September 25ths

9/25/1999            

On the future of music listening: Now that we have the capability to compile songs and make our own collections, we need to weed out all this similar-sounding material: “Techno with samples of monks—already have one of those”. This will put the onus on the composers to come up with new and exciting material that will stand the test of time.            

[9/25/2024: I realized at popular tourist locations millions (or perhaps billions) of people take pictures of the same things, and I had the idea for a camera app that would automatically delete photos that had already been taken, or would apply an effect of some kind to make them different. This is probably very easy now with AI. But the current data sets are full of cliches and they would all be removed if you made the instruction to do so.]

[9/25/2025: If you generate a song with your words, then replace the words, and use those words to re-generate the song with the same prompt, will the song be the same? I’m thinking it would be. The music in the language is creating the music, so the same music in the new words is creating the same music in a feedback loop, which, like the camera app idea, would delete the duplicates or near-duplicates. Even if your new words are in another language and the prompt is the same, the music might be the same. This is where AI music is distinctly different from music made by humans. If you were to collaborate with a singer who sings in Esperanto, the rhythms in the words would make a different music, whereas AI would make generic music from the Esperanto].     

9/25/2015            

Anthropocene (2017), 18x24 inches, acrylic, custom stencil, hardware, on double panel. Another piece in my text art series (“Hash Art”, as a riff on “Flash Art”), using the MD5 Hash: 26A62357DD22BB74226DB1DF2D71AB68 as the digital “fingerprint” for the following quote by Paul MacCready, also referred to as the “The MacCready Explosion”. The Hash is a semaphore or icon for a possible beginning point of the Anthropocene based on the quote: “Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life—complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans—a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature—have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power.”

 Piece is for sale. Inquire.       

9/25/2022        

There can be music without a musician and art without an artist. Art and music can sometimes simply be a matter of assigning an aesthetic value. Sometimes we hear sounds in the environment that are musical, and some sights that are perhaps artistic—such as how a shadow falls, or a reflection. We can capture it as Art so as to document the experience; That’s what some photographs are. Many times I’ve seen things and only appreciated the moment without having to take a picture of it. (I used to call them cameraless photographs, but not to be confused with photograms). Photographer Jeff Wall would do this as a way to scout an image and go back and stage it. All art is a form of capture and a form of “tagging”. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be documented or objectified. You could even just frame the caption card. 

9/25/2024            
          
Usually it is the musical instrument manufacturers that control what’s possible in music—at least with synths and other electronic gear. They typically pander to what they think are the trends, and it’s up to the composer to work around those constraints. In terms of the music itself, everything on the periphery has been explored: serialism, microtonal music, and so on. I don’t think those areas will be revisited. AI as a one-on-one or one-to-many collaborator needs to be developed, such that you could jam with it in real-time and come up with material. Later you can develop it manually with live musicians.