September 18ths

9/18/1993

Guy in subway playing a Turkish instrument–looks like a banjo, played like an oud. Had a formica fingerboard and a body about 6 inches deep made out of metal. Don’t know the tuning, 12 strings.

This is what it is:

9/18/1999

At some point in the next 50 years, musicians will have to create music from scratch rather than create music based on just digital remnants, or new music will be based only on the surviving remnants, i.e. those that still physically exist in a medium that is still playable, and have stood the test of time in a cultural sense. (For example, Beatles recordings are likely to exist, but might not be part of the musical landscape, or become esoteric museum pieces.) 

[9/18/2024: At 25 years, even non-musicians are generating music from digital remnants that we now know as LLMs and data sets. Music started to become more about playing recordings rather than instruments around 2000–two years before this entry. I recall at the time Sony had released the Acid software, which allowed you to assemble music with sound files. By 2049, you could extrapolate that music will emerge from new technologies, but it remains to be seen if traditional instruments will still be played. If we think of them as a tactile object–and wanting to be held, they might still be played. I can’t go 2 days without the urge to play a guitar. But if people never do that now, very few people will bother with them. There may be other ways to create the tactile experience in the brain that will be as satisfying]. 

[9/18/2025: A nice diary juxtaposition with the 1993 entry. The oud will always be around and played].

9/18/2010

Interesting: “Entailment”: using one thing to make another. You’re using some object to chip the stone into a particular shape with the intention of using it for something else. There’s an operational chain - one tool entails another. In music, using existing tracks to make a new piece of music is entailment.      

[9/18/2024: Generating music with AI is the perfect example of entailment. I have done it in the past by making alternate mixes of songs by using just the piano tracks or atmosphere tracks. In The Cloud on my Virga album is just some of the guitar parts from Dreaming of Tornadoes with other atmosphere tracks added. The title was informed by the advent of cloud computing, around 2010].

9/18/2017            

Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental!            

The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsim because jazz improvisation is based on 7-note chord scales, whereas Taqsim is based on tetrachords or other scale sub-units. There is improvisation in classical music as well, but is defined as a Cadenza, that similarly constrains performance with a scored melody.            

I don’t think there could ever be a universal definition of improvisation, although historically, the older forms of improvisation in other cultures have been integrated into Western music as a way to make it universal.            

Spiritual Aspects of Improvisation            

I like to think that the basis for playing music is always “spiritual”, meaning your performances are always the output of the “buffer zone”—the gap that controls what you’ll play. You can blame bad playing both on the lack of free will to hone chops, but also on lapses of attention to what’s happening in real-time in the music.            

Jazz and other genres (including actor improv) that allow for free playing tap into these phenomena. This is what comprises “spirit” or “soul”. Scored music doesn’t for the most part; the player is the marionette controlled by the conductor (engineer) using the composer’s (architect’s) plans. Composition also doesn’t play in the gap, unless decisions on key centers and tempo really matter on the page. Bb minor won’t make the players better, especially if they can’t play in the key. Perhaps that’s the point—to make bad players out of everyone to level the field. Everyone is lost at the same time. 

Long jazz improvisations tend to bore audiences but they are really “musical imaging studies” of a group of humans (and their “souls”) being pushed around at the mercy of their neurons. Check out any free jazz performance and you’ll hear the MRI (Music Response Imaging), full of mistakes and random firing, but also revealing of what we perceive as “soul”.            

Cells that fire together wire together.

[9/18/2024: A few days ago I was riffing on the idea of AI jazz improvisation. If a soloist has a “tool box” of techniques to use in a solo: arpeggios, pentatonics, and so on, how is that unlike AI randomly using “tools” (random phrases)? In classical composition, motifs or cells of 3-5 notes can be used to build a whole composition. What I want to do with AI is to load those melodic or rhythmic motifs into a musical LLM and have it generate improvisations based on the “seeds”. This is how AI has been used in the past, which I think is more interesting and creative than generating music where we don’t know how the random permutations are created. It also gives us authorship if we designed the seeds].

Musing On Music Mostly LLM: Discuss improvisation

Diary scribbles/seeds: