December 17ths

12/17/1998
            
Demonstrations on the streets about Iraq bombing. People being thrown in paddy wagons. Everyone curious about the spectacle because it’s not something you usually see. Interesting that now most protesting is done on the Net, and probably more effectively.

Excerpt Library (History): "Discuss the history of war protests in the United States 

Excerpt Library (Technology): "Discuss the efficacy of social media as a form of protest" 

12/17/2016
            
Ambient music in headphones at low volume works well as a foreground-background experience in urban environments where there can be lots of pitched elements: Certain junctures in a piece of music will randomly coincide with a pitched element in the environment. This is essentially “Audio AR” (the headphone sounds augmenting or overlaying what is in the environment (the “Reality”).

A useful aspect of Audio AR is that it can be used for alerts at low volume in narrow frequency bands with piquancy. But again, do we want another layer of distraction, and how do alerts or notifications fit in the various cognitive levels? 

Audio AR (or just listening to something at low volume while walking) naturally encodes the place memory. Your brain does this as its own routine. 
            
[12/17/2024: Our experience of the world is spatiotemporal; there are ‘place’ cells mapped in the hippocampus, and are associated with memory. (I know this is true because listening to music or other sounds while moving, encodes the memory of the place when played again. Audio books will do this, whereas paper books, even though they invoke place in the imagination, don’t get replayed in the brain when read again.) Virtual environments are like books read while traveling; it doesn’t imprint your memory of the place where you were reading it. If stationary, a virtual experience probably will not invoke place memory. It will be interesting to see the effects of VR and VR audio on ‘brain places.’]     

"Discuss extramusical or ambient sounds used in music"

12/7/2022

One of my creative credos in music is that music should be as long as it needs to be. We don’t need to pad it, or cut it necessarily. But if there’s a constraint set, then you have to stick to the constraint. The Video 45s that I’m working on have to be exactly 45 seconds--the opposite of music needing to be as long as it needs to be. It’s an absolute. I think constraints have to be absolutes, but not always--you can break the rules sometimes. But if you start breaking the rule then you’re breaking it all the time and then the constraint is no longer a constraint if you keep changing it to 60 or 65 seconds and it starts to become the original constraint or the original rule that music needs to be as long as it needs to be. I’m of two minds about that. Ideas take as long as they need to take, but if you’re using a constraint for the sake of using a constraint then stick to the constraint. #riff

[12/17/2025: The Curios series are pieces a minute or less drawn from rhythmic seeds. The finished Curios are then the “seedlings” which can continue to be cultivated into longer pieces, which can then be used to create more seeds and seedlings. Rules are generative as well when you start breaking them for the purpose of creating variety. I am reminded of the work of artist Alan McCullom whose forte is variety. Apps are like that: a designed system (not an object) that does one or a few things, and all are unique. Or like Ai  Weiwei’s seeds. The difference between fungible material like seeds and apps is that a seed has the same system as every other seed. Apps only have the OS in common].

Dynaxiom 3406: Everything goes to seed; Choose your seeds wisely and know when to plant them. 

Excerpt Library (Art Philosophy and Aesthetics): "Discuss generative art"

12/17/2023

Finished up a string ditty for Light Road For A Dark Night, now an Astrolabe 21. Good word for these: “Cureos” (Video Curios)

What’s remarkable about big-budget films is that there’s so much attention to detail and everything takes a long time. It might take a year or 18 months just to figure out what the costumes are—playing around with the wigs and the hair colors and so on. But then there’s an argument for doing things quickly. If you don’t have a lot of time you have to work effectively, such that it doesn’t look like it was rushed out the door in haste. Typically when I do a Short it’s not taking a short time, because as in full-length films, details need to take as long as they take. The cake has to bake and pass the toothpick test.
            
[12/17/2024: Yesterday I was reducing a 3-minute piece to 1 minute and took over an hour to make all the decisions on what to leave in and out].     

***

Yesterday I had watched a short documentary with Tony Iommi and Brian May and they were just playing around with Black Sabbath riffs, and I realized just how popular they are. They’ve become like folk songs or hymns. It’s now a “traditional” music that everybody can relate to. So heavy metal has become “folk” in some ways. A lot of rock and roll that wasn’t necessarily folk is now folk. Once music matures it becomes a fixture of the culture. People playing War Pigs and all the other Black Sabbath riffs are performing a form of folk music.