For anyone curious about tablature systems in European music, this monumental tome by John Griffiths, David Dolata, and @pvendrix.bsky.social should go a long way to answering your questions! Out today. link.publicate.it/pub/3092a46b...

One of the most profound privileges of editing a scholarly journal is reading peer reviews — I learn so much from the detailed conversations between specialists that go so much deeper than most of what ever makes it to print. And I have such respect for the generous labor of our colleagues.

Bonnie is deeply missed but her legacy will live on in many ways. My job involves more developmental editing than copy-editing. But when I proofread, I think of her. She had such skill that her edits made you sound more like yourself, if you were fully rested & caffeinated & writing at your best.

And because of the nearly infinite complexity of the past, and because of the complex nesting of its nearly infinite temporalities, you (yes, you) will "see" things that no one else has ever seen before. If you do the reading. And if you don't surrender this gift of perception to a machine.

Each of us gathers that material idiosyncratically and brings a unique personal and professional pathway and viewpoint. That "quirkiness" is especially valuable in studying the past where our evidence is partial in every sense. Probability and predictability are not what make history interesting.

A friend and colleague asked me to write for her substack. So I wrote on some recent work. open.substack.com/pub/mtmola/p...

This is the case even though the AP theory curriculum makes a fairly weak case for what’s great about music theory — much college theory teaching is much richer!

Career opportunity | Job opening Musical instruments conservator careers.yale.edu/us/en/job/YU... #classicalmusic #nowhiring

Every AI prompt is a conversation you are choosing not to have with a human being.

A lot of “preppers” just stick weird shit between the strings in their piano to make them sound funny, and that’s important work too.

A lot of digital tools are not about reducing work, but rather about redistributing it to a different set of workers. A handy rule of thumb when considering people embracing digital tools is to just see if that person is redistributing their labor or having labor redistributed to them.

I’ve seen this in submissions. 🤨

Last and least, FWIW, my current AI policy for students. Subject to revision. Recommendations welcome.

FWIW, you could definitely make the dictionary today.

The conference app: a solution in search of a problem.

Very happy this is now published! Here, we find that participants, regardless of musical training, are fairly good at explicitly matching looped harmonic progressions! emusicology.org/article/id/6...

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

TBF these publications could also try putting someone on the higher ed beat who has … literally any relevant knowledge or experience of higher ed.

This is the litmus test

I hate to say it, but the colleagues positioning themselves to be pro AI in teaching and curriculum, are probably also positioning themselves to be administrators, and probably aren’t thinking about or don’t care how it will affect teaching, learning, or the careers of those around them.

@thejop.bsky.social announces the right to refuse consideration of manuscripts of those who have declined to review 3+ times. Careful who you co author with!

in case anybody is wondering how author advocates are handling AI in trade publishing, this is language my agency fought for and won

Learning, writing, reading, and scholarship are profoundly inefficient processes! That is a good thing!

Reflecting on a conversation with my students about AI in teaching. The promise of AI is infinite productivity, at infinite speed. But the implicit promise of teaching is that an expert will give you some of their very *finite* time. You are important enough that your instructor will incur a loss.

have I mentioned that I teach first year writing here and that I am being laid off

I don't know what everyone's complaining about. Just go to settings > features > worms, then change the "worms pouring out of my phone" toggle from "yes" to "maybe later"

Love that my entire search history is now just variations on "stop autofill in [name of app]" and "remove [needless toolbar item] from [name of app]."

Doing Zoom aural skills placement exams, AMA.

How about folks who don't like writing just ... don't write things?

This is appalling on several levels, most crucially: why would a *pedagogy conference* full of people hoping to nerd out about classroom teaching provide a platform for something like this?

AI companies are absolutely hostile to the fundamental work of teaching and learning. This technology has many potential uses, but intervening in the classroom is not one of them. Fight fight fight for the integrity of our work.

This is the best encapsulation I have heard of the book writing experience. Simultaneously the hardest and most rewarding thing I’ve ever done and I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

See also switching to ebooks even in humanities fields that are typically print bound. Sure, OUP claims you’ll have access to these books forever. How do you know that’s true? What about ransomware attacks? Massive changes to digital infrastructure?

Best recent life hack: I bought a salt cellar and a box of Maldon salt for the department lunch room.

The best thing about writing another book is that I don't have to use author-date. The worst thing about writing another book is everything else.

In the last few days I've talked to a few people who are planning to spend the summer converting a dissertation chapter into an article. In the spirit of a productive writing summer, a few pieces of advice based on my experience writing a bunch of articles and editing two journals.

I am starting to see ChatGPT-style formatting strategies in human-produced work (like boldface type for main ideas and bullet lists in formal writing) and it is making me twitchy.

The tired “liberals dismissed the canon” trope. We are … still teaching and researching the old canon, we are just … also doing other stuff? Hope that helps!

The "major news outlet publish an informed take on higher ed" challenge.

Reading some 18th c reception history and honestly this hits the same.

“It’s so cool that we also worked on this piece in aural skills!” Who do you think made the aural skills course pack?

"Grade inflation is a national problem that experts say reduces the value of grades. If most students get an A, grades become less valuable to employers, grad school admissions officers and students themselves as measures of subject mastery." Okay but what if we just got rid of grades instead?

Regardless of your disciplinary citational ethics/rationales, if you can get a paper through peer review with dozens of hallucinated citations, your citational practice is probably not doing the work you think/claim it is.

Can we please start calling AI-generated citations, AI-supported "nonfiction" writing, etc., what it is? It's fraud.

Actually, AI errors in a book about truth in the age of AI *do* diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust, and A.I.

Regardless of your disciplinary citational ethics/rationales, if you can get a paper through peer review with dozens of hallucinated citations, your citational practice is probably not doing the work you think/claim it is.

Maybe the real citations were the friends we made along the way.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Incredibly agree, I had to move this into a folder so it wouldn't offend my visual sensibilities.

Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian