October 4ths

10/4/1998         

Advent of web radio means anyone can be their own radio station, whether they know something about radio or not. This will bring into play the “broadcast’” metaphor and everyone will start being DJs.            

[10/4/2024: This is the very beginning of streaming using the RealAudio format, It was actually “narrowcasting”. It would be 8 years before the first podcasts, which were downloads to the hard drive of the iPod. It was inconceivable, and perhaps unpredictable, that you could “watch” a podcast, let alone “listen” to a photograph. There are inconceivable things now that will be mainstream by 2032, but people are thinking of them, just as da Vinci’s idea for a helicopter didn’t materialize until all the components of it were conceived, invented, and manufactured over the course of hundreds of years. Similar to watching a podcast, we will be mostly watching books. The world is moving towards watching. This is both good and bad but early adopters will fully embrace it because it’s the new shiny thing. Paper books will be revived in, say, 2060, but we will be using them in new ways. Everything will rely on the energy required to make them possible, and might be too unstable in the future, delaying the time between idea to product].

[10/4/2025: LLMs make it possible to read and analyze many books together, which is what we want in terms of finding relevant threads that interest us. In general the web enabled DIY. The iPod, then smartphone, allowed people to create radio programs, YouTube allowed people to create TV shows. And now AI has allowed people to be recording artists. Are we enabled beyond our natural talents?]     

The next frontier in music is DIY loop montage. The challenge will be how we can assemble millions of loops into meaningful art. Instead of having octaves divided into 12 different pitches, we can divide them into samples. Therefore, one octave on the piano is a “loop world”.   

10/4/2021

The premiere of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony is coming in a few days which was created by AI. I think it’s a great idea that you can immortalize a composer using the data set of their entire body of work. I was thinking the other day we could do this with rock bands as well because in Genesis, the final dominoes might be falling and you could run machine learning on it. I think it’s a great idea because even if you don’t use the output [verbatim], at least you could listen to it and say to yourself, “That’s kind of cool—maybe I’ll use that to make something new.” That’s what I would find useful. In terms of whether Beethoven would have embraced this, I think he would have. It’s kind of an enlightenment idea.     

[10/4/2025: I suspect that many artists will create their own AI music generators trained on their own material]

10/4/2023            

While watching the various videos of the U2 concerts at Sphere, I’m always thinking about how this new technology is going to change music. At this point it’s going to change music in the sense that when we go to see a concert at these kinds of venues it’s more of a music video than it is a concert, or is more of a hybrid. It is also an evolution in the sense that we’re moving away from the proscenium arch to one that is a sphere, globe, or in-the-round, and for the U2 show, a spinning record.

10/4/2024

If you don’t have faith, how can you have faith?    

[Used as a lyric in an AI song]