November 14ths

 11/14 Podcast

11/14/2001            

US liberates Kabul. The first thing the people did was play music. All humans need freedom and music is the most basic urge. It’s also ironic that the Taliban terrorist training tapes have a music track.

11/14/2004            

I had two internet radio stations playing at the same time inadvertently: a classical station playing The Rite of Spring, and a live recording from the 1980s—such that the crowd cheering could be heard over the top of the Stravinsky. What would happen if you overdubbed each instrument in an orchestra and ran tracks through effects and added drums, grooves, loops, etc.?
 

11/14/2009

Dynaxiom: Always strive to be well-prepared for fate and destiny. 

11/14/2020

  

11/14/2021

When I’m playing instruments, it’s not a visual phenomenon; I’m not thinking of aesthetics. Aesthetics in music has to do with production. When I create ambient music, a lot of it is visual thinking. I know it’s a cliche at this point, but it’s like painting. Using the metaphor that music is like painting was something that started in the 90s or 80s. People have always been putting those two things together. It makes sense because somewhere in the brain, those two areas are in the cross-fire of adjacent neurons, particularly with artists. It’s more that musicians can think visually than visual artists can think musically. As to the latter, I think it’s more of an abstraction because there’s less of a correlation between having to do things temporally rather than doing things spatially. Music can be spatial as well in terms of production—using reverbs as a way to place things on the z-axis for a sense of distance, for example. #riff 

11/14/2024

The more ideas I get about how to use AI in the flow of the creative process, the more I’m disappointed by the results. There’s too much “latency”, meaning having to navigate through poorly designed interfaces and the frustration of pay walls. I feel my energy draining away by the second, exhausted by all of it.]

[11/14/2025: This has been seemingly resolved. Now it’s too easy and generates too much material. It’s exhausting to curate everything. The longer you’ve been doing something the more you’ve accumulated objects, as well as digital files. Software companies are continually adding new features–most of which you will seldom use. Imposed constraints and limitation of options can be used for efficiency until they reach the point where they become inefficient. That is when you add additional limitations as necessary to bring it back to an efficient state–or go in the opposite direction, taking away constraints for a period to determine what’s relevant in the moment. AI can obscure what’s relevant. Another example of this process are the Curios I’m writing. They either start from new seeds or are a reduction of longer pieces].

Musing on Music LLM: “Discuss exformation” 

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Artists have to be more comfortable with shifting the way they look at AI. Most seem to be scared of it because we overestimate its actual usefulness at any given moment. For example, you may use it at some point in the creative process just out of curiosity, and it might produce nothing usable, and you just carry on with what you were doing. To be carried away by AI may mean you never had faith in your own creativity and skill to begin with. As an artist, I always (at least initially) want something specific based on an idea or concept I’ve had. Having faith in it for the long-term is a different story: As I’ve said before, creativity is a phenomenon of continuous interruption—in whatever form it comes. It can come organically as you flit from thing to thing, or it comes from the things you’re involved with in the moment, now, which is, for most people, scrolling on a smartphone. Creativity shouldn’t involve scrolling, but in music, scrolling through thousands of options on a synth is essentially a kind of scrolling. Scrolling is so exhausting and kills the mood. AI isn’t arty at all, but can be if you put it in its proper context.            
The other thing I now find exhausting and frustrating is a form of “the medium is the message”, meaning all platforms create different kinds of messaging that I sometimes don’t care about. Some people talk in Emojis, and I’m just not interested in that kind of dialog. Again, it’s about specificity. Well-written words and phrases are best for that.            

2024 CE: Revenge of not only the nerds but of the trolls. Memo to back 2000: You saw this coming. The internet was a breach into the collective unconscious and should have never been. It was the iceberg the modern ship collided with. [Every century has its Titanic(s)]

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On a lark, I thought I’d try AI Music-generating software on some of my old 90s lyrics: This could be my foray into metal. You have to admit this is an amazing performance...by nobody. These are my lyrics, and it is a finished song, but it’s nothing like this soft metal band. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/14/2025

It's between the ages of 8 and 28 that you are wired to become the you for the rest of your life. That's why it's crucial to decide what you want to be and what interests you.  It's harder now because of social media addictions. 

An AI-generated song based on this idea. I love the lo-fi 60s bubblegum vibe against the Cindy Sherman photo (1980)--one of my favorites. There's a large print of this at the Art Institute. The aspect ratio is interesting--more like the aspect of a screen.

An interesting exercise for AI-generated music would be to replace every track with a manually played part. For example, you would be replacing the bass part, the keyboard parts, and the guitar parts. It would be interesting to compare the generated version with the version that you did with all the replaced parts. It’s essentially the Ship of Theseus philosophy where if you replace every part of the ship, is it the same ship? With AI-generated music, that's the ship, and the one that you replaced it with would be something probably totally different, and will be totally different every time you play it live, which is the way music is supposed to be. In the process of replacing every part, you would probably come up with different ideas and probably other songs as well. That's one of the ways in which AI music and real music is essentially different. #riff