I haven't actively looked into it, but on a couple of occasions after google began inserting gemini results at the top of the list, I decided to try using some of the generated code samples when then search didn't turn up anything useful. The results were a mixed bag- the libraries that I'd been searching for examples from were not very broadly used and their interfaces volatile enough that in some cases the model was returning results for obsolete versions. Not a huge deal since the canonical docs had some recommendations. In at least a couple of cases though, the results included references to functions that had never been in the library at all, even though they sounded not only plausible but would have been useful if they did in fact exist.
In the end, I am generally using the search engine to find examples because I am too lazy to look at the source for the library I'm using, but if the choice is between an LLM that fabricates stuff some percentage of the time and just reading the fucking code like I've been doing for decades, I'd rather just take my chances with the search engine. If I'm unable to understand the code I'm reading enough to make it work, it's a good signal that maybe I shouldn't be using it at all since ultimately I'm going to be on the hook to straighten things out if stuff goes sideways.
Ultimately that's what this is all about- writing code is a big part of my career but the thing that has kept me employed is being able to figure out what to do when some code that I assembled (through some combination of experimentation, documentation, or duplication) is not behaving the way I had hoped. If I don't understand my own code chances are I'll have zero intuition about why it's not working correctly, and so the idea of introducing a bunch of random shit thrown together by some service which may or may not be able to explain it to me would be a disservice to my employers who trust me on the basis of my history of being careful.
I listened to an interview with the woman who was at the time I believe overseeing the efforts of the Audio Engineering Society to address the problem of the countless recordings made on proprietary digital audio tape machines like the Sony PCM-3348. The total number of those machines that were ever built was small since so few studios could afford them, but they were major studios and thus the masters of many of the most culturally significant albums are on tapes in that format.
She mentioned that even if you could find one of the machines that was working, keeping it running required routine maintenance and that they were down to essentially one guy who was nearing the age of retirement who had the skill and parts to keep one running. So they were in a race against time to figure out which masters to convert.
The problem gets even more thorny for sessions that were recorded using software like ProTools, which has been around in some form or another for almost 40 years, has gone through countless revisions of project file formats, and has a complicated relationship with specialty audio hardware and software plugins.
It seems like there's a general awareness of the problem now and good studios are taking some measures to archive sessions in ways that allow them to be imported in the future, but in the meantime there are two decade's worth of recordings at risk, even if their media hasn't been lost or corrupted. I guess if nothing else its a cool opportunity for people who like to hack on systems of this type though.
All of the recording I did for my friends back in college is stuck in Nuendo/Cubase projects with a bunch of long-obsolete plugins used for mixing and mastering. Going forward I'm going to print every individual track to PCM so that I have a "digital tape" of the entire session to avoid this problem.
I learned of Michael Levin via Sally Adee's "We Are Electric", one of the more interesting pop-sci titles I've read in a while, the section on Levin's lab was definitely the highlight.
i'm also an audio nerd and although I do everything in the box when i'm recording, i agree completely that it's way easier to use outboard stuff for this case. i had an analog channel strip but decided to try one of the very inexpensive behringer uv1 strips with an integrated usb interface and it's been great, the gate and compressor work well, and i have a rolls audio parametric eq in the effects loop to high pass and de-essing.
since it's convenient to use the headphone out on the uv1 for the headset, i do use a limiter plugin in Rogue Amoeba Soundsource to compress the output from the conferencing software we use, it's nice being able to do that per-application since i listen to music through the headset a lot and don't want to have to take the limiter in and out.
analog headsets are so much less annoying and flexible, huge fan
I've struggled to teach this to jazz students, I know when I was a kid I read the same kind of advice in guitar magazines, and while I don't think that the theory-first advocates are malevolent, I think most of them were not serious jazz players and were getting paid to deliver a monthly column.
