[HN Gopher] How is it even possible to cheat on a musical perfor...
___________________________________________________________________
How is it even possible to cheat on a musical performance practical
exam?
Author : scns
Score : 181 points
Date : 2023-05-06 06:16 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
| robswc wrote:
| What a ridiculous plan in the first place.
|
| It hinges on:
|
| 1) Things going exactly as they do in the past.
|
| 2) The student being chosen.
|
| 3) The student remembering the keys.
|
| 4) The instructor not getting suspicious (it was brought up in
| the post)
|
| 5) The instructor never seeing the paper.
|
| What do they even teach these kids, lol. Seems it would only ever
| work in a perfect world.
| euroderf wrote:
| "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." (in this
| case, teaching staff)
| dehrmann wrote:
| Maybe it's graded on a curve, so you just have to beat the
| median.
|
| Or hope you're luckily a "C" student.
|
| It is a bit ironic that liberal arts students have to have
| demonstrated competency, while engineering students who will go
| on to build things your life depends on just have to do better
| than other students.
| somsak2 wrote:
| it better represents reality, at your job you also don't have
| some objective measure you're being evaluated against. you
| just have to do well enough not to get fired
| jzellis wrote:
| I'm imagining this story as an Everything Is Terrible educational
| video from the 90s about the evils of cheating and it's much
| better frankly
| carldaddy wrote:
| In college the night before a big computer programming project
| was due, all of us students met in the computer lab and basically
| copied one student who had his working. The Professor obviously
| noticed and told us all to do it again.
| dehrmann wrote:
| As someone who dabbles in guitar, I'm astonished how pianists
| happily accept an instrument that so heavily favors specific
| keys.
| yadingus wrote:
| Is this sarcasm? 90% of rock songs are in Em or Am because of
| guitars.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Am (especially) and Em happen to be very easy piano keys,
| too.
|
| What I meant is that playing a C major scale is easy, but it
| gets weird as you work through different keys. There's no
| consistency, so transposing is non-trivial. Compare that to a
| guitar and barre chords and capos.
| abruzzi wrote:
| all white keys is easy to play a scale without thinking,
| but I find it much harder to play well than keys that have
| some sharps or flats. that pattern of 2-space-3-space on
| the black key shelps to anchor your hands. I'd take e-flat
| major--its far easier to play than c-major.
|
| Transposing is harder, but the vast majority of piano
| litature is never played tranposed--you play the notes on
| the sheet music. I've tried some of those new layout
| keyboards like the Linnstrument, and I'd never try to play
| a Beethoven sonata on one.
| FrankyZunim wrote:
| Are we supposed to believe this actually happened? If it did, the
| author has done a great job of making it sound fake.
| analog31 wrote:
| The story sounded apocryphal to me too, or maybe it evolved
| through re-telling and re-remembering.
|
| Most people are in the dark about what college level music
| education consists of. If piano was being taught in a
| classroom, then it wasn't a music performance major program.
| Also, there are tiers of colleges, and a school with an easy
| music program for rich kids is not unthinkable.
|
| I have two kids who are both music performance majors in
| college (yes, we had the conversation about jobs), and I'm a
| musician myself. I learned the scales in middle school.
|
| A remote possibility is that this is a freak occurrence. I
| think you can't design a training program that absolutely bars
| creative cheating, without also degrading the program for the
| majority of students who don't cheat.
| jcpst wrote:
| I could just be confused, but I thought I remembered the
| folks doing performance majors alongside us in Keyboard class
| to get prepare for the piano proficiency exam. Obviously not
| the Pianists- but I thought every music major had to pass
| keyboard proficiency.
| hecanjog wrote:
| Yes, that was my experience too. Everyone needed to pass a
| basic keyboard skills class the first year (or test out of
| it) regardless of their focus in performance, composition,
| teaching, etc.
| analog31 wrote:
| It's true, but it tends to be a pretty lightweight class.
| Neither of my kids learned to play the piano in any
| useful way.
| jcpst wrote:
| Huh, that's interesting. My fellow scholars and myself
| found it rather challenging. Basically all students who
| were not piano players took 4 semesters (keyboard I II
| III IV), where IV prepared you for the exam.
|
| All of us could play in a lot of scenarios at the end of
| it.
|
| But it just so happened the college at the small
| midwestern town I grew up in had faculty from Eastman,
| Yale, Stanford, NW... and the music department was
| unusually rigorous for the level of school it was.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| My daughter's name: Albert Einstein.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha, it's the "we wanted to party and not study and we didn't
| tell you because you aren't pretty" is hilarious. It definitely
| makes the story sound fake even if it is true.
|
| People don't describe themselves like that. They rationalize
| why it's reasonable.
|
| Folks are more likely to say "I didn't want to learn a
| regimented set of things because it interfered with my ability
| to compose freely and play fluidly instead of mechanically.
| Also, art is about collaborating with other artists to make
| novel things, not just to repeat stuff like a machine"
|
| Maybe these days even "not everyone is privileged enough to be
| able to obsessively repeat the same exercises over and over
| again"
|
| No one in the history of man has ever made themselves out to be
| villainous. This sounds like a Scooby Doo villain when
| unmasked. "we would have gotten away with it if it weren't for
| you meddling kid"
| orestis wrote:
| I studied classical guitar for a few years, and let me tell you,
| scales on the guitar do not involve just moving a finger or a
| barre or a capo: look up the Segovia scales, that's what I was
| learning and it's physically demanding...
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| I often tell this Latin phrase to my students that I came across
| in the TV show West Wing:
|
| "corruptio optimi passima" : The corruption of the best, is the
| worst.
| tremon wrote:
| *pessima
| jancsika wrote:
| > The students didn't even distribute the keys among themselves
| in a plausible manner.
|
| Then the answer to the headline is, "Have instructors who _do not
| care about teaching_. " By the fourth "F major" announced, any
| musician with a working brain would know something is up.
|
| > Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot
| of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors.
|
| B major fits the hand better than F major and is significantly
| more fluid to practice. The only two white keys are for your
| stubby little thumbs, and the black keys are for the other
| fingers. _For both hands_. It 's a key that fits like a glove.
|
| F major requires a "bump"-- the b-flat is played by the ring
| finger on the right hand-- this is a weak, long finger and it
| feels awkward to have to strike the higher black key with it.
| Edit: even worse, the stubby little thumbs are on white keys. A
| student lazy enough to cheat might start out shifting their wrist
| to accommodate the short thumb. When you try to speed that up you
| hit a wall and have to relearn the motorhythms of the scale.
| Relearning wrong physical motion on the piano is at least an
| order of magnitude more difficult than just learning the correct
| way. So now the student has less time for dates because they
| didn't cheat properly to begin with.
|
| To learn to cheat properly you have to actually practice each
| scale and feel the relative facility. Oh, the irony!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As an advanced amateur pianist, F major and C major are my
| least favorite scales. F major has the awkward B flat and C
| major has no good reference by feel for where you are on the
| keyboard.
|
| Personally, 3 sharps/flats are the easiest scales for me. A lot
| of people like B and C# because you have 5 and 7 sharps that
| make it really easy to find the notes (F# is marginally
| harder...).
| tester756 wrote:
| To be fair I expected some crazy Windows related way to cheat on
| musical exam :P
| bombcar wrote:
| I'll try to make one for you!
|
| Not being musically inclined, beyond liking a bit of the
| Beatles now and then, I did not expect to get anything out of
| the music class my wife wanted us to take. Though it had no
| particular recognized value, the class did award a certificate
| of completion after finishing the course, which was about a
| semester-hour spread over most of a year.
