September 17ths

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9/17/2001

Louis Farrakhan on radio this morning. It was quite moving. Director of the NEA to be re-elected, Michael Hammond. Apparently he's some sort of polymath who sees a return to a sense of craft in art. 9/11 certainly reversed the swing of a pendulum.

[2026: A shift to metamodernism started around 2022 for me as a post-COVID effect. After a traumatic event, we want to soften and slow down, but I don't think the postmodern world will ever end...]
 

 9/17/2004

 Woman killed by a falling cross in Rome. “Instant Karma’s going to get you...”

As a riff. Any prose can be made musical by making it musical


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting cross-discipline metaphor, blurring of boundaries between arts: “that’s how I push myself in my jazz solos—I want to see if I can get out alive on the other side.”            

[The current sentiment is that AI will never be able to improvise jazz. I think it will be possible given that soloing is about a linear flow of randomly-accessed ideas. But what is different about improvisation by humans is that the ideas are being strategically planned in the background as a kind of “buffering”. Our neurons are firing a split-second before we actually make an action, and computers obviously can buffer well. Will they be master improvisers? No, but they might make an interesting counterpoint duet].    

[2026: Suno does an impressive modeling of solos, but it is "tokenized" soloing that resembles improvisation but it's still in the uncanny valley. The lay listener wouldn't be able to tell]. 

9/17/2021     

Music heard in a dream. I played it for a friend, and he said “That’s Spirit of the Radio”. So it is—at least the chord changes. 


 

 

 

 

 

9/17/2024

How do we shorten the time between an idea and the completion of a work of art or music? As I’ve been working on the Songdays—now for 4 months—I have accumulated lots of ideas but very few completed tracks. This is because the production process slows things down considerably. Anybody can have hundreds or thousands of ideas, but how do they get developed, and what questions have to be asked along the way? There are hundreds of tiny decisions that have to be made. In the end, the final result is the result of all those decisions, and some of them might not be very good in retrospect. Artificial intelligence solves this to some degree because it eliminates the production phase. What I want to use is a seed idea, say, 1-4 bars of something, and use artificial intelligence as a “hot house”, then use other “machinery” to harvest the crops. This way I can say I made it—I was the farmer, not Big AG.

[2026: Seeds aren't fully grown plants that bear fruit--at least with songs. You have to develop the lyrics and form. Generative music from seeds to make ambient music is different. What I want to see is a song seed that develops that way infinitely. The song you heard yesterday is different today--never the same river twice...]

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Interesting: Musical etudes created with AI. It teaches you how to play by generating random technical uselessness, but the results are better skills.

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