Knowing Him

With Ben leaving, it’s caused me to ponder a lot about what makes him such a good friend. Ultimately I concluded that what I appreciate the most about Ben is the Christlike example that he sets. The more I get to know him, the more I feel I get to know Him.

In fact it’s remarkable how much this has triggered a change in how I am approaching coming to know Jesus Christ. My whole life Christ has been “untouchable,” a perfect, yet remote figure. Like, say, Mitt Romney or maybe even President Hinckley. People that I know because of what I hear about them, what I read about them, what I see of them on TV. But Ben—I know Ben. I’ve worked with Ben, I’ve played with Ben, I’ve listened to Ben, I’ve asked Ben tough questions, I’ve seen Ben in tough situations, I’ve seen him in situations where it would be tempting to get frustrated, to say something negative, or to give up—and I’ve seen him do the right thing. And I’ve experienced a feeling each time I watch that, a feeling that that’s the way I want to be, that that’s the way we all need to be to be truly happy.

So at what point does the way I feel toward Christ change from being the way I see and feel toward Mitt Romney to being the way I see and feel toward Ben? Because Ben directly inspires me and Mitt Romney—well, somewhat less so. I love Ben. I want to follow his example, I feel the Spirit when I’m around him.

Now I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Jesus Christ. I really don’t know much about him personally. I don’t know what he’d say to a Costco hot dog. I don’t know what kinds of things would make him laugh. I don’t know how he feels about an Elder’s Quorum move. I don’t know how he prefers to get his exercise. I don’t know how he reacts when he’s happy. I don’t know how he reacts when someone says something awkward. Except of course beyond trying to find some scripture that seems to relate to those things. 

Yes, I may have learned a lot about Him, but I don’t really feel like I know him, with the lower-case ‘h’, if that makes sense, and knowing him, at least as far as might be mirrored by my experience having been friends with Ben, makes an enormous difference in how it inspires me to see a man, with foibles and who is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities,” “in all points tempted like as we are.” I need to see the ways that He is like me, both for His successes and for His struggles, to see that my potential is somehow related to His. To see that the greatness I see in Him comes in ways that I am able and inspired to follow. I guess, as Lehi puts it, to see the “opposition in all things,” because without that element, without that attribute, as Lehi continues, “righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad.” Picturing a Christ who “cannot be touched” or is even in some degree less touched is to picture a Christ who “[has] no joy, for [he knows] no misery; doing no good, for [he knows] no sin.”

Since coming to that realization, I’ve thought a lot more about Christ. I even catch myself thinking about him while watching random TV shows. I’ve tried to picture the “him” behind the “Him”. I’ve read the scriptures about Christ more carefully, picturing a man “touched” and “tempted” and “yet without sin”. I’ve found myself pondering who He really was. I’ve found richer meaning in simple phrases that I’ve read hundreds of times like, “then Jesus was led up of the Spirit, into the wilderness, to be with God,” and “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

I’ve never understand exactly what it meant to know Christ. I’ve always known that I should want to know Him. But now I really want to know him. My friend, Ben, taught me more than I think he’ll ever know about the Savior, because he reflected something that directly emanated from the Savior, something that caught my eye and touched my heart. I realized that beyond the love for my friend, I had a love for the goodness, for the light, for the truth he bore. Recognizing that what I saw in my friend was but a reflection from somewhere or someone else made me realize that the source of all goodness is a real, tangible source. It made me realize that were I to come to know Christ as I have come to know my friend, those feelings of love, light, goodness, truth, and inspiration would be deeper than perhaps I ever thought imaginable. This is not just some man who changed the world. This is not just some person my Sunday school teachers tell me I should want to know better. He's not just a name in a book. He is a “treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and *for joy* thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.”

