September 24ths

9/24/1999            

Prediction: by 2020, the pop music world will experience a Singularity. If one uses the rule that cultural revolutions occur every 20 years, in 2020 will be using all recycled music. There will be no innovation, just digital remnants. Very few people will want to play an instrument.            

[9/24/2024: A pretty good prediction @25. By 2049 there will be things we’re doing now that people will no longer be doing].

[9/24/2025: Those “digital remnants” are the training sets that AI music uses]. 

9/24/2005

Watched Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan. Things I liked: he talked about the “sound” and how it compelled him to pursue music, “the sound” meaning the intrinsic, 4th dimension qualities; A musical “expedition”; an artist has to be careful to never arrive at a place where he thinks he’s somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming...

9/24/2017

I was thinking back on how I actually got attracted to art: My affinity for modern art was actually inspired by music, and through many visits to the Art Institute in Chicago. My favorite bands in the mid-to-late 70s were the “Art Rock” bands, subsequently labeled as “Progressive” (Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Moody Blues, and so on). While the museum has a fantastic collection of European art, my favorites were always the Picassos, Dalis, and other surrealist painters.

9/24/2018

As a composer/songwriter, I’m most interested in the overall framework, such that the same ‘instructions’ could be recontextualized. This probably comes from my jazz upbringing where performance arises from those instructions (the lead sheet). While I do have some skill in orchestration, I would defer to those that are experts in that area. I like how David Bowie continually recontextualized his songs live when many of them were originally written on a guitar.

9/14/2024

Music has always been known as an expensive hobby with buying instruments, amps, effects, and so on. Subscriptions to AI music generators might be $100. Music for most people with money to burn is the collecting of instruments rather than playing them. Now you don’t have to play anything, but I would imagine people are still buying them because AI produces no objects of desire.