its applicability to engineering and empirical rigor. But it remains dominant, in part due to his influence and the logical conclusions one draws from a strong interpretation of Universal Grammar. Since much of that foundation is ultimately philosophical, there are bound to be challenges from the field now and again, and acolytes of the Chomskyan school are likely to attack them ferociously. It will probably be a few decades before there's a major shift.

Wow

If the President is vowing to veto it, you can probably rest assured it's more than just "normal machinations of the government", as long as that implies "nothing to be concerned about".

Wherein a bunch of privileged white men all agree that they were never privileged all along.

Agreed, I'm kind of shocked people aren't seeing this for what it is.

Like the much ballyhooed open office plan, or the typical "we don't track vacation time" policy in modern startups, the real bottom line, so to speak, is always the bottom line.

It may very well be that employees who don't take vacations are more productive, overall than those who do. But by placing the burden of self-repair entirely on the employee, on their personal time and dime, the employer effectively washes its hands of the matter. If we take this article to its logical conclusion, burnout is your own fault, even in the face of pathological organizational structures, workloads, etc. That's an outward radiation of risk and responsibility par for the course in the new economy.

What's the name of your company?

It's funny how tech companies are making money from the distribution of this supposedly valueless content that the market supposedly has no demand for.

Not at all. Rather, it's that your heuristic of "providing value" breaks down spectacularly in the face of even the most casual observations of consumer demand. Whether value is provided by copying bits is arguable, that artists add value to society is not even worth debating. Producing an album is bespoke labor as well, just work that, as such, typically goes uncompensated. And to the extent that these are merely symptoms of a market in flux, as opposed to the stratifications of a class system, it undermines that analysis to make the tired assertion that poverty wages are the price one pays for "following one's passion" (albeit very specific passions).

In any event, I suspect that you don't know many "so-called artists". May you have a long and prosperous career, and retire young before the market value for your passions is reduced to zero.

There's such a pervasive notion, especially among techies and other white collar types, that artists and musicians either don't deserve a good living or should be happy just to get to do what they do, regardless of income. It's a tremendous sense of entitlement on the one hand, to express contempt for the individual while expecting unlimited access to their work. I believe Astra Taylor made an interesting point about how this idea of the artist as the mandatorily broke but (ideally) self-fulfilled creator is also increasingly extended as a metaphor in recent business press when discussing the plight of graduates, interns and freelancers.

And the parent thread will?

Here's another "fun" example. Some of our early uses of the term were to describe the KKK, which was and remains a terrorist organization par excellence. Except that the clandestine nature of the group, and thus the need for its members to lead superficially normal lives within the community, does not lend itself to claiming responsibility for attacks in the sense we associate with jihadist organizations. A classic example is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, which was perpetrated. The communities targeted by Klan members don't need to know exactly who was responsible for the violence to have its intended effect.

Aside from the usual difficulties in defining a word so politically loaded, this is a problematic heuristic. The Pan Am Flight 103 bombing was claimed by at least three groups, before being traced back to Libya. Gaddafi, for his part, didn't acknowledge responsibility until 2003.

For real?

"According to Suraiya Faroqhi, lack of interest and religious reasons were among the reasons for the slow adoption of the printing press outside Europe: Thus, the printing of Arabic, after encountering strong opposition by Muslim legal scholars and the manuscript scribes, remained prohibited in the Ottoman empire between 1483 and 1729, initially even on penalty of death,[4][5] while some movable Arabic type printing was done by Pope Julius II (1503−1512) for distribution among Middle Eastern Christians,[6] and the oldest Qur’an printed with movable type was produced in Venice in 1537/1538 for the Ottoman market."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...)

Cheers, thanks for the insight! :)

A bit OT, but how are you liking the UAD stuff? I know a few folks who have made the leap and feel pretty happy with it. Been thinking of snagging one of the new Apollos.

Totally with you on the analog summing. It's kind of funny that people love the sound so much, an analog summing mixer often finds its way into the mastering process even if the original production was all digital.

I didn't necessarily think you were being unfair to "rich people", I just don't buy the idea that only the wealthy have access to non-virtual instruments. It might make the difference between a new(er) and a used car for someone on a budget, but that's old hat. Musicians have been saving up to buy gear for generations.

Choice of instrument is a very personal decision, and of course there are practical considerations (I'm not going to be lugging an acoustic piano on stage any time soon). If you like virtual instruments and usb controllers best, more power to you.

For many modular synth enthusiasts the interface is actually primary, over other considerations such as the mechanism of synthesis and sound. A growing number of modules are digital, with only the control voltage I/O in the analog domain. For these the appeal is still the same; something you touch with your hands, immediacy, freedom from the tyrrany of endless options, something you can't check Facebook on, etc. Speaking for myself, I feel like I'm using a different part of my brain when I plug a cable into a physical jack as opposed to dragging a virtual cable across a plate of glass. That's not even to get into the question of how it sounds, which is still relevant. I disagree with your characterization of acoustic piano vs digital sampling, although it's not really worth getting into the nuances here.

I really don't understand the "rich people" sentiment at all. You've already mentioned guitars, but it's true for pretty much any traditional instrument – don't even get me started on the money string players are willing to spend on just their bows alone. That doesn't mean violinists are all independently wealthy, they just have different priorities. If anything, hardware synths are much cheaper now in real dollars than they were during their vintage heyday. For instance, the 1973 Moog catalog lists their VCO module at $320. In today's terms that's nearly $1800 for one lousy oscillator!

Personally I use both hardware and software, and appreciate the strengths of both. It's nice that modern computers let you do so much so cheaply, but I don't want to use SuperCollider or PD to emulate an analog synth any more than I want to replace my upright piano with a digital keyboard.