October 2nds

10/2/1914, Friday            

Wittgenstein wonders what his fate is. Will he or will he not stay on the ship?  

 

 10/2/2005

10/2/2015

What is a “digital breath?” This is an interesting metaphor that brings together how we play music with the body and how we make it with the mind. Even if we can figure out how to simulate the process of manual phrasing, it is always the mind at work.            

There is so much useful information in the history of music that is being discarded in favor of digital techniques that have no correlation in the analog world.            

We should always honor the artists who have come before us. This is common in the art world. In the music world, everything is discarded as being “old” and therefore irrelevant to the Now.     

[10/2/2025: When we generate music with AI you don't have to be concerned about breaths, so you can have very long vocal phrases with complicated tongue-twisting lyrics, and they never make any mistakes.]

10/2/2016            

Is art better if it took longer to make even if you can’t tell the difference? If it takes 6 months to make a digital image using a custom algorithm, printing and proofing the image, framing, and so on, does it have the same impact as a painting that took as long?            

Art will always (perhaps not always) be associated with skill using traditional materials (hopefully), but that idea might be devolving. Skill is a labile concept and can change with time.    

[10/2/2025: Does it take any skill or physical exertion to generate art or music just with a prompt?]  

10/2/2021

These [video] riffs are sort of like music because my mind works in kind of a musical-logical way, so freely talking about things for 10 or 15 minutes helps me to organize my thoughts much more than text can do. Text is slow because you have to type it, and you have to think about how the words are strung together. This happens automatically with speech, so it’s a faster way of communicating. But here we are with video reduced to text—crudely. #riff

[10/2/2025: It’s interesting that video transcripts have fewer grammatical errors (with a few tweaks taking the stammerings out) than composed prose. There’s something in the overthinking during writing that creates errors. This probably has something to do with left/right hemisphere thinking. All the writing I’ve done that started with a video transcript I now call “Wriffs”]     

10/2/2022

It is important to distance oneself from art. It is all artifice after all even if there is some emotional investment in it. You can’t take it too seriously. It’s not the real “you”.            

Tori Amos is interesting in this respect: Her songwriting is “channeled” through characters and myths, but she is not trapped in those elements.  

Possible lyric:            

You see him coming
(He’s a fake McCoy)
He’s on to something
(He’s stealin’ your joy)     

The AI Version:

 

 10/2/2023

Black-out lyric: