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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, I think we’re gonna lose a ton by not having to actively think when trying to accomplish a task like this.

I had an engineering professor in college who talked about the amount of math he was able to do in his head early in his career before taking a job that needed a calculator. It wasn’t long after he took that job that he noticed he lost most of his advanced mental math skills.

On the music stuff specifically, writing it out (or figuring it out on a piano) is useful because you’re going to need to commit intervals to memory anyway if your goal is to be a serious musician/composer/whatever.

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You could create your own music by hand, but presumably someone wants to generate music because they want to target a specific skill like playing on the fly rather than playing something they just spent 15min writing.

Just like you might want to practice reading a foreign language with paragraphs you haven’t seen before, not the paragraphs you just wrote yourself. Certainly a useful skill to be able to write yourself, but not necessarily the skill you want to practice every time you want to practice reading.

I don’t see the problem.

it's a series of notes with the same mathematical relationship to one another. It's like the times tables, you should memorize them and writing them down is another mode to help memorization

So, as someone who made a living for a time with piano sightreading skills… there’s already a near-endless supply of free sheet music to practice sightreading with. I guess you could use it as an input for some LLM and practice against its outputs… but just… why? Part of the benefit of practicing sightreading (in a non-paid context) is that you’re playing material that you might have to “sightread” for money (quoted here because yes, it may be the second or third time you’ve seen it… sightreading vs. memorizing a piece is a whole spectrum, but customers only really care if you can play things well). I guess, there could be a market for sightreading LLM-generated music (“write me Chopin lines but with Monk chord progressions”)… at a cocktail party… for an audience that was into that? This seems really unnatural and unlikely to me though.

Amateur guitar player here, I feel like sometimes I don't know if my fingers have gotten the concept or if I've just learned a difficult passage by rote.

I'd love to have something that generates the same right hand picking pattern with a different left hand.

Also, I think there are licks that you have to be very precise with fingering or picking pattern. It would be cool to generate those.

For the latter, I’m working on something like this with my app BeatScratch. (Though I’m currently picking it back up and updating to Dart 3 after a hiatus to work on what will be its new backend in place of Reddit…) The notation format is a bit limited but does have a novel way of choosing enharmonics (like F# vs. Gb) to maximize readability. https://beatscratch.io

Is there free sheet music for popular music like there are for guitar tabs? I've tried to find this in the past but not been able.

Thesession.org, imslp.org

MuseScore is a good source! But there is absolutely an art (with deeply mathematical influences) to producing pleasant-to-read sheet music. You’re better off paying for even mediocre songbooks, say Hal-Leonard or Alfred press, for musicians or even just genres you like, than sticking purely to free sources. For $5-20 a book (of say, 8-20 songs) I would argue it’s better to pay for it.

> I guess you could use it as an input for some LLM and practice against its outputs… but just… why?

The same reason you might want to use an LLM to generate language or a meal plan or anything really: it's interactive and you can customize it arbitrarily on the fly instead of browsing pages of content until something kinda lines up with what you want over and over again.

A lot of peers in my PhD cohort and myself were always impressed with how much more math the average dissertation seemed to contain 50 years ago when we’d flip through the copies kept in the break room. Even non-theorists had to do a lot more analysis themselves since simulations were non-existent, not accessible, or not good enough for their needs back then.

We always wondered if we were missing out on some insight or intuition by not having to churn through the mathematical analysis they did because simulation was so easy for us. On one hand, the computer can tackle situations we could never come up with a good approximation for to studying analytically. On the other hand, maybe we’d be asking our computers smarter questions if we had to grind through that stuff by hand in our own research for a few years before getting high-quality simulations.

I wrote recently about how much sense of location I've lost by using GPS, but at the same time, it's a huge boon for exploring. Everything in life is a tradeoff.

I'm one of the rare people who are the opposite. But! I always keep my gps in map mode, North up. I also zoom out as much as possible or show the full trip on screen (in units that support it). So gps is a huge noon to me building a mental map of places and their orientation to one another.

(Everybody else in my life uses go's on default "your direction is up" and it's worthless. You follow directions and have no idea which way you're going or how far :-()

TIL there's a "north is up" setting! I always found this frustrating because my mental model is also "north is up", and when zoomed in I can get confused by "your direction is up".

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