August 17ths

8/17/1999            

A better strategy for making a record is to build perpetuity right into it, avoiding dated production. But the paradox is that you have to date your work in order to garner enough fans to inform the pricing of records.            

[8/17/2024: All production is eventually dated–especially when music is generated with AI, as those elements are present in the training sets. The only real perpetuity in music is the fact that instruments can always be played manually without software. The monetization of music now comes in the form of what is generated from ads and subscriptions, not people buying records as they did in the 20th century. It is the internet itself that created this paradigm shift because the question has always been how to monetize its content, now made by listeners, not musicians. Music is also elementally about imitation, and generated music removes human imitation and replaces it with machinic algorithms, not epigonism, as the Beats would have pondered in the 1940s for example. Gone is the epigone.]                

I have no doubt that the Blair Witch Project has created a new paradigm at the expense of more compelling art.            

[A similar shift was happening in cinema at the time, perhaps informed by the internet and digital media, again, where we became users].

[8/17/2025: DIY has evolved to the next stage in music where any marginally interested person can try their hand at songwriting. Rick Beato demonstrated this recently using Suno where a musical artist and single can be produced in minutes. This is songwriting as a listener, not songwriting with a notebook and a guitar. Recordings have always been illusions. Real songs have a real blueprint, proving they can exist without a recording. Jazz is another good example of music that is impervious to smoke and mirrors because it doesn’t really need elaborate recordings. AI music is epigonistic, but humans aren't in the loop of imitation. What musicians need to do is to imitate the generated music and create "derivative" works. For most musicians, attempting to learn songs inspires unique work. Very often playing these AI songs reveals their musical emptiness. The emotion is there of course but it's because of smoke and mirrors. It's kind of a con. How I see AI music working in the future is that it will be seamlessly integrated with other manually created music. It's like the architectural layers in a city, where you have buildings from the 19th century, the 1920s, the 1930s and so on, and it all just looks like a city. But if you examine it you can appreciate all those different layers and it is all of a piece.]

8/17/2000            

Interesting article about the Sol Lewitt exhibit. He said he was deeply influenced by music. It’s the opposite for me; the visual arts overlap music in a lot of ways that are interesting—which got me thinking about how other domains overlap, e.g. film/politics. (TV will always dominate, making any political issue a construct of public perception, image manipulation and Hollywood special effects.) 

[8/17/2024: It’s always in the slippage or overlap between domains where the most interesting things happen–but not necessarily in the ways we personally think they’re interesting. It’s interesting that music can be like a painting, as it was at the time in 2000. It’s both interesting and disturbing that reality can be like a disaster movie, and is in fact. Metaphors can be very dangerous if you fail to see them as such].

8/17/2001  

[Blackout poem/lyric]:

Thinking is a great way to travel. It takes a long time to get places worthwhile in life and a lot of faith and endurance. A very interesting metaphor is traveling through space on a spaceship. To get to the “promised planet” it takes 25 years of traveling, all the while having to trek through the perils of space, not knowing if you’ll ever get to the promised land. You might as well sit back and try to relax, because you’re confined to the ship, with no way of turning back. Space travel is a great metaphor for life.            

[The Nostalgia Galaxy album was based on this. Creative people have various thematic ideas that are continually running the background, and they sometimes resurface for further use sometimes decades later].

8/17/2004            
         
On the new Scion XB: They left out all the curves, what one would expect in auto design—with stunning results.

8/17/2013        

Grant Park Symphony, slow-shutter, blurred:

8/17/2023
            
Interesting: If composers knew music theorists would analyze their works, would they write for analysis? In other words, do creative intentions change with different kinds of attention?

8/17/2024

The effect of the use of AI in music is that people will compete with it and will force them to come up with more innovative ideas. This is certainly the way I want to work.