July 3rds

7/3/1930

(Edward Weston Diary)

Morning walk near Point Lobos with Becking. “The scientist and the artist coming together for the avowed purpose of getting each other’s viewpoint, on mutually exciting ground.”   

Songday Seed:

 

7/3/1997            

Dream: Visited folks in Dallas. On way to airport on way back to Chicago, stopped at concert and lost track of time—late for airport...
       
7/3/1999

WXRT Flashback to 1967. I love listening to this stuff, not so much that I enjoy the music itself, but rather, thinking about that particular time and what led people to write and record the way they did. Zawinul’s Mercy Mercy, Mercy (the live Recording): I wonder if the crowd noise was coached or added later like a laugh track. What was going on on the stage that the audience would react that way? (Idea: Add another layer on top of recorded tracks, such as live audience sounds, as a way to put the music in a different context).

Hendrix’s Foxy Lady: Hard-panning The vocals, tracks left “dirty”mics left on—lots of bleed.    
The music of that time also evoked a certain type of dance, like The Monkey or The Swim. I like the “plummy” bass lines, played with a pic. I think it was James Jamerson that influenced electric bassists to play with their fingers. See Emily Play: A twenty-year-old, born in 1980 would listen to this and say, “that’s cool”, when in fact it was recorded almost 15 years before they were born. That would be like me in 1979 saying “that’s cool” to something recorded in 1946! In 1979 what was cool was what was current. There was no nostalgia or recycling of ideas then as there is now. It seems that there’s been 30 years of invention which has given way to a period of no invention, with lots of recycling of ideas. Is this because of technology, or is this a natural cycle?

[7/3/2025: It’s innovation itself that re-shapes how we construct music as logical sequences of sound. 400 years ago it was Equal Temperament, allowing us to write music that went beyond just writing for voices and lutes. Now we could write using the harpsichord and pianoforte, a period that lasted for quite a while. The advent of recording was probably the paradigm shift away from just sitting with an acoustic instrument and manuscript paper. We were thinking about how we could also record it and make copies. Now we don’t have to write or record and just use the copies.]  

7/3/2006

Curvilinea released. 45-minute kaleidoscopic collage made from a series of transformed photographs, originally authored to DVD-Video. Score is generative, composed of loops running in and out-of-phase. The music is strictly incidental to the imagery, although I used loops of recordings of nature. Part of the inspiration was symmetry in nature, in butterfly wings for example.

7/3/2008

Death of Music:

 

[7/3/2025: Music (and painting, and photography...) has been dying for a long time. Parts of it do die off but it will never completely devolve. Music is too joined at the hip with language–something eternally alive in some form or another. Now it’s the descriptive LLM prompt].  

7/3/2010

Field Recording: Taste of Chicago and other street sounds.

7/3/2014

In some marginal ways, the orchestration of electronic music reminds of the book TV Sets, which extrapolated the floor plans of the 1960s sitcom sets, The Lucy Show, Perry Mason and so on. Contemporary ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound do almost the same thing by translating the electronic to the acoustic. It’s an interesting exercise to imagine a reality beyond the confines of artifice. Aphex Twin’s Blue Calx is a calming ambient work. Calx is a powdery residue, like Usuyuki, a fine snow. AWS’s arrangement is reverent, although the metronomic pattern is somewhat jarring, and was probably included as a guide, like letting the grid lines show through on a painting. 

[7/3/2025: I have done something similar where I’ve transcribed and orchestrated music generated by AI. Example: Vintage of the Vinyl. AI Version. Arrangement for string quartet]      

7/3/2024

I like the idea that if AI gets good enough at writing music, I’ll just steal the ideas and call them my own, continuing on with the chestnut that “all great composers steal”.

[Or create fictional artists and bands, and then perhaps in the future forming tribute bands of those fictitious band, used in a film scene, etc]

 A mixtape of fictional bands writing music to the same or similar lyrics: 

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Watched interview with Debbie Harry. She was talking about how the songwriting process typically started with a repeated line or phrase, which became the seed idea for the entire song, e.g. Dreaming Is Free. It’s a songwriting universal that pieces start with “drummed” words (Wordrums)

7/3/2025

AI bands will become mainstream very soon. We used to think that the upslopes on AI technologies would be slow and would take years, but it's months now. I don't see a downslope really, but perhaps a rapid "troughing". As to quality, I think people have to be careful not to be sold down the river and winding up at rallies at Choctaw Ridge, i.e. drinking the Kool-Aid.

There's a difference between fiction and deceit. Deceit isn't necessarily bad and has been used in art for millennia. Music has to be conceptual now (Level 3), where there are bigger ideas than just songs as "canoes". Anyone now can make canoes and float them on the same river, but ideally you want is your "signature" river system. I like what Harvey Mason Jr. Said: "“At the end of the day, we have to make stuff that the computer can’t make.”

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The AI summary of some of the 7/3 entries. Interesting that the voices stammer and have their own opinions--"great track" and the "y'nows". Checkpoint, Charlie!