August 2nds

8/2/1998

Interesting article in Pulse magazine about the connection between football fight songs in England and pop music, written by Boff, the guitar player for Chumbawamba. At one time, pop stars would have their songs lifted by footballers. Now it’s the pop groups that steal from the Terraces.

8/2/2002

New field of study: “Musics” (like physics). Title: “Musicists”. Most of music is really not music in the traditional sense, but has rhythm, tempo. “Musics” also deals with social context and politics, which often get ignored in the craft of music.

[8/2/2024: In retrospect, what I thought was Musing is now Music relative to AI-generated music, which I think is the current form of Musing. Artists who are currently absorbed in it are Musicists in the domain of music, as Physicists are in the domain of physics].[See Appendix: Music Versus Musing] 

8/2/2015

A black-out lyric:

There is a new type of seeing now, that doesn’t involve direct observation with the eyes. Rather we see through devices, satellites, and cameras deployed in the environment. We perceive the world through data, which might be happening with art, i.e. using data manipulation as a tool where the retinal experience is largely determined by the data. 

8/2/2022            

I continue to have the opinion that AI is essentially a tool. Nick Bostrom devotes a section in his book Superintelligence to tool-AI. It’s not what the larger vision for AGI is but it is something with practical use, instead of going to extremes.

If an AI jazz group can sound just like a human version that’s both exciting and slightly creepy, but in some ways, jazz is open to the possibility of free randomness in the moment, shaped into an artistic statement.

8/2/2024

Lyric idea and Songday Drift To Today. On a lark, I tried an AI generation. I still don’t like what it does. AI-generation depends on the quality of the query, which is an interesting way of songwriting but again it’s too much like research—too left-brained, and is in the same cognitive arena of searching the internet, not being inspired by the idea, the words, and the general dreaminess of imagination.
            
Drifting yesterdays
Drifting tomorrows
Drift to today 

A song idea about The Now, now just a chorus.

An AI-generated version. Not what I had in mind and is "wrong" in terms of the rhythms in the lyric.

*** 

There are so many different ways to generate music now with artificial intelligence, perhaps too many. Each one has a different data set and UI, which means it makes the songwriting process dependent on separate databases, as opposed to creating music based on your imagination and simply working with the basic rudiments in music and language. 

8/2/2025

To the Loop for long river and lake walk, past Lollapalooza at Butler Field, distant music.