1/11/2025

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 January Saturday 2025 Abstract



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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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10/25/2026

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0256. Be careful that a planned trajectory does not circle back to where you started. Without bold acts of will, things will naturally default to the basic shapes and characteristics of the universe, circular shapes, orbits, and routines. 
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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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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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Photographs For Music (That Was Me)

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 I love this photo of Bowie but I don't know who the photographer is. It was a photo shoot of some kind as there are a number of stills. Perhaps it is Masayoshi Sukita. The nice thing about AI generation is that you can skip around genres to find something that fits the words. This came from a diary entry of November 17, 2004: "Interesting observation/existential moment: A twenty year-old musician dressed in tight black leather, getting off the El with his girlfriend, slinging his bass, getting home from a gig at 7:30 a.m....That was me 25 years ago. "I overheard an actor talking about improvisation in theater—following impulses, making arbitrary choices, discovering characters as you go along, you set the rules and go—like improvisation in music. "Since you can't teach someone to be funny, you can't teach them to be musical."...Doing comedy is physical work—being alive in your body and in the moment; "Struggling in the moment and getting through....
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