"Pieces that are almost impossible to perform but you can't tell by listening" is SUCH a category. Absolutely the most stressful thing I've ever performed was Sven-David Sandström's "Lobet den Herrn." www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E9z...

Feeling personally attacked that in our music library the MLs are on the lovely open stacks on the ground floor and the MTs are in the scary moveable stacks on the second floor.

My one complaint about SMT-V is they keep making videos that I wish I'd made first:

TFW your 600-page scholarly book does not have a topical index.

Friends! Seeking a fun example for quick dictation in aural skills 1 that uses melodic arpeggiations of V7. (My not fun examples are Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the William Tell Overture.) Bonus points for anything from recent pop hits, musical theater, or beloved film scores.

Enjoy Bill's absolutely beautiful (and very fun) video about Amy Beach and 20th-century birdsong transcription!

Ted Chiang: "The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write [...]. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning."

I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, invites applications for their fellowship in the Digital Humanities itatti.harvard.edu/fellowship-d...

JOB: FSU is hiring an Assistant Professor of Music Theory (tenure track)! I am on the committee and happy to answer any questions. societymusictheory.org/resources/jo...

Who would have thought that an algorithm trained on human produced text would replicate the biases of those humans?? OH WAIT EVERYONE.

We already have summaries of research articles. They are called abstracts. I have written many of them. In fact, I am in the middle of revising one right now.

Also: I'm so bewildered by this. What self-respecting scholar is reading articles because they just want a summary of key points? We're generally reading on a much more subtle level than this—engaging with the argument and the ideas is the whole point. If I want a summary I'll read the conclusion?

Meanwhile @historians.org has suggested last month that one of the possible acceptable uses of gAI is to summarize "key points" of research articles, before reading.

Today a student told me she was sad we didn't have Aural Skills today (the class meets MW only) hashtag achievement unlocked.

It's too bad there's not a centralized way to look up the real books that your library owns, maybe like a sort of catalogue, one that was organized by subject. Maybe this kind of technology could even tell you where in your library to locate said book?

If you feel you need to use AI to write and respond to emails ... maybe you shouldn't be sending those emails in the first place. Pick up the phone and make a quick call; show respect to your colleagues by not inundating them with pointless messages, reply all, "got it, thx!", &c.

We’ve somehow lost the seemingly obvious truth that the point of experiencing art is experiencing it 😩

Why would this interface have a word I know and can easily recognize like "copy" when instead it could have a series of inscrutable icons like "two sheets of paper"?

What's that? Another AI product that's a solution in search of a problem? 🤷‍♀️

I can't believe I need to have an AI policy! I made it pretty short though: Using AI is cheating, yourself mostly. In addition to the environmental blight created by AI, it makes no sense to use it in your intellectual and creative work. Why would you outsource your innate intelligence?

I've updated #EarlyModern Resources earlymodernweb.org/resources/ Quite a few new links but also a big overhaul of the site to be more usable + a visual refresh. (If you can't see a change, you may need to clear your browser cache and refresh hard. 😬)

Yeah, I'll believe it when I see a check.

Yes yes yes!! Writing badly and then editing that writing helps you think more deeply!! But you have to do the steps to get there.

Great thread on writing as thinking. Your LLM can't do this for you. And verb your nouns, folks! Put the action of your arguments into verbs, not nominalizations!

This is not a dunk on anyone in particular, but allow me to illustrate with an example from my own writing: "The natural and sharp signs rarely appear in Agricola's examples, but their occurrences are revealing of Agricola's thinking." 🧵

I'm just an editor standing in front of a line of academic authors asking them to use fewer gerunds.

It's almost like LLMs are likely-word-generators and not fact machines or literate readers and interpreters of texts? 🧐

In my experience as an editor, "of course" is almost never something obvious and I always strike it.

Every disability experience is a little different but the pervasive idea that all learning difficulties can be “solved” by posting the lecture slides/notes online and providing extra time in exams is foolish. These are half-measures that provide cover for the institution, not meaningful assistance.

The bar for tenure at the majority of institutions should not be "are you a top scholar in your field," but rather "are you making a meaningful contribution to your field." This feels like an "all the children are above average" kind of metric that's destined to breed frustration and resentment.

Collaborate using Google Slides? Sure! I love using a much worse version of a software I know intimately with an entirely different set of keyboard shortcuts.

Not me passive aggressively ILLing every book that my library purchased a digital copy of. (Me, in the notes section on the form: "I am aware that we have a digital copy. I do not want to read a digital copy.")

I would quite like to watch someone dance about architecture, I don't see the problem

No, I do not want to open this .csv file in Numbers, I have never wanted to open anything in Numbers, do NOT test me on the first day of classes.

Gosh, I can think of a lot more unsettling questions, like who will suffer as a consequence of unthinking adoption of AI across all sectors of our economy?

Tressie is reposting lots of fascinating views here. I would love to ask my college students to put their phones away BEFORE class—they come in, sit in their seat, and text or scroll and refuse to talk to each other or even make eye contact. The phones prevent us from building an IRL community.

I’m stuck on this: ok sure it is helpful (maybe not) to give you feedback, ideas or brainstorm, but WHY is it important that this information not come from a person? Why don’t you ask a person, or feel like it’s worth relying on a person’s expertise? What can replace a person in our social fabric?

My syllabus essentially says "don't use AI but if you do I promise you're not going to get a good grade." Unfortunately last semester I had a very bad final project that was definitely 100% AI-generated, so I just graded it in good faith and sure enough it earned a (low) F.

Key to the success is the institution's exploitation of faculty, especially contingent faculty and grad workers by making them feel like they have a moral obligation to engage in good pedagogical performance even as the institution progressively worsens their working conditions.

As a close reader of notes and a VERY dedicated writer of them, I love this exercise. In my own notes, I try to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for grad students and others -- why was I interested in this problem, how do these texts relate, what other directions could I have gone?

Just sharing the “Xtreme endnotes” assignment @parisnoire.bsky.social mentions here in case anyone else finds it helpful as we begin a new academic year. FWIW, it’s a purely analog exercise in an AI-freaky world & my students have never not had fun doing it.✌🏽 www.historians.org/perspectives...

::Journalist writes breathless story based on a misrepresentation of a single data point in a preprint::

tenured academics writing their second/third/fourth books be like:

As a devotee of the em-dash, I support this message.

Fun! This digital book (OUP) has endnotes (conveniently located before the appendices making them extra difficult to find). And no, they are not linked to the main text.

Our library no longer purchases physical books if they're available digitally. So excited to read this new Indiana UP book in the form of individual chapter downloads from JSTOR. I love separately downloading dozens of files, crashing my computer, and not having access to the index or works cited!

New Blackboard glitch unlocked: the space bar doesn't work when you're using boldface text. Love this software, its capacity to get worse every year is really spectacular.

Why do we put the number of pages in the headers of published book reviews?

Don’t you mean AHBA?

"LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text"