July 17ths

 7/17/2007

 

7/17/2022

Book: The Power Of Daily Practice. There was an interesting part about who we identify as painters, regardless of domains. Are you a Paul Klee or a Joan Miro in your working style? How do we show up for creativity, and where are we on the spectrum of serious to playful, left-brained to right-brained? When I am in divergent mode I’m in idea-collection mode and open to happy accidents. But at some point you have to get started on making something, which will tilt you into left-brain mode. If I’m working in a score I’m almost all left-brain. Since I’m not a skilled orchestrator I have to study more. The Songdays are now my daily practice, whereas before it was the daily riffs, which I stopped doing.

7/17/2025

On relying on AI to make music: Your skills would devolve and over time would lose the ability to "fly". You'd become a musical penguin. "People who’ve never driven a car without GPS can’t drive using road signs, for example. Your brain has offloaded the task and it’s really, really hard to take it back. And so the more machines are used by human creators for certain tasks in music creation, the less likely it is that humans can then perform those tasks and train future artists and musicians and songwriters to perform those tasks. That’s a serious risk." [More]

AI Music is essentially a coloring book. Some “advanced” users can produce the actual outlines that get colored in. The way I look at AI authorship is that if you made or designed some kind of a seed that drives the whole work, then you were at least a co-writer and have rights that have legal weight.  It also ends the "song shopping" rigamarole. I wrote countless letters: "Enclosed please find my latest songs that I think would be great for your next album". 

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The 3 levels of meaning of a lyric (can combine all 3):

1. Specific: It tells a specific story, either fictional, real-life or a combination
2. Vague/Ambiguous: Possible narratives, single lines or couplets hint at possible meanings
3. Wordplay/Nonsense: Words serve as placeholders for sounds. Words are used rhythmically or percussively.