August 1sts

August is A Lydian Month. From Rifts, Eocene

 

 8/1/1968            

(Beatles Studio Diary)            

Hey Jude quickly completed, 5-8P

8/1/2007

Warhol had it right; He made all the Copies before everyone else.       

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 AI spin:

 

 8/1/2009, Saturday 

Subway, Chicago Avenue (Sepia App)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8/1/2010   

The album format continues to endure. The digital format is useful in terms of archiving the data, or for accessing the work in the cloud—but music needs a tangible cultural artifact to be truly archival. 

8/1/2022

Standards of any kind always have a deep history yet don’t necessarily need explanations. In music, standard tunings, standard music notation, and Equal Temperament facilitate the composition and performance of music. But music is “open source” in that you can tweak standards to fit your creative objectives. Most people just go with the standards because it’s “plug and play”. But with guitars, sometimes you need a specific voicing or sound and alternate tunings are useful. I use them to generate ideas, but the songs can still be played on instruments in standard tuning and be reduced to notation.

[8/1/2026: It's interesting that AI music has no established standards as most art forms do. Is a certain prompt schema a Standard? Is there a "fine art of prompt-writing"? As much as AI music is interesting ear candy, it's not yet an Art. Lyric-writing is a form of poetry, so it's at least half art. Collages are art, but it depends on how a particular piece hits the ear or eye. Collages have typically been a collection of found objects, with elements placed in some aesthetic context and placed in a frame. With AI music you have to do some of the same thing but giving it some context by compiling them into albums, making the art work, which is essentially its framing]. 

8/1/2025

Now more than ever it requires musical artists to just be Artists and do things in an interdisciplinary way. I like using AI, but it isn’t always the tool to use. I see it as a prototyping tool, but the prototypes can also be finished pieces with aesthetic value. Maquettes can be pieces of art in themselves, and can gain in value over time. 

What typically happens in the first years of any new medium is that there's a general push-back on it, then becomes gradually normalized. I think if you look back in history you'll find the same trajectory. I'm not intimidated by it at all because I still like to score music, and others can't, so I consider myself to be actually more talented in music. but I would say that I'm also a good designer and that's a good metaphor to use.

On the other hand, there is a dark side to normalization, which happens by thousands of tiny cuts. If this continues, and it probably will, within 5 or 10 years there will be no one who either will know how to write music manually, nor will they have any interest. So I think postmodernism is probably never going to die, but there will be artists who will push back on it, as much as I love postmodernist art. I don't think anything goes all the time. It's fun to play with ideas and see what you can get away with, but when your whole life and career is based on getting away with things, it should not sit well with you.