October 30ths

10/30/1996

Documentary on the search for a lost city in the Arabian desert. I thought that it was interesting that our digital culture will leave no artifacts at all, even in a time capsule that is never found.

10/30/2021

Throughout the last 300-400 years, there’s been a compromise in music, and it will continue as musicians create both new instruments and sounds that will either be integral (as in an acoustic instrument) or are separated, as controllers or interfaces are.            

Guitars started to become controllers once amps and effects produced the sound. If you just heard people playing them acoustically, it doesn’t sound like much compositionally. It’s not composition per se. So using instruments as sound controllers is one of the compromises we make in music. #riff

[10/30/2024: AI-generated music is another compromise because it makes music that is good enough and disincentivizes the exploration of it. We are no longer explorers of knowledge for its own sake, and over time, become inured to new ways of being. This is why we can’t fully understand ancient civilizations: even in their own time, they forgot how they used to do things, and consequently, things were allowed to wither, and they adapted to whatever was new. Where do all the things we forgot go?] 

10/31/2022

People who play music probably have different wiring that people who don’t play instruments don’t understand. I think music fans might get some of that vicariously through simply enjoying music or dancing to it. But I think there’s an impact from the things that we do manually which shape our cognitive styles. People who are involved in some kind of trade probably have a different brain wiring that other people don’t understand if they don’t do that kind of thing. I think it’s very important that we do something with our hands besides scrolling on a phone or typing on a keyboard, although writers probably have different wiring because they’re using language differently. We use language when we’re speaking it but it’s different from writing it. Some people can dictate very well and it becomes a form of writing. But I’m of two minds about dictating and writing without speaking: I think dictating is a different form of writing that isn’t writing per se. Writing is better if we do it with a silent mind. Speaking is a different kind of cognitive style—it shapes our brains in different ways if we can articulate verbally. The transcription of what I’m saying here would not be writing because I’m not in writing mode—I’m just riffing. But some people can dictate and riff, put in all the punctuation and it can just go right out the door. I used to work with people who could do that and I’m impressed by it. Cognitive styles have to do with the things that we do rather than the things that we think or think about doing. #riff 

10/30/2023

Dream: Fragment 1: I was in a cathedral playing the organ, but only using the pedals, which were very small made of cheap plastic, perhaps like Taurus Pedals. People said they could not hear them. Fragment 2: I was apparently somewhere along the winding Colorado River, looking out over it. I thought it was the Mississippi. People were wading into it. I was trying to brush my teeth with a kit that had been given to me. There were many different implements in the kit, some of which I couldn't understand what they were for.

[A song about being lost--or thought you should be somewhere else. This is very common in dreams where you "see" one thing and are thinking of another. Dreams are always emotionally charged by the limbic system. David Eagleman describes it well]. Idea: Use Moonrise in Hernandez as a music "quotation" or "cameo", as they have the same chords--as well as weaving in "crossing a bridge, in the bridge. If a video, scene of approaching a large river from a cliff. Also music for a place--Newburyport or Salem].

10/30/2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10/30/2025

You should be able to make art out of anything. AI has nothing to do with stopping you. In fact, you can appropriate what it creates and it won't ever know (at least now)