December 23rds

12/23/1998
            
The irony about the success of Miles From Mars is that I never took it that seriously. I created it for solely artistic purposes, but never had my ego wrapped up in it.

[12/23/2025: Wu wei essentially. The act of trying might be a function of ego–that we feel we are in control]. 

12/23/1999            

Last minute shopping at Marshall Fields with mobs of people buying things for the sake of buying them–perhaps because they feel it’s the “last Christmas”. Left early and met A. at MCA. 

12/23/2002 
            
Went to Michelangelo exhibit Art Institute. Interesting: his work was done primarily as a study, a way of experimenting and working things out, solving problems.

12/23/2003

Prediction:  The selling of music will get like the selling of appliances with extended warranties, rebates, and so on. It will no longer be as free as it was in the 60s. 

[12/23/2024: NFT smart contracts can potentially have “warranties”, other ways of specifying terms of ownership or use.]   

12/23/2011

Went to take some photographs at 155 W. Burton, one of the Edgar Miller handmade home masterpieces. Arts and crafts are ubiquitous and embedded into almost all surfaces. The structure itself is a synergy, sometimes a congeries of art and architecture, not exactly meeting at a point of artistic or functional perfection, but just a bit off-kilter and funky. These are places to zoom your attention, not just pass through.

12/23/2022

There is peripheral information everywhere if you are attentive to it, even in sound. The Music For Places series was based on the idea that there would be a commingling of music and the naturally occurring sounds in the environment.

The more we’re conscious of the things on the periphery the more we’re able to be more selective in how they interplay. If we just leave it to chance sometimes there will be interesting context collisions. But most of the time I think it might confuse people because the intent won’t always be clear, or why the artist is “winking”.

Musing On Music Mostly: "Discuss the periphery"

12/23/2023

The Bean is still closed. Took some interesting pics in fog.
 

Idea: periods with other punctuation marks: .(!) .(?) .(...) 

12/23/2024

Dynaxiom: When you’re too focused on one thing, other things happen unwittingly, and evade your radar.

Research on creating my own music LLM using the Comp Strategies. A lot of the generated jazz out there is jazz as a “sound”, not as a music. Is this interesting or another distraction? AI music isn’t going away so artists should begin the adaptations. A new music requires new experiments in a Lab before a new Beatles can apply some of that experimentation. There has to be a new ground floor, a new foundation. It is happening at minute levels, and perhaps will catch on in 20 years. AI music is sort of where recording was 100 years ago: each take was etched and you couldn’t edit. So the next steps should retrace them. My guess is that you’ll be able to export generated songs into individual tracks and have the ability to change lyrics and the voice, down to the syllable. 

***

AI music is an interesting tool for irony by marrying visuals to music. Music has been more about irony since the early 90s. Millennials were raised on it. It was their "Wonder Bread".

Technological disruptors can perhaps be good for creativity because you can move the “spotlight” around. For example, if AI is generating the music, you can shift the creativity to visuals and the interaction between domains. 

 

 

12/23/2025

Sometimes I hate the convergence phase of a project. After years of collecting ideas for the Songdays series (now the Curios) you have to winnow down hundreds of them to 12 or 15. Also given the fact that I'm also doing the visuals I'm working on it from different angles, which involves even more divergence. It's like making a map while you're attempting to use it to go somewhere you've never been. 

We like to say that something is generative and can produce new ideas, but when you're attempting to map the terrain, you don't need a flood. It makes everything grow like crazy. Another analogy is having to go into more rooms, and you find yourself in one room more than others, and when you go into the ones you haven't been in for a while, everything is covered in dust and needs to be cleaned and organized. 

Musing on Music: "Discuss divergence and convergence in creativity"

Same query in On Creativity

Same query Music II 

AI App idea: "Early Mix-er"--takes any recording (of yours) and makes it sound like a provisional early mix of the song.