October 5ths

 

Fishing Near Winchelsea, Sussex, John Horace Hooper

 

10/5/1899 (Rye, East Sussex, England)            

(William James Diary)

Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman:            

...The land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture, alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has seen in pictures, all exceedingly tiny....

Prose converted to a poem or lyric:

[Discuss the similarities and differences between, prose, poetry, and lyrics]

The land is bathed
In greenish-yellow light
And misty drizzle of rain
The little town
With its houses and coves
Curiously vivid and quaint
English, Dutch, and Japanese effects
All exceedingly tiny

 

 

10/5/2000            

Revolution in Serbia. Milosevic overthrown.            

Form dictates content (or rather context dictates content).

10/5/2003       

Multi-episode documentary on PBS about the blues. Interesting bits: Blues was one of the spin-offs of modernization in the south and consequent migration north; The African griots were not allowed to be “artists”. It was seen as selfish; Modern versions of the original blues songs are blusier than the originals. Loved Wim Wenders’ documentary—he used blues in the context of outer space—a way for us to shout out to the universe that we exist. (It was very spiritual.)            

1275. Blues is a music for not thinking, or for stopping anxiety-provoking thought. As background music, blues naturally interferes with thinking. As a blues musician would use music as anodyne, the listener should as well. It’s not a background music at all.            

0459. Louis XIV’s Jason Hill: ‘I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better’. This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences.            

0158. The great thing about jazz and blues is that you can age gracefully as an artist as well as an individual. Once a genre matures, it is the elders that uphold it.            

0156. When you listen to eastern and Indian music, you hear what the blues was trying to do.

10/5/2010            

Idea: a music system (like Atmosphere Generation) that creates music by assembling randomized bits based on musical grammars or semantics, not on parameters set by the user. The algorithms are based on ‘Natural Music’ inferences as in ‘Natural Language’. This could be the next frontier in music creation and listening. You would turn it on and not have to choose anything. Pandora is doing this to some degree, but only on complete pieces of music. It should be done on smaller chunks of data.            

[10/5/2025: Essentially AI music. A pretty good prediction] 

10/5/2011            

Steve Jobs dead at 56. He championed the idea of animated industrial design. A PC never glowed like a Mac under Jobs. He had an interesting background that did not include a college education. 

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." 

[10/5/2026: Over the past 15 years innovation has become "innovationism" as a kind of religion or cult where innovation is only pursued for the sake of itself--similar to scientism or other isms]. 

10/5/2021

I've noticed that even in my own writing, rhythms fall within a predictable range. Melodies in pop songs tend to hover around chord tones and the range is sometimes only a fifth. Anyone can make their own AI, but why would we want to?

[10/5/2026: Anyone who holds the rights to masters will eventually create music generators. You can already do this on Suno to the extent that it doesn't detect a fingerprint. Apparently there's a plan to verify artists who have released material, but those releases will just be a churning of what's already in the training data, so there will be gradual decline of original work. The effect might be that artists make more experimental music. But will there be an interest in it amid all the AI material?]