December 14ths

12/14/1996

(From the article in Telegraph Magazine, A Star Comes Back To Earth):

“Bowie wants to play me some of the tracks from his forthcoming album, Earthling - a title that plays none too subtly to Bowie’s new persona as an ordinary, affable, if somewhat arty, bloke. In the studio an engineer cranks out the songs at full volume. It is always a potentially awkward moment, listening to a performer’s work when he is sitting beside you - how do you compose your face into a rictus of approval if the songs are awful? In fact, they sound like the strongest he has recorded in years: densely textured - “industrial rock”, says Bowie - yet rich with the sort of commercial hooks that have been absent from his more recent work. Bowie was always clever at appropriating musical styles and stamping them with his own signature— - the “white boy” soul music of Young Americans; the ambient electronic atmospheres of Low.”

[12/14/2024: In my view, the 2 mid-90s albums Outside and Earthling comprise one his best periods, even if it was only 2 years. Postmodern music at its best done at the fin-de-siecle]

12/14/2000

Interesting show on NPR on electronic literature. They talked about “preference clouds” and “taste communities”, collaboration between typesetters and writers, authors being involved in layout, whereas they weren’t before. 

“Discuss how the internet changed the process of writing, editing, and publishing in digital form, contrasted with the print medium”  

12/14/2004

Google has announced that it will be digitizing all the books at major libraries and allowing full-text searches on the Internet. It’s a “liberation of information”, as democratized knowledge. (How will it impact all the blind faith sweeping the nation?)|

[12/14/2024@25: Hallucinating AI].

12/14/2008

“Professor Yuval Shavitt, of Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering, is melding math and sociology to describe mass behavior on the Internet. He is the principal investigator of DIMES, a project that hopes to map the structure and topology of the Internet, begun four years ago. And for the past year, he has used data-mining tools to collect and interpret massive amounts of data from file-sharing networks. By applying a decades-old sociological theory that describes the spread of information in social networks to the online world, he has been able to develop a predictive algorithm that identifies musicians who will ascend from local popularity to national stardom.”  [More]

12/14/2016

If the culture of jazz is considered “hivism”, do the science discoveries become the tribal currency, not shared for the benefit of the world or just the group? Science has generally strived to change the top-level systems, not just middle tiers. The hive is the world, not some small community of tribes. And when you have a multiplicity of tribes you need a dictator as a referee. 
            
If it’s true that we are innately inclined to morally guided social cohesion based on organized religions and traditions, then how can the foundations of science, which have made our current state of AI possible, be denied? Science is in the cross-hairs for its basis on individualism. But it’s individualism that has made it interesting enough to pursue in the first place. Once you start artificially creating some kind of “error” of history in order to “restore” it, you end up in a position with too many constraints. Where we are is not some kind of error that needs correcting. 
            
“The social network may feel like a modern town square, but thanks to its tangle of algorithms, it’s nothing like the public forums of the past. The company determines, according to its interests and those of its shareholders, what we see and learn on its social network. The result has been a loss of focus on critical national issues, an erosion of civil disagreement, and a threat to democracy itself.” [Commentary: Facebook's Algorithm vs. Democracy]

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Clunky and robotic TTS runs parallel to early drum machines and sequencers that applied various algorithms to make them more “human”, and they can now add breath sounds and stammering to do this. There are interesting possibilities in terms of “effects” that can be added, such as prosody, that can run the range from tone inflection right up to rap!
            
Robotic voices are always annoying, but robotic music will always have artistic value. (You don’t always want to necessarily remove the machine from music.) What is more interesting is the feedback loop of dictated text and the synthesized version of it.

12/14/2022

Swarms of tornadoes in Dixie. December tornadoes are starting to be an annual event.

High fidelity is sort of like salted and unsalted peanut butter: If you keep switching them people will start to think unsalted peanut butter has salt in it.  

12/14/2024

I’ve never made apologies about the way I work. I like to think that everything I do is of a piece and part of a larger integral system of creativity that interests me at different levels. I wonder why I like what AI has done to my songs, but I do. Emotions are like that. I’ve heard or read many times that people don’t understand their emotions, or why they like or dislike things. They just do. No explanations are necessary.  

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Another problem that we’re starting to have with artificial intelligence is that it’s starting to become another distraction. I like working with it and it is fun but it’s distracting. One of the bad side effects of it will be that it will direct people away from the things that they used to do. As an artist you have to consider what your intentions and goals are. If you say “My intention is to create a series of three paintings within 3 months”, and you can have a soft deadline. This will give you room to explore and discover new things—particularly with artificial intelligence—which you can incorporate into the paintings that you’re making. 

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Exhibit at library: Sara Moskowitz drawings. I like the “unknown” title used for all the portraits. 

  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
12/14/2025 

I feel that my interest in new technologies has not waned. I've always explored them. Currently, I like using LLMs and I use them quite frequently. But there are other people who have absolutely no interest in any new technologies. My interest goes back to my first MIDI synth that I bought in the early 1980s. I had regularly read music magazines, and I always dreamed of buying keyboards, drum machines, sequencers, effects, and so on, and that carried over to my interest in other technologies. If it weren't for technology, art would have been as interesting and exciting. The world doesn't want to be doing the same thing for centuries--although that's the way it typically was. In the baroque and classical periods, a composer or player wouldn't have seen much change, unless radical change was happening underground and never got recorded historically. It would be interesting to write that possible music that broke all the classical rules.

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50th Anniversary of Wish You Were Here. Nick Mason said there wasn't a theme until Syd Barrett showed up at the studio. Ideally, that's how creativity (and perhaps life) should work, where you change course abruptly. No interviews with any band member (at least not yet), probably because of trauma triggers over Barrett. A deluge of review videos, all by really young people who have no intimate memory. There are different collective memories of culture, and they are equally valid. People born in 2000 have a different understanding of 70s bands. For me, Pink Floyd (and surrealist art) were my primary access points to music (and art).

"Discuss how generations view music history differently"