Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: "Only Amateurs" Re: Music-Research Digest Vol. 5, #34 Summary: Professional what? Message-ID: <12884@venera.isi.edu> Date: 13 Apr 90 14:32:12 GMT References: <134123@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <15312@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 116 In article <15312@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes: > I see the NSF financing a certain amount >of work being produced by amateurs, especially neural nets that produce >"melodies" and that sort of thing. Eliot, I think if we "look at the record," we might find this statement to be at least slightly misleading. In particular, let us concentrate of three neural net researchers and their sources of support: 1. The work reported in Peter Todd's "A Connectionist Approach to Algorithmic Composition" (COMPUTER MUSIC JOURNAL, Winter 1989) was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. In other words, it was part of his research as a graduate student. As far as the NSF is concerned, graduate students are not professionals. They are students. The funds in the fellowship exist to enable them to be students without having to support themselves by other means, such as driving cabs. The primary concern at NSF is that you be a good student while you are receiving their money, which ultimately boils down to devoting most of your waking hours to writing a good thesis. Therefore, Peter Todd is probably an amateur, by your standards; but NSF was supporting him because he was a student, not because he showed any promise of providing musicians with any deep insights. 2. Todd's mentor, Jamshed Bharucha, has also been supported by the National Science Foundation. My assumption is that this money came from their psychology division (given that he is a psychology professor). In order to get this money, he probably had to write a proposal in which he put forth one or more psychological problems whose validity and interest would be recognized by his peers. Then he had to offer an experimental plan for investigating those problems which would be judged for its methodological soundness. Probably, he also said something about how the results of this work would lead to further investigations. The bottom line is that in order to get such a proposal approved, he had to demonstrate that he was a good PROFESSIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST. As a professional psychologist, he runs the risk of making assumptions with regard to both problem formulation and methodology which a professional musician would write off as unfounded. However, the National Science Foundation reviews proposals written by psychologists on the advice of OTHER psychologists. Unfortunately, we cannot expect the poor officer who has to deal with a mountain of proposals to know enough to assemble a review board for such work which will allow for input from musicians. (Chances are, he has enough trouble getting PSYCHOLOGISTS to submit their reviews on time!) The conclusion is that NSF supports him for being a good psychologist who is going to make valuable contributions to his community of fellow psychologists. Musicians who would question the value of this work really do not have any voice in the matter, for better or worse. 3. Teuvo Kohonen is in Finland. I do not think NSF supports ANY work in Finland. Certainly, his paper in the 1989 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks proceedings does not list ANY support for his music work. My guess is that he does all this "on the side" while being supported for his more scientific efforts with neural networks. Therefore, we certainly have ground for calling him an amateur; and he probably would not disagree. There is certainly nothing wrong with his present results of his personal investigation to an audience of other neural network researchers. My guess is that he would probably not consider presenting it to a meeting of, for example, the Society of Music Theory. > I also don't see that the NEA or other >foundations to whom musicians can turn -- generally "peer panel" foundations >-- are lending too much support to neural net research that generates >melodies. Unless I'm mistaken, the NEA does not support ANY research. They have so little money to give out that they devote ALL of it to supporting artists to make more art. I'm not even sure to what extent the National Endowment for the HUMANITIES supports research. I think they are more interested in general promotion of the humanities than in any speculations of basic research. Again, they are pretty short on funds. >For that matter, very few professional journals appear to even be >publishing that sort of work, with a couple of exceptions. Looking over >the proceedings of the AI/Music conference, none of the papers written by >people in music departments have anything to do with tonal music (except >for Cope's paper); those that do come out of psych/cs departments. > Professional journals basically have the same peer review problem that NSF has. Because there is such a gross over-production of scholars who must get their work in print in order to survive, we are faced with a glut of journals, each of which has a relatively narrow scope for what it publishes. For example, MUSIC PERCEPTION has more than enough material of the sort that Bharucha publishes to worry very much about expanding its horizons. It is true that someone with the credentials of a David Lewin can come along at get published there, but it is unreasonable to expect that one paper by a music theorist will tilt the editorial balance towards the concerns of musicians. Unfortunately, about the only professional journal which has tried to deal with questions of cognition from a musical point of view on a regular basis seems to be INTERFACE; and my personal opinion is that the editorial quality of this journal is very sloppy. The bottom line is that there are still too few of us trying to ask serious questions to have much of an impact on either the scholarship or the practice of music. Frank Zappa is probably right. If you are serious about music, you should go out an get a Real Estate License (or follow Ives into insurance or whatever). ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "Only a schoolteacher innocent of how literature is made could have written such a line."--Gore Vidal