February 4ths

2/4/1998

Interesting (hard to write on train) article in Computerlife with Brian Eno. He talks about the generative nature of future music where pieces are started from seed ideas and grow organically and evolve naturally, which mimics the way folk music resonates through culture. Computer programs also will have these types of characteristics whereby they are designed to develop and learn with experience, just as humans do. To me, generative music is useful in producing raw ideas from which to develop new pieces. This approach could also use the computer to solve the problems inherent in composition, for example, to design the form of the piece, dynamics, and so on. Eno also says that the most interesting connection is in the brain, so we don’t always have to associate images with sounds. He says we spend too much time syncing things together. He didn’t even compose cues when he wrote for film, he just uses existing music. And as in Hall’s observations, things can naturally synchronize regardless of whether they have anything obvious in common.           
            
[2/4/2025: Describes AI music: “You can strap together a few nice-sounding samples, and they’re all loops, so the thing will run forever, and in half an hour or so you have something that really sounds like music. And that’s very dangerous. The thing has a sheen - it sounds professional; it sounds authentic - but actually you haven’t really got anything yet.” But it takes five minutes and you have a produced song, but it still isn’t really a song in the sense that it can be reproduced live.]

Excerpt Library (Music I): “Discuss generative music”   

2/4/2009

The best way to provide infrastructure is to not go in with a meat axe but to practice urban acupuncture, finding thousands of different spots to go into.” I like this line: “You can’t do something the same way once you discover a new way exists” The use of technology (or over-use) sometimes over-drives the process, e.g. in architecture, where the ability to visualize something drives the prospect that some-thing strange and alien might be built. Frank Gehry buildings all look like this. I like the idea that you can find places and build larger villages around them, or make them places people want to go to. 

***

I like this line: “You can’t do something the same way once you discover a new way exists!”

[2/4/2025: The old songwriting trick (whose technical term escapes me) where the last word in a phrase pivots to the next one on a single word, in this case "once"]

 

 

 

 

 

2/4/2016

“Beyond Music” ideas: The problem with future music (at least at the instrument level) is that it is too concerned or involved with industrial design and not how music affects cognitive function and pattern-making and pattern recognition, which then informs the design. But music is also tied to fashion as much as visual art is. (In fact, it doesn’t have enough “ism” in it), and consequently, instruments are mutely sculptural and beautiful, regardless of what sounds they make.

2/4/2017 
            
If we listened to today’s pop from the vantage of 1950, it would sound stupid and/or broken. That wasn’t the future then, at least in pop music. It was Les Paul and Mary Ford, or anything using electric instruments. This was really the first “going electric”, and I would imagine purists hated it. The future is always in harsh un-patterened noise, that is continually self-fulfilling.
            
Futurization of music is hard to do. Bowie was great at it because he used everything with sophistication, without resorting to pastiche. This is what Miles, Sun Ra and Ornette were doing. Jazz is still the future of music because of its natural sophistication.
            
The past is all there waiting to be used. How do you use what Les Paul was doing and deconstruct it? Would you want to? The idea of neo-big-band is kind of exciting, but the music education armatures are missing. No one would have the skill (or attention) to play it.
            
Musical “facadectomies” are still possible, a device borrowed from architecture where new structures are built on the base of an older structure. Up until now futures have been all “neos” or “posts”. That’s good too. The 90s are now up for Neo, a period where we started sampling the past. These days, everything might be Posts. 

[2/4/2025: In terms of early electronic instruments there was the Ondes Martnenot which came out in the late 1920s. We’ve run out with things we can do with electronics. The magic is now all in how AI is reshaping the whole landscape. Anything new in music will have to have some kind of magic in it. At the moment AI is still a magic, but more of a black magic. It’s not just the 90s up for neo. Since AI music is a repository of all decades, you could even start using recorded music from the 1920s-1950s. At the moment, the problem with AI music is that it is more of a magic trick or shell game, where you waste a part of yourself, “Panning for gold at the expense of the soul. Now you know, you’ve been controlled”, which was actually a lyric of mine that was a somewhat successful AI generation].

2/4/2022

I’m reminded of the idea I had years ago about the intergenerational band where every person in the band would be from a different generation—so the drummer might be GenX, the bass player GenX, the keyboard player a boomer and if there’s anybody that’s in the silent generation who’s still alive maybe they can be the sax player. It seemed like a good idea at the time and maybe not so much now.

On staying young through creativity:

 

2/4/2025

As I was reading through Martha Beck’s new book, she cited an example of a person who is exactly like Tony and Anthony in Reset 2046, where they had sustained a head injury, and then became an artist or a musician. The person she cited was Anthony Cicoroa, an orthopedic surgeon. Now he goes by the name of Tony Cicoria, which is the opposite of the characters in my story, where Tony becomes Anthony. I watched his piano performance from 2013 (interestingly, the year I wrote Reset).  

People who play music from the right hemisphere of the brain tend to be very non-judgmental about what they’re playing. It was mostly atonal with some pretty good pianistic skills. Improvisation probably comes closest to right hemispheric activities, where the brain isn’t putting things into categories and lists, which is actually what I do a lot of. I’m probably mostly a left hemispheric person. But I don’t think I’d want to improvise all the time either. When you listen back to improvisations, there are some good parts and some bad parts. This is where judgment comes into play. All right hemisphere stuff can seem too dreamy and diffuse. But what’s interesting about listening to him play is that it is what free will sounds like, and not that it’s all good just because it’s free.