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? 

6/14/2023 

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.