Furthermore, there are many intangible qualities of the way an instrument resonates and feels while playing that often contributes more to the better playing than the raw sound itself. It’s strange to say but instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound
I understand what you're getting at, and I can appreciate it, but it's also kind of bullshit. You say "instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound" - well, if that's the case, then people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests, which so far they basically haven't.
A relationship with an instrument takes time. There are more factors than the mechanical use of an instrument, our hands and bodies feel things on subconscious levels, leading to emergent qualities that don’t fit neatly into “sounds better or worse”. For musicians and artists this is a no brainer, for those that haven’t experienced this I understand why you are incredulous but it doesn’t mean it is a throwaway factor.
But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.
I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
I certainly appreciate all the emotions and culture that go into making beautiful music on a cello. But it's important to separate that placebo affect ("I think it sounds better because I know it's a Strad"), from the real physical differences, because people have gone to great lengths to find "the secret of Strad": was it his varnish, the Maunder Minimum, an extended drought, special wood treatment to prevent woodworm, etc. etc. Except time and time again we find there is no "Strad secret", beyond his expert craftsmanship, attention to detail, and fundamental changes he made to the shape of the plates of his instruments compared to his predecessors.
>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?
edit: by the way
>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.
I guess another way of putting it would be that the aura of an instrument that elicits a more sentimental playing of it by the musician is sort of not really interesting or relevant because you can just lie about any instrument to elicit it.
No, I am not talking about aura at all, I'm just saying that the physical, measurable sound that an instrument produces in response to being played, physically and measurably, could have more subtle effects on artistic performance (as a consequence of the physical vibrations of the object and the way those vibrations respond to the player and vice versa) than those that could be elided in an afternoon of A/B-testing under the banner of "stradivarius myth DEBUNKED".
In controlled tests the instruments are played by highly skilled musicians (usually the ones that possess them) but they don't know which instrument they are playing. Musicians cannot perfectly reproduce their performance so statistical methods are used to separate the effect from the noise, just like every other scientific experiment.
There have been both. Here is a famous example from around 1977 I believe that was broadcast on the BBC (I knew of this example but this is the first time I actually found a recording of the broadcast): https://www.baroquemusic.org/violincomparison.html . The violinist playing is Manoug Parikian, who presumably knew which instrument was which, and neither Isaac Stern nor Pinchas Zukerman (both world class soloists) nor Charles Beare (a famous luthier described as "the most esteemed authenticator in the world" by the NYTimes) could identify which violin was which.
You’re going to run into a bunch of trouble using “soul” for anything. It serves a purpose but that’s usually either laziness, inability to measure some physical quality or a placebo effect. Generally pointing that out will end up putting someone in the pedant bucket but I’m risking it.
It is none of those things despite being not easy to measure. There are many phenomena not empirically proven that science still mentions and theorizes about. The quantum theory of cognition points to something like a soul mattering more than it used to for example. There are countless scientific discussions involving unknown unknowns of our universe yet as soon as we go the opposite direction, into the unknown unknowns of our own experience, that is somehow unscientific?
This refers to physical impediments. Spreading legal information is not an impediment, it is free speech. If all info could be interpreted as impediments to federal officers then phones, the internet, the human voice, etc would be illegal
No, they are organizing legally, of course there will be bad actors, but blocking an agent out of bad faith is certainly less of a crime than a bad faith ICE agent killing someone for their assumptions
She says so eloquently what is such an obvious crime against consumers that we tolerate because we must. Modern serfdom is when “trust” turns to “must”.
In that context, what leads you call yourself and the rest of humanity primarily "consumers" in response to an essay? I think this has become uncomfortably (to me) normalized, and it begs the same question that Le Guin asks about whether we understand what we are doing when we are defining ourselves. A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
> A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
I find this is at the core of Stallman's criticism of the term "content". We speak of media "content", of "content authors", etc, as if movies, articles, books, etc were just that: content, ready to be commoditized, packaged and sold. And some of it is! But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.
Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague & generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a container. Content is simply "that which is contained." Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you need to fill with words, any words, or else people will stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.
You should read Stallman, because what you said (container vs content) is his actual beef with it. It's looking at it from the perspective of companies who own the platform (the container) rather than from the more human perspective of artists and authors.
Less and less people have the option to male "art" and need to make "content" to simply survive. Art has historically been reserved for the elite privileged and it seems the world is heading back towards old norms as wealth consolidates.
In a similar breath, that may be why we don't heat much of the next generation of Stallman's and instead hear of a looming crisis in FOSS as the old guard retires. Less devs (if they are even pursuing that path down the line) will have the free time to choose FOSS as a path, unless big tech is paying for it to bend ot to their will.
>But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.
Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence to capitalism demands it.
You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about these things.
>but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
You can make an argument that it is more depressing when the compartmentalization of everything also isolates off community. No amount of individual riches can repair a trusted community to engage with. We're definitely getting lonlier in the process.
Have to? No, there are other options. But to twist this question a little bit - does a child that grows up in the United States have to speak English? They do not, technically. And in fact some small percentage don’t, but the vast, vast majority do. And not because they chose to, but because that is the overwhelming tendency of the environment they live in. I think much the same happens with consumerism.
I think I hear you, but you're phrasing your twist as a choice made by individuals or made by their circumstances, e.g. choices that you are not a party to. However I'm asking about you in this case, alongside the "us" that comprise the people taking the time to observe and hypothesize about the world we're living in by discussing in on HN. Maybe after that it'll lead elsewhere.
A person doesn't have to be defined as a citizen either, even though membership in a community is as fundamental a part of being human as consuming goods is.
Anecdotally I’ve felt this shift over the past few years. I am 33 and have always been a huge proponent of personal growth, change, pushing yourself to be better. In the past few years Ive felt the opposite urge, an urge to accept myself, flaws and all, as the hand I’ve been dealt and I must merely play that hand, not focus so much on what-ifs, etc. Perhaps this is my brain solidifying.
There is wisdom both in trying to change what you can, and realizing that you maybe can't change everything. If you've been trying to change things, by 33 you may have a fair idea of what you in fact cannot change.
29 and feeling the same. It's kind frustrating and freeing at the same time. I feel like I'm making less progress, but at the same time don't feel the pressure to make progress.
I'd also like to add anecdotally that a lot of people develop burnout at that age, probably because they keep pushing themselves and/or get sucked into their own enthusiasm / passion instead of set limits and the like. But then, I also think people get less resilient to stress and the like after 30, less able to compartimentalize or bounce back quickly.
What you end up getting is people ~10 years into an exciting career where suddenly they can't perform or cope as well as they used to. But they can also be in a pretty senior position by then and be pushed out of their comfort zone.
True, I think this happened to my partner, she had to face the hard limits on her working style and therefore had to shift careers. Thankfully I changed careers 6 years ago preemptive of burnout, etc so I'm still growing skills-wise and motivated by that challenge
He’s projecting his own guilt about his actions onto another. As the article implies, he is a top candidate for Antichrist if there is such a thing, and on some level he’s trying to avoid that truth.
We have life-saving allergy treatments that also can target digestive issues that we did not 5 years ago. We have vastly expanded research into chronic illnesses thanks to long covid putting viral fatigue syndrome on the map. Autism diagnosis has risen because research has expanded drastically. There have been major improvements because of existing systems, they do not require entire dismantling
The existing state of society, economics, and governance in the US has led to many people and communities being left behind. Rather than support our people, we call them addicts and jail them for mental health issues. The US is an experiment in replacing true deep community bonds enjoyed by older nations with our purely fiscal bonds. A side-effect of this is that problems without lucrative solutions remain unsolved.
