April 23rds

4/23/1999

Interesting program on WBEZ (“Odyssey”) about how recordings changed our perception of music. Steve Albini made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on a hard drive, as a type of ‘time capsule’. It is also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own in cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved [in a fixed form]. In this scenario, archived copies become relics.

April 23, 2009: He must be using his I-told-you-so’s as vinyl (and even well preserved tape) is still the most durable medium. Digital media is already degrading and precipitously disappearing. The only thing perpetuating it is the fact that it is collaged into other works.

[4/23/2025: This reminds me of a recent visit to my local record store to donate vinyl. It's interesting that in a record shop you're not thinking about AI music, or streaming music. It just doesn't exist in that arena. A record shop represents what music should be and how it should be made. Once the people who run them pass on, it's very unlikely that their children will continue the business. But all the records will still exist, and someone will do something with them. The only thing I can think of are vinyl records museums ("Final Records").

4/23/2005
            
There’s a water stain on the concrete wall at the Fullerton Avenue underpass that people have been flocking to because it resembles the Virgin Mary. Some people think it looks like a woman with a veil. (We see what we believe, what we should see, or that things up here before us as being suffused with meaning, i.e. there are no random events). We're all "looking for Mary".

[AI is efficient in that you can carve a lyric out of something, then get a demo. This is too slow for me, but the production is nice]:

 

4/23/2016

Wonky:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4/23/2021

I was listening to an interview with Paul McCartney and he was saying that he doesn't know a lot of chords. I think most musicians don't know a lot of chords or just use a few chords. Even me, I have a pretty large chord vocabulary just from my jazz training. But I find that I'm starting to use the same ones. And I think even within a songwriter's own work, you could plagiarize yourself. It stands to reason that people who don't know a lot of chords, or use the same ones over and over, might be copying other people. Perhaps the solution is to start enlarging your chord vocabulary. The music would start to sound like jazz and would be very dissonant, but you wouldn't be copying anybody. #riff 

4/23/2023

Video 45 for Ukiyo-e (The Japanese single)         

4/23/2025

If there was a metronome or beat running in the background while someone was speaking, some words and phrases would align with it. This is when they start to become singable and can become a basis for lyrics. But music has very strict constraints on word use based on their ability to be sung and the meaningfulness of the rhymes. This is where meaning takes a turn: to make lyrics meaningful sometimes requires quite a bit of wordsmithing or a sculpting of words, which might cause you to change your original meaning and let the arrangement of words tell you what the piece is about. 

[4/23/2026: One of the biggest flaws in AI music is how the lyrics are phrased. Back in the day, most songs could be reduced to a lead sheet because the music was based on human logic, not an LLM squeezing the words to fit a guitar riff based on a word in a prompt].

4/23/2026

With AI music you usually can’t go with an original lyric because it might be too raw (unmusical) and needs rewrites, or they are not working with the prompts. A raw lyric could sound good with a certain kind of prompt that uses specific vocal stems, but not in other cases. This is where the “singularity” in music will never happen. There are two kinds of wabi-sabis.