June 1sts

 6/1/1997

Dream: A tornado turned into a woman in a blue sequined dress.

[Eventually became a piece of music]

6/1/1998

The act of creating and playing music represents the mysteriousness of being human. Once machines can reproduce a mysterious experience, there’s nothing left to call “soul”—or will there be a distinction between human soul and “machine soul”?

 [6/1/2025: Machines (at least at the moment) can’t listen and react in real time. Improvisation is based on this. AI music is a facsimile or simulant of music].

I think what we’ll see in the future are music mixes that are released like software, or revisions are made and re-released. I think we’re in a situation where the computer metaphor will be heavily applied to music. 

It’s not so much what an individual has abilities in, but rather the state by which abilities can develop. 

 6/1/2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[6/2026: This view no longer exists. I'm not a big fan of Maggie Daley Park. They should have kept the classical-style Grant Park east of Columbus]. 

6/1/2017

The best way to construct melody (in songwriting) is to sing words (either with existing lyrics, or just random words) over some kind of accompaniment (preferably piano), but a guitar or bass can be used. Sometimes just a beat or loop can work, over which you can improvise a melody. I find melodies easier to write from words, because the melody (prosody) is already there.  

Writing melody in through-composed music (classical) is more “architectural”, using motifs, cells, and other elements to build out larger forms. Melody in that context is reliant on how well you can use the limitations. 

[This is essentially what I’m doing with the Songdays: finding the music in the language and using that to create rhythms. I’m actually more interested in the rhythmic aspects, whereas most people are more sensitive to tone and timbre, but rhythm puts you more in the body, and perhaps more in the right hemisphere.]  

6/1/2024 

Songday: Blue Sequin Dress. When I first began to write it, it was very R&B, but when I took it to the synth it became EDM, with the tornado metaphor by using the C-F# tritone. It’s interesting that EDM didn’t exist in 1997 and it’s a new/old sound being applied to the past (a fake nostalgia). The curious thing about synths, especially when they started to be more sound and beat machines (~1995), is that it hijacks the music, i.e. as soon as you select a patch or setting and press a key its going to take you away from the original idea you had in your head and forces you into another world and persona. In 1975 there were synths of course, and they usually gave the music a spacey dimension, but they didn’t take over the music—and you. Our natural creative instincts have been oppressed for decades and we don’t even notice. The equivalent in today’s world are algorithms that direct out perceptions and desires.  

6/1/2025

Eventually music AI will become more sophisticated and we will be able to select more complex chord changes, choose keys and meters, and so on. But if we can simply select those things from a drop-down, is there a difference between the simple selection of options and intimately knowing something? For example, if you generate a jazz head that is composed of ii-V-I patterns through several keys, and all the dominants are altered, or have complex extensions, what would be the result? Would it sound like the jazz that humans actually compose and play? Music composition with LLMs, while interesting in its syntactical connection with music and language, doesn’t rely on any “procedural knowing”: you’re simply clicking on things in an interface or dashboard, letting it generate iterations and selecting the ones you like. It’s like photography in that sense, choosing a decisive moment from 10 or 12 captures. If we look at creativity being untethered to a domain, where a domain doesn’t (always) require procedural knowing, perhaps the results can be more interesting. The Esperanto thing is something that was never possible before. While it’s interesting, there are certain aspects coming from procedural knowing, or intimate knowledge or skill that create a cognitive dissonance, even frustration. Why am I stuck with cliche chord changes, or is it that ultimately to listeners it doesn’t matter? AI is already making that decision for us, where we just capitulate to the constraints of the tools we’re given rather than use all the tools (and knowledge) that were always available.

[6/1/2026: I'm still certain that AI music will not replace music as we have known it. What does change permanently is the generational effects on the cultural aspects of music as "outside" elements. But music as a creative activity can't ever be satisfied by AI alone, which is why we have to do both. AI music is "entertaining", whereas composition isn't, even if you've gotten to a flow level. But AI music is here to stay, or as long as the data centers don't destroy the environment].