September 20ths

9/20/2005            
       
On the advent of cell phone video: Is it a new medium? How does it affect perception? 

[Musing On Music Mostly LLM: Prompt: "Discuss the evolution of film and video and its effect on perception"]     

9/20/2016            

What all musicians should love is the process, both at compositional and performance levels. Sometimes I love the potential in ideas that I get, even if the first demos don’t fully express or resolve them. If all I get is a nice set of changes, I feel a sense of satisfaction and/or relief that the muse is still there.            

9/20/2017            

Orange Peel, 19 x 25 inches, acrylic on paper with iridescent copper patina. (Third in the ‘Leaf’ series (Goldleaf, Silverleaf). Copper patina makes the work bright and pastel in sunlight and darker and dramatic in low-light.)     

9/20/2020            

On the morning after a presidential debate, there is always lots of unpacking to do, so I dialed up the transcript because I was curious how they handled the crosstalk.            

In vocal music, contrafacta is the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music. It reminds me of an idea I had to write a song that had two sets of lyrics, one sung into the right channel, and one into the left. I am sure this has been done before, and I vaguely remember a song by The Clash that did this. Like the Necker Cube, it creates an alternating focus of attention.

[9/20/2025: In a pop song if you have a riff that repeats throughout, you can sing the verse and chorus together in the outro. This happened surprisingly in an AI-generated song. I love the effect].
 

 9/20/2021

One of my first "Dynaxiom Songs", music created from my running list of aphorisms begun in 1990. It's interesting how words can drive the music--sometimes just a title or line or couplet. Once I started tracking it it veered off in different directions. In this case, I abruptly modulated from A minor to Ab major in an outro vamp, which became a piece in itself--or a 70s-era jam that you could riff on for a few minutes. It's a "strobing" of two chords (A7 and Am7) in which only one note is changed: C# to C-natural, but the modes are contrasting as well: A Mixolydian, G Lydian or E minor pentatonic, to C major pentatonic. On this I actually composed the solo as if I were improvising it, but the improvisation is really in the bass using the same chord scales. 

The original lyrics are still there as a "ghost" and you could sing them somewhere in the piece, adding verses and so on. The original words were "formless and timeless", although the shape or prosody in the words suggested the form, as projected light can seem to have form.

In my view, music is mostly nurture, if the child is primed in some way. I recall being fascinated by language—rhyming specifically—which led to an interest in music. As I got older, I realized that it was playing with blocks that had an influence on how I looked at composition.        

Look at what leads to an interest in music. Obviously with more difficult instruments, such as piano, the child will need to be motivated to practice, but the motivation might be coming from somewhere else. People who are interested in math tend to like jazz for some reason. People who like philosophy and history might like language (writing) which can lead to writing lyrics, which then leads to music. I call these “access points” and work with all areas of study.    

[9/20/2025: AI music generation is probably an access point for some. In order for it to work musically the words have to be musical first, and have to be “singable” even if you’re not singing them.] Prompt: “Discuss the vocal apparatus"