March 1sts

3/1/2004

Interesting: In Afghanistan the rug is a medium of social commentary and protest–sort of like a protest song, or even a T-shirt. (warrug.com) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lyric idea:

Moody music on cyberwaves
Washing over the mood I made
Watch the river
Watch the stream
Wash the minds of endless dreams

[3/1/2025: What's useful about keeping a diary is that you can revisit ideas decades later and develop them].

Watch the River (3/1/2004) by meta4s

 3/1/2007

Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter on TV re: tribute to T. Monk. Monk used to talk about "so far outside that it sounded inside"—what Herbie does so well. 

There’s been a revival of the production of vinyl records, but only for the purpose of digitizing them using dedicated devices which were specifically designed to convert analog to digital for archival purposes only. Malcolm McLaren is still promoting vinyl!

3/1/2017

Once I started working more electronically in music, I found I needed to spend more time getting good performances, and/or editing them. One task is at the level of craft and one is administrative. Being software-savvy has supplanted innate musical talents and skills, or skills well-hewn.

The major innovations thus far in music are from Africa (rhythmic), Equal Temperament (harmonic and melodic) and the electronics industry (texture) which has given us every popular genre since the 17th century. It's interesting that the ones from the Enlightenment are fading away unnoticed, even though they were the seeds.

3/1/2021

Once the generations pass on in this country, rock ‘n’ roll will probably wither. But it’s going to live on in the other countries. That’s a really strange thing because we’ll have another boomerang effect where American culture is coming back in, say, the 2050s and it’s a melange of all the different decades of rock ‘n’ roll and no one in America knows anything about it or they don’t care, but it’s coming back in these interesting ways that might inculcate certain aspects of  these other countries within it, so it’s more deeply acculturated rock ‘n’ roll that might not have much  to do with the original. 

3/1/2025

As I've been using some of the new AI tools, from LLMs to various tools for stem extraction from audio, lyric generation, and so on, I was thinking that there are two ways of working currently: The first is” new uses for old tools”, which means that you are going to use new tools in ways that you are used to. For example I'll revisit material from the 1990s and do an AI version of it. The other way is “old uses for new tools”, such as using texting as a form of voicemail, or leaving a message on an answering machine. An old tool in music is music notation. Transcribing music that was generated by AI is a new use for an old tool.