January 13ths

Antipode: July 13ths 

1/13/1998

The cloning idea is out of the bottle and it won’t be long before all the wrong people abuse the technology.

[In 2002 the Raelians claimed they had cloned a human. A central tenet of Raelianism is the pursuit of biological immortality through human cloning. A company associated with the movement, Clonaid, gained worldwide notoriety by claiming to have produced a clone.] [More] 
 
Reading Edward Hall’s The Dance of Life. He made an interesting observation of Hopi culture with respect to time and rituals. Ritual was much more important than any finished product–sort of like playing music but never writing or recording it. Apparently, the Hopi had a hard time finishing projects because they weren’t driven to bring closure to all their activities, as do Westerners.            

[1/13/2025: Most primitive cultures don’t see art as a product. They can be objects of course, but they’re not decorations].

Excerpt Library (Sociology): “Discuss music ritual”

1/13/1999

Alan Lomax in Folk Song Style and Culture said songs are “danced speech.”

[Converting prose into song lyrics requires placing syllables somewhere in the bar so it can be "danced to". We don't usually talk our way through music but rap changed all that over 40 years ago, where this wasn't necessary. Rap isn't concerned with bar lines and brings it back to prose. AI music shoves the words into the stems it's using].

1/13/2002

Billy Bob Thornton: If something takes lots of effort to do, or is hard work is probably not worth doing in terms of being successful at it. Hard work destroys the free-flow magic in life.” But if it is done out of a feeling of right livelihood, it has the same effect. 

1/13/2003
           
Guy in Subway with silver paint makeup doing a dance routine on Prince songs. When he was doing “When Doves Cry”, a pigeon flew by.  

1/13/2016

Some experiments with shadows while the projector was on.

1/13/2022

Apparently, Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest on record...Collectively, the past eight years are the warmest years since modern record keeping began in 1880. 

Yearly global CO2 ppm values 2016 to 2026 

 Sound Opinions show with Merry Clayton. It was the crack in her voice that made Gimme Shelter and the overall lo-fi sound that echoes into history. Perfect example of a happy accident, and a very emotional one. I’m sure it’s been sampled. 

1/13/2023 

On the “preservation” of music: I would define it as, “The process of “active influence”, i.e. using some aspect of the history of pop music, either at the musical level or in reverence of the composers and songwriters of the past century, which becomes in itself an act of preservation, rather than discarding any aspect of music history and only focusing on The New. To the extent that The New incorporates some aspect of older music, then it is preserving it. The use of the Blues in 60s rock, as well as other fusions was a “preservation”.

[1/13/2026: AI is preserving the music but not the people who made it].

1/13/2024

Lots of good takeaways in the Geddy Lee Memoir, to wit, mid-80s when they were doing their Power Windows album and Geddy started to use keyboards and their whole approach changed. Alex Lifeson was feeling his ideas were being snubbed. 

1/13/2025

In Morricone’s Composing For Cinema. he said there has to be a certain cunning to effectively communicate new ideas to people first hearing them. The key is to get enough saturation where the door gets pried open so people start to get where it’s going.

***

AI makes a box for language. In AI music, it squeezes the words into the “riff” box. For example, if the genre is rock, it will generate a guitar riff, and will “sing” against it. It is a bottom-up process. Typically, song ideas are top-down, where the rhythms in the melody suggest the riff, and language makes a box for music. This is my understanding of what’s in the black box of AI music.

1/13/2026

Idea of the day: Curators For the Future (an organization to promote methodical archiving) 

Watched travelogue on Greenland. Fantastic place. Interesting: The Greenlandic artists' "eum miton"--create things that look strange. 

Excerpt Library (Art History and Criticism): "Discuss strangeness in art"