July 19ths

Excerpt from Some July 

The blackout poetry version and a nice juxtaposition of entries--from real life to "reel" life, the world of Anne Frank and the world of Marilyn Monroe. Inge Morath was the set photographer for the film The Misfits.

  Into A World So Different (7/19/1943) by meta4s

7/19/2020

Usually I’ll understand something completely in retrospect. And the more I talk or write about it the more it becomes clear to me what the thinking process was (I dictated this as a first draft). When I say ‘thinking process’ I’m talking about the thinking process that happened subliminally and was not analytical. Improvisation is a good example of this (in speaking or in playing music): You simply cannot analyze as you are improvising, or, ideally, you want to stop yourself from doing that. In music, when I’m improvising the only thing I have to make a concerted effort to do is to listen to what’s going on around what I’m doing and react accordingly. Therefore, the hands-on process of making art is a kind of improvisation in which you have to remind yourself to be more mindful of the things on the periphery that can change the course of the work, as one would think of things as they speak.     

7/19/2021 

As I’ve been working with music AI over the past couple months I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to contextualize it with all the other things that I do. I realized this morning as I was working on something—and it wasn’t really catching my ear—is that it has to be recontextualized as something else. It might be a good way to make a new music avant-garde. If something doesn’t work in the practical sense then you could always shift your view and make it something else. I think that’s where it wants to go.

What companies seem to be doing is to make music AI a part of the mainstream and I don’t think it ever will be. If it does become mainstream, it won’t be very interesting. It will all sound the same.  

Boomy is kind of interesting, but seldom works as “turnkey”. Algorithmic Trap works in somewhat the same way where it’s generating permutations. The thing that’s interesting about Algorithmic Trap is that it has a tonality to it so you can actually play your guitar against it. There was one that was in C minor but kept throwing in other chromatic notes and was doing it illogically. It was at that point that I thought, “Well, just use part of this or do something with that little error”. Don’t call it pop music because it can’t be pop music—it has to be something else. If you go to that other place where it’s something else then you can find something interesting. I think that’s where I want to go with music AI.

[7/19/2025: Obviously, AI music has come a long way since 2021–like how the Beatles progressed from 1962 to 1966. My process is the same with AI: since I can’t control the rudiments (key, tempo, meter), I just keep spinning the roulette wheel as I tweak the lyrics. If something sounds good, in whatever genre, I’ll tend to go with it. Since they’re my lyrics, I’m less likely to dismiss a genre out of hand]. 

7/19/2022

While I find generative procedures intriguing at a systems level, I tire of them quickly. I like playing instruments. But if there’s something at the production stage that is AI-generated that I can use, then I’ll incorporate it. In terms of how it makes me feel it’s a bit like how I feel about microtonal or serial music: slightly queasy and dyspeptic. I admire people who can work with it days on end.   

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I think AI is grossly over-hyped. What it might cause is a lazy disinterest in doing things manually because it takes too long and time now feels compressed by the sheer weight of all the attention that is required to get to everything. Personally, I don’t want my real artistic intentions automated by algorithms. Up until now all I seem to have gotten from AI is an idea generator or happy accident generator. If it’s better than what I do with my ideas then great. What is of concern is if we view art as something that is produced by machines and delivered like any goods we buy online.   

[7/19/2025: What would be interesting is a bot that continuously churns content, then you have another bot do the curating and selecting based on personas, similar to how we create personas of users when working on UX. It seems novel to me but is probably already happening. While I might like an idea I won’t necessarily like the idea of it, i.e. what it will do to further erode artistic ethos].