November 18ths

11/18/2022

A realization I had years ago was that music had become all about the sound rather than music for music's sake. It was after I had seen a Japanese blues singer on TV: He said, "I didn't know what I was singing about, but I liked the sound." (A testament that American pop music is primarily about sound.) People are looking for an emotional connection with music and it's interesting how that's now done more electronically.

[11/18/2024: AI music is all about the sound. If the sounds weren’t good the bad lyrics would sound even worse. Pop music never really needed good words, or that they were intelligible]. 

 

11/18/2023, Saturday

Nice autumn day, clear, 55 degrees. Used the telephoto for some selective-attention photos at the top of Swallow Cliff. Apparently people use the stairs as a form of fitness training.... What was also interesting were lines of small stones that people had made--perhaps also a form of counting device. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really like working on only one song per month. It allows me to experiment with the idea and let it reconfigure itself.

[11/18/2024: My recent use of AI to generate music troubles me because it’s a distraction away from more rigorous creative work, which makes me think about what the current definition of “meaningful” is. A popular political opinion is now vastly more meaningful to the masses because it taps the emotional jugular–what art has done historically. So the question for artists is where do they focus?] 

[11/18/2025: It's now a matter of adaptation and finding a way to use AI in your work such that it doesn't make you less interested in manual ways of working. Since pop songs are easy to generate, I bookend them with a combination of scoring and playing bass, guitar, and keyboard parts against them as a way to be the human in the loop. I realized that AI will never do everything you might want to do. If I want to write a piece with minor chords a major third apart, AI isn't going to do that--at least at the moment].

11/18/2024

Technology, especially smartphones connected to the internet, is now the elephant in the room. For example, how can we sit through a 45-minute symphonic work at a concert hall without being influenced by even the thought of what the smartphone makes possible? Since the medium is so cool, we can always touch it, as opposed to pre-internet when media was hot. It wasn’t that people were going to the symphony or a rock concert and taking newspapers and magazines with them. The news may have been on their mind sometimes but it didn’t infect every moment as it does now—regardless of whether you even have a smartphone. It’s still the elephant in the room. You can get the elephant out of the room, but you’re always thinking of the elephant. I personally don’t care about “going viral” but we live in a world where that matters a lot. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 11/18/2025