May 9ths

3 Against 4

 

5/9/1967
 
Beatles at EMI: A long (11.00 pm-6.15 am) but decidedly unproductive session in which the Beatles committed to tape a mere 16 minutes of an out-of-tune untitled instrumental jam comprising two guitars (one with vibrato effect), drums and a harmonium.

[Imagine an entire night of noodling with no results] 

5/9/2005

There’s a guy in London who wanders the streets—He is a mute, and says nothing, but when he sits down at the piano, he plays beautifully. That’s his only way of communicating. Music is indeed language, processed at the emotional centers of the brain. 

5/9/2010
 
Article about the precipitous decline in interest in fidelity. This is one of the ideas behind the idea of ambient music. But not all music is created for the purpose of being pushed to the background. The only way to get people interested in fidelity is to somehow take it beyond the quality of the sound and introduce psychoacoustics and 3D sound. File size constraints or lengths of songs should no longer be an issue. But they are because ISPs throttle download speeds. Economic incentives are the new constraints, not CD length.

In a broader environmental sense, the transition to a post-industrial world has created a "lo-fi" soundscape. Unlike a "high-fidelity" environment where discrete sounds can be heard clearly from a distance, the modern soundscape is characterized by aggregate textures and noise pollution (such as traffic) that mask natural sounds and soloistic "gestures". This has led to what researchers call a "generational amnesia" or "learned deafness" to the sounds of nature. ["Discuss the decline of audio fidelity over the decades']

5/9/2024

Article re: kids stop reading for fun at around 9 years old. (“Decline by 9”). This is the equivalent of the transition around the age of 30 when adults are checking out of pop culture (and sometimes technology) and don’t care about things they used to care about. I’m hearing more people say they can’t get through a 300-page book. It could be that we’re moving away from reading linearly. Or it might have something to do with the ability to “click away” to find something that gratifies us more, in comparison to previous experiences we’ve had.  

*** 

If you’ve ever lived in an apartment or other multi-unit building the doors opening and closing become a “clock”. As people have moved in and out, the clocks change.

Song idea:

5/9/2025

When you use large language models to generate content, it's a kind of "whispering". Like animals, we can't get into their minds; we just have to imagine what they might be thinking, and the same goes for AI. There have been times when what you created as a lyric creates the most perfect music, other times it simply doesn't understand the connection between language and music. You could generate it 30 times, and it still won't understand it. What it’s doing is squeezing the rhythms in the stems to the perceived rhythms in the words. When you write music manually, you don't have those constraints; you can write something in 6/8 or 12/8, however the music feels. This isn't happening (yet) with AI. So far, we haven't been able to give specific instructions to LLMs, but I would imagine it's possible, but at what cost, and more importantly, what is the cost to creativity--not to mention the environment because of the energy demands of AI? After creating music with AI for about 6 months, I have to make a concerted effort to focus only on the music, so I notate as much as possible--even just on paper. 

5/9/2026

Another view of Kinzie Bridge: