So many of these AI boosters just need a group text.

Okay it’s Christmas now #9LC

Here it comeeeessssss #9LC

I can tell who’s listening to the BBC broadcast and who is listening to NPR because the former is about 15 seconds ahead of the latter. #9LC

this grace note figure in the organ has me laughing like a lunatic every time omg #9LC

For my part I prefer my Rutter more cheesy not less. #9LC

Update. My dad: “ooh the subwoofer is picking up the organ pedals!” #9LC

My family, completely bewildered that not only does #9lc exist, my entire feed is just people talking about it. 😂

So much of the “who has time to read all the books” discourse seems to stem from bewilderment on the side of AI boosters that people do hard things, and do them willingly, because it is worthwhile.

Historians speak of "gutting" books - getting the gist, knowing where the facts they need will be, later on, like a squirrel memorizing acorn coordinates. But there is also reading to understand the author's project, which is a little different than grappling with every bit of the book.

Here are the first 3 titles in OUP’s Theorizing African American Music: A.D. Carson, Being Dope: Hip Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir; K. Coleman, Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz; H. Lewis, Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis." global.oup.com/academic/con...

Big books scary and difficult need the slop machine to chew it up first and regurgitate it into my little baby mouth like a mama bird

😂 That is the usual baseline for academic expertise, yes, sorry no one ever said it had to be easy

If you offload your scholarly thinking onto an LLM … what do you talk about when you get together with other scholars in your field? Serious question. If you don’t enjoy thinking through things together with other people who value what you value, are you sure you want to be an academic?

The google AI summary of my most famous piece of writing--a thousand word blog post--misunderstands it on a fundamental level. In doing so, it reproduces the way critical yet lazy scholars misunderstood it, by reading the title and filling in what they thought was the most likely meaning.

Reading is thinking, and afterwards, writing is thinking. Doing an "AI" summary eliminates thinking in both steps. A doc told me some of her colleagues are using "AI" to write their case notes. Her take: oh hell no, because writing the case notes is when you think about the case.

If you think LLM summaries are good, actually, try asking an LLM to summarize your own work and see what comes out.

Also this imagined “efficient” process for scholars fails to understand that we … like reading, thinking, developing ideas, and writing? That’s why we do these jobs?? Why would we outsource the best part?

I’m always writing my footnotes for curious students interested in following my footsteps. “Here’s some super cool stuff you should check out! Here’s something I read that helped my thinking develop.” It’s not pedantry, it’s generosity and community.

Anyway, I read all of these anti-AI posts in academia as love letters to our disciplines. And that, at least, gives me joy in a weary world. So thank you.

Guess what: LLMs don’t do this well, and the basic work of scholarship is close reading and digesting relevant material. If you hand off this work to error-prone LLMs, enjoy not having a meaningful idea to write about ever again. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Honestly one of my favorite hobbies.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

A new issue of Engaging Students is hot off the digital presses for your holiday reading pleasure, and it includes a piece I wrote! Check it out everyone! engagingstudentsmusic.org/article/id/6...

This horrifies me -- do people cite papers they haven't read? That they haven't even downloaded and glanced at?? What are we doing here.

I guess the makers of Spelling Bee aren’t Fétis fans?

For something to count as "my work," do I need to have written & revised it myself, and developed the ideas by seeking out, attempting to understand, & appropriately crediting the prior work of others? Formerly: YES, DUH! Now: "different colleagues will have different views"

Great gift idea

I am still grading.

I feel called out I do this every time.

All I want for Christmas is for students to learn how to use the export button.

'Tis the season for final projects submitted in the form of iPad screenshots.

u gotta winterpill ur reise. bro is ur schmerz weltcore yet. bro r u even dichtermaxxing ur liebe

I want the semester to be over as much as the next person, but I also hate the trend of students leaving campus the day classes are over and acting resentful if you expect them to be present, physically or even mentally, during finals week.

AITA, scheduled an in-person final. (The final is a performance of our midterm and final compositions for my upper-level counterpoint class.)

I also had to abandon my dissertation font (Georgia) but I highly recommend choosing a unique font for each writing project and course. It helps keep the visual look of my course materials distinct.

When you put it this way … why are we doing anything else?

There's more to IU than football! Come teach with us in the music theory department! indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/31358

SO FRUSTRATING

Workshopping final projects in my 16th-century counterpoint class and it is SO COOL to be at the point where students and I can explore solutions that aren't just correct, but idiomatic, energetic, suave, and elegant.

Oh so GS isn’t itself presenting the hallucinated journal as real; it‘s just indexing real articles that have hallucinated references?

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

This should be illegal.

relatable

It must be really exhausting and lonely to constantly view other scholars as adversaries rather than folks you are in community with and to whom you have an ethical obligation.

Make punctuation expressive again!

My takeaway this semester is that our Gen Z students all love Mary Poppins.

niche post The niche is me, I am teaching Victoria's O magnum today.

Endorse. Please leave small comments as a list in a word document or other text file, not as embedded comments in Word document.

A liberal arts education is designed to make you a better person, not train you to do a job.