Pat Savage

What 6 songs would you choose to represent your language? Watch/listen to season 1 of @manyvoices.bsky.social podcast on YouTube/Spotify/Podcast to hear guests share songs from their 8 languages. And let me know if you have guests or ideas to suggest for Season 2 and beyond! many-voices.com

In case you'd like to hear something great, overheard two students, one says in response to the other one discussing challenges with their combination of courses: "That's fire though, you're getting a full on liberal education bro"

Today learned of a fairly rare example of an English cover by a major artist of a Japanese original (Ray Charles' "Ellie My Love" www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU39... based on the Southern All Stars' 「いとしのエリー 」 www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDRN...)

Think this might be the funniest possible outcome

As I've said before, it's only once I became a professor that I realized the entmoot, a meeting that goes on for three days and three nights, was a professor's joke about faculty meetings.

Hear me out. AI-written articles go to journals for AI-writing edited by AI and get AI-written peer review. Human written articles go to human-edited journals and get human peer review. Let the market decide which journals beings with attention spans and money want to invest in.

Life goals: live your life so they don’t make a movie about you with this kind of cover image

More than 8,000 papers published by PLOS journals violate the publisher’s policy on author-editor relationships, as well as around 2,500 papers published by MDPI titles, the researchers found.

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

How has The Selfish Gene held up after 50 years? My verdict here for @sciam.bsky.social is... mixed. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Like many, I've updated my guidance re: AI slop emails from prospective students (compmusic.info)

Curious about studying at a Japanese university in English? Register via QR code for this free online information session with 5 top universities on Nov 15 (10:30-13:30 Japan time). I'll be presenting on behalf of Keio. Hope to see you there!

The wool is a metaphor for what’s left of NZ’s research funding

Ysabel Yates'... I mean Cookie Monster's superb takedown of why GenAI in the workplace sucks.

My shortest job? One night as a "host" in Kyoto. Didn't even get paid in the end. Some crazy details in my diary...

If you like that (you should), then check this out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe1R...

A New Jersey family recreated OG Anunoby's iconic NBA Finals tip-in with their Halloween decorations

The Vanderbilt Report data do not remotely support their conclusions of "deterioration in scholarly standards" in the humanities, and should be corrected or retracted. (My updated preprint now reflects analysis of data from belatedly published Vanderbilt sub-reports: doi.org/10.31234/osf...)

I'm considering adapting this response for a coauthored publication. If you are (or know of) an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, literary scholar, or philosopher interested in joining me (a musicologist) on such a collaboration, please get in touch!

OSF has been practically useable a lot recently. I know they're winding down OSF research project storage, but this is even happening with their PsyArXiv preprint hosting, which is not supposed to be affected. Any one have an idea of what's going on and if it is supposed to improve?

We’re pleased to share the results of the CES Executive elections for the 2026–2029 term: President-Elect: Thomas Morgan Secretary: Elena Miu Executive Ordinary Members: Monica Tamariz, David Lawson, Jana Nenadalová, & Stephen Vaisey Please join us in congratulating our new elected colleagues!

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Me: Yes, it's because "your" and "resume" are two separate words.

(I see everyone settled on the same smugly alliterative allusion to "time-tested tools" that I did Because we all know that scholarship should never introduce any new analytic or critical methods I'm going to gently suggest that the report was itself authored by some time-tested tools lol)

This report is very much as Pat Savage describes. Utter garbage The mere deviation from traditional repertories and methodologies is given as evidence of a decline in quality, made explicit (despite their protestations to the contrary) in their description of a "shift" from "center to periphery"

Ok I read this and I know I am sort of in the Well He Would Say That Wouldn't He category, but I agree with Pat Savage here that this report was *remarkably* bad. Like actually to the point that at times its hard to work out what the complaint is or how one is meant to infer anything from it.

Another enraging thing about this "report" is it claims to represent all of music studies (including ethnomusicology/comparative musicology, which has been devoted to the study of non-Western music for over 140 years), but it's data exclude ethno and focus almost exclusively on music theory

lotta people have been asking

I'm gobsmacked at this passage. There is no "data" on cancel culture, it is seven anecdotes, and those anecdotes do not "show" this! You need an argument!

they did the thing

Correct. Increase in the study of any music that is not "Baroque, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century common-practice period, and modernist European (Western) canon" represents, by their methods, a decrease in scholarly standards. It's so bad, it's beyond parody.

This is the most elitist and racist way of measuring "scholarly standards" I've ever seen! They literally just defined "central areas" by ChatGPT classifications as "Western art music"! Plus some predictable whining about anecdotes of "cancel culture" (e.g., Schenker, Brown's open letter on racism).

“Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power.”

Vanderbilt sub-report on Music Studies is out. TLDR: it is utter garbage. The long-awaited evidence of our “deterioration in scholarly standards” is...: "the shift from...central areas of music scholarship [Western art music] to the more peripheral areas". www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/s...

Remember folks, human peer review guarantees that at least 3-4 humans will read your paper!

Glad I get to include Kokuho in my "Musics of Japan" course this year

I think this wins the Nobel Prize for #ChartCrime: look at the units on the Y-axis!

‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us The year’s most popular slang reveals what young people think about artificial intelligence – and it’s not positive www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

We have put in a bid to hold the next @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference in Auckland 🇳🇿 from Feb 17-19 2028! We could really use your input in this survey to help us plan for if/how this conference is held (particularly re: in-person vs online participation): us.list-manage.com/xEOnWEahXJf?...

One reason I'm so upset about Henrich's report is that anthropology is THE main example used to justify the Vanderbilt report's wild claims of "deterioration in scholarly standards" throughout the humanities (see osf.io/ta6kg). And it turns out to be almost completely unfounded. What a travesty.