July 5ths

 January 5ths

 7/5/2022

Will AI be “beneficial” to music? The term “beneficial” can be applied when something is used in the general flow of creative output, such as when Bob Dylan “went electric”. AI will similarly have to “go electric” in some way. It wasn’t that Dylan stopped playing an acoustic, but there was a paradigm shift in culture.    

[7/5/2025: If 2025 was like 1965, it's the year AI music went "electric". But you can still play real instruments. There's this idea that technology destroys purity somehow, or that it's "profane". I loved the Blonde On Blonde album. I wonder if 2025 will be seen in retrospect as a sea change year, as 1966 was.]

7/5/2025

One innuendo is all it takes. 

What happens to a sound when it reaches 50? Was Big Band still relevant in the 1980s? I think the definition of nostalgia shifts with feelings of "missing out". Since many musicians were influenced by Big Band in the 80s and were still using those kinds of skills, there was no need for nostalgia. Nostalgia is largely driven by a sense of loss.

 The AI version:

 

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Video about a guy in Idaho who had a spiritual awakening using a chatbot. Everyone has an access point to something. It has to start somewhere. For me, in music it was an old acoustic guitar with only four strings. In higher consciousness it was the Dianetics book—something now cringe-worthy—but it starts a path—which meanders around. At least you had an awakening of some kind in your life, as opposed to never having any one of any kind. You sleep-walked through life going through motions.

[7/6/2026: I was thinking AI music and art could be an access point to making it manually, but there is no infrastructure that could hold it up. As learning becomes a "pull" phenomenon from the internet and LLMs, there is no pedagogical foundation. But it can move the needle somewhere. In music, the new places won't be like they were before because the shape of the landscape is different. Your first instrument probably won't be an old guitar with just the bottom 4 strings, it will be the internet. At least you are in motion, checking new things out].

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AI music is: 

• Like photorealist paintings you only had a partial role in making. It is unlike photorealist paintings in that skill is apparent and real. It is merely a print of a photorealist painting.
• A TV or film set (Something that seems real but is just artifice—and doesn’t have a real-life counterpart—like the Brady Bunch house. The actual house doesn’t match the real one, inside or out. It’s a photograph of an exemplar.
• Lazy remix (like the photorealist painting you hardly painted and didn’t know what your sources were)
• Something we will gradually normalize like all other new art forms
• Mostly a listener experience for the writer. [Now any writer can become a lyricist because it's essentially a language art. It's not music, other than you're finding the music in the words].
•  Like making something with blocks but you’re only writing the instructions for how to make it. The instructions are actually useless and may look more like poetry or lyrics
• Is difficult to play like the record because it’s made up of lots of (too many) different records.