February 19ths

2/19/2002

Lyric: If it wasn't for the misery that we feel we'd be made of steel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/19/2016

What I realize when I see savants play music is that musical ability doesn’t necessarily arise from structured learning. All people probably have infinite potential, but some individuals have feedback loops in the brain that cause a piquancy in certain abilities. The musical genius has the ability to shorten the distance between sound memory/processing and the fingers.

Musicians' ears are naturally attuned to ambient rhythms in the environment. City environments are particularly rich in pitched elements such as squeaking brakes, car horns, and at stoplights—a Cagean symphony of car stereos. Ambient sounds in rural environments, such as the sounds of fast trains, are well known to have influenced many rhythms in folk and pop music. I call it “Window Music” because sounds outside sometimes blend in with what you’re listening to inside, even if in your headphones. 
            
Recordings are how the genetic (or epigenetic) code of music shapes cultural history, and takes the original hometown experience of the musician along with it. There’s a “Chattanooga” in every Stubblefield sample. 

2/19/2017

R.I.P.. Clyde Stubblefield. In the NYT piece, he was quoted “There was a factory there that puffed out air — pop-BOOM, pop-BOOM — hit the mountains and came back as an echo...” And train tracks — click-clack, click-clack. I listened to all that for six years, playing my drums against it.” 

2/19/2018

Window track for Rings of Saturn. This is the hospital window that Sebald's character is looking out of in Norwich, and thinks of Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka, who finds liberation by being able to look out the window.

 

2/19/2023

So far AI has little impact on my creative practices, and I have been dabbling in it for some time. To the extent that people see it as a required tool to do anything, then AI will be everything. That has been the case for anything that’s been automated for the past 50 years. Ideally, we want to have humans-in-the loop just as much as we want automation in the loop. I still see it as an idea generator, but if a creative person already can generate ideas, there is no use for it. However, I will say that AI will generate combinations of things humans might never think of, perhaps because we don’t think of our intelligence as being artificial and we lose out on those possibilities. It also allows us to utilize what would be dismissed as eccentric ideas because they came from a machine.

[2/19/2026: LLMs are actually quite amazing and clever. We call it “hallucination” but when you diagnose it, it actually isn’t. It connected dots that you didn’t see. The problem is a bad inference and you can’t find the dots it connected].

2/19/2025 

Somehow I have to keep explaining to people what I’m doing with the Songday series. What I do everyday is go through my diary for that day going back to 1997, and I find musical phrases in the entries, then I notate the rhythms for those words. At some point I go back and map a melody over them.