August 27ths

8/27/1998

Dream: In a southern Baptist town working at a studio there. One of the songs was an old spiritual that I arranged. When the album finally came out, the credit read as “God/Lee Barry”. Town had yellow church buses with black-out windows and curb feelers. 

An AI-generation using this as a prompt: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8/27/2019

AI, in general, hasn’t yet impacted the future of music, at least not in an aesthetic sense, but that could be a possibility, as could the blockchain, such as turning samples on and off. But that will essentially be the avant-garde, not pop music. The problem I have with new technologies is they just barely overlap with artistic expression as has been defined through history. We’ve already explored cybernetics and systems theory in the 20th century, so anything we do with blockchain or anything involving computers will be a variation on what’s already been explored. It may be interesting but that’s just speculation on what future generations will value.            
 

[8/27/2024: I think everything is ultimately a variation on what’s already been explored–by previous generations. It’s interesting that new fashion trends/memes always touch on early PCs, especially the color space. DOS computers used only 16 Windows colors. The new Decora maximal vibe/meme uses a constrained color gamut–which is ironic in context with its maximalist ethos. But if future generations are going back 20-40 years, which recursively use elements from 20 years prior, there will never be any innovation. It will only seem innovative. It has, in fact, affected the future of music. It’s now in the flow of my music–but I’m not using it as a turnkey thing. Retro culture is “turnkey” in the sense that we can one day decide what the vanguard is by just turning a key].  

[8/27/2025: AI music is going to remain turnkey until people are actually involved in some level of craft. It begs the question that if you're going to spend 2 hours tweaking stems of other people's music in order to produce new music, why would any musician do that/ You could use your own. The reason I don't is because mine isn't a slick production. So that's what we're really after...]   

 8/27/2024 

There are so many AI music and art generators these days, perhaps thousands of them now. I just used another one this morning called AI Music Factory. It’s always kind of interesting, but in the end, I say to myself, “I really hate AI”, in the same way that I hate LA. It generated a country and western 2-step, and a traditional 12-bar blues, which was kind of ironic in context with the text that I had used–the August 27, 1998 dream I had about being in the southern Baptist town. I can see how people would use these generators to do ironic things like this. That’s what makes it interesting. Otherwise, for most people it’s just too generic, and it’s flooding streaming services. People are probably creating fake artists and releasing albums. People won’t know the difference. They might ask more about the artist, but they’ll find nothing, Everything will be completely fake, like a George Santos. If people are going to pay monthly fees, they’ll find ways of gaming it. Another reason to hate AI. Ok, it’s fun and ironic, but like the internet since 2000 everything is wacky and it’s made people that way.
 

[8/27/2025: What a difference a year makes. The takeaway is that if time, energy, and money is thrown at something you get something that starts to become useful. There’s a general cynicism that seems to come with any new technology, even by people who have been more apt to try new things. It’s fun and cool to play with AI generation but it’s still a toy in many ways, which is why I want to go back to using a quill on manuscript paper. How to differentiate different kinds of knowledge is crucial. From Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work: “One major problem is that masters themselves can rarely disentangle the alchemical process that has gotten them to where they are, in part because of a fundamental disconnect between “declarative knowledge” — knowing about something — and “procedural knowledge” — knowing how to do something. One can theoretically learn all there is to know about how to ride a bike without being able to do it; conversely, you can ride a bike really well and struggle to explain it. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle theorizes this divide as “knowing that” vs. “knowing how.””]