February 25ths

2/25/1997

Final mix of Force of Will.

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

[2/25/2026: I still like my own version, even played on a uke. Not that the AI version isn't interesting in its own way, but you probably couldn't reduce it to chords and melody, and if you did, the result wouldn't be musically interesting on its own. That's typically the problem with AI music in general. I suppose over time, the training data will make the harmony more interesting. But humans will always be more effective--the reason being time itself. There is a difference between the creative moment with a guitar and a creative moment waiting for the result from typing a prompt].

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?

[“Ali’s press conferences and TV appearances in the 1960s functioned very much like proto‑rap performances: short, rhythmic, boastful verses often improvised on the spot. Lines like “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee / The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see” show punchline structure, internal rhythm, and crowd‑oriented delivery that anticipate MC routines.” [More]  

2/25/2012

Dynaxiom: 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.

2/25/2019

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.