The analogy I've tried to use in teaching is that learning to play jazz is like being a comedian; when your skills are at their peak you're going to be inventing jokes regularly, but in the decades before you get there, you're going to be delivering other people's jokes putting a little of your own spin on them. The delivery matters a lot, and like good jazz playing it's pretty much impossible to write a book called "How to be Funny" that wouldn't just be an academic analysis rather than an instructional guide.
I struggled with jazz for the reasons I've alluded to above, and it wasn't until I started studying with a teacher who just had me memorize hundreds of standards that I got my playing together. We definitely talked about the technical bits of what was happening in the tunes, but those were really just interesting observations; repeatedly playing them in a group setting after woodshedding them at home between lessons, then taking a lot of solos was really what made it happen.
It really makes me happy to see up-and-coming killer players like Patrick Bartley espousing this same approach. Yeah it means you're going to spend thousands of hours memorizing tunes, but if that's not fun then playing jazz isn't going to be fun either.
As I alluded to in another comment, you are fighting upstream against the dominant Western conception of learning. But any musician I have ever met worth their salt knows the importance of learning songs and transcribing their favorite artists.
I think one of the causes is that some people struggle for years with music and then one day they learn a bit of theory and they experience a moment of enlightenment. Suddenly, all of their confusion is dispelled and what was once difficult is clear as day. They then think "if I had only know this years ago I wouldn't have struggled!". But they are wrong. It was the years of struggle that helped them understand the theory, not the other way around.
It's the "wax on, wax off" of Karate Kid and the wise old Mr. Miyagi.
I read a music theory book from the 1800s and in the first chapter the author stated that while he endeavored to write useful theory to help students they must realize that if some composition they write follows all of his rules but sounds bad, it is bad. And if they write a composition that breaks his rules but it sounds good then it is good. These are old, old ideas that we re-learn over and over.
I’ve played mostly hard rock and metal, and am often the only band member with actual music theory knowledge (as the drummer, no less!). I’ve watched a number of bandmates resist learning any music theory because, “I don’t want to have to play by the rules” - as if they were some 16th century court composer.
Inevitably, they end up reinventing the wheel, in order to understand music they learn or write and then share with other musicians.
I think one thing that gets lost is that beyond being rules (more like observations these days) about how to write music, music theory is also a language that allows you to communicate with other musicians.
Good analogy. There's a flip side to it though. You can be a great comedian on the level of individual jokes, or short bits, but be unable to write a story. And you can be a great jazz musician when it comes to soloing, but be unable to write a song. Stan Getz was a famous example. So yeah, learning jazz by imitation and immersion (as one learns a language) is very cool: learning these hundreds of songs will most certainly teach you how to solo. But it won't teach you how to make a song. Not nearly as reliably. It needs something else, I don't know what.
I don't know quite what it is either, but I do know with certainty because it was my own experience that the act of inventing songs doesn't require any kind of experience at all, as some of my earliest memories as a child were riding in a car with a radio playing in the background, having some melody occur to me, and then being unable to get it out of my head. They weren't novel because they wouldn't have come to me had I not been idly listening to a lot of music, but neither were they just a slight variation on what I had been listening to.
I am by no means a prolific or genius songwriter, nobody would know any of my music, and I don't believe that any of it is particularly impressive. However I've always found the fact that it happened spontaneously way to be a source of wonder, and as I've aged as a musician its delightful to see the endless stream of new songs and that it doesn't seem to matter whether you're a prodigy when it comes to writing songs that impact listeners. It seems to be a fundamental aspect of the human experience.
I grew up in this area of West Virginia, it's such a crazy thing that a community of really amazing scientists are nestled in the middle of this incredibly rural area. It's really neat to see the old blue trucks if you take the tour, and the Cass Scenic Railroad is just nearby and gives a really beautiful view of the telescope array. The National Youth Science Academy Camp is also surprisingly located nearby, it was wild as a kid knowing that this batch of future scientists were flying in from all over the country and once I learned of it I wished I'd studied a bit harder. Such a beautiful, strange place.