Pop* and Lyrist Debut

Description of the Work

Pop* (pronounced Pop-Star) is an automated pop lead sheet generator. It uses a modular framework to generate verse-chorus structure, rhyme-scheme, lyrics, harmony, and melody. The lyrical module, which we call Lyrist, functions as a stand-alone lyric generation system. Pop* and Lyrist work in concert to create novel full-length pop songs in lead sheet format on their own with no external input (beyond an inspiring set of pop music and lyrics). To concretely render compositions, we generate both printed sheet music and MP3 audio recordings. MP3 audio files feature computer-sung lyrics accompanied by synthesized piano and bass comping chords.

Technical Description

Pop* uses a hierarchical Bayesian program learning model, meaning that the concept of a pop composition is factored into subconcept models such as verse-chorus structure, rhyme-scheme, lyrics, harmony, and melody. These subconcepts are further factored until subconcepts represent simple enough ideas to be approximated using data-driven (conditional) probability distributions. Generation of novel compositions is achieved by combining subconcept values as they are probabilistically sampled from subconcept distributions. 

Lyrist represents a subconcept model of lyrics (conditioned on melody and intention). Pop* creates lyric templates by recombining lyrical phrases from existing songs. These templates serve as input to Lyrist which intelligently replaces words in the template to create new lyrics. Lyrist uses word embedding (i.e, a numeric vector which represents the semantic meaning of a word), vector operations, and constraint (e.g., rhyming and part-of-speech) filters to generate novel lyrics that evoke an intended theme and rhyme structure.

More complete descriptions of these systems will be found in the proceedings of ICCC 2017 and MUME 2017.

Best Song So Far (BSSF)

Here is a recording of our "Best Song So Far" with music generated by Pop* and lyrics created by Lyrist:

The sheetmusic can be found here.

Biography

Paul Bodily is a PhD candidate in the CS department at Brigham Young University (BYU). Under the advisement of Dr. Dan Ventura, his research focuses on machine learning in pop music with the intent of building data-driven generative systems.

Ben Bay is an undergraduate research assistant pursuing his B.S. in CS at BYU. Under the advisement of Dr. Dan Ventura and mentorship of Paul Bodily, his research focus is on systems that generate lyrics.

Dr. Dan Ventura is a CS professor at BYU whose focus is on computational creativity systems generally. Students under his advisement have published systems in domains such as artistic image generation (DARCI), recipe generation (PIERRE), jazz lead sheet composition (CARL), and neology (Nehovah).

'Tis a Gift

Larry Howell, a professor in Mechanical Engineering at BYU, recently spoke at a graduate student symposium on the topic of Faith & Scholarship. In light of his renown and success as an academic, I was struck by something he said (and I paraphrase): "At the final judgment, God will not be interested in how many degrees we earned or how many publications we had, but He will ask what we've done with our gifts."

"To every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God," we read in Doctrine and Covenants 46:11. It seems apparent that we each have different strengths and talents. Discovering our gifts requires more than simply identifying what we're gifted at (though it may be a good place to start); gifts require passion.

There are certainly some gifts that we might not be particularly passionate about, but which we should seek for, hence the admonition to "seek ye earnestly the best gifts" (Doctrine and Covenants 46:8). Some of these might include parenthood, charity, and faith. Some gifts are essential to developing the character of Christ.

But just as each of my children have unique gifts and talents, each of us, as literal children of heavenly parents, are blessed with unique gifts and talents, passions for different areas of human endeavor that would drive us not only to make the world in that sphere a better place, but also a predisposition towards seeking and receiving inspiration in those areas.

It's common, in my opinion, for people to go through life without ever discovering or magnifying the gifts they've been given. But those who do become a blessing to any and all with whom they come in contact.

I can readily picture God at the final judgment taking a very personal moment to show us what has been so unique about us, even since the premortal world and then asking us how we used those talents to bless others.

In picturing that moment, I suspect He will also ask us about one particularly important gift that we are to receive in mortality, which is the Gift of the Holy Ghost. A gift to guide and direct us to find other gifts. "How did you use that gift?" He will most assuredly ask. That's probably not a question I think about enough.