I’ve been a Solstice regular for many years, and organized several smaller Solstices in Boston (on a similar template to the one you went to). I think the feeling of not-belonging is accurate; Solstice is built around a worldview (which is presupposed, not argued) that you disagree with, and this is integral to its construction. The particular instance you went to was, if anything, watered down on the relevant axis.
In the center of Solstice there is traditionally a Moment of Darkness. While it is not used in every solstice, a commonly used reading, which to me constitutes the emotional core of the moment of darkness, is Beyond the Reach of God. The message of which is: You do not have plot armor. Humanity does not have plot armor.
Whereas the central teaching of Christianity is that you do have plot armor. It teaches that everything is okay, unconditionally. It tells the terminal cancer patient that they are’t really going to die, they’re just going to have their soul teleported to a comfortable afterlife which conveniently lacks phones or evidence of its existence. As a corollary, it tells the AI researcher that they can’t really f*ck up in a way that kills everyone on Earth, both because death isn’t quite a real thing, and because there is a God who can intervene to stop that sort of thing.
So I think the direction in which you would want Solstice to change—to be more positive towards religion, to preach humility/acceptance rather than striving/heroism—is antithetical to one of Solstice’s core purposes.
(On sheet music: I think this isn’t part of the tradition because most versions of Solstice have segments where the lighting is dimmed too far to read from paper, and also because printing a lot of pages per attendee is cumbersome. On clapping: yeah, clapping is mostly bad, audiences do it by default and Solstices vary in how good a job they do of preventing that. On budget: My understanding is that most Solstices are breakeven or money-losing, despite running on mostly volunteer labor, because large venues close to the holidays are very expensive.)
On sheet music: I think this isn’t part of the tradition because most versions of Solstice have segments where the lighting is dimmed too far to read from paper, and also because printing a lot of pages per attendee is cumbersome.
I think a bigger factor is that not very many people can sing unknown songs from sheet music, so it wouldn’t help very much to include it on the slides.
How hard would it be to project them? There was a screen, and it should be possible to project at least two lines with music large enough for people to read. Is the problem that we don’t have sheet music that’s digitized in a way to make this feasible for all of the songs?
It depends a lot on the musician and their skillset.
For me: I don’t really speak fluent sheet music. When I write music, I do it entirely by ear. I record it. I have musicians listen to the record and imitate it by ear. Later on, if I want sheet music, I hire someone to listen to the record and transcribe it into sheet music after-the-fact, a process which costs like $200 per song (or, free, if I do it myself or get a volunteer, but it’s a couple hours per song and there are like 30 songs so this is not a quick/easy volunteer process)
Some musicians “think primarily in sheet music”, and then they would do it with sheet music from the get-go as part of the creation process. Some solstice songs already have sheet music for this reason.
I’ve paid money to transcribe ~3-5 solstice songs with sheet music so far.
Can the process not be automated? Like, sheet music specifies notes, right? And notes are frequencies. And frequencies can be determined by examining a recording by means of appropriate hardware/software (very easily, in the case of digital recordings, I should think). Right? So, is there not some software or something that can do this?
One thing that makes this hard to automate is human imprecision in generating a recording, espeically with rhythm: notes encode frequencies but also timings and durations, and humans performing a song will never get those things exactly precise (nor should they—good performance tends to involve being a little free with rhythms in ways that shouldn’t be directly reflected in the sheet music), so any automatic transcriber will get silly-looking slightly off rhythms that still need judgment to adjust.
This seems solvable by using multiple recordings and averaging, yes?
Also, if the transcription to sheet-music form is accurate w.r.t. the recording, and the recording is acceptable w.r.t. the intended notes, then the transcription ought to be close enough to the intended notes. Or am I misunderstanding?
