May 15ths

5/15/1998

Hot and humid, 88 degrees. Early summer—odd.

[The late 90s was when I started noticing a change in weather. Now it’s normal in Chicago to have summer weather in mid-May, when the frost season used to end].

Frank Sinatra died at 82.

Web-based music is really becoming an industry. It's the perfect milieu for generative music. I also like the “sound font” idea, so that you can orchestrate pieces and have them play back with the same sound every time. 

[5/15/2025: So much of the early web was saturated with all the potentialities for collaboration in the arts. The beginning of any new technology is all "blue-sky", then you realize that "weather" exists. Napster was the "storm" that rolled in. The internet is now the musical instrument replacing the recording studio as an instrument, just as the internet is now the new TV].    

5/15/2001

Hot, 90 degrees

To MCA for Christian Marclay Exhibit. Guitar Drag—gallows humor.

Interesting show on This American Life about setting a date for your death in 6 months, and seeing how it changes your experience of life. Kevin Kelly cried and got very emotional once he passed death and felt like he got his life back. Interesting: how you could be so disciplined to keep a fictitious date, and schedule your life accordingly. That’s like saying “on such a date I will be a multi-billionaire”, and making plans for it. It’s mostly delusional. But if it changes your long-term outlook what harm is done? 

5/15/2003

Interesting article in New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, Connecting the Dots on the intelligence failures preceding 9/11. The more information you get, the grayer it becomes, i.e. you fail to see shades and bits of information in different context changes the meaning. This reminds me again of the book The User Illusion. Once the brain creates “exformation” it naturally sorts out common information. Sometimes you want to see and examine common information to see the finer shades of gray. In music, instead of twelve tones to the octave, you can have an infinite number. But humans will always be able to see such minor differences. 

5/15/2010

Red Shirt protests in Bangkok out of control. A failed coup d'etat.

You Tube turns five years old. It's very mature for its age.

[5/15/2025: Astonishing how far it has come. But 2012 was its inflection point where it truly became (ad supported) TV with the use of algorithms. The big wish in the beginning of the web was streaming video. It was already using the film metaphor with elaborate Flash intro pages that were like opening sequences in films].

5/15/2022 

Reading Man Ray’s writings on art. What I like about books of correspondence is to marvel at how much people wrote to each other—in long-form, not just in little text messages.  He thought painting was dead but still did it “to convince himself of its inanity”. “Painting is dead, finished”; You will perish if you are not abreast of [ the latest art developments]. The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.”

[5/15/2025: Very true. Artists need to be on the cutting edge, now with AI. At the same time you have to explore other edges in the past–the geological strata. If you painted in the past, you should still make paintings, like I still work in music notation. It’s important not to dismiss new technology out of hand. If artists aren’t finding interesting things in new technologies then you just scratch the surface. It’s like the aeropainting style that emerged out of Italian fascism. It didn’t stop artists in their tracks. It was grist for new work].   
 

5/15/2024

Another Keith Haring entry and song idea. 

5/15/1977: "We're on our way to Sacramento in a '62 Chrysler with a dome dash and plastic slipcovers. It's a really neat car. Also, he is blind in one eye and has a cataract in the other and the radio doesn't work right 'cause he spilled a glass of Coke down the front of the dash a few years ago. But we'll get there..." Alternate titles: "Really Neat Car," "Getting There".

When I think about AI now in comparison to music technologies in the mid and late 80s, I see it as being provisional and experimental, and interesting in that way. When I got my first cassette 4-track in 1988 it was basically a way to experiment. In 2024 I think it’s still in that phase. People who are using it now are how I used it then, such as turning the tape over, using different tape speeds, recording found objects and sounds. It was all about experimentation, yet in the flow of other more “serious” things, or where the experiments turned into something traditionally usable.

If LLMs existed in 1988 people would be experimenting as they would with tape, and would be very popular and everyone would be making mixtapes and sharing them around. There would be millions and millions of cassette tapes and it would be overwhelming—huge mountains of cassettes of people experimenting with the new technology. It’s a good thing that the mountains are now digital.