|
| The music history we talked about was interesting, especially
| as I enjoy trivia such as the differences between various
| apparently similar instruments - did you know the viola is the
| only instrument to use the alto clef for notation?
|
| The "final exam" had us play a relatively simple (or so they
| said) piece by Beethoven - _Pathetique II. Adagio_ - and it was
| making me feel pretty pathetic. My wife had some previous piano
| history, and was doing quite well; but for me, the notes seemed
| to always end up in alphabetical order, or arrive long after
| they should have already left to go home. I began to slightly
| despair; I 'd never hear the end of it if I didn't at least get
| a (barely) passing grade.
|
| The evening came for the exam, and my wife reported that she'd
| done quite well. I stepped into the room with apprehension,
| knowing that the instructor's usual smile would soon turn to
| disappointment - but wait! _The instructor wasn 't there?!_
|
| He'd been called away to fill in for the Seattle Symphony, and
| had left instructions on how to take the test - a simple MIDI
| keyboard connected to an older PC. A slight ray of hope beamed
| through the window along with the setting sun - could it be?
| Would the PC be old _enough_? Sure enough, it was running
| Windows 98 (not Second Edition, that would have been
| disastrous)! I could do this!
|
| The Windows 98 MIDI handler had a buffer overflow! All I would
| have to do is start the exam, hold down the right keys on the
| keyboard to trigger it, and the program would crash. Since the
| way it "scored" your playing was to start by writing your name
| and 100 points to the database, it would record that I had
| begun, and then there would be no recording of me making any
| mistakes.
|
| I now have my certificate, and a photo of me with a slightly
| sheepish grin, as I was the only student to get a perfect
| score. I think my wife might suspect something, as she was
| perhaps near enough to hear that what I played sounded more
| like the _Cascades_ trying to clear the track than anything
| Beethoven would have written, but I just told her that he was
| mostly deaf and probably played loud.
| tgv wrote:
| > to look pretty
|
| The author might have missed on some of life, because I don't
| think "effort to look pretty" necessarily has to do with the
| looks you were born with, but rather with styling: hair, make-up,
| clothes.
| nayuki wrote:
| Playing in different musical keys would be a lot easier if the
| piano keyboard was like these:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard ,
| https://www.lumatone.io/ ,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_table_note_layout
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The went to university for a music degree and they can't already
| play scales?
| picardythird wrote:
| Typically at this level the scales will be performed in more
| difficult variations, e.g. the right hand plays starting on the
| third or 6th note of the scale.
|
| There are also cases of concert pianists who notoriously
| refused to practice scales for these kinds of exams.
| zsaffir wrote:
| While students getting a music education degree have to learn
| all the instruments, they typically have a primary instrument
| that may or not be piano. If piano isn't their primary
| instrument there's no reason they would know how to play all
| the scales before starting the degree.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| That's still concerning. If your mental model of a scale is
| via the notes, the piano has helpful colour coding. Not being
| able to use that implies that the scales have instead been
| memorised by how they're played - frets, valves, etc. - that
| will stop working when a more in-depth application of keys is
| needed.
| markatto wrote:
| The piano is not the canonical model of a scale - it's just
| a bit more visual than some other instruments. I went to
| music school and primarily play guitar and violin but can
| sort of play some keys. I could definitely figure out
| pretty much any scale on a piano but couldn't just sit down
| and immediately play most of them.
| nlnn wrote:
| I don't know about these exact exams, but often there are a lot
| of variations to play.
|
| E.g. multiple octaves, arpeggio inversions, scales in 3rds,
| 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc.
|
| Plus there's often a requirement to play at a certain tempo,
| legato/staccato, with correct intonation (for certain
| instruments), and also to use the correct fingerings as taught
| in other cases.
|
| So can be a lot more involved than playing a simple scale.
| djtango wrote:
| I'll admit that I kind of enjoyed scales on the piano because
| I could mindlessly practise them when I was forced to
| practise, but I feel like there's a point where if you don't
| know them, you're limiting yourself in all kinds of ways.
|
| Improv and harmonisation benefit from you knowing all the
| keys on the keyboard inside out. Likewise, if you start going
| for volume of music you can play, at some point not having
| those foundations start to limit you.
|
| Anyone can memorise 3 pieces perfectly and over-practice them
| then ace a test. But what if the spirit of a grade and level
| represented more than that? My final teacher (who I met long
| after finishing exams) was very traditional and had a policy
| that was vaguely "you shouldn't take more than 3-6 months" to
| prepare for your grade exam. If you can't reach distinction
| level within that time, you're not ready so you should work
| more on your actual playing ability and musicianship.
|
| If you're learning like that, scales will be the least of
| your worries as we worked on so much repertoire that the need
| for it was self-evident (and well baked into a good routine).
|
| I guess it's a bit like driving - if you memorize a few
| routes you can probably perform like a real driver, but
| that's not really the same as being a real driver.
| nlnn wrote:
| Same for me, I really enjoy playing scales and the like as
| studying jazz has made the application and benefit of
| practice a lot more clear.
|
| I did some classical study and grades years ago and
| remember there being a big disconnect - my teacher just
| gave me scales and pieces as totally separate entities, and
| just taught them as things necessary to pass the exam, with
| no real application or purpose explained to me.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Standard is 2 or 3 octaves, arpeggios, 3rds, 4ths etc
| ascending only (for some reason), groups of 3 or groups of 4
| and the different types of articulation (stoccato, legato,
| accent on every second, third or fourth note etc).
|
| Honestly that sounds like a lot but all the articulation
| stuff is the same for every scale and once you get the hang
| of intervals they are really not hard.
|
| Classical musicians do the above for major, harmonic and
| melodic minor. Jazzers will typically add the major and
| melodic minor modes, the whole tone scales (only 2 of those)
| and the diminished scales. People like me add the harmonic
| major and harmonic minor modes, the augmented scale and a few
| other bits and pieces.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Sure. I went to music school for trumpet where I learned:
|
| - new scales I didn't know about
|
| - new ways to play scales I did know
|
| - new instruments which required relearning scales. If you're
| learning to be a music teacher this is often a big part of it
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Everyone who majors in music has to learn piano (at least for
| most majors) even if you aren't a pianist.
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| I got into Berklee for piano performance, couldn't do more than
| a few scales fluently despite lessons my whole life.
| seanhunter wrote:
| You'd be amazed. I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining
| to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys
| with all possible variations of articulation for his practical.
|
| A frikkin' guitarist.
|
| For those of you who don't know, playing a scale in a different
| key on a guitar literally involves moving your first finger to
| a different fret and starting from there. There are two or
| three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting
| on a different string or different finger. But it's not hard. I
| told him he should be ashamed of himself and to stop whining.
|
| Playing in all keys on a sax or trumpet or whatever is a
| totally different kettle of fish. Still necessary to learn.
| Still ridiculous to be doing a music degree and not be able to
| just do but definitely much harder.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Scales on a piano, on the other hand...
| bonzini wrote:
| I haven't practiced them in twenty years and I can still
| play them decently. If they start on a black key I need 3
| seconds to play an octave in my mind, to double check the
| first finger of each hand. Twenty years ago I didn't even
| need that.
| hgsgm wrote:
| A little harder than playing scales on a fish.
|
| You can tune a piano, but you can tuna fish.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| > A frikkin' guitarist.
