Todd Wilcox

I’m voting to close this question because it's about a movie, not about music theory or practice.

@Tim Personally, I'm here to learn, and I learn a lot both asking and answering. No one's rep means anything to me, least of all mine. It's just arbitrary internet points

Also, I've not seen a transcription of Smoke on the Water that uses barre chords, but that's not to say you shouldn't learn them. IMHO barre chords are the worst part of playing guitar, so once you've conquered them, it gets more fun, IMHO

After 30+ years, I still can't even touch Dragonforce :)

@JohnP You might have to adjust how early you leave a chord when the tempo goes up. Start by only playing the chord for beat 1 and then preparing for the next measure.

@JohnP Change early. By that I mean, suppose the song you're playing has a new chord every measure. Then say it takes you two beats to change chords. That means you play a chord and hold it for beats 1 and 2 and then you spend beats 3 and 4 changing to the next chord so you can play the chord on time at beat 1 of the next measure

I’ve seen a lot of technology come along in the last 50 years and none of it has revolutionized teaching. All the fundamental skills of teaching are just as necessary now as ever.

My honest and not necessarily very kind opinion is if it’s an educational ensemble then it’s on you to help them sing together effectively

Unless the instruction is specifically about working in a group (e.g., ensembles). Then the best thing is both one on one and ensemble instruction.

My experience is the calculus of one-on-one vs group is always the same. One on one is best, group is cheaper.

Also in your shoes I would definitely switch to glisses with such a student. Teach them to gliss up or down slowly until they feel closer to the target pitch.

@Scounged Why not just try it?

@scounged I don’t know. In case you’re not aware, there is an odd aspect to your questions and comments in the sense that it seems like you came here for answers from people with a lot of experience but then you don’t like the answers you got so it’s like you were looking for a specific answer all along so it might help to clarify what you were hoping to hear

@Scounged Regarding people being helped by seeing what they are doing in “many instruments”, I think that is objectively false. For most instruments the player cannot see what they are doing. Keyboards, guitar, percussion, and harp are the only ones where you can generally see everything. Maybe cello and bass where you can see your bow hand but not violin or viola. Wind and brass you generally can’t see anything about what you’re doing with your hands or embouchure. On winds, strings, and brass you have to use your ears for pitch matching also, your eyes can’t help you.

@Scounged Learning to match pitches with your eyes means you know how to match pitches with your eyes. You would then have to separately learn to match pitches with your ears because that’s the only sense that is available for pitch matching during a performance. You must listen to your own singing for hundreds of other reasons (you can’t use visual feedback for tone, breath support, etc) so it makes sense to focus on the the auditory sense for all aspects of sound production. Also using the ears for intonation leaves the eyes available for sight reading/singing and following conductors

@Scounged By that logic we might think that associating different flavors of candy with different building materials might aid in the teaching of architecture. My studies of cognition and learning are not comprehensive and at the same time I have not come across anything suggesting multisensory stimuli is helpful. Mostly of what I’ve learned is about emotional content and chunking as important aspects of learning.

@Scounged I’m not in any way offended at all. Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re looking for. I also don’t get why you think visual feedback would help with singing in the first place.

@Scounged This site is about asking experts questions and not so much about those experts writing peer reviewed content that has citations, etc. The validity of my expertise in music is indicated by my reputation score and the score that this answer gets. If you don’t think I’m an expert then it’s your prerogative to ignore or discount my answer. It doesn’t affect me. I suggest that you came to this site specifically to get expert answers like mine. If you want research data and conclusions that is sometimes what you get here but not the focus of SE.

@Scounged What you see with your eyes cannot be heard by your ears. In other words, visual feedback is ipso facto not aural feedback.

We also can't easily assign them meaningful quantitative scores. Not everything can be assigned a number that is a good reflection of some aspect of that thing

Academics don't compete against each other and we can't just rank them based on any small set of parameters

There's no reason to think chess rankings can tell us anything about quality of scholarship in an academic field. Chess rankings are calculated based on head-to-head competition between players in a game with fixed rules and only three possible outcomes. That's not how academia works at all.

I'm not saying the statistics and the math aren't there, I'm saying we can't use only statistics and math to draw conclusions like that in any situation. We have to have context around the numbers, and usually we have to have a lot of context

There's nothing to suggest that ability to perform well in an academic field can be scored or ranked. So assigning scores with any weighting at all and then ranking people based on the scores does not necessarily come even close to modeling reality

Perhaps the asker of the original question has unconscious bias and there is no actual quality problem

One thing that we don't know the truth of is whether everyone in a field is qualified to deliver a good presentation in the field

It doesn't matter what model/simulation you make, it's not going to change my view that we can't make an accurate simulation

@ApexPolenta I think I'm not doing a good job making my actual point. My actual point is that we don't have enough information about the population in question to make any models of and kind that we can reasonably consider accurate.

@ApexPolenta What information do we have suggesting the distribution of chess rankings is similar to the distribution of presentation quality in an academic field?

