On Music

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In progress: 35 years of musing on music in a slim 100-page volume. Images are the series of 12 from Chromatic Windows

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KGNC KYOK

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I still haven't decided what I find interesting about AI music or if it's Art per se. Users are attempting it but it will never be art you made entirely by yourself. I write the lyrics--or appropriate other sources, but I didn't write the music or play on it. (You can say you were the "producer" to some degree) As to appropriation, you can make a lyric out of anything--in this case, a section for the book Useless Etymology. "The word and abbreviation “OK” most likely came about as a result of... well, nerds being silly. (Not that anyone reading or writing this book can judge.) Although several other theories have arisen, the predominant theory revolves around the fact that, in the 1830s, collegiate jokesters in Boston and New York came up with a series of slang abbreviations based on deliberately misspelled words." k.g. was short for “kno go” (no go) n.c. was short for “nuff ced” (enough said) k.y. was short for “know yuse” (no use) o.k. was short for “o...
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January 2nds

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1/2/2005 They’re razing the old Sun-Times building in the Loop, and when I pass by it I always tune into the sound of jackhammers echoing through the empty space. [Now site of Trump Tower]                Ambient Audio: [1/2/2025: Little did we know how that eponymous tower would represent the end of American democracy as we knew it. Perhaps it was always fragile and we naively thought, even after 9/11, that it would be razed].      1/2/2007 Projects for 2007: Music For Places, Highway Cinema.  [1/2/2026: Resolutions actually do work, but it can take sometimes a decade to see the results. What's important are "seeds"]  1/2/2012             James Howard Kunstler’s prediction/forecast:             “Vlad Putin has held things together there impressively after the meltdown of the 1990s, but apparently the tranquil veneer is thin. Except for two big citie...
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Remodel I (AI Jazz)

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My first AI jazz album using digitized cassette demos from the late 80s and early 90s. Most of it was never performed. or if it was, the performances were mediocre and not recorded well. The "restorations" are akin to the restorations of old films or recordings on 78s.  The model (v4.5) sounds less than optimal (and better than v6), and interestingly has a warbly cassette sound, so it inherits the imperfections of the medium. The corollary with vinyl would be that the restorations would include crackles and pops. The lo-fi quality actually gives it a faux-retro sound, or the sound of a live recording where the tape had degraded. To do restorations in a more musical way, you would let Suno create provisional versions from digitized tape, then transcribe them in some form to a MIDI file, and then use the audio file from that to create the final.  Be Bach : The original recording was me playing the bass melody, but the horns play it on the AI gen. Suno filled out the arrangement...
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Memory Theater

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In many ways, the method by which we now compose and record music, is very much like the editing of film. Film editing takes the linear experience of real life and rearranges the sequence of events to construct a story line, and places things in specific contexts (“reel” life). This is much different from real-time performance, where there are no second chances, and the only option is to do it right the first time. You could film a theatrical event and later go back, rearrange the sequence of events, include a soundtrack and you’d have something completely different from the actual performance. By simply adding a sound to a visual event you can change its meaning. Placing one event before another changes the viewers interpretation of the moment. And in music, making recordings gives us the illusion of things taking place in one moment, but in fact could have taken place days, weeks or even years apart.  [10/19/2026: This is exactly what's happening in the film (or documentary withi...
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On Nudging and Recursion

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One of the interesting things about keeping a diary—especially electronic diaries—is that you can compile a lot of information. I've been keeping an Evernote diary since 2009. In the beginning, I just saved articles to it to read later, and now it's become encyclopedic in some ways. It's my personal internet. A while back I was thinking about nudges. (There was a book that came out in 2013 by Cass Sunstein titled Nudge ). I had a note in my diary about doing a piece on it and then I ran a search in Evernote and I have articles going back to 2010 talking about nudging—especially nudging with technology using notifications and algorithms.  What's remarkable about digital text is that you can amass a lot of it and you can go back and do searches and then collect that information and shape it again in a recursive process, which is interesting because our minds are naturally recursive in some ways—continually connecting to something else—winnowing it down—-a narrowing. Last ...
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September 30ths

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9/30/1997             Roy Lichtenstein died. His use of ads, cartoons, etc. is similar to using samples in music. Music is really mimicking what happens in the art world, but with a long lag time.     9/30/1998             Surfed the Net on collaborative information filtering idea. Lots of great links: The Game of Life, the “Serendip” page. Must revisit.  [9/30/2024: This was the beginning of what we now know as simply an “algorithm”—the black box that defines the world we experience online, and now in life in general because it is recommending our relationships and how we navigate them. It has not been good for society or democracy because it is about collectivism as opposed to community. Viktor Frankl: “Only the community can ensure the meaning of individuality for the individuals…only the safeguarding of individuality for the individuals can ensure the meaning of community. This is what distingu...
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