April 29ths

4/29/1817, Halifax

(Anne Lister Diary)

Went to Whitley’s to pay for the blank [diary], then said to Whitley I wanted to hear Sugden play on the flute.

[200 years ago music had to be performed from published music, and people would go to great lengths to get the sheet music for music they wanted to learn to play. This continued on through most of the 80s and perhaps into the 90s, until the internet killed print publishing].

4/29/1998

At about the time that rock and pop music was going off into a psychedelic direction, John Cage was influencing what was happening in the academic world, and then “studied” producers like George Martin, introduced these radical procedures in sessions with Beatles, and studio technology made it possible.

["Discuss John Cage's influence on pop music"] 

4/29/2010

It’s interesting how suburbia affected pop music. Pop music would not have evolved as it has without the suburbs, as it allowed bands to rehearse in basements and garages. In the late 70s I was in a band that played Rush and other progressive rock and metal and we practiced in my garage at our home in suburban Chicago. My father said it rattled the gutters on the house. Try that in an inner city apartment or condo. Which then begs the question: how do restrictive and confined spaces affect the music? I once heard an artist comment that once he moved from a very small studio to a very large one, it allowed him to make the larger paintings he had been planning.

["Discuss the effect of place on creativity"] 

4/29/2020 
            
Patti Smith: “These days some plans are made optimistically, knowing they have a great percentage of not happening. Yet the imagination reigns. In that respect we can go anywhere, [saved] by the plot of doubt.”

4/29/2021

If we look at music history as a training set as they do in machine learning, blues was the training set for rock ‘n’ roll, as was jazz—and still is to some degree. They’re both baked in the cake. If you use the training set from the last century, blues and jazz are in there. They’re in the collective unconscious for musicians. #riff

4/29/2023

Moonage Daydream (Second Viewing). Bowie is a perfect example of a person with right-hemispheric thinking and behavior, sometimes seeming aberrant, but under the control of the left hemisphere. Also, oddly, I liked watching it on a smaller screen as opposed to the theater. Different aspects came through in each venue. In the part of the film around the Outside album, I thought, “This is when the oldest Millennials were becoming teenagers and I was starting to write songs that were a product of 70s and 80s music.” On the arc of Bowie’s life, I’m a step behind him. At the end of the film, and his life, with the Blackstar album, the music now sounds like an attempt of what future music would sound like. But he wasn’t using AI—rather something that would appear on the scene in seven years of his death, but written traditionally, and perhaps nostalgically, as Jazz.

4/29/2025

When you're generating music with AI, you're either controlling the algorithms or the algorithms are controlling you. I haven't yet decided which one is better or worse. The good side of being controlled by algorithms is that they'll own you, i.e., they’ll steer the work in terms of genre, disabusing you from having to own them. For example, if I write some lyrics and it generates a blues/rock shuffle a la ZZ Top that has some interesting aspects to it, I’ll tend to keep it. If it were playing on a playlist, I might not skip it. But a blues shuffle is something I wouldn't be caught dead writing myself. This is proof that AI music is mostly a listener’s activity, entirely driven by text, either from a lyric you’ve written or a text prompt. This is not music composition by any stretch of the imagination. Songwriting perhaps…

[4/29/2026: The paradigm continues to shift. Music will always adapt to however we are able to make it, which is optimistic. What I'm pessimistic about is that DIY will evolve to the point where there are no musical skills left, aside from how language (lyrics) are interpreted by machines. To this day I can't get an LLM to suss a 6/8 or 12/8 feel in a lyric].

 
 

4/29/2026

Songday: Drop To the Top