|
| > There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be
| able to handle starting on a different string or different
| finger.
|
| This is simply wrong.
|
| Just the 3-note-per-string supershape covering the western
| modes is a cycle of seven ordered shapes for each string. As
| soon as you start including 2- or 4-note-per-string sub-
| patterns to move to the required position on the neck, the
| number of the overall fingerings and movements to memorize
| and practice explodes. This of course doesn't take the pesky
| B-string into account.
|
| If you're a piano player, imagine playing on 6 rows of
| uncoloured keys of similar size, each row _except one_ is
| shifted by a fourth, and the key width diminishes going up
| the scale (to an uncomfortable degree). No chords on a single
| row allowed. Oh, and you need two fingers on opposite hands
| to make a single sound.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| The problem with scales on a guitar is not getting to the
| next note, which is relatively easy. It's if you're playing a
| piece and you haven't worked out the scale to use first and
| then halfway through you find you need to either get your
| index finger off the string it's on and onto the string
| above, or get your pinky waaaaay over there on the same
| string, and what looks like a simple step is actually really
| hard - in that scale.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Unless you're using open strings for some effect then most
| transpositions should be isomorphic on a guitar. And if the
| open resonances matter a capo has you sorted.
| CPLX wrote:
| I would agree that transposing on a guitar is _definitely_
| easier than most other instruments. But it is hardly trivial
| or easy, assuming you actually have to span the entire
| fretboard.
| omoikane wrote:
| Transposing a scale to a different key would be
| straightforward on a guitar (e.g. with a capo), it's just
| that playing any scale might be difficult independent of the
| key.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| ???
| dehrmann wrote:
| Or without a capo. It's more common to practice scales
| without one since songs are in guitar-friendly keys like G
| and C often enough that you want to be able to solo in them
| without a capo.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| You can study computer science without writing a single line
| of code. It's no different for music. Learning all the keys
| by heart is like learning your text editor keybindings,
| useful, but ultimately has little relevance to actual music
| theory and composition.
| seanhunter wrote:
| You'll definitely be hampered in composition if you don't
| have decent keyboard fluency and I would say this is table
| stakes for that. But yes this is more directly relevant to
| performance. The guitarist in the anecdote above wanted a
| soloist career so was definitely squarely in the group for
| which playing scales is a minimum requirement.
| gabereiser wrote:
| They have these things called midi guitars now. You don't
| need keyboard fluency. Hell, now a days you don't need
| any instrument other than a novation launchpad (a button
| grid). However, if you are going for a music degree, you
| should be able to know what the difference between a
| dorian and mixolydian scale. You should know that there's
| 7 different ways to play a D major on the guitar. You
| should know how to do pentatonic scales in any key as
| well as blues harmonic scales. Any guitarist who wants to
| play professionally needs to know this. Whether they are
| a rhythm guitarist, a soloist, a satanist, or a folk
| strummer. It's not just about being "gud", but knowing
| how to construct a solo, using those scales, in the songs
| key. That is very VERY much required. If you are
| interested in pursuing music _as a degree_ then these
| things are table stakes. It 's taught in high school. Go
| brush up.
| smabie wrote:
| Not an expert, but feel like there's a ton of
| professional guitarists who don't know these things?
| gabereiser wrote:
| what is a professional? Steve Vai? He knows all his
| scales. Eddie Van Halen? He's mastered scales at 12.
| Jimmy Page? ditto. Buddy Guy? He invented one.
|
| If you're talking about a touring musician, or a studio
| musician, they absolutely know their scales.
|
| Anyone who makes more than $20k/year with their guitar
| knows their scales.
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| Other cherrypicked examples, Dave Grohl and Clapton
| famously had no formal training and just learned by
| listening to and emulating artists they liked. I suspect
| they make over 20k/year.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Dave Grohl knows his scales now. Yes, if you make a band
| and become successful you can call yourself a
| professional without music theory. If you go back to what
| I said though, I said _as a degree_.
| watwut wrote:
| I doubt he plays scales on concerts. It is actually
| requirement that is not directly related to ability to
| play music.
| l__l wrote:
| Well this is wildly wrong. Scales, arpeggios, etc. are
| taught not just for the theoretical understanding they
| help with but because they occur VERY frequently in
| actual pieces
| bonzini wrote:
| https://youtu.be/I_AX4R-d29o are you sure?
| ludston wrote:
| Music degrees are usually designed to train musicians
| that can perform, compose, transpose and teach.
|
| Playing every scale is a fundamental step in learning to
| transpose, that is to play music in more than the key you
| learned it in. It's a necessary step for when a guitar
| player has learned some piece in say, C major and then
| they need to perform that piece with a singer that can't
| physically sing in that key.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Luckily for the vast majority of guitarists who don't
| know much of any theory there are these magical devices
| called a capo!
|
| And digital keyboards have a transpose by semi-tone
| feature!
|
| It is entirely possible to learn to teach, play, and
| create new music in many styles without any knowledge of
| music theory.
|
| It's really hard to get very good at live ensemble music
| performance without learning some theory as a byproduct
| of the necessity of communicating with other musicians.
|
| It's really hard to get good at playing singing and
| playing songs on instruments like the piano or guitar
| without learning the names of some chords because reading
| at least chord and lyric sheets will accelerate your
| learning process.
|
| I definitely know guitarists who know basically zero
| theory but who could hear a song a couple of times and
| then accompany a singer in any key based on playing by
| ear and interpreted and performed in a way that the
| original songwriter couldn't have been imagined.
|
| The entirety of the Nashville music industry is based
| around a notation system called the Nashville notation.
| 1s, 5s, diamonds, bars. The keys are left out and depend
| on which singer is recording with the band. Five note
| scales, bends, and capos and you're talking about half of
| the popular recorded music in the USA in the 20th
| century, from rock to blues and country and everything in
| between.
| ludston wrote:
| Playing with a capo sounds different to playing without
| one, and digital keyboards don't sound the same as
| acoustic instruments.
|
| Sure you might make a career as a musician playing
| everything by ear, and there is nothing wrong with that.
| But a university trained viola player can join an
| orchestra, be handed violin sheet music and then perform
| having never heard or practiced the music before.
|
| You don't really need to go do a degree in music at all
| if your only goal is performance and you have intuitive
| aptitude, but if your plan is to teach, you're going to
| be a pretty awful teacher if you only can teach students
| to ape your specific methodology rather than being able
| to introduce them to the lingua franca that most
| musicians are using.
| watwut wrote:
| I could be handed piano sheet music and play it straight
| away in elementary school. It is not that hard to read
| sheet music and it does not require scales which I never
| bothered to learn. I was not some kind of prodigy either.
| It is just that if you play enough, music sheet becomes
| like normal reading - you just know what is written
| there. The rest is manual dexterity.
|
| Ability to play from the sheet without preparation if
| completely orthogonal to anything in this thread.
| Especially to ability to play all the scales in all
| variations to the perfection for the practice test.
| ludston wrote:
| Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different
| keys in order to transpose, and musicians need to be able
| to play something they have rehearsed accurately, and
| musicians need to be able to play all across a large
| range.
|
| Testing scales tests all of these things, and more
| simultaneously. I fail to see the problem. If you're as
| good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the
| scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly
| the first time, so what's the problem?
