February 9ths

2/9/1999 
            
Title: Artificial Fun

[AI-generated fun] 
            
I want to approach making a recording like designing a concept car. I want to explore all the cutting-edge possibilities, but in the end pare it down a bit.

[2/9/2026: Essentially, the convergence phase, which can go painfully slow if you’re also generating ideas in the process. Try going from 50 ideas you like to 15. There’s a decision every minute while you’re working on it]. 

2/9/2000

Once you become an artist there is no turning back.— Ray Manzarek

2/9/2011

L. on “stoned thinking”: “We were dealing with metacognition...before the cognitive psychologists gave thinking about thinking a name. It wasn't my invention...but our synthesis…a good nudge! The student-teacher partnership that was not repeated in my career always informed everything I did afterward. In all my experience since leaving Eisenhower, I can honestly say that my time there was the richest, fertile soil from which to continue to grow and develop as a teacher and as a man.” My reply: I've learned so much along the way. I am not the person I was then, but there are vestigial elements of that period that sometimes inform my thinking now, and how it affects my work. We were all lucky to live in such interesting and heady times. I still have your class notes.

[2/9/2025: As we all change throughout our lifetimes, there are those who plant deep roots that cannot be easily changed. The deepness of the roots matter, and you’ll never really know how deep they are until stressors expose them, and other surrendering you might do along the way because there might be no other options. Those who have surrendered have realized they’ve also been deracinated. Perhaps a good analogy today is if you are a Gazan refugee who has been given the option to move out of your native land because of its domicide. You could decide to move but your roots would show in the form of nostalgia and homesickness. As it relates to my earlier periods, I’m still connected to the late 1970s through my instruments, namely, my 1962 Jazz Bass, which I play daily. I could give it away, or it might be stolen or otherwise lost, and in either case its roots are persistent. Persistence of memory or behavior are actually your phantom roots].

***

P.S. (LLM "Music Articles and Book Excerpts" results):

Music's connection to memory and emotion: Music is closely tied to memory [1-3]. Music fused with emotionally charged images or words can have a more lasting impact [4]. Music can evoke milestone events, encoding them indelibly in memory, leading to a sense of being 'haunted' by memory [5]. Music is also described as one of the adhesives that bonds experience and memory [1, 6].

Music and place memory: Listening to music while moving encodes the memory of the place, which gets replayed in the brain when the music is heard again [7].

Recognition vs. Memorization: Recognizing a tune is different than memorizing it [8]. Minds can build an agent to sense a stimulus without being able to reproduce it [8]

Repetition: The power of music lies in its ability to compel repeated listening over many years [9, 10]. Listeners often prefer repetition in music [10].

The role of structure and patterns: The brain uses patterns and symmetry in music as a program to store information in a compressed form [11]

Influence of early experiences: People tend to like music that reminds them of songs, carols, rhymes, and hymns from childhood [12]. The music that one loves at age 30 is likely to be the music that one is endeared to at age 60 [13]

Music as a trigger for memory: Music can trigger memory constructs, drawing people into a mix [14]. Stability of musical ideas: The stability of a musical performance over time demonstrates the precision of feelings and underlying concepts [15].

Music and film: Music that is mood-congruent with film is jointly encoded with the film information, leading to an integrated memory code [16-18]. When music and film are paired, one medium can serve as a retrieval cue for the other [17, 19].

Subjectivity of musical experience: Musical experience is subjective, influenced by personal history, culture, and individual preferences [20-22].

2/9/2013

Interesting: I saw a jazz piano player yesterday playing a piano missing middle C and I realized that he didn't need it. I wonder if it was intentional.

2/9/2014

In music, algorithms have a tendency to produce clunky results, that like distorted guitar effects, are easy to use out-of-the box, but have to be used tastefully. Use of distortion is as much the result of accident as it is the pushing of the natural limits of a system. The guitarist that played on Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 (1951) apparently dropped his amplifier and ripped the speaker cone, resulting in a distorted sound that he liked. Years later the guitarist Link Wray intentionally damaged a speaker cone with a pencil to get the same sound. Now digital artists are doing something similar with processes such as 486 Shorts and GlitchSort by creating a situation where accidents happen by design, similar to Wray’s poking a pencil into a speaker cone.

The ear is also flexible and adaptable: the more one listens to dissonant music, the more one can tolerate it and even begin to have an affinity for it. Just as we have become used to distortion, we are settling in with a more moshed appearance in some digital art.

2/9/2023
                        
Burt Bacharach dies at 94. I was just thinking as I was listening to Harry Styles, he might like some of this. We have to remember that even David Bowie was into Anthony Newly and Edith Piaf.

[2/9/2026: Many musicians (and artists) live well into old age. It has something to do with ideas you are looking forward to. I like the idea of living with the next idea in mind. That probably has an effect on longevity. Boredom is a chronic illness with many older people].

2/9/2024 

What’s the difference between happiness and gladness? Gladness is the sense that we have to force ourselves to be happy. So if you’re glad, you’re comparing your current situation with something that would be worse. You’d say, “I’m glad I don’t have COVID”, “I’m glad I don’t have this”, “I’m glad I’m not like that”, but if you’re happy you’re not comparing yourself to anything. It’s interesting to think about this in relation to the Cream song, “I’m So Glad”, but there’s probably something darker beneath it. So gladness has a certain darkness behind it but it’s you who needs to illuminate it–it doesn’t come automatically. But if you’re happy, you’re just standing in the light, you don’t have to shift the light.

2/9/2025

I’m still making music that I would have made in my 28-35 period. Some people only see 45-65, some 35-65.

[2/9/2026: Once you’ve reached your 40th year of making things, you have the Overview Effect of your body of work, and can see the value in things you did 30 years ago and want to revisit. I was writing chamber music in the 80s and started it again, this time combining it with electronic and ambient music].
 

*** 

With AI music anybody can put out a country record these days. This is my first one, which is kind of odd for me, someone who is mostly an arty postmodernist guy releasing mostly ambient music. Actually, even though it sounds generic, it is postmodern in the sense that it’s based on a concept, which is important now because if you use these generators the probability that songs are going to sound the same is pretty high. There are probably songs that already exist that sound exactly like these. So I get to focus on the concept, the lyric writing and working on the visuals. That’s what differentiates it from other generated songs.