January 17ths

Antipode: July 17ths 

1/17/1969

Yellow Submarine released.

1/17/1999

At studio: pedal steel and piano parts on The Inner King. I still can't find the lyric that rings true.

[This is the AI-generated version which I like very much]

[1/17/2025: This piece evolved again by transcribing the AI music for a small ensemble]: 

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Lyric idea (a tongue-twister);

Simple twist of truth
Simple truth of faith
Simple twist of faith
Twist the faith in truth
Twist the truth in faith
Face the truth in faith
Face the faith in truth

 Simple Twist of Faith (AI-Generations)

 

1/17/2004

Idea for story: humans are cloned specifically for interplanetary travel, but wind up taking over the world.

1/17/2011

Tunisian social unrest is literally spreading like fire with self-immolations to spark a coup.

11/17/2024

With AI art we don’t necessarily have to own everything; we can use what we like and leave the rest. However the archetypes might be active below the surface. If I generate metal music, which has never been an influence in the things I’ve written for 30 years, I can now just select it as an option in software. If a metal band wanted to write music to my lyrics and I liked the results, it doesn’t make me a fan of metal music. I’m still just the lyricist. What was particularly interesting to me about When Comes was that it spanned 200 years by using the 1824 Daguerre painting in the video, the lyric was written in 1994. and is re-imagined in 2024 using artificial intelligence. 

1/17/2025

Jury duty--dismissed. Stopped at AI on a lark. Featured exhibition was Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica. Loved it. You realize how exciting Africa was in the late 60s and early 70s, and how it had yet to influence R&B, although Miles and Herbie Hancock were. Pieces I liked a lot: Omar El-Nagdi Seaweed (1970), DRUM magazine covers from the 60s “Who are the Africanists?”, escapism through the arts amid the tyrannical dictatorships (Quilombismo), coming soon to the US at a theater near you.
 

Lincoln reflection:

 

 

So far, AI doesn't seem to be spotting my musical patterns. Some iterations work, most don't. Is it recognizing those that I've kept, and learning from those, and does that mean I actually like them? The fact that I've kept something and not deleted it doesn't mean that I like it, and it doesn't mean that I want more of it. If I generate something that isn't "me", do I reject it out of hand? Why is it that I can't make new emotional connections to my own art, or revisit ones from my past? There's this idea that older people are supposed to act their age. I don't think it applies to art. We can be as eclectic as we want--or not?

 

[1/17/2026: As I continue to use AI in the flow of my writing, I can now more clearly realize what AI will never do for me. It simply is musically stupid. Clever? Yes. But AI has a limited historical knowledge of music, which means that music is not about recordings. Music has a cosmic origin and is woven into a symmetry. Timbre is something that affects us emotionally and is its “decoration”, not the framework].