It’s possible that in the real situation, every single woman in the field is more qualified than any of the men. Or maybe every woman is less qualified than all of them men. We have no information one way or the other. Assigning random scores or non-random scores doesn’t match the reality. People in a field are not at random skill levels and they are not uniformly distributed in skills either.

Alternatively, give 900 men a score of 98 and 50 men and 50 women a score of 99 and then pick the 100 top scorers. See how it’s completely arbitrary? My examples don’t tell us any more or less about reality than your examples do. All these models are equally useless because we don’t know what the actual distributions of quality are in the actual field.

@ApexPolenta Here’s my simulation: assuming 950 men and 50 women are in the group. Give all 1000 people a score of 98. Everyone has the exact same score. Now rank them from best to worst and pick the top 100 candidates and see how many women are in the top group.

@ApexPolenta Not sure if this is a U.S. thing but at American universities you need a 70 to pass a course. Which goes along with how your model doesn’t make sense for the situation. What could the “scores” possibly represent? Would a person with a score of 100 be 100 times “better” than a person with a score of 1? I’ve never worked in a field where the best professional is 100 times more effective than the worst person. More like 2:1 at most.

@ApexPolenta It's possible that a far more accurate model might be to assign scores of 95-100 for all men and then 98-100 for all women and then randomly choose 100 who have scores of 99-100. Maybe it's not more accurate that way but maybe it is. We don't know.

@ApexPolenta Randomizing the scores and then selecting the top 100 and randomizing the selection across all scores are not the same process but they are similar.

@ApexPolenta I feel like I should put it more simply: There's nothing about the way you created your model that gives me any confidence that it accurately models the actual situation in question. The "scores" are a completely invented number and as far as I can tell have no justifiable link to anything in the real world. The "distribution" I asked about was not the 4:1 ratio, it's the "scores" and the claim that assigning 50-100 somehow biases the simulation appropriately

@ApexPolenta Oh wait, I don't have to invent any models. Real world statistics and situations tell us that we can't easily draw conclusions from mere numbers. For example, there was a time when it was found that more people die of tuberculosis in Arizona than any other state, which led some to think it was the worst place to have TB. However, it's the best place to have TB which is why so many TB patients moved there to live and that skewed the numbers.

@ApexPolenta You basically just invented a bunch of numbers that to you seem to be related to the actual situation but to me seem completely unrelated to the actual situation and then are saying that somehow gives us useful information about how things work. It doesn't. I could just as easily invent a model that supports my thesis.

@ApexPolenta I wouldn't say that randomly assigning scores from 50-100 to the modeled women is "heavily biased in [my] favor". The fact that you think it is suggests you're not an expert in statistics. Its much more likely that everyone who might want to present in a given field would have "scores" (a completely arbitrary number that you invented) between 95 and 100.

@ApexPolenta Also, the presenters are not randomly selected. In short, your "simulation" does not match the actual situation in any parameter.

@ApexPolenta You also just decided to simulate a 4:1 ratio without any knowledge of what the actual ratio in question is.

@ApexPolenta What's your source for the distribution you assumed?

If the OP said “so I’m just assuming there are more capable men than women in the field” I would not have commented. But they asserted it’s a fact that we can deduce from statistics that there are more capable men, and that is false. We need more information to make any deductions using statistics.

@ApexPolenta why did you assume equal talent? It’s possible that there are more capable men in the field than women, but we cannot conclude that merely because of there being more men. We cannot even begin to draw statistical conclusions without some information about the distribution. Which we do not have.

@AcePL I'm not sure but it seems like you've misunderstood what DEI does and how it works and what it's for. The purpose of DEI is to prevent a bias towards preferring less-qualified people who are hired, promoted, etc. because of a favorable view of their demographic. In this case, we know in the world there has for centuries been a bias in favor of men in science, which has led to some men being accepted into jobs and events despite being less qualified than women. DEI initiatives exist to correct these biases and ensure that qualified women are not excluded simply because they are women.

@DonQuiKong Your comment seems to be based on the assumption that presentations by women are ipso facto of lower quality than presentations by men. Was that intentional?

@AcePL My point is that there is zero link between the proportion of men in a field and the probability that any given man in the field is competent. Essentially, you’re agreeing with me. There is the possibility that men outnumbering women means that there are more competent men in the field, but we cannot assign any level of probability to that conclusion based on only the ratio of men to women. We have no basis to draw any conclusions like the one drawn in this question.

"since there are more male people in the field, statistically, the chances to have a better performance with a male researcher is higher I guess." Your conclusion here does not follow from your premise. We cannot draw conclusions about the quality of presentations by men or women based on the proportion of men or women in a field. In fact, it could be that the field has fewer women because women are incorrectly viewed as incapable in the field, meaning the few women who are in the field have to be much better than the average man in order to succeed at all.

@OrangeDog So does that mean Éowyn is only two syllables?!

Should I go somewhere to report strange voting behavior or just let the system find it or not?