November 4ths

11/4/2010

Playing music is a way to be genuine.

[11/4/2024: Playing music for 3-5 minutes clears my head. I’m with Daniel Levitin that music can be pharmaceutical (adjective).] Quincy Jones: "Music was the only thing I could control. It was the one world that offered me freedom. When I played music, my nightmares ended. my family problems disappeared. I didn't have to search for answers. The [greater] than the bell of any trumpet in my scrawled penciled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant, and cool."

11/4/2016, Friday

Cubs victory parade—perfect weather.

 

11/4/2021

Over the past few weeks, I have been spending a little bit of time (still) trying to find something interesting and useful in AI music. The one that I used that was kind of interesting is called Boomy. It creates tracks by selecting genres, sub-genres, and instruments, and then you scroll through until you find something that you like. This is the way that I think AI works at the user level, in which it generates permutations and then you select the shots that you want, not unlike going through a video and selecting Stills....

[11/4/2024: There have been some good developments in AI and more artists might be using the tools. But I find myself frustrated with endless tweaking rather than working. It’s the big-box store of AI–perhaps a form of mindless entertainment, but you can’t decide on what mindless entertainment to watch. I see it all as screwing up the mind and soul].

11/4/2023

As I was working on Disaster Movies this morning there was a protest happening on the street and took a video to capture the audio: 

Stop their suffering
Stop their pain

The end of the world (Disaster Movies) will be a meme come true.

 

11/4/2024

Quincy Jones dead at 91. "Music was the only thing I could control. It was the one world that offered me freedom. When I played music, my nightmares ended. my family problems disappeared. I didn't have to search for answers. The answers greater than the bell of any trumpet in my scrawled penciled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant, and cool." What's remarkable about artists who live into their 90s is that they never stopped doing things they like to do, or having a desire to do them. I've never fully understood the person that is "just being". Perhaps there is still a desire but is transcended. They're still making artwork, but the art is their life. Jones could work both of those ways. 

This is why music has a natural mystical quality, and can be used in tandem with a spiritual practice. I've been trying to figure out a way to do this while still retaining my artistic freedom without the constraints of it being necessarily mystical music, ambient or new age, which I don't necessarily want to do all the time. Interesting: Jones learned piano from his next-door neighbor. That's how it starts--where you're in proximity of someone who has an instrument in their home and you're magnetized and galvanized. This is how it happened with me, first an acoustic guitar, then a Wurlitzer organ, then a guitar with only 4 strings, then a bass].