May 10ths

5/10/2005

Louis XIV Jason Hill: “I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better.” This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences. This is how one discovers classical music as well. You can never expect that people will appreciate music history if they don’t see the context. ( Like telling people The Rite of Spring caused riots at its Premiere).

[5/10/2025: It’s interesting now with AI-generated music that there are no influences that we could ever know because it’s all anonymous. Musicians always learned through imitation at some point, but with AI artists, they might be asked in the future who their influences were and they will have no answer–or it might be anything except music].

5/10/2013

Carbon Dioxide at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory Reaches New Milestone: Tops 400 Parts Per Million

[Now at 429] 

When I like something, then I discover something that I have been before, that is profoundly already within me. It resonates, like a piano that you hit.-- Stockhausen

Stockhausen aphorism: "Whenever we hear sounds, we are no longer the same, and this is the more the case when we hear organised sounds – music."

 5/10/2015, Sunday

Watched Ex Machina. Ava seemed too human. Even a sophisticated AI is more interesting if it still has some uncanny-valley characteristics. It's natural for robots to be creepy.

Studio for 2046 album: "Barely Born" 

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Footage: L'Atalante (Jean Vigo) 

Ava (Strings) by meta4s

5/10/2020

A song based on an errant phrase that I used as a lyric, which I think is Rumi, but I can't find the source. It is essentially a jazz piece and is mostly instrumental. (A song about uncertainty) 

5/10/2022

Lyrics to pop songs seldom mean anything—at least at the point they are written. But they usually gather meaning over time. For example if you just search the phrase, you will get the literal meaning. If you reverse-engineer them, it’s the typical hook. The idea must have been the title because it’s in the hook, then beyond the first stanza, the rest is love song filler: Hey, girl, stop what you’re doin’, Hey, girl, you’ll drive me to ruin, I don’t know what it is I like about you, but I like it a lot... 

5/10/2024

The downside of the Songday routine is that they produce earworms I might not want. Today, reading Keith Haring’s 5/10 entry, I have a “dorm apartment” earworm. 

Steve Albini: “I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.” 

5/10/2025

AI Music: The Look That Fits the Man. Not sure if I want to change "black" to "blue", but it's true. Played it for P. He didn't notice the words. I think most people don't hear the words--I never did until I started writing songs. A good way to become a better "noticer" is to start getting interested and doing  more things. It certainly works this way with photography: once you start taking pictures, you notice things you never saw before.