[edit: one issue is that some irregularities will in fact be correlated across takes and STILL shouldn’t be written down—like, sometimes a song will slow down gradually over the course of a couple measures, and the way to deal with that is to write the notes as though no slowdown is happening and then write “rit.” (means “slow down”) over the staff, NOT to write gradually longer notes; this might be tunable post facto but I think that itself would take human (or really good AI) judgment that’s not necessarily much easier than just transcribing it manually to start]
re point 2 - the thing is you’d get a really irregular-looking hard to read thing that nobody could sightread. (actually this is already somewhat true for a lot of folk-style songs that sound intuitive but look really confusing when written down)
You’d think, but I wasn’t been able to find such a thing despite looking pretty hard a few years ago; there might be a more recent AI approach to this though. A useful search term might be “audio to midi conversion”. (Stem separation, for which Spleeter works well, might be a necessary preprocessing step.)
2) if you ask me to transcribe a song I will often say yes (if it’s not very frequent) (it costs time but not that much cognitive work for me so I experience reasonable amounts of this as fun)
So I think the direction in which you would want Solstice to change—to be more positive towards religion, to preach humility/acceptance rather than striving/heroism—is antithetical to one of Solstice’s core purposes.
While I would love to see the entire rationalist community embrace the Fulness of the Gospel of Christ, I am aware that this is not a reasonable ask for Solstice, and not something I should bet on in a prediction market. While I criticize the Overarching Narrative, I am aware that this is not something that I will change.
My hopes for changing Solstice are much more modest:
Remove the inessential meanness directed towards religion. There already has been some of this, which is great ! Time Wrote the Rocks no longer falsely claims that the Church tortured Galileo. The Ballad of Smallpox Gone no longer has a verse claiming that preachers want to “Screw the body, save the soul // Bring new deaths off the shelves”. Now remove the human villains from Brighter Than Today, and you’ve improved things a lot.
Once or twice, acknowledge that some of the moral giants whose shoulders we’re standing on were Christian. The original underrated reasons to be thankful had one point about Quaker Pennsylvania. Unsong’s description of St. Francis of Assisi also comes to mind. If you’re interested, I could make several other suggestions of things that I think could be mentioned without disrupting the core purposes of Solstice.
I’ve been a Solstice regular for many years, and organized several smaller Solstices in Boston (on a similar template to the one you went to). I think the feeling of not-belonging is accurate; Solstice is built around a worldview (which is presupposed, not argued) that you disagree with, and this is integral to its construction. The particular instance you went to was, if anything, watered down on the relevant axis.
In the center of Solstice there is traditionally a Moment of Darkness. While it is not used in every solstice, a commonly used reading, which to me constitutes the emotional core of the moment of darkness, is Beyond the Reach of God. The message of which is: You do not have plot armor. Humanity does not have plot armor.
Whereas the central teaching of Christianity is that you do have plot armor. It teaches that everything is okay, unconditionally. It tells the terminal cancer patient that they are’t really going to die, they’re just going to have their soul teleported to a comfortable afterlife which conveniently lacks phones or evidence of its existence. As a corollary, it tells the AI researcher that they can’t really f*ck up in a way that kills everyone on Earth, both because death isn’t quite a real thing, and because there is a God who can intervene to stop that sort of thing.
So I think the direction in which you would want Solstice to change—to be more positive towards religion, to preach humility/acceptance rather than striving/heroism—is antithetical to one of Solstice’s core purposes.
(On sheet music: I think this isn’t part of the tradition because most versions of Solstice have segments where the lighting is dimmed too far to read from paper, and also because printing a lot of pages per attendee is cumbersome. On clapping: yeah, clapping is mostly bad, audiences do it by default and Solstices vary in how good a job they do of preventing that. On budget: My understanding is that most Solstices are breakeven or money-losing, despite running on mostly volunteer labor, because large venues close to the holidays are very expensive.)
I think a bigger factor is that not very many people can sing unknown songs from sheet music, so it wouldn’t help very much to include it on the slides.
This plus “also it’s a lot more work to setup” are my own main cruxes. (If either were false I’d consider it much more strongly).
That’s right: if it were free to include then sure, even if only 5% of attendees can read it. But it’s actually quite a lot of work.
