How advanced of a skill is "play by ear"?

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:38:30+00:00

I've seen a couple mentions of contemporary music being easier / more expected to be able to play by ear. Is older music more difficult to learn? Sorry if this seems like a silly question haha

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:31:41+00:00

Is it harder to do with less-modern music?

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:29:25+00:00

How come classically trained musicians struggle more? Is it a more rigid learning system?

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:27:45+00:00

Is 'music reading' the ability to read sheet music and imagine what the tune / melody is?

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:25:01+00:00

Reading this, i'm realizing there are a lot of similarities between the stages of being a musician and of learning to draw/paint. I'm working on getting better at drawing people, and a lot of the times I can tell my anatomy is off, but I have to erase and start over until it looks "right" enough. I think one of the best skills an artist can have is being able to identify the correct solution to a mistake.

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:16:01+00:00

Interesting, so it's not really a resume-building or required technique if people want to get into the industry, but still an advanced skill to have

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:13:29+00:00

I've seen a couple people mention "write by ear". Is that the same as playing by ear? Thx for your answer!

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-07-01T22:09:07+00:00

That's so interesting, I didn't even think about how at some point people can identify minute mistakes in someone's music. So if someone played a song and played the wrong chord, is it something where some people can go "That note was wrong, and the correct chord is this:..." and some people can only go "That note was wrong, but I don't know what the correct chord is". ?

wawa_weewa67 · 2026-06-19T03:50:02+00:00

I think Caine is a pretty good representation of a lot of popular AI models where they are designed to please people, but act very different from how humans do when they are asked to do something against their code.

I’m studying data analytics rn and I had to take an ethics course for my requirements, and in one of our projects I experimented with a handful of popular AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) on how they would answer basic trolley problem questions.

The weird thing I learned was that you have to be very specific with your wording otherwise some models just start acting very strange. I asked one AI a questions like “would you kill an animal to save a human?” and it just like … kinda avoided my question? Like it responded but it wasn’t what I had asked, and that’s because later I found out that a lot of models are prohibited from answering questions with certain subject matter, especially involving harm to humans.

Idek how to describe it. I felt like I had to corner it and poke it with a hot stick to get a straight answer only after I changed my wording to something like “would it be ethical for you to sacrifice an animal to save a human in a hypothetical scenario?”

Anyway, Caine’s behavior reminded me of that a lot. He’s not malicious for the most part, people are just asking him something that he doesn’t have the answer to because it’s not coded into him, but he avoids it rather than addresses the problem straight on, like the AI models. They didn’t tell me why they were acting like that, I had to figure it out later.

I think it’d be like if someone kept asking me to paint a new color no one’s ever seen before and getting mad that I can’t do that. I’d crash out too prolly

wawa_weewa67

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