2/24/2024

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 Flower Pot Friezes--Cheney Mansion




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January 2nds

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1/2/2005 They’re razing the old Sun-Times building in the Loop, and when I pass by it I always tune into the sound of jackhammers echoing through the empty space. [Now site of Trump Tower]                Ambient Audio: [1/2/2025: Little did we know how that eponymous tower would represent the end of American democracy as we knew it. Perhaps it was always fragile and we naively thought, even after 9/11, that it would be razed].      1/2/2007 Projects for 2007: Music For Places, Highway Cinema.  [1/2/2026: Resolutions actually do work, but it can take sometimes a decade to see the results. What's important are "seeds"]  1/2/2012             James Howard Kunstler’s prediction/forecast:             “Vlad Putin has held things together there impressively after the meltdown of the 1990s, but apparently the tranquil veneer is thin. Except for two big citie...
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September 30ths

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9/30/1997             Roy Lichtenstein died. His use of ads, cartoons, etc. is similar to using samples in music. Music is really mimicking what happens in the art world, but with a long lag time.     9/30/1998             Surfed the Net on collaborative information filtering idea. Lots of great links: The Game of Life, the “Serendip” page. Must revisit.  [9/30/2024: This was the beginning of what we now know as simply an “algorithm”—the black box that defines the world we experience online, and now in life in general because it is recommending our relationships and how we navigate them. It has not been good for society or democracy because it is about collectivism as opposed to community. Viktor Frankl: “Only the community can ensure the meaning of individuality for the individuals…only the safeguarding of individuality for the individuals can ensure the meaning of community. This is what distingu...
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Remodel I (AI Jazz)

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My first AI jazz album using digitized cassette demos from the late 80s and early 90s. Most of it was never performed. or if it was, the performances were mediocre and not recorded well. The "restorations" are akin to the restorations of old films or recordings on 78s.  The model (v4.5) sounds less than optimal (and better than v6), and interestingly has a warbly cassette sound, so it inherits the imperfections of the medium. The corollary with vinyl would be that the restorations would include crackles and pops. The lo-fi quality actually gives it a faux-retro sound, or the sound of a live recording where the tape had degraded. To do restorations in a more musical way, you would let Suno create provisional versions from digitized tape, then transcribe them in some form to a MIDI file, and then use the audio file from that to create the final.  Be Bach : The original recording was me playing the bass melody, but the horns play it on the AI gen. Suno filled out the arrangement...
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911@25 Dark Days

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  [View Gallery]   The first images are photos of the TV that I took as I was watching various commemorations and footage of the event. When I got downtown, I started taking pictures of buildings that serve as a snapshot memory.  On 911, they had closed the office at about 10:30 and I started to walk around to take photos. I had gotten my first camera about a month before, and I wasn't completely familiar with it, so most of the photos were overexposed. Later on I inverted them, which is a look that I liked. So I thought that I would take overexposed pictures and then invert them in the same fashion.   
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9/24/2025 (On Lyrics and AI)

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Figured Basses

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I have a penchant for re-arranging pieces originally written on a bass for string quartets or string ensembles. In fact one of my first classical pieces was written for two basses , then arranged for string quartet. This one was an etude I wrote in the 90s that is based on a compound time signature and cycles through 4 dominant 7th chords (or Mixolydian modes) a minor third apart: E7, C#7, Bb7, G7. Now I've re-arranged it again for the Songday series for an album of pieces that are a minute long, as Sum IV.1 (as "shortets"). Sum III are pieces an hour-long (like field recordings), Sum II are pieces that are about days, and Sum I was an album of songs per month (There are none (yet) for years). Shortet No. __ (Figured Basses) by meta4s The Score:  On the Rhythm By Addition album:
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