September 16ths

9/16/2001            

While listening to music on the radio, you get these very interesting coincidences, or “collisions of context”. You’d be listening to a report about an Islamic holy war, change the dial to a rock station and hear Lennon’s “Instant Karma”, followed by Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”—I’ll stand my ground. (Prediction: song lyrics will become more important. Songwriters will also have to censor their own work.)            

[9/16/2025: Lyrics are now hugely important in AI generation because their musicality will drive the overall musicality. They also anonymize the voice in the sense that a marionette is singing them].   

9/16/2004 

One of the wonders of digitized information is that you can endlessly edit it. It is possible to scan the original documents typed on a typewriter, convert it to text, edit the text, then make another original. These could be merely proxies of the virgin originals. This process is very common in music and art. Even Edvard Munch, the artist of the stolen “Scream” painting painted several additional copies after the first one was sold. We assume that works of art or authoritative documents are originals, when in fact they can be versions or assemblages of originals. Here’s the article on Munch, One-of-a-kind doesn’t apply to masterpieces [Chicago Tribune, 9/15/04]            

[9/16/2024: I’ve always done this with mixes, where after I finish the main mix, I‘ll do alternate mixes and use them in different contexts as I would with Photographs For Music. They are CONTINUATIONS–as Threads was–first a song, then a painting, then a video short–shared on Threads].

[9/16/2025: Another wrench is thrown in with LLMs. Why don’t LLMs always sing the same song? Anyone who generates AI music understands this. Eventually, we'll have the capability to tell the “singer” to use “this line” and “sing it this way”. The way it works now is that your cheesy provisional couplets can create the best hooks, so you go with the music that has a stupid line or a word sung in a weird way. Music is interesting in that it takes a while to "soak"..., so you're paying attention to what you always pay attention to but then the wallpaper goes up and you get used to the way it looks, and you stop noticing the less-than-optimal pattern and begin to like it. It works. But with AI now that wallpaper can't be replaced or painted over. See: https://superintelligencenews.com/research/thinking-machines-llm-nondeterminism-inference/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email         

9/16/2015            

Threads, 13x17 inches, acrylic on paper.    

 9/16/2019            

When I’m writing in the song form, I always hear other voices singing them. What I feel I’m doing is making frameworks for possible performances. Performing artists have the advantage of interacting with audiences and gaining popularity, in which the song itself is only a “lubricant”. I should say that good songs also come through improvised performances, as a way to continue shaping them by finding out what’s possible outside the vacuum of the studio.

[9/16/2025: A complete paradigm shift with AI music generation, yet I still see them as very functional prototypes. It’s like making a maquette of a sculpture and liking it enough to let it stand on its own as an entity. But it’s still the model of a building or a “doll house”, not the actual building. Another corollary is the modified Brady Bunch house].     

9/16/2022      

The latest installment in my experiments with the G5 tuning–a very interesting tuning to experiment with. You could view it as an "Open G" for bass or as a combination of bass and cello tunings, or a "cello sandwich" with fifths bookended by fourths, or as "Drop D-G"). 

9/16/2024 

Even if you keep handwritten journals, software is much more effective in shaping the finished product, although there are too many ways to endlessly change it. However, in the flow of endless options are things that wouldn’t have happened if it had not been for software. I can jot down musical phrases or riffs in a notebook but eventually it’s going to end up in software. You can make more copies with much more variation. Painters used to make multiple identical copies of paintings that people liked. Now each copy is different–sometimes an entirely different work. That wouldn’t have been conceivable in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th.