| toast0 wrote:
| > Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in
| different keys in order to transpose
|
| > Testing scales tests all of these things
|
| I don't see how testing scales tests knowing the sharps
| and flats really. If you're playing all the (major)
| scales on a string instrument, it's all about starting on
| the right note, and then doing the scale pattern: whole,
| whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. On a guitar, half
| is one fret and whole is two, and you need to know how to
| jump to the next string if you don't want to just walk
| the length of the fretboard. I've never played a wind
| instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to
| play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in
| others, and keyboards are setup for c-major, so it takes
| some practice to get the sense of where the whole and
| half tones are for other keys, but the example of guitar
| is not hard. If you can play guitar and have a week to
| practice it, you should be able to play any major/minor
| scale on demand.
|
| If you can play the scale, you can probably take the time
| and think the sharps and flats, but that doesn't really
| mean you know them, IMHO.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> I 've never played a wind instrument, but I understand
| those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can
| be akward to play in others_
|
| It's been a while since I played (stopped after college),
| but yes. Wind instruments really only play in one key. It
| is really rare to have sheet music in a different key and
| because of that transposing is not a skill that you
| really need to be successful. You still learn scales... I
| played one of the few instruments where you were expected
| to be able to transpose (F horn with some older music in
| Eb). Even then, while it wasn't hard, it wasn't a common
| skill.
|
| Guitar, string, and piano are an entirely different
| beast. And that flexibility of scales and keys is
| probably why you don't see many wind instruments
| professionally playing outside of orchestras.
| ludston wrote:
| You see wind instruments outside of orchestras all the
| time though. The main reason for the domination of guitar
| and piano is economic: you can play more notes at once
| and therefore have played richer sound with fewer
| players. You can split the gig money across less people.
| It really has nothing to do with the number of wind
| players that can transpose.
| watwut wrote:
| Like, none of what you wrote here has nothing whatsoever
| with the actual concrete practice test this particular
| guitarist complained about. Testing scales does not test
| any of these, actually. It is just absurd to claim that
| playing scales at practice test is done in order to test
| how you play "something you have rehearsed accurately" or
| "ability to transpose".
|
| > If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can
| just read the scales off the sheet music and play them
| all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
|
| So basically, you do not know anything about the test the
| guitarist complained about.
| mrob wrote:
| IMO knowing about sharps and flats is an impediment to
| transposition. I play alto recorder, and I was very
| careful to avoid learning any sheet music. Instead I
| wrote a simple Python script to convert MIDI files to
| numbers, with 0 representing the lowest note, 1
| representing a semitone above it, and so on. I then
| memorized the fingering for each number. I can transpose
| in my head just by adding or subtracting. And I practice
| scales based on the semitone intervals between the
| degrees of the scale, so I only need to know
| major/minor/wholetone/pentatonic etc. and just change the
| starting note.
|
| This is more difficult on the standard piano because of
| the badly designed keyboard, but you can get isomorphic
| keyboards that let you play all the keys without learning
| all the sharps and flats.
| watwut wrote:
| The quitarist in question was looking for soloist career,
| so singer wont be an issue. Plus, it is not exactly as if
| he ever needed to do that quickly on the fly. He does not
| need to know when all in all variations for that either.
| Being able to understand and look up scales in that
| unique situation is useful, but that does not require
| being able to "play all scales in all keys with all
| possible variations of articulation for his practical." I
| am not saying that school does not have right to put in
| such task, but I am saying that it 100% makes sense that
| student does not like it.
|
| And second, it is not like you would pass practical just
| by knowing which notes and chords are in it. You need to
| play in tempo, with accents and all that jazz. It does
| require training even if you know exactly what you are
| supposed to do. Except that this training is brain dead
| boring.
| 2devnull wrote:
| I disagree. One can read without knowing how to recite
| the abc's (ie alphabetic order), sure. But anybody that
| is a competent reader will have little problem learning
| the abc's if they were forced to recite it for a test.
|
| You claim to be a competent musician who doesn't know
| scales. I can imagine half-diminished and other
| intermediate level stuff being non-essential but at the
| very least major and minor scale knowledge is needed to
| read music. Being able to sight read implies playing in
| all keys, which requires knowing the major/minor scales.
| tremon wrote:
| Some of the most revered guitar players, like Steve Vai,
| Joe Satriani or John Petrucci regularly play scales
| during their concerts. Of course, they don't keep to one
| scale while playing -- they're masters of their craft, so
| they play a different scale every other measure.
|
| See e.g. https://youtu.be/Z01s5siJl6E -- the first two
| licks are clear examples of walking the scale, in one or
| both directions respectively -- or
| https://youtu.be/lGnEy9COP88
| eirikbakke wrote:
| Whether you're playing by ear or by sight, having the
| current scale baked into muscle memory makes it a lot
| easier to hit the right next note on the first attempt.
| Otherwise you'll be frequently off by a semitone, or end
| up using non-optimal finger positions (which can be hard
| to unlearn).
|
| Any given melody will modulate between multiple major and
| minor scales; see Coltrane's "Giant Steps" for an extreme
| example.
| analog31 wrote:
| If you're in music school, and are not already performing
| at a fairly high level, and not interested in being
| challenged beyond the bare minimum skill set needed for a
| given position, you're wasting your time and money.
| You'll never catch up with the competition.
| ghaff wrote:
| The arts are probably one area in general where it's
| mostly impractical to show up at college, decide this
| thing is really cool, and decide to make a career out of
| it--over and above the lottery nature of the field
| generally.
|
| Arguably there are some aspects of this in software as
| well--deliberately avoiding the CS term--but it's almost
| certainly going to be really hard for someone with no
| music background to show up at university and decide this
| is something they're really interested in.
| analog31 wrote:
| At a first or second tier school, it would be basically
| unthinkable. None of the professors would even be willing
| to give you lessons -- they fill their studios through
| the audition process. It would be a huge waste of money
| to pay college tuition for remedial music lessons. Also,
| a big part of college music study is playing in ensembles
| that are coached by faculty. You have to be at a level
| where you can hold your own in an ensemble or you can't
| even participate. The schools are careful to admit only
| those students who can hang in the ensembles. Getting
| into music school is an application process _on top of_
| getting into the college.
|
| With that said, you could get lessons from a graduate
| student who wants to earn some money.
|
| My observation (two kids in music school) is that
| undergrad music is almost like grad school in other
| fields, in that you sign up with a specific professor who
| is your teacher for 4 years, and their job is to turn you
| into a fully fledged professional. The kids who are
| coming out of those programs are ready to start an
| independent professional career, the only obstacle being
| competition and not competence. My daughter, who is
| graduating this spring, is in fact playing
| professionally.
| ghaff wrote:
| (At a tech school) I signed up early-on for an Intro to
| Music course I thought would be interesting--and to be
| clear it was. But as it turned out the person teaching
| the class was a pretty well-known choral director (John
| Oliver as I recall) and pretty much everyone else in the
| class were well-versed in music and were there because of
| said well-known choral director so not knowing the
| difference between major and minor keys wasn't really
| part of the program.
|
| It was fine. It just wasn't really what I signed up for.
| harrylove wrote:
| Counterpoint[0]: I have a master's degree in composition
| and I don't play any instruments at a decent level of
| performance. I would say the requisite skill is knowing
| how instruments sound, how they sound together, where
| their limits are, where the golden sounds and techniques
| can be found, and how to notate all of that so you can
| reproduce it accurately. If you can read a piece of music
| and know what it sounds like without needing to hear it
| played, you'll be fine. And that's also a skill you can
| learn, just like performance. The rest of composition is
| experience, artistic vision, and luck, just like every
| other job.
