October 21sts

10/21/2004

People still remember the song sequences on the albums. The more choice you have, the fewer things are fixed. I think it’s better if something is fixed because it’s one less decision you have to make.

[10/21/2024: This is why I now do video albums. Human In The Loop is the latest. It can be played like a record sequentially, but you can move the “tone arm” around].

Possible new medium emerging: satellite radio with internet radio. (A paradigm shift, a la FM radio—how will it affect the creation of music?)

[10/21/2024: Little did we know where this would all go.]

[10/21/2025: Little do we know where anything will go. We didn't know where the internet would go, or social media, or AI. It's always a mixed bag. Some benefit hugely, some are oppressed by it].

“From Hunger To Satiety”.

Possible new medium emerging: satellite radio with internet radio. (A paradigm shift, a la FM radio—how will it affect the creation of music?)             

10/21/2021

Neil Young said that if he practices a song too much, it loses the organic feel.” There are different kinds of organic: Organic in pop music means that you can jam around on a few chords and simple rhythms. It’s an easy space to play in. Jazz is different: it’s still an easy place to play in, but there’s a lot more preparation at the front end. But they’re essentially both improvisations. Even pop songs can start to get kind of jazzy—because if you go in that direction, and you have jazz players, they’re going to add that flavor to it. That’s one of the things I like about adding improvisation later, after the framework has been established. With a pop song, it’s easy to build structure. With Neil Young songs, lyric ideas are usually driving the music. Since there are typically no lyrics in jazz, there’s no linguistic aspect that has an influence. That can be added later as well. But in terms of improvisation, there are two different kinds: one allows for more free-form playing, and one might happen only within a bridge section, for example. 

[10/21/2024: Conceivably, one could write (generate) a tune with AI, then rearrange or re-imagine it in some way. This latter process is actual composition and arranging, and not just generation]. 

10/21/2024

Music carries you along the surface of the words.

Article: Finding the music of speech: Musical knowledge influences pitch processing in speech.“Even if music- and language-specific processes are observed among adults, this does not mean that such processes are innately domain-specific. Specialization could result from developmental processes and interaction with language and music throughout childhood. Statistical learning mechanisms allow infants to learn the distributional and transitional probabilities in syllables, tones, and even visual shapes. Infant listeners might broadly apply such mechanisms to interpret both spoken and sung input until they have acquired music- or language-specific knowledge or have learned to track specific acoustic cues that are critical within each domain.”

The study of the connection between music and language usually focuses on pitch, but it’s the rhythms in words and phrases that also make them musical. A syllable will either fall naturally on a downbeat or an upbeat. In the phrase, “Little did we know”, “little” falls on a downbeat when spoken, but can be shifted for musical effect. You can do this in music but not in everyday language, otherwise it would be incoherent. Music can exist on a loose continuum of coherence and incoherence. Very often pop music will be sung in such a way that you can’t make out the words, but it doesn’t matter because the music carries you along the surface of the words.