November 24ths

11/24/1872

(Letters of William James)

To Harry James:

On this saintly Sabbath morn I take up my long unwonted pen to make you a report of progress at home ensheathed in other gossip. I sit at your old table facing the Lowell's empty house which has grown to look more tumble down than ever during the absence of the family in the country—(they are still there, old Mrs. L. being sick)—the double sashes just put up in front and a sickly mist-swathed November sunshine pouring through the back window on the right...

[Almost a century into the future, a group of young musicians play these new "electrified" instruments and magically makes a new "sound book"]

11/24/1966

(Beatles Recording Sessions)

"And so the Beatles entered the new phase of their career. No longer the tidy, smiling 'Fab Four', singing boy/girl pop songs on stage. Now they were casually dressed, sometimes mustachioed, smiling-when-they-wanted—be-Beatles who would make the greatest ever batch of rock recordings at and for their merest whim, strictly not for performing on stage. 'Strawberry Fields Forever' captured in one song everything the Beatles had learned in the four years spent inside recording studios, especially 1966, with its backward tapes, its use of vari-speed and its use of uncommon musical instruments. And it could only have been born of a mind (John Lennon's) under the influence of outlawed chemicals. Strawberry Field is a Salvation Army home in Liverpool, round the corner from where John was brought up. He went there for summer fetes. 'Strawberry Fields Forever' evokes those childhood memories through a dreamy, hallucinogenic haze. It was, and still is, one of the greatest pop songs of all time."

11/24/2004

Ed Paschke died. He influenced my "neon" style. He was just an ordinary guy as well, which goes to show you can do weird stuff not have it suffocate your identity.

[11/24/2024. On one of my recent AI music generations, He Got Celebrated, I used 2 Paschke paintings. He’s a fellow Chicagoan–you get celebrated out of hand]. 

11/24/2007

While it might be enticing for an artist or architect to do things that are ‘anti-art’, you always run the risk of wasting your time on things that within 5 years time will be silly looking, and in the case of many of the deconstructionist buildings, falling apart as well. (Some things architects have forsaken: buildings built to last—and similarly in music—songs composed to stand the test of time.) Architecture as sculpture is a seductive idea, but it still has to work as a building for people. (Music has to work for people too.)            
Interesting book on-point: Architecture of the Absurd 

[11/24/2025: AI is evolving so fast that what you did 6 months ago looks or sounds old-hat. Back in 2023 I was using TTS voices that I thought sounded good, now they have the vibe of Steven Hawking used in a Pink Floyd song in the 1980s].

11/24/2011

Thanksgiving. Maggie Daley died. She championed the idea of beautification of a city. The Daleys were a large part of my life in Chicago.

11/24/2015 

Back in the day, less than a mere century ago, Tin Pan Alley songwriters would use titles as a springboard. Usually there would be a natural music in them, which would inspire a chorus idea.
           
“Back in the day” is almost like “Yesterday” when you sing it, spoken on a downbeat. No one says Yes-TER-day, let alone sing it that way. (If you pronounce “back in the day” on an upbeat it begins to sound like “begin the day”).

But the written word and spoken language converted to text is a different animal. There are phonemes, oronymns and mondegreens that naturally emerge when words are strung together. Typed text, especially when communicating in short bursts, always remains somewhat ambiguous in its emotional tenor, and can sometimes sound coarse or blunt.

As we know, music can restore language when it has been affected by stroke, Alzheimer’s or head injury. It is evidence that the ancient hard-wiring in our brains naturally connects music with language. Machines are completely changing that, at least superficially.
            
I think this has interesting implications for music. Perhaps this will make speech more prosodic. Prosody adds another layer of information from inflection, and will make all languages tone languages. 
            
[11/24/2024: AI can now sing words, but the syllabication is usually wrong. You could run 30 versions of it and it will never get it right. Therein lies a major differentiating factor between manual songwriting and AI-generation. Many of the songs I've generated with AI already exist as songs I've written. While they are interesting they don't compare. AI-generation is a "microwavable" music]. 

11/24/2021

Interesting article about “Ancient AI”.  I wish this would have been written when I was working on that music and would have made it more dystopian, a meme we need to control more than the control through automation. The meme is control.

11/24/2022

Apparently, Charles Mingus always had a pot of soup on the stove. There was also the story, perhaps apocryphal, that he had once interrupted a concert to eat a steak dinner on the bandstand and would be taste-testing it contemporaneously: “needs more garlic”. Some people knew him as a “huge cauldron of sounds” that was “always in a state of becoming something.”
            
In an abstract way, a multi-step recipe is like multi-tracking and overdubbing. The seasonings and other flavor-enhancing processes (like caramelization) are the “effects” and “treatments”. Serving and savoring the food is the “mastered final mix”. 

11/24/2024

If musicians followed the same arcs as artists, I’d now be in my neo-classical period, but I’ve left all the doors open to things I’ve done before. I’m not done with pop music yet, or prog, or the avant-garde. AI music has allowed me to revisit those genres, simply by setting a few options. I wouldn’t be the artist that cremates all his earlier work, as did John Baldassari. I’m more of a Gerhard Richter, with the AI music as the “scrape” paintings.

***

Threads (New Threads). This AI interpretation is fairly gnarly-sounding, yet interesting. The last "threads" sounds like "threats".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/24/2046

(Tony Townes Diary)

Dad gave me some old hard drives from the 20s with data on them. I can barely open my DU, plus date/time metadata is dodgy. No one gave a shit about future data, and look what happened to history! Glad to have the privilege of going for weekly DU while getting a massage.

"Discuss data uploads"