How hard would it be to project them? There was a screen, and it should be possible to project at least two lines with music large enough for people to read. Is the problem that we don’t have sheet music that’s digitized in a way to make this feasible for all of the songs?
We do not currently have sheet music for most songs. It’s also extra labor to arrange the slides (though this isn’t that big a part of the problem)
What exactly does the process of generating sheet music involve? Like, how does sheet music happen, in general?
It depends a lot on the musician and their skillset.
For me: I don’t really speak fluent sheet music. When I write music, I do it entirely by ear. I record it. I have musicians listen to the record and imitate it by ear. Later on, if I want sheet music, I hire someone to listen to the record and transcribe it into sheet music after-the-fact, a process which costs like $200 per song (or, free, if I do it myself or get a volunteer, but it’s a couple hours per song and there are like 30 songs so this is not a quick/easy volunteer process)
Some musicians “think primarily in sheet music”, and then they would do it with sheet music from the get-go as part of the creation process. Some solstice songs already have sheet music for this reason.
I’ve paid money to transcribe ~3-5 solstice songs with sheet music so far.
Can the process not be automated? Like, sheet music specifies notes, right? And notes are frequencies. And frequencies can be determined by examining a recording by means of appropriate hardware/software (very easily, in the case of digital recordings, I should think). Right? So, is there not some software or something that can do this?
One thing that makes this hard to automate is human imprecision in generating a recording, espeically with rhythm: notes encode frequencies but also timings and durations, and humans performing a song will never get those things exactly precise (nor should they—good performance tends to involve being a little free with rhythms in ways that shouldn’t be directly reflected in the sheet music), so any automatic transcriber will get silly-looking slightly off rhythms that still need judgment to adjust.
This seems solvable by using multiple recordings and averaging, yes?
Also, if the transcription to sheet-music form is accurate w.r.t. the recording, and the recording is acceptable w.r.t. the intended notes, then the transcription ought to be close enough to the intended notes. Or am I misunderstanding?
re point 1 - maybe? unsure
[edit: one issue is that some irregularities will in fact be correlated across takes and STILL shouldn’t be written down—like, sometimes a song will slow down gradually over the course of a couple measures, and the way to deal with that is to write the notes as though no slowdown is happening and then write “rit.” (means “slow down”) over the staff, NOT to write gradually longer notes; this might be tunable post facto but I think that itself would take human (or really good AI) judgment that’s not necessarily much easier than just transcribing it manually to start]
re point 2 - the thing is you’d get a really irregular-looking hard to read thing that nobody could sightread. (actually this is already somewhat true for a lot of folk-style songs that sound intuitive but look really confusing when written down)
You’d think, but I wasn’t been able to find such a thing despite looking pretty hard a few years ago; there might be a more recent AI approach to this though. A useful search term might be “audio to midi conversion”. (Stem separation, for which Spleeter works well, might be a necessary preprocessing step.)
As someone who likes transcribing songs,
1) I endorse the above
2) if you ask me to transcribe a song I will often say yes (if it’s not very frequent) (it costs time but not that much cognitive work for me so I experience reasonable amounts of this as fun)
While I would love to see the entire rationalist community embrace the Fulness of the Gospel of Christ, I am aware that this is not a reasonable ask for Solstice, and not something I should bet on in a prediction market. While I criticize the Overarching Narrative, I am aware that this is not something that I will change.
My hopes for changing Solstice are much more modest:
Remove the inessential meanness directed towards religion. There already has been some of this, which is great ! Time Wrote the Rocks no longer falsely claims that the Church tortured Galileo. The Ballad of Smallpox Gone no longer has a verse claiming that preachers want to “Screw the body, save the soul // Bring new deaths off the shelves”. Now remove the human villains from Brighter Than Today, and you’ve improved things a lot.
Once or twice, acknowledge that some of the moral giants whose shoulders we’re standing on were Christian. The original underrated reasons to be thankful had one point about Quaker Pennsylvania. Unsong’s description of St. Francis of Assisi also comes to mind. If you’re interested, I could make several other suggestions of things that I think could be mentioned without disrupting the core purposes of Solstice.