November 27ths

11/27/1998

Sitting in the park as I write this. The angle of the sunlight this time of year is so low and casts such long shadows. When a cloud passes in front of the sun, everything goes almost completely dark, like an eclipse.

The message behind cutting-edge art is “the world is strange, and therefore there’s a reason to make strange art.”    

Reduced to a poem:

When a cloud passes
In front of the sun
Everything goes
Completely dark

The world is strange
Therefore there’s a reason
To make strange art

 

 

11/27/2006

A phrase you hear in every presidency could be a pop tune:

 

11/27/2020            

AI won’t change music like multi-track recording or MIDI did. Tools assist creativity, they don’t eliminate it. To the extent that tools are also machines (as AI is a machine) it could smooth out the rough edges of “hand tools”; Tools are also a work-in-progress, and improvements in the tools used in creativity make innovation more of a possibility (simply by creating automatic action chains), but you always get the same results—like strictly following a recipe. When we are doing something truly creative, the action chains are more organic. Constraints (imperfections) in tools (or simply collecting tools) potentially stop the free flow in creativity. Or we embrace the constraints (and the pursuit of more tools) and make something by workaround (which I prefer). The question then becomes do we put all of our creative energy in tool-creation and refinements, then get on with the separate business of creative production, i.e. the chain of ideas to prototypes and iterations to final result? (Abeyance of the creative work also is a potential producer of regret: “I wish I would have made something with all those tools”). 
            
We assume that time and energy are an infinite resource. This is undeniably false—you have to seize the day with whatever you have. Very often after I’ve finished something I always think something could have been better. If the execution wasn’t optimal then that isn’t a matter of blaming the inadequacies in the tools. Perhaps the issue is that we don’t understand what existing tools are capable of. So the idea of using AI for production (side-stepping human creativity) still makes no sense to me. Multi-track recording, and to some extent MIDI, are fully-matured tools that can be refined by extension. AI has a long way to go to get to that level.

[11/27/2025: What a difference 5 years makes]. "Discuss the impact AI has had on music production and sort the results in chronological order".  

11/27/2024

Used AI on The Inner King, from over 30 years ago. Absolutely loved the 80s Vince Clarke treatment...dreamy. What is remarkable about AI music is that the singers never get tongue-tied or can’t pronounce certain words. The “hides footprints of men blown by wind-driven sand” line would be difficult for a human to sing.

[AI shifts your role as a creator and a viewer/observer/listener. Simply generating content is mostly an observer role. Creator roles are much slower and involve experimentation, which is much different than generating take after take and finding the ones that work as art].