April 7ths

4/7/2013

As a musician, I am always ready to move on in terms of the instruments that we use to make our art, and I am an ardent fan of lots of new music that has parted ways with the traditional piano. I am forever conjoined with physical instruments but have no emotional or nostalgic feeling for them (at least as of yet). I can move on to electronic music and come back to them anew and feel their unique power.

[4/7/2025: This is what I've been doing with AI music in combination with manual playing and writing. I find both are interesting in their own ways And they can cross pollinate with one another. For example, I'll generate a song based on my lyrics, and then transcribe the song into a lead sheet].

4/7/2017            
         
To the extent that one includes all sound as being potentially musical, then background music is ubiquitous. The only place devoid of all sound or music is an anechoic chamber, in which sounds from your body would be acutely perceptible, and could be “background music”.

4/7/2023

A lack of a sense of rhythm is probably more of a Western phenomenon, where some feel they can’t physically react to classical music because it is anathema to the genre, so music is to be experienced strictly intellectually. I can see how this understanding of music would make someone arrhythmic or “rhythmaphobic”. 

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Music theory is actually concrete as opposed to abstract in its purpose. In my view, to be abstract in music is to “pull from” (using the literal definition) theory as the music requires it, which might require exploring it. I would agree there is no point in studying it just for the sake of itself and not make something using the theory. For example, knowledge of ii-V progressions can be directly applied to songwriting.    

4/7/2025 

It's interesting now that people can use AI music as an access point to music. Typically it used to start with the radio and records, and AI music is now that radio and those records that you make yourself, which you can then reverse engineer. But the big difference is that AI-generated music tends to be very generic, especially harmonically, as compared to radio and records in the 1970s