March 8ths

3/8/2002

It was the advent of FM radio that made a big impact on how music developed in the late 60s and 70s.

3/8/2010

Show on the death of radio: I too “heard it on the X”—Chicago’s XRT. That was the station I listened to when I picked up my first guitar. It was an auspicious beginning of my music education and vestiges of it remain in my work. But nostalgia aside, I will not miss broadcast radio. XRT is now just a shell of its former self, consisting of a mostly relentless and torturous barrage of screaming commercials. I now time-shift almost all my media with podcasts, which I can re-listen to at any time, and it still sounds like broadcast radio. The profit model in this approach is that people like me are willing to pay for this service, as a return to radio in its current state is unthinkable.

[3/8/2025: The early days of podcasting, like the early days of anything, were its best in some ways. But as we see with everything these days, particularly YouTube, it’s so infested with commercials and clickbait that it’s almost unusable. Sometimes I just import the transcripts into my LLM and get a summary that I can read]. 

3/8/2013

Stopped Smoking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3/8/2025

More on Hadju's An Uncanny Muse"

"A writer for the Christian Science Monitor captured the doubts about player pianos well in a piece published in 1911: “It gives them, who can't have a living player play, a sort of photographic idea of how music might sound. Still it is not art. It occupies the same relation to art that a photograph of an oil painting does to the painting itself. It plays Ragtime exceptionally well and entertains a great many people who do not necessarily care for musical art.” 

[AI-generated music is essentially like a photograph of actual music being played by musicians,  as a photograph would be of a painting, it's a reproduction. But in the case of AI-generated music it's a unique photograph that isn't representational. It's not representing anything specific in the sense that if I take a photograph of a flower I'm re-presenting it. But with artificial intelligence it's finding thousands of different flowers based upon your text prompt. In music, it's taking a musical sample and mapping a melody based on your text over it. It would actually be interesting to have a camera or app that would do this kind of thing that would take your description and combine it with the photograph that you're taking and make something new out of it. This probably exists already.]

***

Now that I’ve been using AI to generate songs I’ve been focusing more on the lyric writing. But it’s interesting that when I play the songs for other people they’re not really listening to the words–or if they are, they’re over-analyzing them. Generally speaking, lyrics are mostly on the periphery. The challenge is always to move things that are on the periphery into the center of attention. An example of this is ambient music which is essentially audio editing for a film. When you’re watching a film you’re not focusing on what’s happening subliminally in the audio, but it’s there. If you were to make a soundtrack that’s mostly ambient music from a film, people would be listening to the music more intently, so they would be noticing things in the music that they wouldn’t have if they were just watching the film. Creativity is often a form of nudging, or you have to occasionally put in things that “blink”. 

***

As computers get smaller and smaller the possibilities of what you can do with them will continue to expand. A friend of mine commented a few days ago that I’m still using a small notebook computer and I do everything on it. I think the future is going to be a situation where we’re mostly using our phones to do everything, and we already are. But it’s going to continue to get smaller and smaller, but processing speeds will continue to go up and people will be using quantum computers. So the rate at which we can create things will continue to go up. But the challenge remains how we can create interesting concepts and stories, because if we’re working too fast we’re not spending enough time to think about things. While computers get faster and faster the speed of our mentation is not increasing, and in fact I think we need to slow down to think about things.

[3/8/2026: After a year of using AI to generate music I have a glut of it, then becomes a job curating it all. We should livestream our content 24/7 and people can tune if they want. It would be a like a web cam for music--essentially broadcast radio].

3/8/2047
 
(Anthony Townes Diary)
 
Art therapy. More neuroart pieces, which are beginning to inspire ideas about sculptures, perhaps with Sera.

["Discuss neuroart"]