|
| [0] wink
| hgsgm wrote:
| Music performance is different from music theory, like
| software engineering is different from computer science.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I hope "all scales" didn't include modes other than Ionian
| and Aeolian. And then there's harmonic minors.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about
| having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all
| possible variations of articulation for his practical.
|
| > A frikkin' guitarist.
|
| What instruments do you play? I'm going to guess not guitar.
| Guitar is one of the few instruments that very many people
| learn by themselves, by ear, and can get extremely good
| without foundations like scales and reading notation. I am
| not surprised about a guitarist struggling to "formalize"
| their guitar-playing as an undergrad, where it can be as hard
| as learning a new language when you're an adult.
| rvba wrote:
| To be honest, the world is quite strange. You are supposed to
| know how to play the piano - and well, before you go to music
| university.
|
| Somehow people who study medicine are not expected to have
| medical knowledge. Precursors sure.
|
| Of course I understand that it is a question of supply and
| demand, for some reason tons of people compete to finish the
| relatively scarce music university, so the university can
| demand them to know stuff.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Just like in a Chinese musical school, something like 98% are
| supposed to have perfect pitch. Because they have enough
| applicants to fill the school even with that bar.
| homami wrote:
| We had a CS undergrad intern that didn't know what i++; means
| in JavaScript for loops.
| etothepii wrote:
| They didn't know what it means or what it does or that it's
| important.
|
| I'm not sure it matters for most practical uses what i++
| means so long as you know it is required.
|
| Much as with {} being used for scoping.
|
| Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z know
| about how anything _works_.
| maccard wrote:
| > Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z
| know about how anything works.
|
| I've worked with GenX'ers and Millenials (I'm a millenial),
| and this isn't unique to GenZ at all. A large number of
| people don't understand, and are just getting by.
| Anecdotally, I've seen people at very senior engineering
| positions who just don't understand the basics of what
| they're doing. Does that mean that it's jarring how many
| GenX'ers don't understand?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Yeah, we see this a lot with younger people because they
| are just starting in the world. Also, they're the
| predominate generation right now that's video taping and
| posting every even possibly interesting moment of their
| lives, irrespective of whether some 30 year old thinks
| it's embarrassing. If 60 year olds were posting every
| strange thought or funny moment we'd have some opinions
| about them too (Facebook, anyone?) They're just thinking
| about and misunderstanding a different set of things. But
| i think the kids are somewhat closer to a humility that
| might be hard to find elsewhere.
| maccard wrote:
| > If 60 year olds were posting every strange thought or
| funny moment we'd have some opinions about them too
| (Facebook, anyone?)
|
| My older relatives pore out the most excruciating details
| of their personal lives on people's Facebook profiles,
| not understanding that it's not a private message. These
| people grew up and we're the ones who warned us "never
| use your real name online", etc.
| homami wrote:
| Unfortunately this person graduating from a Western
| European uni, could not even grasp the algorithm for
| creating a count down timer.
|
| They asked me for career advice. I wonder whether the jobs
| that require only this level of copy and pasting skills
| would thrive or die in the AI era.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Except it's not required :-P
| maccard wrote:
| I made it as far as my first internship before I learned what
| `!val` meant. Don't ding people ( _especially_ interns or
| juniors) for not knowing specifics or notation, or things
| that can be answered in a single google. What matters is what
| they do when they learn what `i++` is - does it ever come up
| again, and do they understand it.
| davnicwil wrote:
| Did they know what it meant within seconds of you you
| explaining it to them, though? That's the only important
| thing.
| drowsspa wrote:
| How come a CS bachelor never wrote a for loop?
| _dain_ wrote:
| not every language uses i++.
|
| increment operators are a language design antipattern
| anyway, not some fundamental knowledge.
| davnicwil wrote:
| I don't know, but I also don't care much because it
| doesn't matter.
|
| Again, can they quickly understand and apply the
| knowledge once it is explained to them is all that
| matters.
| balfirevic wrote:
| It also matter that they apparently wrote a for loop a
| number of times without wondering what each of those
| symbols actually does and just treated it as magic
| incantation.
|
| Edit: assuming they didn't use a language where such
| idiom doesn't exist or is not common, as another
| commented pointed out.
| oriolid wrote:
| They could just write loops and remember that repeating
| the variable name with ++ is part of loop syntax without
| knowing what it means. Almost like text-generating AI
| would do it (ducks).
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| In recent years it's very possible they either don't use
| a language where that syntax is ever required (python) or
| just use one of the foreach variants in pretty much every
| language.
| drowsspa wrote:
| I can only think of Python, but are people learning that
| alone these days? In every other popular language, I
| can't imagine not ever encountering a situation where you
| also need to know the index of the iteration.
| rvba wrote:
| Maybe cheated, maybe third world country diploma mill,
| maybe sports scholarship
| jb1991 wrote:
| Scales can get very very tricky. There are multiple modes of
| minor, for example, that have different notes ascending and
| descending. When you combine that with some requirements, like
| playing the scales the full length of the keyboard up and down
| at a consistent quick tempo, perhaps in triplets, missing just
| one note is extremely easy to do. Depending on the requirements
| of the exam, missing just one note may be enough to hurt your
| score.
| tgv wrote:
| Come on. Scales are not very, very tricky. And you can't
| really play scales in quavers or triplets: there's no time
| signature.
|
| And there were only two modes (if the story can be trusted to
| get all details right).
| jb1991 wrote:
| Strange that you would feel a need to debate this.
|
| Triplets have nothing to do with time signature. Just that
| point reveals lack of experience in this area. Triplets
| exist in any time signature or lack of one. They are about
| beat subdivision.
|
| I could explain each of these points in greater detail but
| I am not compelled to take the time. Playing scales to
| meter is a common technique.
|
| And if I asked even a professional to sit down right now
| and whip out, say a melodic minor in five flats, four
| octaves at a quick consistent pace, many would indeed need
| a quick try first. They do get tricky indeed.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Professional musician here. That would be trivial to do,
| even on my weaker instruments, and even with triplets.
|
| Though just give me the tonic name, no need to call it
| five flats.
|
| Edit to add: To be fair I'm about a decade further in my
| career than someone going to study music for the first
| time.
| jb1991 wrote:
| That's great to hear, but allow me to offer a common
| example. Ask a pianist to quickly play four octaves of
| melodic minor in thirds, and especially as one hand is
| ascending and the other is descending at the turning
| point, and there are two different modes being played
| simultaneously, many will indeed miss a note. Now make it
| a less common key, and you can see why it can be tricky
| for some. Certainly not everyone, for students yes and
| even some experience pianists may need to practice a bit
| first.
|
| This kind of request is very common at many music schools
| for these kinds of exams.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I took piano classes for several years as a child and they made
| me learn all the scales somewhere around the age of 12 or
| something. It was standard practice and I can't imagine anyone
| who took classes in the same music education system as I did
| and couldn't play all the scales.
| watwut wrote:
| I played classical piano too, but never learned scales. It
| seemed completely useless to me and I was still was able to
| pass. It still seems completely useless to me, to be honest.
| The # I am supposed to play are right there in the music
| sheet notation.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I don't know if I found them useful, but the program my
| parents put me in forced me to learn them.
|
| Overall, I was pretty indifferent about my music education,
| it was just something my parents sort of made me do and I
| had to spend a few hours every week on, but I wasn't very
| enthusiastic about.
