June 14ths

 

6/14/1886

I witness history disguised as necessity. The war taught us that democracy survives through decisive action. But whose decisions? Whose survival? 

6/14/2005

While on a walk, there were two locomotives idling, their pneumatic system spitting out an insanely fast jungle rhythm in 64th notes, with little bursts of odd moments. (incorporate into music). 

[Not exactly the same but a field recording of a passing train that could be used for atmosphere]:

6/14/2021

On “emotional piquancy” in music: Emotion is an emergent or flocking phenomenon. In music, there’s a flocking that happens when the dynamic level rises. If just one instrument got louder then it would throw off the piece. It’s the thinking together that really creates the emotion. When the composer is writing the piece it’s a mechanical process because you have to write in the dynamic levels to say how the piece should be emotional. In my experience working at that granular mechanical level is removed from the actual emotion. It has to be properly interpreted.

Emotion is very unique in how it’s communicated. In any kind of music there are “inflection points”  where things take off on their own and become galvanizing but you’re not sure what’s causing it to go in the direction it’s going. In the emotion of art it’s the way that the strokes are interacting and it works like that in music as well. As the painter is putting on the paint, the composer would be putting in the dynamic markings. It’s a nice corollary but that’s not how we’re thinking about it when we’re doing it. We have to sometimes simply do the work and doing the work is not emotional at all. It’s through the interpretations where the emotion comes into play, or has piquancy. 

6/14/2023 

It’s interesting to compare generative AI with generative music 25 years ago, which was more esoteric and arty, which used things like Markov Chains (Sony’s Flow Machines), or other randomness generators like putting multiple sound sources out-of-phase (like my track Io (1999), which would come back into phase in 10,000 bars), or Atmosphere Generation, which was a random-shuffle playlist on 3 separate stereo systems. Nobody seems to be interested in these aspects anymore, but they are the roots of generative music—just as blues, jazz, folk, musical theater, and classical were the roots of rock’n’roll. Now it’s just “snapshots” of data. 

6/14/2025

What's the difference between a lyric that is written and given to a musician to create music for, and lyrics written for a music LLM? When I write lyrics now, I'm having to continually rewrite them to get the LLM to produce a certain musical result. This is not unlike a traditional songwriting team writing a song and giving it to different artists for interpretation. I think it's very interesting that we now have the capability of creating many variations based on one lyric idea. In the past, it was a division of labor, and we accepted whatever music might have been written to the lyrics, but now it can go on indefinitely.