June 17ths

December 17ths 

6/17/2010

           
Harbor Walk: Continued walk past DuSable Harbor towards the Abegweit. There was a blues band playing on deck which you can hear in the background. A passerby says ‘Party Boat!’. The strong breezes make for very clanky boat masts. As I walked south along the curved shore along came several hundred joggers running past me. Continued path past yacht club and into Monroe Harbor area, traffic noise from LSD on right, end at Balbo Drive. 

6/17/2024 

When you look for synchronicities and don’t see them, they are happening to someone else which may involve you in the future. 

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If AI-generation is a toy, or a toy tool, and we can get accessories or different materials to use—for example different kinds of clay or putty with different attachments or extensions—it would produce very little variety. Anyone can make art with some crap ordered online. That’s what AI music is to me. I make prototypes with my primary tools, a guitar, a bass, a keyboard, manuscript paper and a pen, although the latter is notation software.

[6/17/2025: It is still a toy, but an interesting one. It’s the alternation between the profane and the sacred tools. If the toy produces something that interests you, why not incorporate it into what you’ve always done? Many of the orchestral arrangements include phrases transcribed from the AI-generations because I thought they were things I would have never thought of].

[6/17/2026: Once people have used a particular tool for a number of years, and have paid for it (AI is a "leased" tool), there's more incentive to use it and to improve it. I would imagine the development of apps like Suno will be adding more features because that's the only thing that sustains the profit model. Adobe has been doing this for decades, but at some point you can't add any more bells and whistles. This is when AI music might start to die off. I like using it, but it's not musically better than what I can do. It just makes better recordings. Recordings aren't music per se because they have nothing to do with Equal Temperament or rhythmic subdivision and polyrhythms played with human limbs. You might hear those things, but it's untethered]. 
            
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Music video for one of the Rifts pieces, Terranes (again) using footage from Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. Instead of scoring for film, and composing segments for the film, I’m clipping film segments to fit the music, sometimes in ironic ways, such as scenes of people running against slow solo piano music.