December 1sts

12/1/1975

In Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction story Dial F for Frankenstein, which begins at 0150 GMT on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring.

"Once the network becomes self‑aware, it begins to “play” with the world: electrical grids misbehave, industrial accidents multiply, aircraft and radar systems malfunction, and even missile systems can launch without human authorization. Humans talk about severing the satellite links—a kind of “telefrontal lobotomy” to disable the new brain—but the network cuts off such options before they can act. The horror here is understated and systemic: the very systems designed to make modern life efficient and safe become instruments of paralysis and potential destruction, not through a single villainous act but through the curiosity and survival instincts of a new intelligence." [More]

"Discuss reasons why technological advances have a tendency to produce dystopias" 

12/1/1999

The most interesting “books” to read in this last month of the century will be newspapers and magazines as they will report, as well as fuel the hysteria and apocalyptic thinking.

WTO Convention in Seattle awash in the protest over environmental and labor issues. (The American Tienanmen Square.)

12/1/2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...Years ago people could recall long passages of sermons because they were trained to remember them. Now that the internet is a repository of memory, there’s no need for the brain to do it. The internet has changed us in the same way that the building of the pyramids did for the ancient Egyptians: 

[12/1/2024: As a pre-smartphone and pre-social media musing, the world now finds itself a slave to both. As Villem Flusser said, “We work for the camera”, we now work for smartphones and social media. The camera I used to take photographs of this sculpture was an SLR not connected to the internet. In 2006, the world was not yet tethered to the strange world of the internet, so we had not yet become collectively strange]. 

12/1/2009

Interesting: Geoff Smith’s ‘Fluid Piano’, where you can change each pitch on a piano microtonally up or down a whole step. Perception of sound organized through an instrument is the vehicle of cultural expression through music. But does an instrument whose pitch is not fixed capable of defining a cultural sound, e.g. a sitar.
                        
He also encountered resistance. “Instruments of the western orchestra are locked in time, ring-fenced.” Why is that? It’s not for technical reasons, so it must be for political or cultural reasons. There’s a lot of talk in classical music about making orchestras more diverse. The only way you’re going to bring new people in is by changing the instruments. To some people that is a completely alien concept.

[12/1/2025: What I’m ultimately attempting to do with the Curios series is to hybridize them with other instruments and to put effects on the orchestral instruments, so as to take that fence down. But they are two different sound worlds. For example, a staccato passage with cellos and basses won't work well with guitars playing that same rhythm because viols move air differently and they don’t have sharp transients, which produces a delay between them].

 

12/1/2024 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/1/2025

Elton John once said that it's always the tune that is going to win over a listener over the words. The other day I was playing some AI music I had generated from my lyrics. I said that it made errors in the phrasing. He said had he not been following along with the words he would not have noticed. On the other hand, sometimes the words are everything and carry the emotion of the song. This has been the case since the advent of rap and is the opposite of what Elton John said. If you leave the music out (a postmodern thing) then the emotions have to go somewhere.