August 7ths

8/7/2000            

Prediction: People will eventually get sick of downloading entertainment. You’ll have 10,000 files on your hard drive and not use any of it. You’ll want to go out and see a film or a concert and not have to have a copy of it.

[8/7/2025: Streaming resolved the issue of downloading copies, but the issue is now an overwhelming number of options, especially with film and video. Perhaps if we had a small physical library of films, we’d choose to watch those first because we valued them enough to have a copy. But that’s not what happens. Consider a library with stacks of books. How many people browse through stacks anymore? I think it’s useful to just browse through the spines of books to find something interesting, which could have been published 25 years ago. Looking at spines is the book equivalent of scrolling, but the choice is easier because you are limited by the number of books you can carry. The equivalent of going to a theater to see a movie is actually doing that. The equivalent in music is going to a record store and buying albums and sitting around listening to them without distraction].

Black-out poetry/possible lyric:

8/7/2022

When I was first learning to play guitar, I didn’t know theory or the fingerboard, and was playing by rote patterns. After I learned theory and the fingerboard, I forgot how I approached music before. This might be happening in life in general based on new experiences replacing the old ones. But even then, everyone has a framework for how they’ve learned all their lives, which doesn’t change. We know the maps, but perhaps we need to relearn the territories. 

8/7/2023

Music composition involves taking things that are of a random nature and making them more solid. Say an idea that comes to you is the result of some random permutation. You have to do something with that permutation—the idea itself can’t stand alone. You can’t just say I had an idea to create this piece of music. It has to be crafted in some way to be a logical temporal entity, as a symphony would be. AI can suss out the syntax of course, but what if it’s not the syntax we want? #riff

[8/7/2025: It seldom is what I want, but what I have capitulated to. Capitulation is dangerous in many ways. We don’t see what it means in the long term. If we stop creating things manually because “other people can cook better than I can and I don’t want the clean-up”, then we’re “punished by efficiency”.]

8/7/2024

I love the idea of just parts of a piece of music being generated with AI, such that only the bridge section is generated. The equivalent in art is using found objects such as newspaper clippings or trolley transfers a la Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauschenberg.            

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A palindromic name, perhaps for an aloof cat that’s always ignoring you: “Snubbuns”