| oriolid wrote:
| I did the same, and found out that it's a great way to
| paint yourself in a corner. In this corner you can learn
| very complex pieces by practicing learning them from the
| sheet music, but on the other hand every new piece is an
| unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch, and
| it won't help at all with playing by ear, improvising or
| even much for playing from lead sheets. Yes, I was able to
| pass the exams by just knowing how scales work and coming
| up with fingerings on the fly, but in hindsight it wasn't
| the best idea.
| watwut wrote:
| If we did some improvising, it might be useful. We did no
| improvising at all, therefore it was just completely
| useless theory that had literally nothing to do with
| anything. I think that if they taught us some little
| improvising, we might see value in scales and maybe I
| would even ended up liking the piano more.
|
| > on the other hand every new piece is an unique
| snowflake that you star learning from scratch
|
| Not really. You still have memory of previous ones and
| you do hear how it sounds. The intuition builds up, so to
| say. You do learn to hear and distinguish what sounds
| good or bad. I kind of do not see how theoretical
| knowledge of the scales would help here.
|
| But also I dropped out the first moment I could, so there
| is that too. But remembering the pieces was not issue at
| all. Issue was that I did not even liked music I had to
| play all that much and playing pieces you dont like much
| again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.
| oriolid wrote:
| > If we did some improvising, it might be useful.
|
| Of course, it was the way back then. I've been told that
| it's changed a lot in the recent 10 or 20 years at least
| where I live. But the point is, even if they didn't teach
| improvising in the official lessons, the curriculum also
| didn't prepare us to do anything outside that narrow
| scope.
|
| > playing pieces you dont like much again and again to
| perfection is not exactly motivating.
|
| Sounds still better than half-assing a lot of pieces and
| then deciding that that's not it, let's try another one.
| It would have been nice to have some repertoire in
| playable shape for once.
| watwut wrote:
| > Sounds still better than half-assing a lot of pieces
| and then deciding that that's not it, let's try another
| one.
|
| I dunno. It sounds like you got further, kept doing it
| for long and kept liking it.
|
| I ditched it first time I could and never looked back. I
| was against my kids playing music instrument unless they
| would really really insist on it, because I felt like it
| is unpleasant activity I don't want to burden them with.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| If all you want to do is play what's on sheet music, a
| player piano will do the job.
| dcminter wrote:
| What would "all the scales" mean here?
| tgv wrote:
| Major and minor in every key (so C, c, C#, c#, D, d, etc.)
| jb1991 wrote:
| It means more than just that. There are multiple unique
| modes of minor, and advanced music exams will also bust
| out enharmonic requirements, playing in thirds and other
| things that requires very extensive practice.
|
| Source: I've done several of these exams.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| In _this_ context, where the article speaks of "all 24
| keys", it most certainly doesn't.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Usually for each minor key there are three minor modes
| they can request. That would be 48 different scales as a
| typical minimum. (not including other requests that are
| typically made of scale playing in these exams)
| [deleted]
| yellowapple wrote:
| I'm just as confused by that. Most people I know who had some
| goal to earn a degree in music were already able to play any
| scale on a substantial number of instruments by the time they
| graduated from high school. Hell, I was in that camp and I
| didn't even plan on going to college.
|
| Granted, not everyone goes into a music program knowing every
| instrument, but scales and arpeggios ain't terribly hard to
| practice, be it on a keyboard or a woodwind or a brass or
| whatever.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Seems like you always encounter students willing to work
| harder to cheat than to learn.
|
| My freshman year some students got expelled for keylogging TA
| passwords and using them to mark assignments passed.
|
| The assignments weren't that hard...
| robga wrote:
| A lot of cheating is about time not difficulty. Rather than
| spend several evenings practising they partied instead,
| perhaps justifying cheating by deeming the exam topic an
| irrelevance.
|
| One of the takeaways here should be for the exam setters.
| If cheating was widespread (it sounds like a one off here)
| then they should consider whether the exam itself was an
| appropriate task, or whether there was an alternative task
| that may have been more engaging and ultimately a better
| test for all.
| aksss wrote:
| > weren't that hard
|
| Maybe that's part of the problem. One of those things is
| way more intriguing than the other, speaking as someone who
| wrote fake login screens for my high school's PS/2 lab. Had
| like thirty passwords in a couple hours, including one
| teacher, by running it on the workstation closest to the
| door.
| robga wrote:
| The degree they were studying for led to a job where for many
| of them the ability to play arpeggios in 24 keys may have been
| irrelevant. For example, teaching the history of music, or
| perhaps musical therapy.
|
| When I studied music part of my grade was based on a singing
| exam. I couldn't sing, didn't want to sing, would never need to
| professionally sing, and have never sung since. Make no
| mistake- it was scored on the quality of singing. But I
| couldn't avoid it being part of the exam system.
|
| Imagine someone studying for a computer science degree majoring
| in chip design. They cheat in Programming 101 by studying only
| one Sorting Algorithm, not 24 of them, since they can influence
| which algorithm they are assigned at exam time. Perhaps there
| is a better example but you get the drift.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I get that people don't want to waste time, but you lose a
| lot from taking this attitude.
|
| When I went to school we had a lot of kids who were only
| temporarily in the country. Their parents were diplomats or
| corporate expats. The government still made the kids learn
| the local language, with the predictable outcome that these
| kids had no motivation whatsoever to learn the language.
|
| Now with the debate in America being the way it is, a lot of
| these kids would actually have had a place to go back to, if
| they only spoke the language.
|
| Similarly with a lot of things you learn in education, most
| of them seem to be of no use, but it's only because you don't
| learn them properly they are of no use.
| data_maan wrote:
| I get this drift!
|
| And I think a bit of cheating is healthy.
|
| The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those
| who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills
| were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1]
|
| Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons
| bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance.
| But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture
| anyone's potential.
|
| For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the
| reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you
| develop yourself!
|
| [1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html
| thewildginger wrote:
| Sam bankman-fried would have agreed with you I'm sure.
| data_maan wrote:
| Hehe, I knew some people would not be able to take this
| perspective.
|
| The comparison is wrong BTW because cheating at an exam
| doesn't hurt anyone - but SBFs actions did.
|
| Well, you can be nice and stay home the whole day and do
| what other people tell to score nicely on some metrics
| called "grades", or you can ...
| CraneWormScare wrote:
| [flagged]
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Is that a bad thing
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Cheating solves a problem for the cheater, but has the
| side-effect of entrenching the selection criteria for
| everyone who comes after. If a genuinely good student, who
| the professors recognize as good, cannot pass a particular
| criterion, this motivates the professors to eliminate, or
| at least discount, the criterion. If the student does pass,
| then the professors see no harm in continuing to use the
| criterion for all future students at its current grade
| weighting.
|
| In addition to this, for those students who _will not_
| cheat, they are then required to spend their effort
| developing a skill which they may never use again, at the
| expense of developing skills they will use again. And also
| at the expense of their placement in the class. Patrascu
| may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as
| brilliant as the person who didn 't make the cut because he
| made the cut instead?
|
| I think cheating is unhealthy for the system.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Too late for the edit window, so I'll reply to add:
|
| If a person gets in the habit of cheating because they
| don't think the thing they are cheating on is important,
| then they have to develop the skill of always knowing
| what is important, and what isn't, or they risk cheating
| on something with serious consequences. Patrascu died at
| the age of 29 from brain cancer. I wonder if he ignored
| any symptoms because he didn't think they were
| consequential.
