Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!eliot
From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: "Only Amateurs" Re: Music-Research Digest      Vol. 5, #34
Message-ID: <15354@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 14 Apr 90 19:30:22 GMT
References: <134123@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <15312@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <12884@venera.isi.edu>
Reply-To: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 68

In article <12884@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
;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.  

Let me clarify. My remarks were intended to apply exclusively to the production
of music, or research that is meant to culminate in compositional
applications. My point was that there's not much common ground between
those things that people in the field of music find interesting and the
psychology department notion of just what a compositional application
worth advertising might look like. Someone asked whether this wasn't
just my own view of the matter, or whether my claim that non-music
professional interest indeed did not intersect with professional musician's
concerns could be substantiated. (It's obvious that I'm reading German
these days, isn't it?) I said the simplest way to verify this was 
to see who was funding who's research. The NEA, as you point out, doesn't 
fund research, most probably because research into compositional applications 
of neural nets is not considered a germane topic among those who decide who 
gets the grant. Or even more probably, those who have done their homework
and are aware of the history of music over the past 40 years know that
hundreds and thousands of composers of avant-garde music each invented
their own compositional systems, the least of which is probably more 
intriguing than the sorts of developments that the NSF might think
worthwhile bringing to the attention of the research community. 

;	                                                     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.

I'll wager that the NSF would have been less quick to support him if they
had a general research category called "interesting ways of composing
music." Not that I'm suggesting that they should. 

;	                   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.

But this is a clear case where a music theorist should have been consulted.


;	3.  Teuvo Kohonen is in Finland. 
;	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.

That paper I haven't read yet. I'll return to it when I do.

;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.

Here the problem is inverted -- I personally would like to see the distance
between the research and musical communities (and those factions enthusiastic
about the accomplishments of the other side) close in on each other: music
cognition is generally a sloppy field, not much less sloppy than composing
NN resarchers. Unfortunately the misunderstandings on either side appear to
run pretty deep.