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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30000 Years

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A remix of diary entries from my 11/10 diary 1998-current transformed into a lyric using a text randomizer. This isn't AI, but it's like AI in the sense that you are using an algorithm. But instead of using a pre-made one you make one of your own, which is ultimately more fun and interesting. You can use the constraints but you can change them as well. This is essentially a cut-up technique. Using the natural rhythms in the words, "get the thing" created the main motif.       The main chorus riff is 30000 Year s, with this rhythmic motif:        Get the thing Everything Rapidly Love the thing Started abandoning Hoping it was the thing 
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1110

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Lines from a Paul Cezanne letter (~1930), with other random lines from 2024. Played on acoustic guitar and demo'd by AI.    Listen on Suno
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On Speech Rhythms

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  In terms of the connection between language and music, there is a finite number of rhythms that can be extracted from poetry and prose—probably in any language. If you read a passage in a book out loud, sometimes you will come upon phrases that are inherently musical.  The musicality of language (prosody) arises from the stresses on syllables, which have to be either on an upbeat or a downbeat in order for them to be coherent. In musical contexts, you can shape language however you want, and make things wrong for the sake of making them wrong for artistic effect, or emphasizing particular vowels when singing them. Ignoring strict meter and using a roving bar line is a cool way of approaching language in different ways in a musical context. Rhythmic displacement is one of the main tools for improvisation. For example, starting a phrase on an upbeat sounds less square than starting on a downbeat. Bass players are known to do this as well leaving the first eighth or quarter not...
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1111

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0034. The camera lies, or the camera finds the truth hiding behind the lies, sometimes the camera see better than the eye because it slows it down. In the end, will the camera lie or will the camera tell the truth?  *** Listen on Suno
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Conundra

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Every so often I'll compose etudes for myself based on repeating cycles. It can be practiced on any instrument and consists playing over a pair of chord changes a tritone apart, then proceeding up in fourths (or down in fifths). Each chord has a set of chord scales that can be played over them, and you can play one type across then all, e.g. the Phrygian mode going down in major thirds, or simply playing arpeggios, or mixing it up in different ways. 
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November 11ths

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      Antipode: May 11ths 11/11/1914 Wittgenstein: Letter to David Hume, who he thinks a lot about and wonders if it's mutual. Cannon fire heard from the workshop.  This could be a score to this “scene”: 11/11/1965           (Beatles Recording Sessions)             The other new song, John’s ‘Girl’, was further proof that Lennon wrote some of his best songs under the pressure of deadlines. It was a fine song, if perhaps a little naughty. (John later revealed that the scat backing vocal by Paul and George was in fact the word “tit” sung over and over again.   11/11/1999 Edge interview with Doug Rushkoff. This is what I call useful cynicism about the Net:  What is our intent and what are we going to do with it?  2026: What the internet might have done is make us more emotionally reflexive, that social media turned up to 11 "...we're supposed to know how we feel before we've ha...
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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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On Instrument/Art Collecting

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  Picasso, Guitar (1924).  On wants versus needs in terms of musical instruments:  It's been several years since I've bought a new instrument. I don't focus on that anymore, yet I see a lot of bassists collecting them–some with hundreds. It must consume your entire day–shopping around for them online, having them delivered, reviewing them on YouTube, and so on. Instruments can make a difference in production, but they don’t make a difference in composition most of the time. Instruments are different and unique and can create unique ideas, but once you take the idea and separate it from the instrument, it obviates the instrument. So you buy an 8-string or 12-string: They have a unique sound but once you start to track up a song and compose the song itself, and reduce it to chords and melody–something that you could play on a guitar or a piano, that bass doesn't mean anything. You could use a stock Fender Precision if you're just playing a simple supporting bass part,...
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