If you consider the idea of music as language, genre as somewhat akin to regional dialects, and performance as akin to a recitation in that dialect to an audience, then the most fundamental prerequisite for composition is having something to say.
My background is in jazz, and often I encounter beginner students who have learned enough about the pedagogical aspects of music to know about a thing called theory and that there is virtue in knowing it, but they also mistakenly believe that an knowledge of theory is sort of the fountain from which ideas flow, which is not the case. For example to learn to compose and improvise in the jazz idiom, the way I learned it, the way essentially all the people I play with learned it, and how I teach my own students to do it is to internalize a great deal of music in your chosen style by players whose style resonates most with you. Memorizing changes, transcribing recorded parts on whatever instrument you enjoy playing, and so on. After doing this for a while you will start to develop a vocabulary of musical phrases which will occur to you spontaneously as a reaction to some kind of prompt, for example in jazz there are common sequences of chords that occur frequently in compositions, and by absorbing thousands of melodic phrases that occur over those changes you will have an innate idea of what you like to hear over them without having to think analytically about the relationships between tones and scales. You can certainly apply knowledge of theory to expand on your ideas in an analytical way, but the intuitive part needs to be developed first.
Many beginners balk at this idea because they like the idea of having purely new ideas, and you can certainly do music however you want, but I think ultimately most composers/performers want audiences to hear their work and there is a tacit relationship between the two; the audiences have an opinion about what sounds good and if your compositions don't sound like the genre of music they enjoy, neither of you are likely to be happy. I like to use the analogy of stand-up comedy; your jokes may crack you up but people don't want to watch somebody else laughing, so you have to meet them partway.
So having said all this, I think step one is to develop some opinions about what you think sounds good. Make a list of your favorite recordings and your favorite performances on those recordings and learn to reproduce them somehow. If you don't play an instrument, figure out how to sequence the changes, or noodle out a melody on the piano (if you don't play any instruments the piano is the smart choice, since it's like knowing how to type if you're a musician). The act of making these reproductions will tune your ear to hear chord qualities that might not be apparent to you until you try to recreate them, and relationships between notes in a melody and the supporting changes that you missed when just listening.
During that process, take time to just play. Undirected noodling on an instrument is the way you develop an intuition about where the notes you like live in relation to each other, and bumping around the space of notes on an instrument is a great way to learn.
At some point during those play sessions, you'll have an idea that'll get stuck in your head. Capture those ideas, save them, and then when you have a few you like, its time to start working on the composition process, either by notating/sequencing them with software instruments, or making a recording of mixed live/sequenced performance. I generally use Garage Band for making demos that I give to people I perform tunes with, some of my friends love Ableton Live, and the friends I know who do arranging for a living typically use something like Sibelius to produce scores.
I think that after you've made a few compositions of your own, if you decide you want to continue, its not a bad idea to take an introductory course on harmony to help develop your ear so that you can identify sounds that you like, but I think its best to do that after you have started to develop an intuitive sense of what sounds good, since that's the skill thats going to determine whether you make something that is interesting and not built from a formula.
In the end, I am generally using the search engine to find examples because I am too lazy to look at the source for the library I'm using, but if the choice is between an LLM that fabricates stuff some percentage of the time and just reading the fucking code like I've been doing for decades, I'd rather just take my chances with the search engine. If I'm unable to understand the code I'm reading enough to make it work, it's a good signal that maybe I shouldn't be using it at all since ultimately I'm going to be on the hook to straighten things out if stuff goes sideways.
Ultimately that's what this is all about- writing code is a big part of my career but the thing that has kept me employed is being able to figure out what to do when some code that I assembled (through some combination of experimentation, documentation, or duplication) is not behaving the way I had hoped. If I don't understand my own code chances are I'll have zero intuition about why it's not working correctly, and so the idea of introducing a bunch of random shit thrown together by some service which may or may not be able to explain it to me would be a disservice to my employers who trust me on the basis of my history of being careful.
I also just enjoy figuring shit out on my own.
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