The Wonder of a Place

"Lyricized"  prose using Yi-Fu Tuan's Passing Strange and Wonderful. 

"Humans may be primarily visual, but hearing enjoys temporal priority. Infants in the womb can hear their mother's breathing and heartbeat, digestive processes, and muscle and joint movements.They also register messages from the external world, such as loud conversation; even before birth they may become accustomed to their parents' voices! Thus infants acquire their earliest awareness of the external world through organic and human sound rather than through sight. The steady sounds of organic life, especially the heartbeat, provide comfort. Even a left -handed mother tends to hold her infant in her left arm, apparently from the instinctual nowledge that the baby appreciates the rhythmic throb of the heart. Adults retain this preference. "Wherever you find insecurity," Desmond Morris asserts, "you are liable to find the comforting heartbeat rhythm in one kind of disguise or another."

Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Sioux, said to John Neihardt in 1931: 

"I will first make an offering and send a voice to the Spirit of the World, that it may help me to be true. See, I fill this sacred pipe with the bark of the red willow; but before we smoke it, you must see how it is made and what it means. These four ribbons hanging here on the stem are the four quarters of the universe. The black one is for the west where the thunder beings live to send us rain; the white one for the north, whence comes the great white cleans­ing wind; the red one for the east, whence springs the light and where the morning star lives to give men wisdom; the yellow for the south, whence come the summer and the power to grow."

If there was a place that would go with the lyric, it would be somewhere in Wyoming or other Native American lands. But somehow the Wyeth paintings (done in Maine) resonate because of their poignancy, particularly the emotional connection people have with Christina's World, which carries over to the other works. Lyrics tend to be about whatever they’re about after they’ve been set to music because you have to tweak words and rhymes. Music is always the master of the words, although it can be reversed, as is the case with the Curios where the music in the language becomes the rhythmic seed. It’s interesting that with AI music it’s the other way around because the stems (seeds) that get applied to the lyric lines shape how they are vocalized. It’s not a natural way of working. Singing the words with a guitar or piano makes very different rhythms. AI music is a nice shortcut to a completed song, especially if you’re not a musician, but there’s very little interesting music in them if you attempt to cover them as they were generated. If you formed a band to play your AI songs, they would become something different because you’d have an opportunity to change every aspect of them.