May 9ths

5/9/1998

Book: Consilience by E.O. Wilson, the theory that everything in the world is based on just a few fundamental laws and that everything will be a consilience of art and science. Gene culture is the underlying process by which the brain evolved and arts originated. The roots of inspiration in the arts date back into deep history. The epigenetic rules are the gravitational centers that pull culture together.

[5/9/2025: This was a seminal book for me as an interdisciplinary artist–the idea that the humanities could overlap with the sciences. This was also the time when the Third Culture movement began. I recall lots of artists being involved in it. I named my record company after the book]. 

 5/9/1999

Sitting in the hot sun at Scoville Park as I write this. My front is burning while the cold wind is freezing my back. Reading Notebooks of the Mind by Vera John-Steiner, chapter on visual thinking. Quote by filmmaker George Stoney on non-sequential approaches to films: "...we do this in our minds all the time...we are haunted by the fracturing of time."

5/9/2000

Hard time getting to sleep, raging storm at midnight. Finally got to sleep and picture fell off the wall. I woke up screaming.
       
Nancy Snyderman—”Life is not linear”

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 the 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.

5/9/2024

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.