No shame in that. I find modulars a bit too expansive for my taste. It sounds like you'd benefit from a more traditional hardware synth where the signal flow is mostly locked down.
Yeah. Having a model of the signal flow in your mind and being creative with the structure is half the fun of synthesizers for me. And even if you don't comprehend everything in the moment, happy accidents are a big part of the fun.
Some modular performers like Keith Fullerton Whitman have a very dynamic approach to patching. I've seen shows where he was aggressively re-patching throughout the performance and hot-swapping connections on the fly. I'm talking several patches in a minute. It wasn't subtle, either. It was a nice contrast to many performers who tend to design their system as a fixed structure and then play from there.
That doesn’t smell right. Why develop the telemetry and go to all of the trouble for such a paltry return? That probably wouldn’t even cover the legal consulation to cover their ass, much less go through the trouble of implementing and selling the telemetry.
It would be cheaper to do nothing if that were true.
There are less questionable things they can do with all that data: I'm sure it's really useful to figure out how electrical and mechanical faults correlate with driving conditions / weather / region etc. The result from this is just a better car in the next iteration.
Then someone offers them $1 each for a fleet of 1M cars, who is going to turn down $1M for a few TB of data?
To your second point, surely they’ve considered the hit to their relationship with their customers before selling for $1/car. Surely the trust between them and their buyers is worth far, far more than that.
Even assuming maximum greed, is every car manufacturer really so short-sighted as to break that trust for so small of a return?
We need to start thinking more like the average evil C-suite. We live in the golden age of fraud. Not my words. There's probably some sort of circular deal where the people that enacted this data sharing personally benefit in some massive financial way. The low financial benefit from the parent company side is probably to avoid regulatory eyeballs.
something around 50% of Uber's profits now come from their "private" owned insurance Company. That, of course, does not have to disclose how they are making money. Even though Uber is their only customer.
There is probably some sort of similar deal happening here.
I oversimplified this, and actually it's a lot closer to what happens with any digital service.
Rather than saying "give us 1$ and we'll sell you a customer's data" it was more like "provide the navigation software and we'll let you keep the data". It probably seems like an elegant solution: as long as the driver needs navigation they "pay" for it with their data. It's really no different from how gmail or facebook works.
Telemetry is used to push service, which is the big money maker for dealerships. Roadside assistance, maps subscriptions, driving data for market research.
It's increasingly practiced in the open in the music industry these days.
There was a recent row over the revelation that Chaotic Good, a music marketing company, was astroturfing on behalf of the bands Geese and Sombr.
I had a meeting last week with a well-known record producer who tells me labels are increasingly leaning into astroturfing.
Just two days ago a colleague told me about his bandmate whose day job is managing five Instagram accounts to astroturf for Mk.Gee. According to her, "Mk.Gee is not allowed to know about it", with the implication that he would reject it if he did.
I'm not saying a real, recorded trumpet doesn't make an appreciable sonic difference, but if it were a sampled trumpet "Safe and Sound" would most likely still be a hit.
Attributing it's hit status to the perfect intervals is ignoring all of the other choices (and supporting infrastructure) that go into making a hit. It's like saying that the Dodge Charger was a successful car because the windshield wipers are of a certain make.
“"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying”
>>>The trumpet line in ‘Safe and Sound’, for example, didn’t appear in the production until nine versions into the song. The final version, on a whim, we decided to try using a trumpet, a live trumpet, to play that line and it stuck. We ended up actually using the trumpet a lot throughout the album after we included it in ‘Safe and Sound’.
"It was trial and error, right? We felt like that line was an epic line and we thought about different instruments that sounded epic, and the trumpet is obviously one of them,<<<
The thing about trumpets is this: Their fifth is a little “sharp” because it’s a perfect just intonated fifth (i.e. a perfect 3/2 ratio).
While these are helpful topics to understand, they are not beginner topics. Not if you want to make music. They are fundamental questions in that they reside at the base of why things are the way they are, but they are not fundamental in the sense that you should teach them to a beginner who wants to make music.
The point is to make music. And the most practical way to do so is to teach instrument technique, intervals, scales, chords, and melody. Not low-level acoustic phenomena.
To make an (imperfect) programming analogy, you are proposing to teach low-level computation when most students would benefit from some Python, if/else statements, and functions. Not memory allocation and assembly. They're useful someday, but less useful when your first goal is to simply write a program.
Because music is pleasurable to play, to experience, and it's gratifying to be creative and to discover your creative potential.
If you have an alternative reason to learn music and to start learning through acoustic phenomena then let's hear it.
Most people don't get into molecular gastronomy if they don't intend to cook a meal. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of aspiring cooks shouldn't learn cooking via that discipline without first starting with something more practical and immediate.
I am approaching 40 and in two weeks I will begin clowning lessons with a Cirque du Soleil clown. I am thrilled.
So why clown as a discipline? Something deeply misunderstood and that probably lowers my social status with people who don’t understand it? Something with zero career utility? Because to me it represents extreme vulnerability.
I’m a pretty dignified person. A lot of poise. Goofy, but restrained. If I can debase myself in front of an audience in order to win a laugh then I believe I can do anything.
If I can (figuratively) hang my ass out for all to see then I can move with confidence. If I can blow past my natural inclination to save face, or have the answers. If I can discard the emotional hangups that make me feel embarrassed then I can be the person who I (and I suspect a great number of us) want to be deep down.
I want to (constructively) tear down everything inside of me that restrains me and discover who I can really be.
Ah, thanks for chiming in with your inspiring anecdote. I realize that perhaps I interpreted "working on" as pertaining to career work, rather than just investment of effort.
Your example of clowning shows something that requires real work and, as you laid out, hopefully does wonders to improving confidence, humility, humor, and charm. I wish you the best with that! And happy early birthday. :)
I took an acting class in college and found it remarkably challenging, but valuable, to tear down those emotional restraints. I should get back into it, it’s a skill that needs to be regularly practiced. I wish you luck and I hope it’s a valuable experience for you!
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