April 12ths

4/12/2011

150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

4/12/2021 

There’s this new software Dynascore which scores films using pre-existing algorithms. It makes the most cliche things! If you keep using this kind of stuff that’s all you’re ever going to hear. It’s the usual John Williams score–what people expect. It’s “template” music. I think it’s more satisfying to learn to write cliches and to learn why composers use those kinds of voicings and orchestrations. But I suppose once you’ve written a lot of cliches, you might as well let AI churn it. 

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.  

4/12/2024

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...”

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").

Nervous Service (4/12/2025) by meta4s