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 training 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].

Diary scribbles/seeds:

 9/18/2025

Interesting that Jane Goodall--now 91 is still traveling and visited Chicago: "Sadly, we have not used [our brains] wisely...a wise creature doesn’t destroy itself, and we’re destroying planet Earth as we speak.”

This can work as a lyric:

Together we can
Together we will
Together we must
Change the world