February 25ths

2/25/1997

Finally finished the final mix of Force of Will.

[2/25/2025: 28 years later, the AI-generated version]:

2/25/1998

Sitting in Starbucks listening to 1970s groove jazz, Herbie Mann/ Herbie Hancock, realizing that much of hip-hop and rap is based on the two-bar grooves that were the basis for long psychedelic improvisations. Also interesting that at this time (1974), Muhammad Ali was becoming famous and he had his little raps that he would do. Did they somehow influence hip-hop?

Watched the Grammys in evening. It was the year of the female singer-songwriter with Grammys going to Shawn Colvin, Paula Cole, and Sarah McLaughlin. Happy to see Bob Dylan and Daniel Lanois winning for best album.

2/25/2012

Dyn: The coolest thing about jazz is that you don't have to play anything the same twice. You just make the map and see different things along the way.

2/25/2018 

Working on Quincunx for Rings (Chapter 1, pp. 19-21). Tempo=120. Five sequences of 5 notes (seeds), that can be played in C# Dorian (5 Sharps) or Eb Dorian (5 Flats). Can be in the meter of 5/8, 5/4 or 4/4 as a polyrhythm (5 Against 4). The seeds can be played in any octave, and any chord can be played pandiatonically against the sequences.

2/25/2019

Studio: Necatha Woods, a bit of a stylistic departure from ambient worlds—a rock-ish blues in an open tuning on a lap steel. An imaginary place in a neck of a woods or an exclusive gated exurban enclave.

The Short:

2/25/2025

I just realized that I'm never going to be influenced by anything that AI generates. I like what it generates but I'm not going to try to copy it. I just leave it as is as its own entity. What I'm influenced by are ideas and the unique ways that people do their work, and you won't find that in AI because there's nobody doing any work– it's just a machine that doesn't have any of its own ideas. It's not thinking, "I have this option of using these three riffs and I'm going to choose this one because the algorithm is telling me that that riff goes with these words." Perhaps it's making a choice but that doesn't mean that it's a human choice–it's not saying, “I want to use the key of G major as opposed to B flat major.” In the real world of music if you're scoring something, a key can be a major decision as can be tempos or meters and I don't think AI is doing any of that.