August 18ths

8/18/1948            
 

(Jack Kerouac Journal--paraphrased)        
 

Jack goes to New York with Tom, jazz club for bop, smoked pot, and pondered epigonism [an imitation of an artist by a subsequent generation], existence of “atomic disease”: “There is something definitely afoot, a madness, one not unlike the late Roman cult-madnesses.”

If we had sparklines for music notation, this is how they would work inline with text: 

Atomic Disease (8-18-1948) by meta4s

8/18/1997            

A. at studio in PM. Did B-vox on Backwater.

[8/18/2025: The AI version. Tooooo country--but I did choose Country as the genre] 

8/18/1999            

Technology is man’s assurance that he’ll continue to evolve.            

I’ve noticed that every time I walk in Walgreen’s, a Sting song is playing. His next album should be Music For Walgreen’s.

[8/18/2025: As much as I’ve been a fan of Sting and The Police, his songwriting beyond Brand New Day has been unremarkable. Stewart Copeland is at least writing orchestral music, which is something Sting should be doing. Once you get into your 60s you can wear the composer wig because it fits better then].        

8/18/2017

Talent is more innate than inherited—nurture rather than nature. If a child grows up in an environment where music is more valued, musical skills might be ‘selected’. What I do think is innate is rhythmic ability and the ability to hear key centers. If you can easily identify key centers and feel the ‘one’, you have a natural inclination for music. There are now other talents associated with music that are influenced by the visual arts, specifically electronic composition which involves the creation of logical structures that don’t necessarily involve rudiments. This is not to say that one couldn’t develop these skills, but if there was a talent, it would be apparent within a short time.    

In the future, musical ability could be genetically engineered, but it might be on the level of endurance. You can’t ‘engineer’ artistry or craft in the same way. That comes through nurture.

[8/18/2025: Now with AI, people won’t want to lift a finger to make music manually, which is a shame because there are cognitive benefits of music--and language--but is different from the language you might use in a prompt to describe it.] 

8/18/2022

When there’s less music or formal composition to begin with, why bother? I think it’s an influence from sampling: A sample doesn’t have an “intro”. The corollary in film is not using a title sequence when at one point all films had them. In the early web, websites had elaborate Flash Intros until people got annoyed by them. I certainly won’t say that Intros are bad, but classical music doesn’t have them. But they have “introductory” sections to the main thematic material unless it’s all “introductory”.

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In film the images are there, but “film music for possible films” is composed specifically to suggest narratives. There are so many cliches now that you could use low strings and low clarinet melody in a minor key and you could shoot a scene against it.

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We don’t necessarily need AI for art-making...Artists still make paintings, pottery, textiles, works on paper, glass sculpture, metal work, and so on. If you go to large international art exhibitions 1% or less would be using AI as a process. It could be the beginning of a new movement if anything.

8/18/2024

A good word to describe an experience that is transformative is “galvanized” (to stimulate or excite as if by an electric shock) which can happen at the individual and collective levels. A common one from the 60s was seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. It’s commonly mentioned in interviews with musicians who were teenagers then. The next day they knew it was something they wanted to pursue. Their minds were quickly changed, and perhaps you’d see changes in the brain in an MRI. 

8/18/2025

AI music makes music 'hardware'. Music is essentially a matter of software made with a centuries-old programming language using a small set of simple rules. AI music is hardware in the sense that it is burned onto a 'motherboard' requiring many complex systems, many of which are burned in and you can't easily change them at the point of creativity. If a hardware system only has a D major chord and not a D minor, and perhaps a D7, the music is stuck in a sealed box.