| dahart wrote:
| Of course if you're not a signer and aren't interested in
| singing then the aesthetic quality of singing shouldn't be
| scored, and hopefully they were also teaching you a little
| bit about how to sing, or maybe you just got unlucky
| (sometimes there are crappy teachers, bad exams, unfair
| situations, it does happen unfortunately). Singing really is
| a very useful skill to have when playing instruments or
| teaching music though. I wasn't interesting in signing when I
| was younger, but now I wish I'd spent more time learning how
| and didn't have to hide in private to be comfortable singing.
| It does something very interesting to sing & play at the same
| time, it's hard but I think it makes playing the instrument
| easier.
|
| There are some problems with complaining you'll never use a
| certain skill teachers are trying to teach. Specifically, you
| don't know in advance that you will never need it
| professionally. More generally and more importantly, the
| whole point of a university education is to give the student
| a broad base foundation in the subject, to teach you more
| than a small set of specific interests, and more than is
| required for a specific job. It is intentionally designed not
| to be strictly vocational training, it is not an
| apprenticeship.
|
| I made this mistake when I was young, and complained in a
| math class, joking loudly and publicly, that the teacher was
| wasting our collective time forcing us to learn esoteric
| things we'd never use. I don't remember what it was exactly,
| I think maybe matrix determinants, and the joke's on me
| because I use determinants and everything else the teacher
| was teaching in my job professionally.
|
| BTW, I work in chip design and all the hardware people know
| and use sorting algorithms, and not just the kind you learn
| in CS 101, they are experts in parallel sorting algorithms.
| Put the death of Moore's law on top and the fact that
| algorithms and efficiency and power consumption are becoming
| more important every day. These foundations that students
| assume aren't relevant to the future actually are important
| to their future prospects, they just don't know it yet.
| robga wrote:
| Yes I understood the point of the singing part of the exams
| and tried my best (which wasn't that good). Like you say, a
| broad base with specialities. I was empathising with how
| the cheaters must have felt - but I took another direction
| when faced with the feeling.
|
| The chip design analogy was clumsy but the point was
| similar - not every student has the motivation to learn
| enough about the broad base and it's value for ultimately
| improving your specialism.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| This seems more along the lines of studying only one basis in
| which to implement fizzbuzz. You're not really supposed to
| need to prepare your scales and arpeggios.
| amelius wrote:
| So we would get chips that perform well on just that one
| sorting algorithm?
| jimmytidey wrote:
| I don't know, but I'm guessing there's a big difference between
| knowing how to play your scales and playing perfectly evenly
| and fluidly.
| j7ake wrote:
| Correct. The conservatory music exams require scales to be
| played from first level to last level.
|
| However each level demands faster tempo, evenness in volume,
| and a smooth "pulse" (like BB gun pellets hitting a wall)
| [deleted]
| jrockway wrote:
| The way I'd cheat on this exam would be to just play whatever
| scale I've practiced and assume the examiner doesn't have perfect
| pitch.
|
| Having said that, I've never really had trouble with scales in
| any key on any instrument I've played. I don't know why people
| training to be professional instructors are even worried about
| this sort of exam.
|
| Full disclosure: I took piano the first semester of college and
| got an F. (I don't really know why. I think I made the professor
| mad or something. I got a B in "intro to Java" despite getting a
| 100% on every homework, lab, and exam because the instructor told
| the class that a "d" after a numeric literal tells the compiler
| that the number is represented in base 10 or "decimal". That is
| not what that does, and I corrected him. F for participation!
| Yes, I did go to a terrible school.)
|
| It was at that point that I stopped taking any classes that
| weren't directly required to graduate; why better yourself and
| become more well-rounded when internships sort by GPA descending?
| But I digress ;)
| rvba wrote:
| > I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any
| instrument I've played.
|
| The fact that you dont have a problem, doesnt mean that others
| wont have a problem. The article even states that the piano
| students cant play piano. Just like tons of managers cant
| manage, or tons of programmers cannot code.
|
| Seriously why do people even make this logical fallacy that
| "everyone is as smart / decent / talented as me"? I would add
| thinking too, in certain countries cheating is blantant, in
| some encouraged.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| There are basically 3 patterns of finger movement for piano
| scales with ~2 special cases that don't fit into any of them.
| I'm guessing that most of them were training to be music
| teachers on some instrument other than piano, and had to take
| an Intro to Piano course to get their degree.
| graemebenzie wrote:
| Puts a dig in at teaching near the end.
| damagednoob wrote:
| Not sure what you mean? I think that was still aimed at the
| students who, presumably if they were to become teachers one
| day, would expect their own students not to cheat.
| nkrisc wrote:
| He does no such thing. He points out that these cheaters were
| studying to be teachers, the very role that they were trying to
| cheat in the test.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how this cheating compact was supposed
| to work; didn't the conspiring students need to control who was
| the first student, or the student selected to pull keys from the
| hat?
| stagger87 wrote:
| It only needed to be one of the students in the cheating ring,
| which sounds like most of the students, so the probability was
| high.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I strongly suspect this story is nonsense.
|
| 1. It seems unlikely that all the students were conspiring except
| one. Why leave one student - and exactly one - out? Was s/he
| incredibly unpopular? Did s/he have minimal contact with the
| others? I suppose it's _possible_ , but it's also quite strange.
|
| 2. It seems unlikely the students didn't understand that if the
| schedule was random there was a non-zero chance of non-cheating
| Student 1 doing the admin.
|
| 3. It's more likely the schedule was posted ahead of time. Given
| that, it seems unlikely that anyone would be surprised or
| flustered when the schedule went as scheduled and the alleged
| plan failed.
|
| 4. It seems very unlikely that the keys would literally be chosen
| out of a hat. IME of these kinds of exams there's no need for
| randomness. Students tend to be asked for the less familiar keys
| because they're less likely to know them well. If someone gets C
| major and someone else gets Gb major for random reasons it's
| really not much of a fair test.
|
| 5. It seems quite unlikely that a student would be asked to hang
| around and do admin for an entire day - especially when the admin
| is essentially trivial anyway.
|
| 6. It seems unlikely that anyone who could play the short and
| long pieces well would be completely put off by being asked to
| play a scale they hadn't practiced.
|
| 7. It seems unlikely that a student would literally say "Oh we
| didn't practice because we wanted to spend our time partying and
| dating." That sounds like something someone would say _about_
| students, not something students would say about themselves.
| (This isn 't about whether it's true, but whether someone that
| age would use those words.)
|
| To be clear: this isn't about defending cheating. I just find
| don't this story very plausible.
|
| Also, the irony that this article about cheating may be somewhat
| elaborated isn't lost on me.
| stefanpie wrote:
| To point 1, many classes I've been in (undergrad and grad) have
| study groups form at the beginning of the semester where I
| decide I'm just gonna go though the class solo. In that case,
| it's fully conceivable for a subset (or almost all of the
| student in smaller class) to work together and study in a
| productive way or conspire together in an unproductive way.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Additionally, by the time you're an undergraduate you should be
| able to play any scale and arpeggio smoothly without
| hesitation. I'm an idiot and played for about 8 years and
| really, scales and arpeggios are not that difficult. For
| someone who aspires for a teaching degree these should be cake
| and you should not be getting flustered by these at all.
|
| Programming equivalent would be something like needing to write
| a syntactically correct for loop in a random language pulled
| out of a hat. A basic exercise with some challenge but simple
| to do if you have put any practice in it.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| that would be like pulling a random instrument out of a hat!
| bentcorner wrote:
| Haha, fair enough. How about - typing out a "hello world"
| program using a keyboard layout pulled out of a hat :)
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Standard warmup - scales and arpeggios round the circle major
| n minor. 15 mins.
