Chapter 8 Reading Response

Man, this book was amazing. I've never read anything like it, and I'm not sure I'll ever read anything like it again.

I don't have anything specific to respond to in this chapter, so I'll respond to nothing, or maybe everything. I just wanted to say—I love this class so much. It's my favorite class I've ever taken here at Stanford. I feel like I say this about a class every quarter, but this time the record will be REALLY hard to beat.

Last Thursday, after Ge's guest lecture, we had a class discussion. It was such a good discussion; it all felt so natural, so open, so inclusive, and we talked about deep yet relevant and timely topics that somehow made me both hopeful and worried for my future. However, I did not say a single word. Part of this was simply because I was tired; I had had a bad argument with a friend the previous night and wasn't in the best of mental states. But I was also deep in thought about the discussion, thinking about how what we were saying applied to my life, and also thinking about how lucky I was to be in that room.

When I think about the reasons I took Music 256a, my mind goes specifically to the internship I had this summer. Despite my usually rather awful performance in interviews, thanks to a recommendation from my research advisor I managed to acquire a position at a San Francisco startup called Eventual. The company had already existed for a couple years but I was still only the seventh or eighth employee there.

Like many San Francisco startups, we were working at the cutting edge of technology. Being 2024, AI was all the rage, and despite not working directly with AI, we were still closely connected to the subject because our main product was a dataframe. Dataframes are programming tools capable of manipulating large amounts of data, and they are essential for AI companies who are trying to get as much data for training as possible. Thus, almost all of our clients were AI companies, and I got to be in a lot of meetings with them.

This came to mind during the class discussion because we spent a lot of time talking about how companies are disincentivized from artful design due to solely worrying about profit, profit, profit. But I feel incredibly fortunate because my startup wasn't like that. Our main product was totally open source and while of course we were thinking about monetization, it was still an "in the future" thing even by the time I left. So I got to spend my internship just thinking about ways that we could make a better, more useful product. And it makes me sad that companies can't all be like this.

But more importantly for the class is not what was happening at work, but what was happening afterwards. This job was my first internship, and my first summer spent away from home in Seattle. I was living by myself in the middle of San Francisco. As a not very social person, I didn't have many activities away from home, so I had a lot of time for myself to play video games and think.

I learned a lot about myself that summer. My parents (my mom especially) are the kind of people very focused on opportunity and success, so I feel like without them around the whole time, and without CS classes to worry about, I was able to think more deeply about my life. From somewhere deep inside of me, an artful side began to emerge. I talked about it in vague terms in RR1 but I mainly had the epiphany that art is what gives us our humanity. As I put it, any intelligent alien will come up with the exact same equations as a physicist or mathematician, but only humans are able to produce truly creative works of art. And if I went my life without creating art of my own, was I really living as a human?

And there you have the reason I'm taking two music classes this quarter. I am unspeakably grateful I am taking this class at the time I am now. I'm not sure if I would have gotten quite as much out of this class had I taken it last year before my "awakening" this summer. So many things I believe in were repeated in the book exactly as I had thought about them, and then elaborated further beyond that. I have never been among a group of people who so closely share my mentality about art and life, and it has been so incredibly validating to learn that I'm not alone in thinking this way. Before this quarter I had never been to or even heard of CCRMA, but after this class I'm not sure I ever want to leave.

Thank you for reading this excessively long reading response! The quarter definitely isn't over yet, and I'm excited to see what I and others will come up with for the final project.