April 12ths

4/12/1999

Segment on NPR about Chinese songwriter. The music sounds like a bad rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but the lyrics had such power to collectivize the thoughts of the Chinese people. This is an instance where the lyric is important, the exact opposite of the role of the lyric in pop music, where the sound itself conveys more of the meaning. 

[4/12/2026: As I've used AI to generate songs, people still don't listen to the lyrics, even though you can clearly hear them. Elton John once said that it's the music that grabs people first. I don't know what Bernie Taupin's response was --if any. With AI music the lyrics are everything because I'm not writing the music, but they could be imperceptible to others. Sometimes it takes years to hear a lyric].

4/12/2011

150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

4/12/2021

What do we want from AI in music?

 

[4/12/2026: As AI music becomes more sophisticated it might make it more playable with instruments. Right now it isn't. If you performed a song that you generated from your lyrics, and it was an artist's voice on it, and could be forensically proven, you could give them the credit for singing on the recording, but it was someone else live]. 

4/12/2022 

Should musicians get paid by the note in their songs? The “should” is established, but the “can” is extremely difficult. The systems involved in that would create more complexity than it’s worth. You’d have to find ways of taking a fungible sea of data and segmenting it in such a way that it can be monetized. Spotify already does this to some degree by parsing some of the metadata, but you’d have to do that at a more granular level using MIDI or samples or groups of samples. For example, if I want to track one whole note at bar 17 in a piece of music, the MIDI data is there, but there is no system in place to tally that one bit of data as performing rights organizations track plays. Plus, the note itself is too fungible to assign any rights to. People now are attempting to copyright colors so it’s not that far-fetched of an idea.     

[4/12/2026: Patents for music would be interesting].

4/12/2024

The Songdays songs are essentially what the Beatles were doing when they’d get ideas from the newspaper, like “I read the news today, oh boy--About a lucky man who made the grade...” 

[The technical term is stichomancy ] 

4/12/2025

 

***

More Drop 31 noodling, this time resulting in a late-70s punk pop vibe a la Elvis Costello's This Year's Model. (Idiot glee--the "blissful and joyous feeling that one experiences when completely lost in the moment of creation").