September 9ths

[Now with AI I would imagine it would be much easier to set up a correlation between live weather data with a fully-produced track. But I've found that moods used in prompts seldom have any real effect on the results. My idea was about generating ambient music, not a fast-tempo EDM track on a sunny day. History of Koan].

9/9/2005

Thousands of NOLA residents are migrating to other US cities—how will it re-shape American culture? (Music will migrate as well).    

[9/9/2025: Does music still have a sense of place? I would argue that it doesn’t, mostly because boundaries changed or faded with the internet. Now that you can generate World Music with AI it may sound like it’s from Senegal or Ethiopia because they’ve scraped the recordings of Yousou N'Dour and Malatu Astatke. AI music is by no one from nowhere]. 

9/9/2017            

Music performance allows one to be intimately involved with the passing of time, although listening to music, or even composing it is untethered to time. If you are performing music, you would be distracted by clock time. It is a bit of a duck-rabbit phenomenon. Music is a good example of a ‘flow’ experience because tempo is the ultimate means for focus.

9/9/2021

On the morning of 9/11 I was on the El and was reading Greg Kot’s review of Bob Dylan’s new release Love and Theft. In the following weeks and months music became an encoder of memory. I recall listening to U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind quite frequently as well as Beck’s Mutations, and influenced my writing at the time as well. 

[An example where music has a place because it's encoded in memory. Now when I listen to that music, I can see what was happening in New York]       

9/9/2024            

September is turning out to be the bluest month in Chicago in terms of how many days have blue skies.            

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There are some people who embrace new media and some who don’t. I totally embraced the internet. In the early days I couldn’t wait to design my own website because it was a way to promote my work. But I know lots of people who never got on board, so they don’t fully understand people who have. But once you’ve gotten through one generation of a new technology it’s totally burned in. People probably weren’t on board with TV when it came out in the 1950s, and there were probably people who didn’t care about TV even in the 70s and beyond. Social media is now burned in and I don’t care about that, and there will be Millennials in the future who won’t care about whatever is new. A status quo kind of a world might be a better world. #riff

[9/9/2025: I think LLMs are really useful and are now in the flow of what I do, just as Microsoft Word and Excel were in 1995. But some people perhaps seldom used them or saw a need. But all new technologies create new worlds that begin to become more and more “populated”. When I first started using Photoshop in the late 90s it was a fascination that led to an interest in photography. That’s interesting in retrospect because it’s in reversed order–the software originally created as a digital darkroom inspired the use of a camera. Similarly, AI apps will lead to other things for other people. In music, AI can lead to wanting to play an instrument].

An album: A mostly cohesive thing that you can call “finished”.