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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

This seems to me like a job where the output quality of a worker is extremely difficult to measure; it's difficult to tell if one excellent musician is better than another excellent musician. Surely beyond a certain point, it's subjective.

People tend to want to think of themselves as being objectively talented and as being deserving of credit; but in certain professions, there is no such thing.

Art is rich people's subjectivity being passed off as objectivity. It can't be easy to base your entire professional self-esteem on the whims and moods of the rich people who fund the industry. In a slightly different world, the definitions of 'good' and 'excellent' would be completely different.

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Performance is a part of music that is less subjective than composition or song writing. It is difficult for a lay person to measure differences between players at a professional level, but other professionals with a deep understanding of technique can.

The problem is that the industry has very few open positions and a good number of talented applicants. Imagine if every software engineering position had 100+ applicants and all of them could code very well, so you disqualified the 99 of them who had to use a backspace key more than once. This is what this industry is like.

(Have multiple orchestral musicians in my family)

Subjectivity is certainly a part of it, like in any profession. But just being able to play that material requires years of training and practice. And the stuff that is subjective to the audience has to be worked out in objective terms by the members of the orchestra (most likely decided by the conductor) so that the performance sounds like it has a coherent style. Imagine variations on: "Let's play it this way instead of that way." And the musicians have to understand and physically implement those decisions instantly.

So the layer of subjectivity that the audience experiences is supported by a foundation of objective choices.

Now, if you hold an audition for a violinist, enough people will show up who can demonstrate those skills (the ultimate coding interview), that your final choice will be a toss-up, like in any profession.

And as in any profession, your self esteem has to come from within. I can't imagine basing my self esteem on what funds the IT industry. I know a lot of professional musicians. They tend to be fairly well adjusted people.

Disclosure: I'm at the next level down, a "semi professional" musician.

Having played the violin for ~16 years and been in many competitions, I'd have to say it's fairly easy to differentiate musicians. There are pieces of music that push the the limit of what your fingers can do, and some interpretations generally win out over others.

Wouldn't all musicians who are good enough to work for a professional orchestra be able to play all of these difficult pieces without making any mistakes? Being able to play difficult pieces without making a mistake is the objective definition of perfection. Yet among the people who can all play difficult pieces perfectly, not all of them can work for the New York Philharmonic or more high prestige group. What differentiates one player who plays perfectly from another player who also plays perfectly?

There must be something else beyond 'not making mistakes'; that thing is subjective, not objective. It's pretty clear if someone hits the wrong note, but who gets to judge that a particular musician held a specific note for 10 milliseconds too long? Or who is to say that some notes were given 'too much emphasis'?

I'm sure that there is consensus among the elite musicians about all these subjective judgments, but it doesn't change the fact that it's subjective... The audience might not care at all either way or they might even disagree with the elite musicians' consensus... Who is right in this case? Isn't the customer always right? What does it mean to have a 'trained ear'? Can't the ear be over-trained or mis-trained.

If you teach someone how to do something the wrong way (e.g. inefficiently) and they learn how to do it the wrong way perfectly, isn't it still the wrong way?

Well worded response, you've changed my mind! My guess is that what is deemed subjectively better comes from past interpretations and builds. I don't have enough historical background to understand the context that has lead to what is popular today.

Art -- as demonstrated by classical orchestras -- really isn't subjective at all. Talk to a professional musician, and it's all technique. Somewhere, deep down there at the bottom of it all, is a squishy place where an artist's passion and poetry is burning bright to fuel everything else...but by the time you get to an orchestral hall, everything you -- specifically as a non-professional musician -- will hear is objective technique you might expect an AI to be able to grade.

It's a very different beast from popular art that holds up Selene Gomez, and even then you'd be remiss to try to explain her success as the result of subjective judgements.

So, there's no objective artistic explanation for Selena Gomez; and all orchestral music played in a hall is objectively 'art'?

There are layers of objective and subjective factors. "What is art" is its own beast. How a particular style of interpretation is chosen, is subjective. Once that style is chosen, the performance can be assessed against many objective standards, such as whether they followed their own stylistic choices correctly, etc.

I'm arguing that the subjective part of art is far less powerful than the objective, almost to the point it recedes from view. You disagree? Strictly speaking, all 'art' is subjective. Or, even stricter speaking, anything at all for which subjective outweighs objective becomes more or less 'subjective', ergo, all art is subjective.

Perhaps you might argue, receded from view but still significant, is that fair?

Thinking that performance is that subjective is a bit weird to me. I can’t imagine a world in which it eg. not being able to play precisely or fast would be considered better.

They said "beyond a certain point". I can't imagine a world where being able to play precisely or fast is what distinguishes B.B. King from some shredder on YouTube.

The variations in ability of a trained musician are imperceptible to an untrained listener.

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