| dmoy wrote:
| Yea this was standard warmup for me two years into high
| school (not piano, but still it's common warmup). I never
| even went in to music on undergrad.
|
| Everyone I knew who went into music for undergrad could
| play arpeggio in their sleep in any key, and most of them
| could do it on the piano too even when that wasn't their
| instrument.
|
| Maybe what happened is that was a class of all non pianists
| who were dragging their feet learning piano? Idk
| mrehler wrote:
| > 4. It seems very unlikely that the keys would literally be
| chosen out of a hat. IME of these kinds of exams there's no
| need for randomness. Students tend to be asked for the less
| familiar keys because they're less likely to know them well. If
| someone gets C major and someone else gets Gb major for random
| reasons it's really not much of a fair test.
|
| Music teacher - the scale portion of our state's band All-State
| auditions are one by choice, two by random draw (for a total of
| 3).
| smelendez wrote:
| It makes sense in a way. If you preannounce the scales,
| people will (theoretically) only practice those. If you have
| the same for everyone and don't preannounce, the scales will
| leak during the day and the later students will have extra
| practice/memorization time.
| effnorwood wrote:
| [dead]
| riwsky wrote:
| Please play a C major scale, but for every third note instead
| sing "Fizz", every fifth note sing "Buzz", and every 15th note
| instead sing "FizzBuzz"
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| This should actually be easy for anyone who practices scales in
| thirds.
| tremon wrote:
| But "thirds" occur every other note in the scale, since
| intervals are 1-based rather than 0-based. "Every third note"
| would more closely match the progression of a circle of
| fourths than a regular triad.
| brudgers wrote:
| Major or minor third?
| gnulinux wrote:
| If it's a major scale, you're not supposed to play minor
| third. Besides "every third note" will eventually be every
| note because there are 7 notes in a major scale. So, by the
| second octave major second will be one of the "fizz" notes
| (similar to ninth chord, stacked 4 thirds, having a major
| second).
|
| This can be a legit exam BTW, some contemporary Western
| classical styles use these kind of patterns to make music.
| dehrmann wrote:
| E->G is a minor third.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, I only do eighth notes and sixteenth notes, not fifteenth
| notes, thanks.
| im3w1l wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuplet#Nested_tuplets not that
| I would have a chance in hell of playing that accurately.
| mdek wrote:
| A music theory instructor from my past told us a story about his
| equivalent practical exam. He had to demonstrate proficiency with
| multiple string instruments. Instead of learning fingering for
| each instrument, he claimed he tuned them so they could all be
| played the same way. I don't have any training in string
| instruments, so I'm not sure how feasible this actually is...
| ludston wrote:
| It's bizarre. It's certainly possible to do this but there
| isn't much point given the different instruments need different
| fingering tequniques to reach notes anyway, and getting a feel
| for these fingerings ought to be harder than the transposition.
| analog31 wrote:
| It is and it isn't. All of the violin family instruments are
| tuned in fifths, but the strings have limited tuning range and
| would either break or produce no sound if you tried to force-
| fit a single tuning onto all of them, e.g., tuning a violin
| like a viola or vice versa. The double bass is its own beast,
| usually tuned in fourths, but in fifths is virtually unplayable
| without injury by mere mortals. And fifths require careful
| choice of strings.
|
| You still have to read the clefs.
|
| A remote possibility is that the person was a guitarist or
| bassist, and tuned the instruments in fourths. I have a friend
| who studied classical guitar as an undergrad, and music theory
| in grad school, while earning a living as an electric bassist
| in R&B bands, then became a theory professor, now retired.
|
| Disclosure: Double bassist.
| hgsgm wrote:
| > The students who are prone to cheating aren't the smart ones.3
|
| This is a pernicious bias that helps smart people cheat.
|
| Plenty of cheating in major by non-legacy admits at my
| prestigious university.
| divan wrote:
| Exams and sports competitions are a particularly nasty example of
| Campbell's Law (or Goodheart's Law) - collapsing the correlation
| between metric and the true goal.
|
| Exams, for example, are supposed to measure how much students
| progressed. "True goal" - learn some knowledge or master some
| skill. "Metric" is the quiz/tests/exam result.
|
| If you try to design an exam for any new skill or knowledge,
| you'll come up with a pretty good metric. But soon, people will
| start ignoring the true goal and focus on the metric. Instead of
| "measuring" how well they learned the skill, your metric measures
| "how well they overfitted for the exam".
|
| In a way, the mere fact that people need to "prepare for exams"
| is a testament to how failed the system is.
|
| Sport is similar. The initial idea of the judging system and
| competitions is to "measure" the performance of the athlete.
| Rewards and rules are introduced to make this metric clear and
| unambiguous. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and athletes and
| coaches don't care about overall performance - they care about
| winning the medal, so they focus only on the subset of a skill
| that gives points. This problem is especially horrifying in the
| sports like figure skating after introducing the IJS system in
| 2006. Correlation between "true goal" (skating skills) and
| "metrics" (points given for specific elements) is collapsed -
| people chase points, not the skill.
|
| It's not a simple problem. There are few neat papers on how to
| approach solving Goodheart's problems ([1] [2]). But on a
| practical level, the number one tool seems to be to decrease the
| importance of the metric.
|
| Some sports, for example, have "one major competition" once in 4
| years (Olympic Games). The price of winning it is insane. Who
| cares about the true goal if it's almost life-and-death
| importance? You chase the points. But other sports have a more
| healthy approach - tennis, for example, doesn't care much about
| the Olympics. They have Slams and different surfaces competitions
| throughout the year. You lost a game - not the end of the world.
| There will be many more. The higher prize is to win all four
| Slams in your career, so the price of the metric at a single
| competition is not that huge.
|
| And this collapsing metric is a reason why people cheat. You
| can't cheat on a true goal, only on a proxy metric.
|
| [1] Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law -
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585
|
| [2] Building Less Flawed Metrics: Dodging Goodhart and Campbell's
| Laws -
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334478956_Building_...
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >Some sports, for example, have "one major competition" once in
| 4 years (Olympic Games).
|
| Even more so for gymnastics, where it's effectively one
| competition a lifetime.
|
| On the other hand, Goodhart's law is the reason we have the
| Fosbury flop, clean & jerk and - formerly the greatest Olympic
| sport of all - racewalking.
| divan wrote:
| Right, but again, what's the True Goal of jump part of
| athletics? Unlikely it's "achieve maximum at vertical jumping
| with these very specific conditions". It's more like "achieve
| maximum at vertical jumping". Which includes thousands of
| variantions. It's just we can't measure it without some
| standards, so specific rules were introduced. In a way, these
| limitations that rule impose at technique are the byproduct
| of inability to measure True Goal. We measure what's
| measurable, and for that some degree of standartization is
| required.
|
| I'm not sure I'm familiar with racewalking story. Any good
| links to read?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| That is so sad.
| dfan wrote:
| I assume the following quote was not meant to be precise:
|
| > The students didn't even distribute the keys among themselves
| in a plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to
| practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B
| flat minors or B majors.
|
| but B major is pretty much the easiest scale to play on the piano
| there is!
| tomsmeding wrote:
| In terms of fingering if you know it. It's also one of the
| least common; there's a lot of music in F major, there's less
| accidentals in the scale and hence music in the key is more
| easily readable, chords are more easily deduced (less black
| keys involved), etc.
| [deleted]
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