There are definitely some opportunities like that, but being a classical violinist with an orchestra is the first preference by far because it’s so much more enjoyable to play the orchestral repertoire, and because having a full-time seat in an orchestra also puts you at the top of every booking agent’s list for casual gigs too. Aim high, fail high, seems to be a good approach.
Solenoid_Entity
Karma: 774
Tall tales and long odds
You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad.
(To be fair, I would make anything sound this extreme, if I was writing about it while in the mood I was in when I wrote this. I love a rant.)
I guess any classical instrument is a device for torturing perfectionists, but violin has a particularly brutal drop-off in sound quality as you reduce your daily focused practice time. Between ‘lapsed professional piano’ and ‘lapsed professional violin’ I know which one I’d pick to listen to. You just can’t do a few hours of practice a week and play the violin very nicely in tune, or at least I’ve never met anyone who can.
There’s also the fact we’re pack animals. There are normally 8-12 violinists in each section of the orchestra, playing in unison, consciously blending our sound together. We’re so wired to watching the others’ bows, listening to their vibrato and articulation, and keeping as much focus on the leader of the section as on the conductor, that I swear we develop a hive mind. I guess this exacerbates the social pressures we feel, since we’re always so aware of each others’ playing.
One way violinists fail
Things Solenoid Narrates
Ahh good point, sorry I didn’t notice that. I’ll update the post shortly.
Thanks for checking! The Libsyn feed has been redirected, it’s now hosted on BuzzSprout. All new episodes should still be going to all the platforms. Are you having trouble with any of the platforms, or just the Libsyn site itself? That one won’t work anymore, unfortunately.
See here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b9oockXDs2xMdYp66/announcement-ai-narrations-available-for-all-new-lesswrong
Please share your feedback here or in the comments on that post, it’s helpful for our decision-making on this :)
Big +1 to playing with others, especially others around the same level or slightly better or worse.
Motivation is one thing, but it’s also just… healthier. One’s musical ‘practice’ can’t be totally inward-looking, that’s when perfectionism starts to bite. Orchestra forces you to compromise and actually learn and perform music, gets you out of the practice room, and generally turbocharges your learning by exposing you to a more varied set of demands on your playing and musicality.
Super hard mode is forming a string quartet with others, since your playing is super exposed and it forces you to stay in time and balance your sound with others.
Thanks for the feedback!
The audio reflecting updates to the text is relatively easily fixed, and that feature is in the pipeline (though for now user reports are helpful for this.)
There’s some fairly complex logic we use for lists — trying to prevent having too many repetitive audio notes, but also keeping those notes when they’re helpful. We’re still experimenting with it, so thanks for pointing out those formatting issues!
You’d probably want to factor in some time for making basic corrections to pronunciation, too.
ElevenLabs is pretty awesome but in my experience can be a little unpredictable with specialist terminology, of which HPMOR has… a lot.
It wouldn’t be crazy to do an ElevenLabs version of it with multiple voices etc., but you’re looking at significant human time to get that all right.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever actually GENERATE narrations for every post on LessWrong (distribution of listening time would be extremely long-tailed), but it’s plausible if the service continues that we’ll be able to enable the player on all LW posts above a certain Karma threshold, as well as certain important sequences.
If you have specific sequences or posts in mind, feel free to send them to us to be added to our list!
This is great to hear, and please feel free to contact us with any other features or improvements you’d find helpful :)
Ha, oops! Yeah, there’s a lot of specialist terminology, we find feedback like this really helpful as often we’re able to quickly fix this.
Currently we can trigger this if someone requests it, and we have a feature in the pipeline to detect significant changes automatically and re-narrate.
Announcement: AI Narrations Available for All New LessWrong Posts
Double-attrition perfectionism and the violin
An interesting thing about violin is that the learning process seems nearly designed to produce ‘tortured perfectionists’ as its output.
The first decade of learning operates as a two-pronged selection process that attrits students at different times in their learning journey, requiring perfectionism at some times and tolerance at others.You could be boring and argue that it always requires both attention to detail and tolerance of imperfection, simultaneously. You could also argue that there’s a fractal, scale invariant pattern of striving for perfection and then tolerating failure. You’re boring and probably right, but I think there’s actually a common, macro structure to that decade, that goes ‘tolerance-perfectionism-tolerance-perfectionism.’
Specifically:
When you first start, you need to tolerate being terrible, especially in the first months, but really for several years. (Grade 1- Grade ~3)
You suck, it’s horribly offensive to your ears and everyone else’s too. You must simply ignore how bad you sound and force your body to learn the required movements.
Mistakes on violin are brutal, they almost hurt to hear.
Then for several more years you must suddenly become intolerant of these same deficiencies. (Grade ~3 to Grade ~6)
You must obsessively eliminate scratches and squawks, develop clear and even tone. Polish your ‘beginner’ skills.
You must learn to play in tune, which requires intensive practice and polishing.
Then for several more years you must again stop worrying about sounding bad and start ‘pushing the envelope’ and playing more expressively. (Grade ~6 - Grade ~8)
Developing exciting and varied sounds means a lot of nasty failures that sound awful and make people wince and/or bang walls.
Then for several more years, you have to again polish and refine this expressiveness. (Associate diploma, Bachelor of Music.)
You have to learn to platy really in tune.
Like really really in tune.
Like unless you’re lucky you probably lack the pitch resolution in your hearing to even notice the difference.
Like
More in tune than a well-tuned piano. Not strictly ‘Just Intonation’ but a compromise intonation system that allows the series of perfect 5ths G, D, A and E to remain fixed in all keys, but other notes to fall perfectly in tune with each other around these fixed points.
You’re supposed to learn this system intuitively by just playing scales as in-tune as you can, often playing two notes at the same time (thirds, sixths, octaves, 11ths).
These changes correspond to fractions of a millimeter difference in position on the string.
Practice sessions now involve hours of obsessive, tiny intonation adjustments.
The result is that if someone plays violin at a professional level, they either have a very healthy relationship with their perfectionism and can adapt it to the needs of the moment (hahahahhhahahah), or they are a deeply disturbed individual who is somehow either able to pretend not to hate their playing for years, or able to force themselves to care about details that don’t bother them in the slightest.
This is as far as I’ve gone (I’m on the final step, trying to reach professional level). If you go further and become a soloist, I don’t know what that implies about your psychology. Soloists seem normal and occasionally seem well-adjusted, but perhaps we should learn to fear them.
Under MWI of QM, anthropics gets weird.
In a single universe interpretation, we can posit biogenesis is rare, but we do know it happened at least once in ~two trillion galaxies worth of stars in ~13 billion years.
In MWI it could be even rarer—with unlimited branches for wild coincidences of chemistry to occur, we’re necessarily living in a branch where such did occur. Allow for argument’s sake that biogenesis is so rare that branches where life is found are tiny in measure. We find ourselves in such a branch, so anthropics and branching kind of gives us the first miracle for free. But given we’re here, the chance it happened here independently TWICE is vanishingly small again.
If biogenesis is so rare it occurs in a tiny minority of branches only, then in almost all branches where it does occur, it only occurs once.
If I haven’t badly misunderstood something, I think if we accept MWI then it seems much more plausible that we are the only life in the universe.